Author: Marko

books. shameless self-promotion. writing.

new york comic con schedule.

Going to New York Comic Con in October? What a coincidence–me too!

I’ll be there doing HIGHLY AUTHORIAL stuff for 47North. I’ll sign copies of TERMS OF ENLISTMENT at the 47North booth on Friday, October 10th, from 4-4:30PM, so if you are going to be there, stop by and say hi so I don’t feel like a goober sitting in front of a stack of books and looking longingly at the three-mile signing line for that Diary of a Wimpy Kid guy. And I’ll be part of the 47North author panel Meet the SciFi & Fantasy Authors of 47North Friday evening from 8-8:45PM, so by all means come and heckle me there.

 

parenting. this monkey house.

on hitting your children.

“My parents spanked me, and I turned out okay!”

God, how I loathe this argument in favor of corporal punishment.

I wasn’t spanked as a child. If someone had set up a nanny cam in our home between the time I was in, oh, first grade, and the time my mother finally left the no-good sack of shit my father was at the time, it would have recorded frequent occasions of what these days would be considered savage child abuse. My father liked to drink, which was a problem because he was not a happy drunk. As his alcohol level increased, he got in turn gregarious, boisterous, morose, and angry. When he was toward the end of that scale, he could get furiously pissed off at anything.

During my childhood, my father ran a series of pubs into the ground. He liked to be the proprietor of the local watering hole, but he wasn’t a very good businessman, so we moved around a lot as he started place after place with much enthusiasm and high hopes, only to see everything shuttered and me having to change schools again when the initial excitement of a new business had worn off and the money stopped making it to the suppliers and the power company again. I suspect this had a great deal to do with what I now, with my adult knowledge, understand was a latent cycle of low self-esteem and depression. It didn’t take much to put him in a bad mood—a pub patron upstaging him or making a light-hearted joke at his expense, that sort of thing—and then the hair trigger was set.

I was his first-born, and after my mother I was the biggest target around that couldn’t fight back and kick his ass. (The one time he picked a fight with a patron he ended up getting cold-cocked and laid out on the floor of the pub in just one hit. The guy warned him not to be stupid, and only hit my father in self-defense when he didn’t take repeated warnings. That didn’t do much for his self-esteem that week, let me tell you.) It didn’t work in my favor that I was shy, bookish, and in many ways not the rough-and-tough son he would have preferred. Sometimes it was stuff that I said or did, but more often it was something I didn’t say or do and should have, in his opinion. Then the belt would come out, and he’d beat the shit out of me. Not just “a spanking”, or “a slap or two on the butt”. We’re talking five or ten minutes of continuous and indiscriminate application of the belt on any exposed part of the body. Struggling pissed him off and made him hit harder. Staying passive and not showing the proper level of distress was taken as defiance or implication that he didn’t hit hard enough, and that made him hit harder too. 

But here’s what I realized at long last, with many years between me and that wretched childhood of mine: he was never the bad guy in his own mind. He was never an abuser in his own eyes. There were always the classic make-up actions borne of the shame of knowing you’ve gone too far: ice cream consolation, promises of future fun, and half-hearted apologies that weren’t really apologies because they always placed the responsibility for his loss of control in my court. See what you made me do? That hurt me way more than it hurt you. Why can’t you just listen to what I’m telling you? In his own eyes, he was the stern but loving disciplinarian, straightening out a defiant kid that had stepped too far out of line by disrespecting parental authority. I never understood the reasoning, of course, at eight or ten or twelve years old. I only understood that I was a wimpy disappointment of a son who spent too much time with his nose in a book, and that it was wise to become invisible when he tromped up the stairs after a long evening tending bar.

And here’s another thing I realized long after the fact: I don’t remember the good times with him.

I’m sure there were some. I have pictures from my childhood that show us all on vacation, or at local amusement parks, at parties, out playing with cousins in backyard pools on family visits—but I hardly remember any of those moments, and I don’t recall much in the way of happy things from that time. What I do remember are the beatings, and being scared of my dad most of the time, and the physical and mental effort to go out of my way to not cross paths with him. 

I’m sure he loved me and my siblings. But I don’t remember the acts of love. I remember the open hand and the belt, and the tears, and the late-night huddled fear.

And that’s why the idea of hitting my children makes me physically sick.

There is no clear delineation between “necessary discipline” and “abuse”. Physical violence is always abuse. It doesn’t teach anything but fear and resentment, and it will always, always, always come back to you in some form.

 “My parents spanked me, and I turned out okay!”

Bullshit. You turned out okay despite the corporal punishment, not because of it. And don’t say there’s a difference between your spankings and my abuse, because then you’re operating a really slippery moral sliding scale, and I can guarantee you that my father too was convinced at the time that what he was going was an unpleasant but necessary parental duty to recalibrate my moral compass. You know, so I’d turn out okay as an adult. What you need to do is to take that justification of “appropriate” violence and realize that what you’re doing is to establish what level of physical and mental pain is okay to inflict on your child intentionally. The answers should always and unambiguously be none.

My father died over fifteen years ago, in his early fifties, alone and eaten up with cancer. He’s buried in a welfare plot somewhere in Frankfurt. I met him only once after my mom left him. When I saw him again, he was in his early fifties and in bad health, and I was in my early twenties and in prime shape, so the power imbalance went the other way, and there was no animosity. I don’t feel anything other than pity when I think of him now. I should have had a good childhood, and he should have had a loving family and children and grandchildren by his side when he got sick and died, but it was all wasted, and it was all due to things solely in his control, and it’s the saddest fucking thing in the world.

I was hit as a child, and I turned out okay. Eventually. After a long time and much perspective, and after having kids of my own. But that shit leaves scars in the head that won’t heal, ever. And from one parent to another, I’m telling you that you don’t want to risk putting those scars there. Because love and fear can’t take up the same space, and what you want your children to feel when they hear you walking up the stairs is the former, not the latter. Hitting doesn’t teach a child anything, at least not anything close to what you think it will teach them. 

books. friends. new hampshah. shameless self-promotion.

scalzi does concord.

Last night, my friend John Scalzi was in Concord as part of a book tour for his new novel “Lock In”, so I went to see him and attend the reading.

A few weeks back, we were talking about signings and stuff, and I joked that my first book store signing event would probably be a pitifully empty affair—like, two people in the chairs, and both of them book store employees. So he said, “You know what? Bring something to read with you, and I’ll have you be my opening act. That way your first reading at a bookstore is sure to have a few more people than two, and you won’t have to get nervous in the future because you’ve already done this thing in front of a bunch of folks.”

So I opened for John by reading an excerpt from “Cake From Mars”, my humorous SF short story that was published in the Unidentified Funny Objects anthology. It went really well, and quite a few people came up to me later in the store and told me they enjoyed the bit. I’ve done two readings so far—one at Boskone, one at Readercon—but this was the first one I’ve done in a civilian setting, so to speak. John’s reading was far better than mine—he’s a seasoned pro with lots of experience, and you can tell that he knows how to entertain a crowd, which was a reminder to me that writing is part of the arts, and the arts are largely a business of entertainment. Note to self: work on presentation and public speaking skills.

(SIDE NOTE and GRATUITOUS ENDORSEMENT: Gibson’s in Concord is easily the nicest independent bookstore I have ever seen, and the people who run it are super-nice and friendly. It’s about an hour away from Castle Frostbite, but it’s such a lovely place that I am going to claim it as my home base bookstore for all future brick-and-mortar needs and events.)

I’ve not said much about the whole Hugo/Sad Puppies kerfuffle online because I have friends on both sides of the perceived divide, and because I think that the whole affair was largely people on both sides talking straight past each other. But what I will say is this: I don’t divide my social circle along political lines. My circle of friends includes liberals, card-carrying Marxists, conservatives, libertarians, and more than a few people with anarchist leanings. Politically speaking, I’ll never be entirely in sync with anyone in the room. And you know what? That’s totally fine. I don’t have to agree with you to like you. If your circle of friends only consists of people who are ideologically in agreement, you don’t have a social circle, you have an echo chamber.

Friends with diverging political opinions are like Amazon three-star reviews. They’re not fawning or flattering like the 5-stars, and they’re not clueless or unconstructively negative like the 1-stars. The 3-stars frequently offer the most incisive, insightful, and useful criticism of your work—those are the ones that often give you material to think and really evaluate the criticism. I have the best political discussions with people who are neither totally opposed to my political views and dismiss them out of hand, or in complete agreement with me on everything.

I have all sorts of political viewpoints in my circle of friends because I don’t sort people by Conservative or Liberal or any other political label. I sort them into two categories: good people and jerks. And both varieties come in all kinds of ideological flavors. I’m friends with John Scalzi not because we agree on politics ALL THE TIME AND FOREVER, but because he’s a genuinely nice guy who’s generous with his time and encouragement, the kind who will share his podium with a relative writing newbie to get acclimated. He’s never been anything but kind to me, so I have no reason to talk or think badly of him because someone else disagrees with him on the Internet. And I do my level best to be as kind as I can be to others in return, because when my name comes up in conversation, I would much rather have it make people say, “Oh yeah, I know him—he’s a nice guy,” and not “Oh yeah, I know him—he’s a total dickwaffle.”

(There are undoubtedly people who consider me a dickwaffle despite my best efforts, of course, but you can’t ever avoid the one-star reviews, folks.)

But when in doubt? And especially when it comes to Internet arguments? I’ll always tend to side with friends, the people I know personally to be Good Folk Indeed, even if I don’t line up with them 100% when it comes to political viewpoints.

Aaaaaanyway, that’s enough on politics and Internet slap-fights for a while. Have some serious author pictures from the reading instead:

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Some dude randomly defacing the existing stock of John Scalzi books.

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“Let’s talk about something called an Adjustable Rate Mortgage.” 

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This woman is pleased. John Scalzi just saved her a bunch of money on her homeowners’ insurance.

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Kloos, Scalzi, and Master Chang.

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Serious author picture.


books. shameless self-promotion. writing.

the space kablooie saga goes international.

Today’s announcement involves the OUTSTANDING literary tastes of the Polish and German people:

The Polish language rights for TERMS OF ENLISTMENT and LINES OF DEPARTURE have been sold to the Polish publishing house Fabryka Slow. I don’t have an ETA for the Polish language version, but my best guess is “sometime next year”.

The German language rights for both TERMS and LINES have been sold to Heyne, one of the really big names in German Science Fiction. This is a rather big deal for me personally—I read a ton of Heyne SF when I was growing up in Germany, and had you asked me back then who I’d want to be published with, I would have said “Heyne” without a second thought. See? Dreams do come true. Eventually. After years of hard work. But! Dreams.

Both deals were made by Evan Gregory at the Ethan Ellenberg Literary Agency. Evan has been my agent for a year and a half now, and I am very happy with both his work and that of the agency. 

TERMS OF ENLISTMENT and LINES OF DEPARTURE in Polish and German! That’s foreign rights sales #2 and #3 (Evan sold the Czech rights a few months ago), and I just can’t wait for those sweet foreign language covers. I hope the Heyne book gets laser-firing spaceships on the cover, just like EVERY LAST ONE OF JOHN SCALZI’S HEYNE BOOKS. (Even the ones that don’t feature spaceships. Or lasers.)

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the death of the ipod classic.

Amid the hubbub of the iPhone 6 and Apple Watch introductions on Tuesday, the quiet death of the iPod classic went pretty much unnoticed. After 13 years of production, Apple has discontinued the hard drive-based iPod.

The demise of the iPod Classic was predictable. It was on its sixth generation, which hadn’t been updated in years, and sales had been declining year after year as people moved toward listening to music on their iPhones (and increasingly using streaming services like Pandora instead of locally copied music). But the iPod Classic was still a viable music-only device. In Michael Caine’s words in “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels”, it was a one-trick pony, but it was a really good trick. If you had more than 64GB of music to carry around, it was your only option in the Apple stable, as the iPhone and iPod touch top out at that size while the last generation of the iPod classic held 160GB.

I picked up a new iPod classic not too long ago as a dedicated device to play all my music in the car, but I’ve found that I enjoy using it in a Walkman-like fashion when I’m out walking or biking because of the click wheel and the iPod’s single task nature. It’s just a comfortable little brick, and after all this time, the click wheel still makes sense when scrolling through music or changing volume. I’m glad I got.one of the last models, and I predict it will hold a full backup of all my music files for a good long while yet.

castle frostbite. fountain pens. shameless self-promotion. writing.

novel the third.

Last Friday, I finished the manuscript for ANGLES OF ATTACK, the third novel in the Frontlines series. 

<insert tired “Hooray”>

Now it’s going to go through the editorial ministrations, and after all the bumps and potholes are fixed, there’ll be the usual publisher magic done to it. I’ll share the release date as soon as my publisher sets one.

I have a modest little splurge tradition going that I may have borrowed from Elizabeth Bear and tweaked for my own purposes. Every time I finish a novel, I buy myself a nice fountain pen. (Bear buys hers when she sells a novel, i think.) Then I use the new pen to start on the next novel. For TERMS OF ENLISTMENT, I got a Lamy 2000. For LINES OF DEPARTURE, it was a Pilot Vanishing Point. And for ANGLES OF ATTACK, it’s this one, which just arrived in the mail:

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That’s a Pelikan M600 “Souverän” in green, with a medium 14k nib. These are to fountain pens what a Benz is to automobiles—solid, traditional, high-quality, and a bit of a luxury. (It’s a modest luxury compared to a new Benz, to be sure.)

I didn’t write ANGLES in longhand like I usually do. Because of the close deadline (which I still managed to overshoot by, uh, LET’S NOT SPEAK OF IT EVER), I had no time for transcribing all the longhand, so I had to write everything straight into the computer, using my MacBook Pro, a Das Keyboard, and trusty Scrivener. 

These last three months have been a bit challenging. Writing is not really hard on the body, but every time I finish a book, I feel like I’ve lifted a dump truck using just my frontal lobe. In addition to the regular mental strain of cranking out 100,000 words of fictional fiction, it has been noisy around the house for the last few months because of the various projects we need to get dome before icy death sets in for another six months. I’ve spent a lot of time out of the house to avoid the hammering, clanging, banging, and dog barking, and I’ve stayed up late a lot. When I turned the novel in, I felt even more drained than I usually do. The next day, I slept until noon and was still tired, and it took me about three days to get back to a regular sleep pattern. So yeah, writing can be hard work—just not the kind where you get blisters on your hands and come home covered in coal dust. But making up stuff all day for months on end can wear the body out in surprising ways.

Anyway, now I am going to reset my brain with video games and other leisurely pursuits for a week or three, and then I’ll ink up the fancy new pen and get started on the next novel. 

in the news. this monkey house.

peel’s principles of policing.

Sir Robert Peel, who in his tenure as Home Secretary established London’s Metropolitan Police in the early 19th century, set forth nine principles of policing. They are as follows:

1. To prevent crime and disorder, as an alternative to their repression by military force and severity of legal punishment.

2. To recognise always that the power of the police to fulfil their functions and duties is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions and behaviour, and on their ability to secure and maintain public respect.

3. To recognise always that to secure and maintain the respect and approval of the public means also the securing of the willing co-operation of the public in the task of securing observance of laws.

4. To recognise always that the extent to which the co-operation of the public can be secured diminishes proportionately the necessity of the use of physical force and compulsion for achieving police objectives.

5. To seek and preserve public favour, not by pandering to public opinion, but by constantly demonstrating absolutely impartial service to law, in complete independence of policy, and without regard to the justice or injustice of the substance of individual laws, by ready offering of individual service and friendship to all members of the public without regard to their wealth or social standing, by ready exercise of courtesy and friendly good humour, and by ready offering of individual sacrifice in protecting and preserving life.

6. To use physical force only when the exercise of persuasion, advice and warning is found to be insufficient to obtain public co-operation to an extent necessary to secure observance of law or to restore order, and to use only the minimum degree of physical force which is necessary on any particular occasion for achieving a police objective.

7. To maintain at all times a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and that the public are the police, the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.

8. To recognise always the need for strict adherence to police-executive functions, and to refrain from even seeming to usurp the powers of the judiciary of avenging individuals or the State, and of authoritatively judging guilt and punishing the guilty.

9. To recognise always that the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, and not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them.

 

Now, if I drew up a list of policing principles with intent to make them diametrically opposed to Peel’s, and then designed a police force around them, what do you think it would look and act like?

Regardless of your stance on the militarization of American police in general and the recent events in Missouri in particular, here’s a simple truth: a police department that loses the trust of the community it serves can no longer fulfill its primary function. 

I am not anti-police—I recognize policing duties as one of the few legitimate and important functions of a state. But the War on Drugs, onerous and liberty-destroying as it is, has merged with the War on Terror, and as a result we have big-city police departments who are perpetually in conflict mode.  It’s not that I mind the cops having AR-15s. What I mind is that “compliance by overwhelming force” has become the first and only tool in the toolbox in many cases. If you dress your cops like soldiers, equip them like soldiers, have them train like soldiers, and adopt the lingo of soldiers, it’s really no surprise when they sooner or later start feeling and acting like soldiers.

I don’t think the War on Terror/Drugs will end any time soon. There are too many jobs involved, too much power to give up, too many agencies making a living and justifying their own existence off perpetuating the whole thing. (Asset forfeiture laws in particular have done more damage to the Bill of Rights that any other piece of legislation in the last 40 years. This policing-for-profit business has to stop.)

I know many police officers who are upstanding both as people and professionals—who take their duties to heart and execute them with integrity and professionalism. But policing as a whole is in dire need of reform in this country, because it’s as far removed from Peel’s Principles of Policing as you can get, and everyone suffers for it: our communities, the officers, and the general respect for the law. 

Where do we go from here? Anywhere but the way we’ve been going, because it’s not working. I’ll leave you with a link to this excellent WaPo article by Radley Balko, who has some insightful examples and suggestions to get our police back to something resembling peace officers instead of law enforcement professionals.

 

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robin williams, 1951-2014.

O Captain! My Captain!

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;
                         But O heart! heart! heart!
                            O the bleeding drops of red,
                               Where on the deck my Captain lies,
                                  Fallen cold and dead.

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills,
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding,
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
                         Here Captain! dear father!
                            The arm beneath your head!
                               It is some dream that on the deck,
                                 You’ve fallen cold and dead.

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,
The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;
                         Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
                            But I with mournful tread,
                               Walk the deck my Captain lies,
                                  Fallen cold and dead.
 
 
—Walt Whitman
 
books. bullets & links. capitalism. friends. writing.

the novels of chang.

Chang Terhune is a good friend of mine.

We met for the first time back at Viable Paradise XII in 2008. He is one of the many talented writers in the VPXII alumni group that are also fine human beings and fabulously fun to hang out with. Because he’s practically a local (Castle Frostbite is in west-central NH, Casa Chang is in coastal southern Maine), we have been meeting up again at practically every SF/F convention since 2008. They say you don’t really know a man until you’ve gotten him drunk on chocolate martinis, and by that measure I KNOW CHANG VERY WELL INDEED.

Anyway, Brother Chang is a fellow SF writer, and he has decided to follow me down the self-publishing path I walked with some success before the magical 47North spaceship beamed me up. To that end, I want to direct your gaze toward his author page on Lulu, where he is offering up his three SF novels: HARVESTMAN, THE ASTROGATRIX, and AUGUSTA, MOTHER OF SALT. (HARVESTMAN is also available on Amazon here.)

So if your fancy new futuristic word tablet is out of new stuff to put on it, and you dig straight-up SF, consider supporting a deserving new author who is also a really nice guy EVEN IF HE CAN’T HOLD HIS CHOCOLATE MARTINIS. (Not a euphemism.)

horseless carriages.

autos in the wild.

Because all the cool kids are doing it, here’s today’s wild vintage car spotting:

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It was driven by a middle-aged guy (OF COURSE IT WAS), with a preteen girl in the passenger seat, presumably his offspring.  With a car like that to ride around in, he’s going to spoil that kid for her future first car, because who could be impressed with something like a Honda Fit or a VW Golf after riding around in a bona fide classic like that Stingray?