Jasper Died on a Sunday

He died six months ago:
Sunday, June 10th, 2018.
He passed away at 4:27PM.
It was raining outside.

Tye was with him.
We were all with him. The whole family was together.
He was happy.
Tired, but happy. He was tired
and he just
went to sleep
one
last
time.

Our boy is gone and there's nothing for it.

I'm glad he was a part of our family.
I'm glad we had those last seven months--
good months--
with him:
months we weren't sure he would have,
months we weren't sure he would enjoy.
But he was happy.
We were happy.
I'll miss him forever.
I'm so happy that he was in our lives for so long.

Our boy is gone and there's nothing for it.

He was a great cat.
He was our tiny prince.
He gained a lot of different nicknames over the years.
He took a five-month road trip with us.
He loved to be shoulder-mounted.
He loved to eat cat grass
(even though it made him vomit).
He enjoyed crackers and bread for some reason.
He emitted a wide range of ear-piercing squeaks
(including what we dubbed "demando-voice").
He often had pointy or pokey feet.
He always liked napping in the bed with us
or curling up with Bayla or Tye.

Our boy is gone and there's nothing for it.

I still cry.
It's been months and I'll still,
every now and then,
see something around the house that reminds me of him,
and I won't be able to stop the tears.
Maybe it'll be like this for the rest of my life.
Maybe someday I'll be more happy than sad when I think of him.

Our boy is gone and there's nothing for it.

I miss so many things
and I don't want to forget.
I miss the way he'd come into the bathroom
when I was on the toilet
and rear up on his hind legs
to rub his face against my hands.
I'll miss his soft, chittering snores
and his low burbling purrs
and the way he'd twitch while he slept.
I used to wonder what he dreamt of,
why he often needed a wake-up snack.
For comfort?
Because he still remembered being feral,
being hungry,
not having a home?

I think we gave him a good home.
I hope we did our best to love him,
especially at the end.
I don't know.
I want to believe we did.
I should believe that.
Maybe later I will.
Maybe someday I'll know.

Today, all I know is this:

Our boy is gone and there's nothing for it.

1,356,976,800 Seconds Old (Approximately)

I turned 43 years old this past Saturday. We celebrated without much fanfare, and that was by choice: I guess I'm now on the even-numbered-birthdays-blowout plan, after the big Trek puzzle hunt for my 40th and the karaoke extravagana for my 42nd.

But despite being low-key, we did manage to pack in quite a few things:

One week before my actual birthday, I livetweeted my binge-rewatch of the first season of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, the best damn show on television. See my Storify for #CXB43.

The night before my birthday, I gathered some friends for drinks and dinner at the Multnomah Whiskey Library, followed by dessert at Petunia's Pies & Pastries.

On my actual birthday, D and I had breakfast (featuring waffles!) at Gigi's Cafe. Then I met some friends to do "Kidnapped!" at Portland Escape Rooms, which we did escape, taking just six minutes longer than the current record time. We rounded out the evening with Bridget Quigg's one-woman comedy show Techlandia at Funhouse Lounge, and filled the intervening hours with stops at two different McMenamins.

On Sunday, we dragged our friend Darla to the Portland Art Museum, where among other things, we saw this camel. Then we stopped at Lapellah for happy hour.

Finally, on Monday, we met another friend for dim sum and chatted about escape rooms and general puzzling.

Is that an accurate snapshot of my life right now? More or less. It doesn't encompass any work activities (writing, freelancing, etc.), but otherwise these are pretty much the things we love doing: hanging out with friends, watching shows, eating and drinking, and playing games. Not necessarily in that order.

I applied to Clarion West SIX TIMES

Applications for the Clarion West Summer Six-Week Writers Workshop in Seattle are now open. If you apply before February 10th, the fee is only $30; it goes up to $50 after that date. The last day to apply is March 1st. This year's instructors are Paul Park, Stephen Graham Jones, Elizabeth Bear, N. K. Jemisin, Sheila Williams, and Geoff Ryman.

As the title of this post says, I applied to CW six times (every year starting in 2008, only skipping 2012 because of WarTron) before I attended the workshop in 2014. My classmate Shannon Fay recently posted her CW personal essay—requested as part of the application; they want a "description of your background and your reasons for attending the workshop"—and I remember having the same experience she describes, of wondering what it was I should say about myself and how much weight the essay (vs. the writing sample) would carry with the decision-makers who selected each year's students.

So here's my own CW2014 personal essay, which was used "to introduce [me] to the workshop’s instructors" after my acceptance. Did the people reviewing the initial applications even read it? I don't know. On some level, I was really writing this essay for myself, to codify my own thinking about where I was with my fiction writing and what I wanted to work on next.

NOTE: hyperlinks below were not included in the original document, but have been added here for reference.

HAPPY NEW YEAR (BACKGROUND ESSAY)
by Curtis C. Chen

Hello again! Here's what I've been up to (writing-wise) since my last Clarion West application in 2013:

I started querying my science fiction spy novel, WAYPOINT KANGAROO (the writing sample attached to this application), and the first place to which I sent it was literary agent Janet Reid's "Query Shark" blog. I'd never written a query letter before, and I figured it would be good to get some impartial feedback. Of course, there was no guarantee she'd even look at my e-mail, but it was a good way to set an external deadline--and those really help me get things done. (More on that later.)

So imagine my surprise when Janet Reid wrote back three days later to tell me she was posting my query on the blog. Not only that, but she wanted to read the novel! Now I really had a deadline to meet.

I cranked through the rewrites-in-progress, finished them in less than a week, and sent Janet Reid the full manuscript. Two months later, she replied--saying "it's not ready yet" but offering very detailed advice on how I might improve it. She also said she'd be glad to take a look at the next revision.

"Chuffed" doesn't begin to describe how I felt. I've done a lot more work on KANGAROO since then, and plan to get a new draft back to Janet Reid before the end of March--which would [be] one year since the Query Shark post. Deadlines are good.

Speaking of deadlines, I also wrapped up my "512 Words or Fewer" blog project last year. In October of 2008, I set myself the goal of posting an original piece of flash fiction every Friday. I wanted to force myself to write more and different stories, and this compact format seemed like the perfect way to experiment and actually finish things.

Why 512 words? Mainly because I used to be a professional software engineer, and thus have an affinity for powers of two. (2^9 = 512.) It also seemed like a manageable amount to produce on a weekly basis. In fact, that was one of the first things I learned: my first draft of any scene tends to come out around 1,000 words. Cutting that by half can be painful, but it was an invaluable exercise in critical thinking--I had to decide which words were absolutely essential, and which darlings I could murder. Learning to see the forest for the trees was one of the most important things I learned from the 512s, and it's something I've been able to apply to all my writing.

I concluded the 512s in August, 2013, after 256 consecutive weeks. Not all of the stories were great, but the process of creating them has made me a better writer. I'm aware of how much more clarity I now have when thinking about capital-S Story, even if it's simply heckling a sloppy plot contrivance on Downton Abbey. (Seriously, eight months later, he's still got the damn ticket? C'mon, guys.)

To commemorate the 512 Words project, my wife helped me select 117 of the most interesting stories to include in a collection which we published on January 31st of this year. That process taught me a lot about what it takes to design and produce both a printed paperback and an electronic version. The 512 book (which we titled THURSDAY'S CHILDREN, ha ha) was also a fun project, but I'm not sure I'd want to self-publish again--I would much rather have help navigating the business side of publishing.

In fact, I recently had a very good publishing experience with a novelette I sold to Leading Edge. They're a BYU publication, and as such have guidelines about explicit language and sexual content--which required me to revise my story featuring foulmouthed police detectives and cloned prostitutes. They were willing to copy-edit the swear words themselves, but also wanted me to consider rewriting one of the final scenes.

So I cleaned up the language, rewrote the scene in question, and did some minor touchups here and there--but otherwise was pleasantly surprised at the overall quality of the piece. (Good job, past me!) And the whole process, from contract to rewrites to final copyedits, was about all of us pulling for the same goal: getting the story in shape and into print.

I want to write fiction people want to read. That means developing my skill as a writer, and also understanding markets, editors, and audiences. I believe Clarion West will help me with all of those things.

Thanks for reading!

I don't know what factors, apart from me improving as a writer between 2008 and 2014, led to my finally getting into CW. To be honest, when I was working on this essay, I thought of it like Red's final parole board hearing in Shawshank Redemption: it was more important to speak honestly than to try to game the application process. Because, in the end, all you have is your own integrity.

And it doesn't matter how many times you fail, as long as you always fail better. Getting a result means you're making the attempt. You can't succeed if you don't try.

I Will Be at Some Conventions This Year

(Wow, has it really been a whole month since my last blog post here? I'm a terrible person.)

If you're a SF/F convention-goer, here are some 2016 events I'm definitely attending and which I would recommend to any fan:

• Norwescon 39 (March) - my kick-ass agent Sam Morgan will be there
• Westercon 69 (July) - I volunteered to be Scalzi's GOH liaison, so get used to hearing me say "COKE ZERO OR GTFO"
• Worldcon 74: MidAmeriCon II (August) - everything's up to date in Kansas City
• OryCon 38 (November) - down by the river

A few others are undecided, but watch my author Twitter stream for announcements.

Plus my friend Claire Humphrey and I are working on a mini-book tour for our debut novels this June (Spells of Blood and Kin and Waypoint Kangaroo, respectively). More details on that as we figure it out.

I'm also like 90% sure I'm going to the Star Trek 50th anniversary thing in Las Vegas this August. Don't even act surprised.

MEOWY XMAS

This year, D and I switched from hand-writing all our holiday cards to drop-shipping pre-printed postcards. It forced us to write more concisely about the past year, but we're very happy with the results:

If you wanted a card from us but didn't get one, we apologize! Please send us your current mailing address and we'll make sure you're on the list for next year.

I Have Some Busy Weekends Coming Up

For the record, I'm not doing this as a #humblebrag or anything douchey like that. I'm writing this down as yet another reminder of all the crap I need to do BECAUSE I'M OLD AND I FORGET THINGS OKAY.

This weekend is GameStorm 17 in downtown Vancouver, where DeeAnn and I are re-running a modified version of the "Number Five Is Alive" puzzle hunt from JoCo Cruise 5. We'll hopefully also have time to play some games ourselves, and go to the Doubleclicks concert! Some of Thursday night's events will be in the hotel garage, which should be interesting.

Next weekend, after we do our taxes dammit, I'm going up to Seattle to help staff the Clarion West table at Emerald City Comic Con. I may or may not also have time and energy to wander around the con stalking Gail Simone, but mostly I want to go help out an organization I love (ObDisclaimer: I am a CW alumnus) and hang out with some awesome writers.

The first weekend in April is our friend Maria's birthday, and our other friend Natalie is organizing a chocolate field trip through Portland. You're either super excited and looking forward to this or deeply sad that you can't join us.

The second weekend in April includes my pal Fonda Lee's book launch party for her debut novel Zeroboxer! And probably a few hours prepping the next Puzzled Pint event, which may or may not include scrambling to lock down locations in all cities and/or last-minute revisions to puzzle materials. Did I mention we're an all-volunteer, non-commercial event?

And with any luck, one month from now on April 18th, we'll actually have some free time to relax and watch the third season premiere of Orphan Black.

I Have Been Married for Ten Years

Our wedding anniversary date is actually tomorrow, but what with leap years and Daylight Saving Time and whatnot, I figure today's close enough to call it.

This past weekend, we attended the wedding of our friends Kenna and Ryan (whom I affectionately call "K&R"--I am, as you might expect, the only one who does this). You can search for #ConkaPotts on Twitter to get some idea of how fabulous it was. Being at another early-March wedding (which also featured a unity candle, and had a tabletop-game-centric "after-party" instead of dancing) reminded me a lot of our own celebration.

It really doesn't feel like it's been a whole decade. Our lives have changed quite a bit--we're living in a different place now, working different jobs, hanging out with different friends--but the most important things haven't changed. We still enjoy each other's company, even if it's sitting on the couch while I watch Arrow and she plays games on her iPad. We always want to share our favorite things with each other. We're still very much in love.

Happy Anniversary, DeeAnn, and here's to many more.

Oscar? I Didn't Even Know 'er!

(I never get tired of that joke. Yes, I am that weird uncle you don't like to visit.)

DeeAnn and I are almost ready to host our annual Oscar Party tomorrow! In the tradition of my previous posts about this, here are links to some materials you can use for fun and games at your own shindig, if you're so inclined...

Acceptance Speech BINGO

The perennial favorite which hopefully makes the endless blathering more bearable. Complete any straight line of five squares to get a prize, then blackout the same card to get a second prize. We let people play two cards at once if they really want:

snout.org/cgi-bin/OAS_BINGO/makecard.cgi

Print a randomly generated card (reload page for new card), and check out the source code and word lists if you're interested.

#OscarTrivia Slides

As the name implies, I'll be tweeting these out one by one tomorrow afternoon starting at 11:00AM Pacific Time. I'll share the complete set on Monday at 4:00PM Pacific, after their Twitter debut.

Meanwhile, here's a proper subset of the slides we'll be running during the party, showing all the nominees (info and pics from AMPAS, MoviePosterDB, and ET Online):

picasaweb.google.com/116737692309729475506/OscarNominees2015

Follow @sparCKL and search for #OscarTrivia to learn dozens of useless facts which may only be tangentially related to these movies!

Predict The Losers

New name, same game. Whoever predicts the most winners in all categories gets the grand prize! (Not sure of your picks? See what one Vegas oddsmaker thinks.)

This year, I like the New York Times' Oscar ballot the best; it's clean and well-organized, with minimal branding. Less visual clutter also means less printer ink used:

malum-iter.com/Movies/ob2015nyt.pdf

That's all I've got for now. If you want to kill some more time, the official Oscars web site has trailers of all the nominated films, organized by category. Go for breadth! Go go go!

The Portland Food Pyramid

A cautionary tale: this is what happens when you spend too much time on social media.

On Thursday, I tweeted about my lunch at Burgerville. Technically, I guess it was a sub-sub-tweet, since I didn't mention the name of the restaurant or even the specific food items (pepper bacon cheeseburger, waffle cut fries, chocolate milkshake). Anyway. My fellow Portlandians Wink and Brian added their own remarks, and then Larry cascaded it into a very cheesy conversation.

Meanwhile, on Facebook—where my tweets get auto-cross-posted—others continued the ad hoc comedy workshopping. And because I have nothing better to do on a Friday night than answer Puzzled Pint e-mails and watch Downton Abbey, I decided to turn my hasty sketch into something more suitable for Thomas to post in his kitchen.

Here's the original:

@sparCKL/566073118629048320/photo

And now (drum roll, please) the new hotness:

snout.org/pfp

The pictured foodstuffs are (top to bottom, left to right):

• Hot Sauce: Secret Aardvark Habanero Hot Sauce
• Beer: Puzzled Pint (logo by Victor Asteinza; not actually food, but definitely a Portland institution!)
• Whiskey: Eastside Distilling Burnside Bourbon
• Butter: Tillamook Butter
• Caffeine: Stumptown Coffee Cold Brew "Stubby"
• Chocolate: Moonstruck Milk Chocolate Mayan Bar
• Fat: raw bacon (stock photo by Floortje)
• Salt: J&D's Bacon Salt (actually a Seattle company, but I'll allow it because BACON SALT)
• Starch: Kenny and Zuke's Pastrami Cheese Fries (photo by Robyn Lee for Serious Eats)
• Sugar: Voodoo Doughnut Maple Bacon Bar

I'm not sure when in the process the diagram became Portland-specific, but it just felt right. Also note that everything is covered in cheese because come on why wouldn't you do that.

If this infographic amuses you, <zoidberg>HOORAY!</zoidberg> And Happy Valentine's Day? Feel free to share the permalink: http://snout.org/pfp

So that happened.

This concludes tonight's episode of How's Curtis Wasting His Goddamn Time Now? Come back next week for more frivolity. Or just follow me on Twitter if you simply cannot wait that long.

<3 CKL

I Spend a Lot of Time Dealing with Puzzles

I'm not complaining, mind you. I enjoy making puzzle games and running events. But here's a snapshot of my hours worked, from January 2014 to early October:

(Blurred-out names indicate personal and/or secret projects)

I spent the most work time rewriting Waypoint Kangaroo, the novel which went out on submission in mid-October, but as you can see, the second-biggest time slice (nearly 18%) is Puzzled Pint.

That's not surprising; in addition to our Portland Game Control meetings almost every week, PP grew to twelve(!) cities last year, which meant a lot more organizational overhead. It's fun, but also a lot of work.

So what keeps me interested in PP, or the JoCo Cruise puzzle hunts we've been running since 2011, or any of the other volunteer events on which we spend dozens of hours and hundreds of dollars of our own money every year?

If you've ever listened to SnoutCast, you know we practice what we preach: RUN MORE GAMES. Puzzles—especially in-person, live events—are still not mainstream, and my impression is that they scare off a lot of people who might otherwise have fun with creative mental challenges. And I want more people to discover that they love this hobby.

But that's an issue of philosophy. The other thing that keeps me interested is the über-puzzle (as opposed to meta-puzzle) of actually putting on these events. Again, as we've covered on SnoutCast, the puzzles themselves are only one component of a much larger machine, even if they are the distinguishing feature.

Recruiting GC members, scheduling meetings and keeping them on track, finding and booking locations, managing players who find creative ways of interpreting your so-called instructions—maybe these things are more challenges than puzzles, but they're at least as difficult to solve. Especially when you can't ask someone for hints.

The reward, though, can be immeasurably greater. It's like any other piece of art: you have to believe in it hard in order to make it happen, to create something out of nothing, to persist long enough to actually finish it. But when you can make others understand what was in your head, when you can make them believe, too—I would argue there's nothing better than that in the world.

This is why I run Games. This is why I write fiction. This is why I keep trying to do more.

I Have Terrible Handwriting

Fortunately, our holiday newsletter is available in convenient, machine- and human-readable PDF form. Enjoy!

Download PDF

Tomorrow: for our traditional Christmas Day movie marathon, DeeAnn and I will attempt to watch six movies in a single day! You can follow our progress on Twitter; look for the hashtag #XmasMovieThon.

I Knew Jay Lake

And now he's gone forever.


Photo by Waterloo Productions

I didn't know Jay very well, but I did have the privilege of spending some time with him over the past few years—in local "co-working" writing groups, at a few different conventions, and once while waiting for our shared flight back to Portland (we talked about how home genome sequencing and "chemjet" drug printers could revolutionize medicine).

We were both writers, and we were both born in Taiwan. That's about where the similarities end, but he was a wonderful person to know and an inspiration in many ways. I'll miss him a lot.


Lunch at Paradise Lost 2013. Photo by Donnie G. Reynolds

As a tribute, here's my own, somewhat morbid version of Link Salad, a frequent feature on Jay's personal blog, and from which I always gleaned something fascinating.

A little bird told me — Twitter is awesome, in all senses of the word. In this case, it was good to know from the source sooner rather than later, but those four little words hit me with a sharp, deep pain.

It was dark and cold that morning — on June 1st, the power went out in our neighborhood just after 4:30 AM, and stayed out until 5:45 AM, the same time as Jay's passing. It's meaningless. But it's a thing. I don't know.

I've seen the future, baby It is murder. — Lisa's post about "the day after." (The title of the blog post is lyrics from the Leonard Cohen song "The Future." It's okay, I had to look it up too.)

The Oregonian story on Jay's passing — longer than an obituary, but still too short.

Remembering Jay Lake, 1964-2014 — a more SFnal perspective on Jay's life.

Free Speculative Fiction Online: Jay Lake — read some of Jay's many, many, many published stories.

Some of Jay Lake's books at Powell's — the greatest bookstore in the world.

International Fuck Cancer Day — the first Saturday of every June. Because seriously, fuck cancer. (Join the Facebook group if you're into that sort of thing.)

The Clayton Memorial Medical Fund — if you'd like to make a contribution in Jay's name, there are many other Pacific Northwest writers who are currently enduring or will someday encounter medical emergencies which strain their personal resources.

Lakeside — a documentary by my friend Donnie, currently in post-production. The original concept was "a year in the life of Jay Lake," but after Jay's cancer diagnosis, the film morphed into something else. I want to see it, and I know I'm going to cry. It's okay. It's going to be okay.

I Have Anger Issues...

...and I love Superman. Those two things are related. Let me explain.

Last Saturday, I rewatched Man of Steel, because why not. And it turned out to be a more enjoyable film on the second viewing, partly because I knew what to expect and was thus able to think more about the filmmakers' intentions—to reverse-engineer the storytelling, so to speak.

It's not a perfect movie. It's probably not even a great movie, as far as such things go, but I have to give producer Christopher "Dark Knight" Nolan and director Zack "300" Snyder credit for their audacity: they did not, in fact, make a Superman movie. They made a science fiction movie which leads to Superman. And they did a pretty good job of setting up what I hope will be a halfway decent movie series.

First, let me acknowledge all the bad stuff:

• Yes, there was excessive and senseless destruction of property (and loss of innocent lives).
• Yes, Zod talks too much, and most of it is ham-fisted exposition.
• Yes, the gratuitous callbacks to Superman II are distracting.
• There are too many flashbacks.
• There's not enough humor.
• And yes, the movie is about 20 minutes too long, mostly at the end.

Now let's talk about the good stuff. In roughly chronological order:

• Weird-science Krypton!
• That smash cut from spaceship to fishing trawler is genius, and you could only do it in a Superman-origin movie.
• Clark's first X-ray visions.
• "You are my son."
• Lois Lane, the smartest person in the room.
• Learning to fly in the Arctic.
• "The truth about you is beautiful."
• The whole surrender sequence.
• Emergency Holographic Jor-El.
• Clark not giving up intercut with Perry not leaving.
• "Welcome to The Planet." (Or, as I prefer: "Welcome to the planet.")

That, by the way, was a perfect ending line for the whole damn movie. Because it's a prequel, you guys. (Even the music signals a prologue: we never get an actual fanfare, but we get a slow build toward something.) As my friend Tom says, this title character is not Superman yet; this Clark Kent has never even considered becoming a caped crusader. The movie is about why Clark becomes Superman. And its thesis revolves around what, for me, are the two most resonant things about the Superman character: anger and choice.

Man of Steel cribs quite a bit from the Superman: Birthright books. There's no Lex Luthor in the movie, but there is an alien invasion of Metropolis, and Clark is first introduced to the audience during his "angry young man" years. He's immature, inexperienced, and struggling to find his place in a world where he can't really be himself. As we saw in Frozen, it's not enough to have amazing superpowers; you have to know when and how to use them—and you have to control them even when you're angry.

We all have powers we're not using. We all have abilities that we can push to the limit when we want to, or when we feel we need to. We can run faster when we're threatened or chased; we can think harder when there are great rewards or dire consequences on the line. And we also choose whether to use a particular skill or talent for fun, for making money, or not at all.

Some people complain that Superman isn't an interesting protagonist because he's too powerful. But for me, that's one of the most interesting things about him—he's not a hero because he's compelled by some inner demons or past trauma or external pressure. He's practically invulnerable; he can do whatever the hell he wants. (Which, by the way, is the question explored in the classic Red Son and the intriguing Irredeemable: what if Superman went bad?)

I have a temper. I've put my foot through a door and my hand through a plate glass window (I still have the scar). I've kicked in a minivan door. I once made another kid piss blood after a schoolyard fight (I didn't see it, but he told me about it the next day, and I felt terrible). In a very real sense, I have—as the saying goes—used my powers for evil. But I've learned from my youthful indiscretions.

And so does Clark Kent. As Superman, he chooses to fight "a never-ending battle for truth and justice"—and he is driven to that choice by his anger.

Those two motivations collide in that train station at the end of Man of Steel, during Clark's final confrontation with Zod. I hope the filmmakers address that in the next movie, even if it's just one line of dialogue. I hope that they intentionally set up that defining moment to explain why Superman doesn't kill people. (Linked image from Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?, the brilliant "imaginary tale" which wrapped up DC's Superman titles before the 1987 reboot.)

I have anger issues. I recognize that, and I'm working on it. Meanwhile, I do my best to avoid being a dick.

More Information Than I Required

If it weren't for robo-calls to the wrong phone number, I would have absolutely no idea what was going on in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Thanks, imperfect automation!


Download MP3

I Less Than Three Portland

(Today's "The I in MEAT" blog post is brought to you by the perfect texture, The Doubleclicks, and the Twitter.)

Back in 2007, DeeAnn and I went all in on what we called "the writer move." In particular, we decided to stretch our savings by moving out of the San Francisco Bay Area to a more affordable city--meaning we had most of North America to choose from.

Some places we ruled out right away, for various reasons. Seattle was also too expensive (and still is). Canada would require proof of rabies vaccination for our cats, which in itself wasn't a problem, but we didn't want to risk losing them to international quarantine or for some other obscure medical reason. And flying the cats anywhere also seemed like asking for trouble. But that still left forty-eight of the United States to choose from.

To narrow down the wide field of candidates, we created a big spreadsheet and researched data which were important to our lifestyle. Some of those properties included:

• Winter comfort (January windchill and annual snowfall)
• Summer comfort (July heat index and average rainfall)
• Cost of living estimate, averaged from five different sources
• Distance to nearest airport
• Distance to nearest VA hospital
• Number of Trader Joe's stores within 15 miles
• Number of Thai restaurants within 5 miles
• Percentage of population identifying as religious
• Percentage of population identifying as Democratic

Here's a link to the full spreadsheet, if you're curious about the details. Note that we gathered this data seven years ago, and much of it will be out of date now:


http://goo.gl/p3tl1O

We took trips to visit our top two out-of-state candidate cities, shown in black text on that spreadsheet: Cary, North Carolina (in the Research Triangle) and Portland, Oregon. (Our fallback was Sacramento, California, which area we were already familiar with from all our Hogwarts Game scouting in 2006.) Cary had a fantastic farmer's market, but the neighborhoods weren't remotely walkable. And Portland... well, we live here now.

It took us a little while to adjust, but now we couldn't be happier with our home. (And no, I am not saying that ironically.) The move also inspired me to ask for 37 Postcards back in 2010, and that was pretty amazing, too.

If you're thinking about relocating, and you have some latitude in your selection criteria, Internet research is an excellent place to start. We started with information from Sperling's Best Places, then supplemented and corroborated that with data from various other online sources which we judged reliable and relevant. Your mileage may vary.

I Dream of Google

Three things you should know about me:

1. I still hand-code my HTML (yes, even this blog post)
2. My favorite Autobot is Jazz (voice of Scatman Crothers)
3. I used to work at Google

And I have only ever dreamed about one of those things. (I guess that's actually four things. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!)

I worked at Google for a little over four years. Yes, I started before the IPO; yes, I had stock options; yes, I was a paper millionaire for, like, two seconds before I had to pay the taxes. I'm not rich, and I haven't retired (unless you count moving to Portlandia).

The first two years were the best. I started when the company only had about a thousand employees. I was hired into a team of four people--I was the fourth--to build internal tools for the Online Sales and Operations division (Sheryl Sandberg's group, for what it's worth; I saw her pretty regularly around the building, and briefly met her at an internal book club meeting once, but even then, she had no idea who I was).

When I dream about being at Google, I dream about the good things. The intelligent and passionate people there. The opportunities to solve interesting problems. And, of course, the various free and subsidized personal services, which helped keep employees "on campus" as much as possible, to maximize the potential for unplanned collaboration (and exempt overtime). All the crazy perks depicted in that movie The Internship? All true, and not half of what was available when I was there. Who knows what else they've added since then.

There were a lot of good things that would have kept me at Google, but in the end, I had to move on.

By the time I left, in early 2008, the company employed well over ten thousand people worldwide. My team had grown by an order of magnitude and was on the brink of being politicked out of existence. I won't go into details, but suffice it to say that even though Google may be the best workplace in the modern world, it is still a commercial corporation: a machine built to produce profit. It's a big company. And no organization grows to that size without picking up a few parasites along the way.

Those last two years were, to be sure, still better than the year I spent at my previous employer, working with one of the worst managers I have ever endured. But since I can make the comparison, I have to say that it may--may--be better to struggle against incompetence than to fight active malign intent. Easier, in any case. No villain ever thinks he's the bad guy, and when he has more powerful allies than you do, the battles can be very discouraging.

I stopped fighting, at some point, because I simply didn't know why I was bothering to do it any more. I had come to Google with the romantic notion that it would be the last place I ever worked--how could any workplace ever get better than this?--and that's probably why it hurt so much when the truth of it slapped me in the face, metaphorically.

I didn't belong there. I didn't want to work for a big company. I didn't want to work for any company, really. Even though I appreciated all the support systems offered by the organization--the free food, the flexible work hours, the on-site massages--and even though I still believed in the cause, I simply couldn't stay after having seen how ruthlessly some would pursue a brass ring. I would always be wary of being betrayed again.

Maybe I was lucky. Maybe it's a good thing that I learned, before I turned forty, that I was not fitted to be a salaryman. Maybe it's better that I moved away from the endless one-upmanship of Silicon Valley.

Maybe I'm happier now than I would have been otherwise.

Sometimes, at night, I dream about being back at Google. But I always wake up.

I Always Keep My Promises

As I write this, it's after midnight on Tuesday, less than ten hours before this post is supposed to go up. I briefly considered not taking the time to finish this, and instead just posting a "sorry, try again next week" message—but only briefly. Because I don't do that anymore. I don't fail just to see what the consequences will be.

It took me a long time to realize that I was doing this. Any time I got into a new project or started a new job, I would always blow a deadline early on, or oversleep and show up late for work, or otherwise fail to meet expectations. I would never do it consciously, but looking back, I'm pretty sure there was subconscious intent. It wasn't just random happenstance that caused me to underperform in such a predictable manner.

I suppose part of me thought this was a valid, even scientific thing to do: how will you know the consequences for failure in a particular situation, whether professional or personal, unless you test the waters a little? And isn't it better to miss a small deadline than to completely screw up a bigger project later?

Perhaps it was also an immature defense mechanism, a way of telling people not to depend on me because I might let them down. But whatever caused me to behave that way, it was pretty stupid. And I don't do that any more.

I'm proud of the fact that while I was doing 512 Words or Fewer, I did not miss a single one of the 256 consecutive weeks of posting flash fiction every Friday. True, sometimes it wouldn't be until Friday afternoon, and sometimes I would schedule posts ahead of time—when I knew I would be traveling or otherwise engaged on Thursday—but even that required planning and dedication. I made a promise, and I kept it.

But even more than the promise, the 512s were something that mattered to me. And I guess that's the real lesson here. I've always been willing to slack off when it came to things I didn't feel very passionate about, but when it's something that really matters to me—The Game, NaNoWriMo, family and friends—I don't make excuses for not getting things done. I figure out how to finish the job.

That's a whole lotta words, but maybe Ryan Gosling can say it more succinctly.

The other part of this is that I've learned how to budget my time better and how to say no. There's a lot of really cool stuff in the world I could do, but there are only so many hours in the day. If I don't think I can do something—and do it at least competently, if not perfectly—I won't commit to it. That's not to say I won't still overreach now and then, letting my enthusiasm overrule my analysis. But I do it a lot less than I used to.

It's easy to fail. It's easy to say you'll do something, and then do nothing. But in the long run, doing stuff is better, and reliability is a hugely underrated talent. Marshmallows!

Two Zero One Three Out

DeeAnn, Jasper, Tye, and I hope you're all enjoying your winter holidays! Here's the news from Apartment de Snout, where the women are strong, the men are still writing, and all the cats are above average:

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I'm Made Out of Meat

That title is, of course, an homage to Terry Bisson's classic short story "They're Made Out of Meat." If you haven't read it, click over to his site and do it now. It's less than a thousand words; shouldn't take more than ten minutes. I'll wait.

All done? Good. Let's begin.

I am made out of meat. The "I" writing these words now is a transient thing, a momentary spark of consciousness supported and sustained by a fleshy engine. There is no mind without brain, and the brain does not live without a heart and lungs to feed it oxygen and sense organs to provide stimuli for contemplation. We are all made out of meat, and we can never escape our corporeal prisons.

Sometimes I wonder if our sentience is some weird side effect of evolution, a freakish emergent phenomenon caused by the complexity of being such large, multicellular organisms. Because (per Stephen Hawking) it is not clear that intelligence has any long-term survival value, and being smart enough to wonder about cosmology doesn't mean we can do a damn thing about it.

I suppose that's where this entire train of thought starts, decades ago: with a small boy lying in his bed at night, staring into the darkness--literally--and also figuratively gazing into the abyss of his own inevitable death.

I don't remember precisely how old I was when I first grasped the enormous fact of capital-D Death. That it would take us all, sooner or later; that each of us would cease to exist forever after that--that even the universe itself will, someday, end. I think it took me a little while to really process that, to understand it completely, and when I did, it totally freaked me the fuck out.

To be clear: I wouldn't say I've ever feared death, precisely. More like I still haven't made my peace with the Reaper. And especially when I was younger, the knowledge that I would someday stop just felt like a terrible injustice, like a punishment I didn't deserve. I liked being alive, and why did that have to end someday? It all seemed so unfair.

Yeah, yeah, I know. Get a helmet, kid. And I don't know what I would tell my younger self, if I had the hypothetical opportunity now. Make the most of your time? Don't waste it on things that don't make you happy? I'm not sure younger-me would give much weight to those platitudes, especially in the middle of a nighttime panic attack. I suspect facing death with dignity is one thing we all have to learn the hard way.

Don't worry, this is not something I've kept bottled up for forty years; I have talked about this, with my parents when I was younger, with my wife more recently. They all made reasonable counter-arguments, including possible future prospects for prolonging human lifespans (giving me more time to come to terms with my own mortality, I suppose) and the fact that I simply won't even know when I'm dead, and will therefore be unable to feel anything at all about it, one way or another. What's the point of worrying about something you can't change?

And they're right, of course. It's more productive to worry about things I can affect, like how happy I am with the work I'm doing right now, maintaining my health for the next fifty-plus years of my life, et cetera. But I can't help worrying about more than that. I think about what I'm going to leave behind, and I wonder what people will remember of me, and for how long after I'm gone.

I suppose that's ego, wanting some recognition that extends beyond the grave and beyond my immediate family. But it's also wanting to make a difference in the world, in some miniscule, brief manner--to be a part of the world, to feel connected to the seven billion other lives on this tiny, shining planet.

Even if all we are is meat, at least we can all be meaty together.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Fresh Meat

As you may have heard, our Tuesday podcast is going on hiatus for the holidays, and returning next year on an irregular monthly schedule. And I also ended my Friday flash fiction project back in August, so... I guess it's time for a new weekly feature on this blog.

I'm calling it "The 'I' in MEAT," but don't worry, I'll never mention that again. (Except in the label/tag/whatever the kids are calling that meta-data now. Think of it as an internal code name.) The point is, I'm going to write about something I care about, and every post title will begin with "I." For example: "I Have a Blog Now HO HO HO" (not an actual title).

If that becomes too obnoxious at any point, I'm sure y'all will let me know, and I'll figure out something else. :)

At the moment, I'm targeting Wednesdays, which means that yes, the first two posts will appear on Christmas Day and New Year's Day. You're welcome.