In the next few days, I’m going to unpublish my short story “Payday.” It will still be available in the collection In Times Such As These, but I think it’s about time that its run as a free short story single should come to a close.
(For those of you who may not be familiar with how I do things around here, I typically publish my short stories first as free singles, then bring them down when I have enough to bundle into a collection. I’m actually going to take down a bunch of my short story singles over the next couple of weeks as I get ready to publish the second batch of stories that will appear in my fourth collection, Beyond World’s End, sometime this spring.)
I originally wrote “Payday” back in 2017, in response to an anthology call sponsored by the Economic Security Project, an NGO whose stated goal is to bring about a universal basic income. My story (which obviously did not win the contest) showcases all of the dangers of a UBI, such as inflation, supply chain shortages, and the breakdown of local businesses and communities.
I self-published the story in March of 2020, just as the pandemic was getting started. At the time, I had no idea that my warnings and predictions would soon become so prescient. The stimulus checks and unemployment benefits weren’t exactly a UBI, but they were regarded by many as a stepping stone to enacting that policy, and what did they lead to? Inflation, supply chain shortages, and the breakdown of local businesses and communities.
In January 2021, I unpublished “Payday” so as to include it in the collection In Times Such As These the following month, but then the other shoe of the pandemic began to drop. The threat of rampant inflation, which the authorities claimed would be “transitory,” convinced me that this story was too timely to take down, so I put it back up as a free short story single, where it remains until today.
At this point, however, the story is less of a prescient look at a troubling possible future than an obvious, and perhaps too “on the nose” (I tend to get that criticism a lot) extrapolation of our present situation. For that reason, I don’t think it’s worthwhile to keep it up any longer. It had a very good run, garnering more than 5,000 downloads, which isn’t enough to have a significant impact on the national discussion, but is still greater than the circulation of most science fiction magazines and podcasts (including, most likely, the original anthology call).
“Payday” will still be available in my collection In Times Such As These, and I do still plan to keep it on submission to the traditional magazines as a reprint, but the free short story single will come down in the next couple of days. If you haven’t already picked up a copy, now is the time to do it.
Check out these group promotions! All of the books are free when you sign up for the author’s email list. Get them soon, the promotions finish at the end of the month!
My resolution last year was to read or DNF 100 books. I was doing pretty well on it through the summer, but then I stopped using Goodreads and lost count. (No particular reason, other than that I just fell out of using the site. It’s clunky and difficult to navigate, and after I started using my wife’s spreadsheet system for tracking my reading, I just didn’t feel like posting updates.) Counting children’s books, I definitely hit 100—probably more like 120—but without counting children’s books, it was probably closer to 80.
I do really want to keep up on my long-term goal to become a better reader—or to be more well-read, which amounts to the same thing. This last week, I’ve been giving that goal some serious thought, and I’ve decided on the following new year’s resolution for 2022:
Read or DNF every novel that has won a Hugo or a Nebula award, and acquire all of the good ones.
Ever since 2015, I’ve been pretty jaded about the Hugos (and the Nebulas, to a lesser extent). However, for a long time they were the most important and authoritative awards in science fiction, and by using it as a reading list, I hope to get a better sense of how the genre has evolved over the years, including how in recent years it has fallen to the woke insanity of our time.
There are 110 novels that have won either a Hugo or a Nebula award (or both). Of those, I’ve already read or DNFed 33 as of today, January 1st. I anticipate that I will DNF many of the rest, but I’ll give them all an honest try, and differentiate between hard DNFs (where I know I’ll never get back to reading it) and soft DNFs (where I intend to come back to it later). For purposes of this resolution, though, I’ll count both, since as a reader I believe in DNFing early and often.
As for acquiring them, that shouldn’t be too hard, and will help to build our family library, which is one of my long-term goals. Paperback Swap is great for acquiring used books, especially mass market paperbacks, which is actually my preferred format for most books (great for stuffing in a back pocket or tossing in a backpack, and you don’t mind it as much if someone borrows and never returns it). The added benefit of using Paperback Swap is that it will help me to get rid of some of the books I’ve acquired over the years that I’ll probably never read.
That’s actually a huge problem for me, and I was thinking about making another resolution to have read at least half of the fiction books that we own before the end of the year, but I think this reading resolution will help with that enough that I don’t need to make it more complicated. I’ve found that it’s generally better to set one resolution and focus on that, rather than setting so many that I’ll probably forget all of them by mid-March. Besides, having a bunch of unread books isn’t actually much of a problem, unless you don’t have a place to store them. We do.
While putting together the spreadsheet of all the Hugo and Nebula winning books, I discovered some very interesting things. One of them had to do with the age of each winner at the time they won the award. The average age was about 46, with Samuel Delany coming in as the youngest for Babel-17 in 1967 at age 25, and Ursula K. Le Guin as the oldest for Powers in 2009, at age 80. (Her first novel to win either award was The Left Hand of Darkness, in 1970 when she was 41.) The average age skewed younger in earlier decades; now, it’s closer to 50.
Another very interesting thing to look at is which authors have had children and which ones haven’t. Of the Hugo and Nebula award-winning novels that I’ve DNFed, almost all of them are from authors who are childless. That’s not too surprising when you consider how much it changes your perspective on the world to have or adopt a child. What’s really surprising to me is how many of these authors are childless, and how many of the childless authors are writing books for children. Since 2015 and 2016 respectively, none of the living authors who have won a Hugo or a Nebula award for best novel have had any children of their own—or if they have, it’s not public knowledge and the internet doesn’t know.
So anyways, that’s basically the long and short of it. I’ll keep track of this goal through the detailed spreadsheet I’ve set up for it, and post updates throughout the year. And when I’m done with the Hugos and Nebulas, I’ll probably move on to the Dragon Awards, which may actually be harder since 1) there are more than half a dozen sub-categories, 2) many of the winning novels are the umpteenth book in a long-running series, and 3) I probably won’t DNF as many of them.
Christmas was great! My parents came over from Iowa on the train, and stayed with us for a few days. My wife’s brother also came down from the Salt Lake area. He has a bazillion board games, so we had a ton of fun playing with him.
Before I had kids, I never really got the point of Christmas. There were things about the season that I enjoyed well enough, but a lot of other things that I despised, and over time I developed a love-hate relationship with Christmas. I think I’ve blogged about it before. In any case, I used to think that it was due to the tension between commercialism vs. religion—Santa vs. the baby Jesus, or holiday vs. holy day, if you will—but now that I have children of my own, my perspective has changed. Christmas really is the perfect holiday for kids, and when you’re celebrating it for them and not just for yourself, the tension between the religious aspects and the commercial fades, and it all comes together in a really awesome way. Perhaps that’s why all of the best secular Christmas songs were written in the 40s and the 50s, in the earliest years of the post-war baby boom.
Anyways, those were some of my thoughts this year. It’s a lot more work to pull off Christmas with young children, but it’s also a lot more fun. It was also really fun to have other family visiting us, even if it was a bit stressful at times. But not too stressful, thankfully.
So we saw my parents off at the train this morning. The west-bound California Zephyr is running on time these days, which almost never happens with Amtrak (I have some of the worst train-travel horror stories you will ever hear—catch me at a convention and I’ll tell you how my girlfriend at the time broke up with me in the middle of a 60-hour train ride). Apparently, the supply chain crisis means that there are less freight trains, which makes for fewer delays. But the east-bound train leaves from California, the most dysfunctional state in the union, so it was running almost eight hours late. For us, though, that was actually kind of nice, because it meant that we got to sleep in.
In any case, the extended family is all gone now, and we’re slowly getting back to normal, though it probably won’t be until after the new year before we’re back to 100% again. If you sent me an email over the break, that’s why I haven’t sent a reply (although I am pretty horrible about replying to emails generally). I’ve got a BookBub Featured Deal running tomorrow that has me biting my nails, and a couple of other things to catch up on the publishing side of things.
Other than that, I hope to get back in the saddle with my writing pretty quickly. Should be able to pick up the WIP where I left off with it, and I’d like to pull out a couple of short stories from the outline too. Definitely need to get some more short stories into the production pipeline. I’ve got every month covered through May with new projects, though April’s story is appearing in Bards and Sages Quarterly and I’d like to line up a self-publishing project during that month too. But that shouldn’t be too hard.
I’ll leave off with this awesome rendition of I Saw Three Ships from the Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square. My dad was college buddies with the organist, Rick Elliott. Happy New Year!
Violence is not speech and speech is not violence. If you conflate the two, you will invariably use violence to quell the speech that you most need to hear. This is because the thing you need the most is usually in the place you least want to look.
So while Mrs. Vasicek and I were in the theater for the first time since the pandemic, watching the trailers before Dune, we saw this commercial for Facebook’s new Meta rebrand:
Since the theater was almost completely empty, we were already having fun by making snarky commentary. And when this commercial came on, it was a gold mine. So creepy. So disturbing. So “I really don’t want whatever the hell this is trying to sell me.”
But right before the end, Mrs. Vasicek nailed it and said: “it’s probably for Meta!” And then, bam! Meta’s new logo came on, and we both had a good laugh.
Seriously, though, ever since Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would be rebranding as Meta, I’ve been fascinated with it—not because I’m looking forward to it, but because it is so. So. Cringe. It’s like watching a train wreck in real time. History may prove me wrong about this, as plenty of things that were laughable when they started out proved to change the world, but I really do think that Meta is going to fail. Spectacularly.
I have so many thoughts about this. So many thoughts. But if I had to break it all down to one core idea, it would be this:
At some point in our lives, all of us will reach a point where something about ourselves comes into conflict with reality. At that point, we can make one of three choices: we can try to change reality, we can decide to ignore the conflict, or we can work on changing ourselves.
Part of becoming an adult is realizing that there are aspects of reality that you simply cannot change. We can choose our actions, but we cannot choose the consequences of our actions. To paraphrase Jordan Peterson, we realize that we should clean our rooms before we try to change the world.
Right now, the world is ruled by people who reject the notion that their actions have consequences, and believe that reality can be whatever they want. That is the main reason why everything is falling apart. But instead of recognizing this and changing course, our leaders are doubling down and demanding that we all bend the knee and fall into line with their false reality.
It’s not going to work.
Zuckerberg is one of those people. Facebook didn’t succeed because it invented social media, or did it better than anyone else: it succeeded because Zuckerberg realized that his end users were actually his product, and his consumers were the corporations and governments that wanted all their data. So he optimized Facebook to be as addictive as possible and got more than a billion people hooked on it.
At that point, Facebook was so ubiquitous that it was difficult to function in the real world without it. Those of us who tried to quit soon learned that Zuckerberg was holding our social connections hostage, and that we could expect to be cut off from our friends and family if we tried to leave.
But then the Trump years happened. Social media became toxic, and Facebook in particular became embroiled in scandal. Zuckerberg tried to thread the needle between the partisan divide, and all he managed to do was split the baby. Team blue hated Facebook for selling their data to companies like Cambridge Analytica, and team red hated Facebook for “fact checking” and shadowbanning them. Meanwhile, team “don’t talk to me about politics” became exhausted by the whole thing, and started to unplug in increasing numbers.
I think Zuckerberg needs Meta to be a success much, much more than any of us need or want Meta. This is pure speculation on my part as I don’t have any figures to back it up, but I suspect that Facebook peaked sometime in the last five years and has been declining at an ever sharper rate ever since. It’s probably not just Facebook, either, but all social media. They’re all toxic now.
But after all the goodwill that he’s burned, is Zuckerberg really the technological Moses who’s going to lead us all to the new promised land? And is the promised land really just a cheesy-looking version of Second Life with VR headsets?
The three things that Zoomers and Millennials crave more than anything are meaning, authenticity, and redemption. Those are also the three biggest things that Big Tech has been depriving us of. That’s not going to change until we get away from Silicon Valley culture.
Anyone who has started a family will tell you that the best way to find meaning, authenticity, and redemption in your life is to raise children. And yet, when Google designed their campus to have all the amenities necessary for their employees to live, work, and play there indefinitely, they somehow forgot to build any sort of playplace or daycare for children. That’s Silicon Valley culture: sexy and sterile, inclusive and censorious, flashy and vapid.
Second life failed because the people at the top tried to milk it too hard, and the users revolted. Facebook’s users are revolting for similar reasons, because manipulating us to have the right behavior is now Facebook’s product, and they’re milking us for all we’re worth. Is Meta going to be any different? Because it looks an awful lot to me like a farcically transparent attempt to build the Matrix. Can somebody please tell Zuckerberg that the Matrix was supposed to be a dystopia, and not an instruction manual?
Ultimately, though, I don’t think it’s going to matter much, because Meta is going to fail. Spectacularly. The deeper I look into it, the more it seems that the writing is on the wall. Of course, I could be wrong about Meta—spectacularly wrong, even—but I’m not betting on it. Because if I had to choose between plugging into Zuckerberg’s new Matrix and vacationing in Iceland, the choice would not be difficult:
