"So, what's the book about?"

The drive towards publication continues apace.  After hundreds of hours spent pimping Axis of Eternity to anyone who’ll listen, and to plenty of people who won’t, it has become apparent that I am a better writer than marketer.

For the uninitiated:  the process of bringing a novel to market is a laborious multi-step endeavor.  Very few publishers, and virtually NONE of the big boys, are willing to consider direct submissions from writers, and certainly not from non-established writers; it is expected that one will work through a literary agent.  Agents serve as de facto gatekeepers, screening out the dreck and serving as advocates for work that they think is both enjoyable and marketable.

This system has its merits.  There is an enormous amount of really bad writing out there―anyone who’s edited for a newspaper, or reviewed public mail, or even read an internet message board, will have an idea of how much―and somebody’s got to sort through the sewage for diamonds.  The downside, of course, is that time is limited and the sifting is imperfect.  The industry standard expectation is that authors will “pitch” their work in a query letter of 250-350 words.  Occasionally an agent will be generous enough to allow authors to include a short writing sample―the first ten pages or so―or a one-page plot synopsis.  But this, needless to say, is not a perfect way of evaluating a book.

Is it a sensible system?  Somewhat.  Young readers, after all, will often make decisions about what to read based on the paragraph on the book jacket, or even based on the cover art.  Agents sell to publishers who are almost exclusively interested in salable pitches; this is why every other novel on the market is a carbon copy of what sold last year (strong female protagonist!  Dystopian nightmare in which oppressive government provokes its population in unintelligent ways for evil reasons!  Unrealistically attractive boys fight for strong female protagonist's approval!)  So:  yes, agents have to make their decisions based on what they believe will sell.  But needless to say, there’s a LOT of work which would probably sell but which isn’t suited to a 300-word summary.  J.K. Rowling, for instance, was famously rejected by virtually every publisher and agent in England, and made it through the door only because an agent’s eight-year-old daughter saw her work on daddy’s table and liked the pictures.  John Kennedy Toole killed himself, partially due to his inability to get anyone to read A Confederacy of Dunces, and we only ended up with the book because his mother subsequently (and thankfully) transformed herself into a relentless harridan who wouldn't take no for an answer.

About 1 in 200 finished novels make it into print, which still leaves something like 17,000 new novels per year.  The question that we might want to ask, though, is whether we're selecting the best 1 in 200, or merely the most interesting-sounding 1 in 200.  Nobody in the industry doubts that there's great work slipping through the cracks; the question is, how much?

I’m beginning to get the impression that my work fits into the "good book, but bad pitch" category.  Axis of Eternity, or a preliminary draft thereof, has been seen in its entirety by about ten sets of eyes.  Every one of the people was selected because they’re well-read, intelligent, and willing to offer frank opinions.  Every review has offered criticism, yet every reviewer’s overall impression has been somewhere between favorable and extremely favorable, and every one has checked off the “16-year-old me would pay money to read this” box.  It’s a good book that has gotten progressively better as it’s evolved; it’s capable of winning converts and garnering excellent word-of-mouth.  But it’s also fairly complicated both in terms of plot and theme; it respects the intelligence of young readers and refuses to patronize them.  It’s not easily summarized, and this means its not well-suited to being pitched.  I’ve queried close to fifty agents to date; nineteen have rejected the preliminary query outright and a number of others have effectively turned it down through non-response.  Zero have asked to read the whole thing.  The most promising responses have been direct solicitations from publishers received following a Twitter pitch event; at present the full manuscript is being considered by two small but high-quality publishing houses.

Long story short:  when the subject of my novel comes up, people ask me, what’s it about?, and I have yet to be able to answer that question in a concise and interesting manner.    Which is bad news.  So let me offer to answer that question as thoroughly as I can.

In the loosest sense, the book is about the adventures of a 16-year-old boy lost in an afterlife he doesn’t understand.  Virtually every theory or myth about life after death operates on the assumption that new arrivals will have the entire design revealed to them as soon as they show up at the pearly gates, or the river Styx, or wherever.  I’ve seen little evidence that such a system prevails on this side of the grave, and I wanted to explore the idea that it might not prevail on the other side, either.  What happens in an afterlife in which the rules aren’t revealed?  What happens when every culture in human history is thrown into one single melting pot, with no higher power in charge?

More broadly, the book is about the question of why a benevolent God permits evil to exist on Earth.  Religions have offered many complicated―and, I feel, highly unsatisfactory―answers to this question.  My novel offers a take on the question that’s won’t comfort readers, but which will make them think.

The book is about the conflict between individual liberty and obligation to one’s community.  It’s certainly a conflict that has a lot of direct relevance to modern American readers.  My own life has been marked by a sharp divide by my own political ideology―generally libertarian―and my professional and self-imposed ethical obligations, which are highly communitarian in nature.  The typical take on libertarianism and communitarianism, as voiced by public advocates of each, is that they are polar political opposites.  I don’t believe that this is necessarily true, and Axis of Eternity explores both the ways in which these world views conflict and some of the surprising ways in which they coincide.  More fundamentally, though, the book explores the way in which people are driven to make bad decisions―even what some might call evil decisions―by each of these ideologies.  The thing I like best about Axis it is that it doesn’t take the typical YA approach of dividing the world along Manichean lines of pure good and absolute evil.  You will find no Lord Voldemort or President Snow herein.  Every character, protagonist or antagonist, has a specific way of viewing the world; every character acts benevolently according to his or her own personal code; every character believes himself or herself to be both the main character and the hero.  Every conflict, major and minor, is driven by the collision of defensible world views advocated by thinking individuals who are doing the best they can, and readers will disagree, often and vehemently, about who’s right and who’s wrong.

The book is about autonomy, and about the various ways in which we may be less independent and less in control of our own behaviors than we’d like to think.  The book is also about the question of whether the autonomy of living organisms matters morally in terms of the way we treat them.  People tend to have a very dismissive attitude towards those they don’t consider to be fully “conscious” or sovereign, such as nonhuman animals or even some specific types of human beings.   Axis takes a perspective that may cause readers to reexamine their own views and behavior, and consider when and under what conditions we may use those who are “less” than ourselves as a means towards our own gratification.

And the book is about memory.  It’s about the extent to which memory defines us―the question of whether we’re mostly the product of our experiences, or whether there’s some part of our personality that makes us ourselves independently from what we’ve done and where we’ve been.  It’s about the question of whether Santayana was right when he claimed that those who don’t remember the past are doomed to repeat it, or whether the opposite is true―whether our attachment to our memories locks us into the same behavioral patterns that made us miserable before.

Axis of Eternity is about 82,000 words, or about 270 pages.  Which makes it about a lot of different things.  I look forward to all of you deciding for yourselves what it’s about.

TL;DR:  Dead teenagers fight alien angels and space monsters.  Also there is a cute boy with tousled hair and six-pack abs.  Buy now!

How to be a young "gentleman" without killing lots and lots and lots of people

I am not going to mention the name of the walking, talking turd who killed seven people in Santa Barbara this weekend.  Other motives aside, I’ve always felt that there’s a certain amount of fame-whoring involved in the decision to become a mass-murderer, and I am happier to mention the event while letting the name of the perpetrator slide into obscurity.

I mention the event because the perpetrator’s motive is disturbingly familiar to me.  Not in the sense that I have ever in my life seriously contemplated killing people, but in the sense that one of the specific frustrations that drove this nutbar over the brink is a frustration I once shared.

I refer specifically to the Turd In Question’s YouTube manifesto statement, in which the TIQ speaks thusly:

“It’s not fair. You girls have never been attracted to me. I don’t know why you girls aren’t attracted to me, but I will punish you all for it.  It’s an injustice, a crime, because I don’t know what you don’t see in me. I’m the perfect guy, and yet you throw yourselves at all these obnoxious men instead of me — the supreme gentleman.”

Ah.  The GENTLEMAN thing.  Been there.  Done that.

The writer Christopher Moore has described in some detail the psychology of a subspecies of man he calls the “Beta Male”, a critter defined primarily by its rejection of the traditional alpha male traits.  For the entirety of my own adolescence and most of my adult life, I have seen myself as a Beta Male.  This has been in part a function of necessity, as I lack certain physical characteristics advantageous to the Alpha Male, such as facial symmetry, pectoral muscles, abdominal muscles, all of the other muscles, balls, and a spine*.  

I spent the greater portion of my teenage years convincing myself that my rejection of Alpha Male behaviors made me superior to the standard brand of man.  I, too, called myself a “gentleman” and bemoaned the fact that my hesitance, neuroses, and general jellyfishery didn’t make me irresistible to women.  Clearly, there was something wrong with them.

I have always been very good at telling myself what I’ve wanted to hear.  In retrospect, I think I was choosing to define myself in such a way as to justify my own laziness and cowardice.  While I endorsed (and still endorse) the general principle of being a gentleman, the real issue was that I was obsessively afraid of embarrassing myself, and indeed that I was almost as afraid of romantic success as I was of romantic failure.  As a result, I adopted a personal philosophy that turned my reluctance to take chances into a virtue.  I spent my adolescence and young adulthood developing intense, elaborate crushes on attractive women (and for all my complaints about superficiality, the targets of my crushes were always conventionally attractive), doing nothing about it, and bemoaning the fates when my crush ended up with someone else.  What I needed, in retrospect, was for somebody to slap me.  Several good friends tried.  I was just too good at persuading myself for their advice to take hold.

Had I been a “gentleman” in the truest sense of the word, I would have upheld the standards of gentlemanly behavior even when they ceased to be advantageous to me, i.e. when I held the upper hand.  This is not my way.  Then and now, I seek to dominate every situation in which my skills are reasonably comparable with those of my partners.  I am not a gentleman; I am merely an Alpha Male who can’t hack it under the alpha code.  My own failure to meaningfully live up to the ethic of gentlemanly behavior, however, doesn’t eliminate the Turd In Question’s argument from our consideration.  It IS true, in many instances, that young men who genuinely adhere to the code of gentlemanly behavior find that their romantic prospects suffer as a result.  My younger brother, as a teenager, was a TRUE gentleman―in the Victorian sense, with the big black cape and everything**―and he got walked on by prospective partners a few times too often for my taste.  Many young women find confidence attractive; failing to find it, a substantial proportion of those women will settle for bravado.

A substantial part of my professional responsibility is helping boys learn to become men.  As a writer, I suspect that the greater part of my audience will be 1. Young, 2. Male, and 3. Emphatically, sometimes terrifyingly, Beta.  So I feel that it's my obligation, as we reflect on the actions of the Turd In Question, to lay down a few ground rules for “gentlemanly” behavior by young Beta Males.  Some of these will seem obvious, but apparently need to be reiterated.

PRINCIPLES ON WHICH THE PROSPECTIVE YOUNG GENTLEMAN OUGHT TO REFLECT

1.       The number of women towards whom a gentleman may acceptably murder while continuing to call himself a “gentleman” is zero.

2.       If you are being a “gentleman” because you think it will get you laid (see the manifesto of the TIQ), you’re doing it wrong.  You choose to be a gentleman because it’s right, not because it’s advantageous.

3.      To be a gentleman, in the broader sense of the word, is, as Oscar Wilde put it, to choose never to inflict pain (unintentionally).  To be a gentleman with respect to young adult relationships is to recognize that specific genetic and societal factors enable you to exercise physical advantages over, and behavioral opportunities unavailable to, women; a gentleman recognizes this reality and chooses not to exploit it.  You may despise the phrase “check your privilege” as much as I do (and oh my God how I do despise it), but if you’re a gentleman you’re choosing to put that phrase into practice in certain ways.

4.  Your decision not to exploit women in these ways entitles you to nothing from them.  See #2.  Many women will be appreciative of your decision.  Some will not be.  Should a woman be unappreciative of your behavior, the correct response is not to stop being a gentleman, it is to withdraw the pleasure of your company.

5.     Extending on #4 above, you lose nothing when a young woman chooses not to seek your company because you are a gentleman.  Some young women, in some circumstances, seek the company of the Alpha Male rather than the Beta Male.  A woman who does so is making a choice.  If she wants what the Alpha provides, she would be doing herself a disservice by spending her time with you instead.  She would also be doing YOU a disservice, in that she would want you to be someone you’re not.  Learn to accept that other people’s interests aren’t always identical to your own.

6.     Jealously or ill-will towards Alpha Males simply because they are romantically successful is out of bounds.  You want women to be happy, right?  Are they making women happy?  Okay, then.

7.      Being a gentleman does not eliminate the obligation to put yourself out there and risk rejection.  If you think it does, you’re doing it wrong.  Life is hard.  Get a helmet.

8.      If you adhere to the code, and are willing to risk repeated rejection, failure, and embarrassment, you will eventually attract the attention of a woman who appreciates a gentleman.  Things will not become easy or perfect at this point.  If you think they will, you’re doing it wrong.  However, you will at least have the privilege of interaction with a person who respects you--and maybe even loves you--for who you are, rather than for your skill at impersonation or at mind games.

If these are principles which you can accept, you may have it in you to become a young gentleman.  Go to it, and good luck.  Don’t kill people.



*The last items on this list are things that I lack metaphorically, not physically.  As far as you know.

**Not a metaphor.  Literally true.  He walked into an inner-city public school, on multiple occasions, wearing a big black freaking cape.  The fact that he did this without getting beaten up even once gives you some sense of how he treated people.

Axis of Eternity: Chapter 1

The first thing I remember is rising.  Shooting skywards like a balloon cut from its tether, utterly uncontrolled, disoriented and frantic.  Plummeting upwards.

I remember wisps of cloud, spinning green ground receding below, blue above as I rocketed upwards, a roaring in my ears.  I remember thinking, Why am I not cold? Why isn’t there wind?

All around me, dimming my view of my surroundings, was a thick, translucent haze, which emitted continual arcs of energy in bright colors―crimson red, emerald green, powder blue.  As I rose, I was continually barraged and battered by these discharges.  I didn’t feel pain―Am I even capable of feeling pain?, I thought—as much as a continual, inescapable, overwhelming discomfort…a spider crawling up my leg, an itch I couldn’t scratch, all over my entire body, throughout my entire being, as if I were allergic to my own skin.  The light display might otherwise have been beautiful, but the sensation was maddening, overwhelming me with an intense desire to escape upwards, to rise higher.

I remember desperately grappling for my bearings, for understanding, for a single thought I could hold onto.  What is this?  What’s happening to me?  Who am I?

And, as if in answer: Will.  My name is Will.  I am sixteen years old.

I remember reaching inside my mind for more information, and coming up empty.  And then, looking deeper.  And then scrambling around inside the dark, vacant room of my own head…and finding nothing else.  Not a clue as to my identity.  Not a single memory.

Nothing.

The haze around me was thinning as I rocketed upwards, the colored bolts growing less intense and more infrequent, the full-body itch mercifully beginning to loosen its grip.  Above, the sky was darkening from blue to black, though the sun still blazed directly overhead.  I must be near the edge of the stratosphere.  Then how can I breathe?  Wait…AM I breathing?  And how do I know what ‘stratosphere’ means?  Who taught me the word?  Where? When?

As the haze diminished, my sight grew clearer.  Something in the corner of my eye captured my attention.   Above me and off to my left was a luminous speck of light, rising like a spark from a campfire.  As I focused my attention on the light, my position changed; I felt myself angling to my left and increasing my velocity upwards, catching up to the glowing spark.  What?  How did I… Startled at having regained control of my own movement, I lost focus on my target; I found myself sliding straight up again, out of control, like a cork through clear water.

Fighting for a grip, I refocused on the light.  Slowly, I felt my path begin to change, to angle upwards and left towards the glow.  With no point of reference there was no way to judge distance or size; was I about to catch a firefly, or was I in futile pursuit of a star?  I reached out towards the speck of light―

―and for the first time, I got a look at my own hand.  It was perfectly transparent and translucent, as was the arm attached.  There was barely more substance to my hand, to my arm, to me, than there was to the ever-diminishing haze.  Holding my palm up in front of me, I could look straight through it and clearly see the spark above.

I looked down at my body for the first time, and was nearly blinded by an intense, luminous glow in the center of my torso.  Squinting to reduce the glare, I found the rest of me―my chest, my stomach, my legs―to be equally transparent.  Aside from the light beaming from my heart, I was barely there at all.   I should have been awestruck by this fact, by the panorama below me―the curve of the earth now plainly visible on the horizon, most of a continent stretching out below in a pastiche of faded browns and greens and blues.  But I wasn’t.  Instead, I found myself wondering:  why am I squinting?  If my eyelids are transparent, how can tightening them reduce the glare?

I looked up again at the glowing spark, and then off at the horizon.  Was it an after-image, or was that another tiny glowing light off in the distance below me? 

I shut my eyes―Why does that work?―then opened them again.  Fighting against my panic, I sought focus, that same feeling which had drawn me towards the spark above.  My mind fumbled with distractions, then grappled at the edges of…something, some inner sense I’d never used nor known I had.  Gradually, my grip on myself grew surer, more confident.  I willed myself to slowly rotate as I rose; my body obeyed.

There was no mistaking it this time.  The light I’d been chasing was real.  As I spun slowly in midair, my ascent now slowing dramatically, the mist gradually dispersing,  I could see other glowing lights off in the distance.  I counted them as I rotated.  One…two…three…four?  Five…  Shooting stars in reverse, rising against the darkening sky.

I looked down again at myself.  My body was an afterthought, almost invisible.   And yet the heart of me blazed on, luminous in the gathering black.  I could not name the color of it; I had never seen it before, yet it was somehow familiar.  And those other lights were, unmistakably, in color and by nature, a match for the light in me.

People, I thought. Each of those lights is a person.

The last wisps of electric haze dwindled in the distance beneath me.  The roaring in my ears had faded to nothing.  I was free of the full-body itch, free of the atmosphere.  Below me was the whole Earth; above me blazed the sun and stars, simultaneously, in the black void.  I was merely another glowing light among many.  The silence around me was absolute.  There was no air, yet I felt no cold, no heat, no pain, no sense of suffocation.

I’m dead.

The realization didn’t provoke any particular terror or awe.  I felt no pain.  I felt no regret.  Shouldn’t I be missing someone?  My family?  My friends?  Yet, stumbling around in my mind, I could not find any of them.  The word “mother” had a definition, but I couldn’t tie a picture to it.  I could remember people, as a concept; I could not recall a single specific human person.

In truth, I could barely remember myself.  My name is Will.  I am sixteen years old.  What did I look like?  An image came to mind, a bit unclear, as through a foggy mirror.  Brown hair, yes…a big, thick, unruly mop of it…darkish complexion…a face a bit too broad to be handsome, with narrow eyes beneath heavy brows…medium height and build.

Am I smart?  Dumb?  Strong?  Weak?  Awkward?  Popular?  Who are my friends?  What are my hobbies?  Nothing.  A total blank.

What do I do next?

Of all the questions I was struggling with, that was the one that really had me on edge.

Isn’t there supposed to be someone or something here to tell me what comes next?  Dead relatives waiting?  A set of huge pearly gates guarded by a winged man with a checklist?  Nasty horned men brandishing pitchforks and beckoning with sinister expressions?  SOMETHING?   I didn’t remember holding any particular religious beliefs, but surely no major faith believed that, after death, God dropped you off in low earth orbit, gave you amnesia, slapped you on the back, shouted “good luck!” and then wandered off about His business? 

In the absence of an instruction manual, I was presumably going to have to find my own answers.  And I wasn’t going to find out anything by just drifting aimlessly in space.  Once again, I checked my surroundings.  The―person?  Soul?—that had been above me on my way up was now just off to my left, floating motionless.  I brought up my arms and legs, pushed them forwards in a powerful butterfly stroke, and achieved utterly nothing.  No, that’s not right.  It isn’t about your body.  Not here.  It’s about the mind...  I willed to move towards the glow; and, in willing it, I found it was happening.  Slowly, like a dandelion seed on a summer breeze, I drifted forwards.

Approaching, I gave a cheerful wave, only to remember that both my neighbor and I were virtually invisible to one another.  I grew closer.  In the combined glow of the lights in each of us, I could just barely see the outline of a humanoid form.  The ghostly shape has its arm outstretched, as if to touch something, and it was looking in…

I paused in my approach.  What direction is that?  My neighbor was reaching out in a direction for which I had no name.

Something in my mind twisted.  Somewhere in my consciousness, a switch was flipped.  Something behind my eyes opened.  And I could suddenly see the direction in which my neighbor was looking.  It was an angle incomprehensible to the mortal mind; I was looking at a right angle to the entire reality I had known.  I was looking outwards.

And in the far distance outwards was The Light.  The Light!

Have I said that we, my neighbor and I, were luminous?  Relative to The Light, we were tiny flickers.  If we were rising sparks, The Light was the bonfire itself.  How could I not have seen it before, when its intensity would have dimmed a hundred suns?  It’s no accident that living human beings can’t see The Light, I thought.  The flesh isn’t equipped for it.  It would fry your brain like an egg inside your skull.

I didn’t have to be told what I was looking at.  It seemed to me that I had always known it, that it had always been a part of me, and of every person ever born.  The Light is unity and love.  The Light is destiny, the purpose of all human existence.  Had I sought instructions for my afterlife?  The Light was, in itself, all the instruction needed.  This is what we were made for.  To join with The Light.

Pulling my eyes away from The Light, I could see that the other human souls which had arisen alongside of my neighbor and me were rushing outwards, with all the speed they could muster.  Rushing towards fusion with the light, heeding its call, seeking to disappear into it entirely.

And suddenly, I had something new to be confused about.

Because I could look into the light, and recognize what it signified.  I knew, at a purely instinctive level, that The Light had to be the destiny of every human being.  That there could be no purpose outside of it or apart from it.  That every single fiber of me should crave union with it.

And yet, somehow, I didn’t.

I didn’t want to merge with The Light.

I didn’t want it at all.

Our Antihuman Future

Dan Quayle once said, “The future will be better tomorrow.” This is a stupid lie, just like everything else Dan Quayle said. The future will be worse than anything we can imagine. We know this because of the second law of thermodynamics, which states, “Everything will get worse and worse until everybody dies.” We are doomed.

It is not possible to describe how bad things will be; our existing paradigm can’t encompass the sheer terror of it, and our language doesn’t have words to describe it. Perhaps the best way of understanding the future is this: picture a foot stomping on a human face forever. Now imagine that what you at first thought was a foot is actually an incredibly horrific mechanical engine of destruction, like a nuclear powered chainsaw, or a steamroller with rollers made from dwarf star alloy. And that human face isn’t actually a human face at all, but rather, some cute cuddly baby animal, perhaps a koala or penguin. The future will be like that, only more so.

Some think of the future as a “dystopia”. This is not so, because the suffix “topia” (as used in words like utopia, dystopia, and fruitopia) implies some form of social organization. In the future, nothing will be organized at all. Society will no longer be a “dystopia” or a “utopia” but rather a “tapioca”: a shifting, amorphous, disgusting mass which smellgs vagueness of bananas. The prevailing social arrangement will not be a Hobbesian “war of all against all,” but rather, a new “war of each against all, and all against each” in which the concerted efforts of the rest of humanity will be focused on the single task of finding new ways to hurt you specifically.

In the future, there will be a term for people who dedicate every moment of their lives to your destruction; this term will be “your closest friends.” The rest of the human race will not be as kindly disposed towards you as these people are. All public areas will be declared “PvP zones”. Murder will be called “pwnage”. The serial murder of children will be called “griefing n00bz”.

In the future, your chair will sit on you, your toilet will crap on you, and your food will eat you back. Books will cut their owners into thin slices and leaf through their screaming flayed carcasses in search of “information.” Movies will “splice” the members of their audience together with crude adhesives, smash them into thin flat strips, and run their still-living remains through gigantic machines. Trees will cut down people.

Ivan Stang has predicted that “in the future, spontaneous human combustion will be so common that small children and midgets will be sold as disposable lighters.” This is true.

Future governments will be “totalitanarchies” in which everything is both mandatory AND forbidden. You will be forced to do things and then shot for doing them. These governments will manage their populations through a comprehensive euthanasia program marketed as “The Nonsurvival Experience.” Each citizen will enter this program on his or her seventh birthday.

A panel of leading futurists was recently surveyed on the following question: “Describe the eating of babies in the future using only one word.” The three most common answers were “ubiquitous”, “compulsory”, and “hyperpsychoultraubermegaviolent”. Get used to that last term; you will be hearing it a LOT in the future.

(reposted from TCP)

Educate yourself!

Good afternoon!  I couldn’t help but notice that your opinion on a political or social issue is somewhat different from my own.  This makes you wrong, morally inferior, and an obstacle to the perfection of society.  Might I make a helpful suggestion?  Actually, it’s not so much a helpful suggestion as it is a buzzword that I’ve heard repeated by people in academia, and it always seemed really cool when they said it, so I’d like to say it too, at this point.  What I would suggest is this:  that you EDUCATE YOURSELF.

Now, you may be confused at this point.  You may find yourself wondering why I’d make a superficially polite request as this in such a confrontational and patronizing tone.  You may also wonder at the fact that I am actually, literally wagging my finger in your face at this time, as if you were a toddler.  If this situation confuses you, perhaps you’ve been insufficiently attentive to the subtext of the catchphrase I’ve borrowed.  This is unsurprising, given that you are stupid and indeed not fully human.  For these reasons, I want to be explicit about what I actually mean when I parrot this particular catchphrase.  I think that you will find that it is a truly versatile rhetorical choice, capable of conveying all sorts of information about me, and my comfort in my own perspective.  To wit:

--ANY PERSPECTIVE THAT DIFFERS FROM MY OWN IS THE PRODUCT OF IGNORANCE.  In an abstract sense, I believe in the concept of plural perspectives, that people’s different experiences can produce different, equally legitimate views of the world.  Indeed, that belief is a cornerstone of my political philosophy.  In theory.  But…well…not now, and not you.  You haven’t arrived at your opinions through a different weighing of the evidence or a different set of life experiences; you’re just flat damn wrong and ignorant as hell.  If only you read the same stuff and listened to the same talking points as my ideological allies and I, even a poltroon like you would arrive at the same conclusions we have.  For we are objectively correct and our opinions on this matter will never, ever evolve in any way.

--MY PERSUASIVE SKILLS SUCK.  I am told that there exist, somewhere in the world, people who possess the actual ability to change minds.  These magical creatures have developed a method whereby they share new information with others; they leverage this information to generate sympathy and understanding in their targets, and to produce, if not a complete reversal of their target’s opinion, then at least a new appreciation for their own perspective.  That sounds like hard work.  It’s much more fun for me to wag my finger in your face.  Behold my wagging finger!  Ain’t it cool?

--YOU’RE NOT WORTH MY TIME.  I am a truly special creature, and to be in my presence is a very great privilege.  The world is full of disadvantaged souls who will never spend even a single second with me.  I must carefully ration my time on this earth amongst those who have earned the right through purity of ideology or physical attractiveness.  To spend even another moment attempting to save your benighted soul is beneath me, and would constitute punishment of those who are, even now, being denied my presence.  Therefore, go hence; go out into the world and seek to obtain that knowledge which would elevate you, if not to my level, than at least to a level that might be worthy of my notice.

--EDUCATORS ARE UNWORTHY OF RESPECT.  I spend an awful lot of time in the social media praising teachers to the heavens, and an even larger amount of time alleging that those who deny funding to public education are troglodytes.  Yes, I am a great champion of education, which is why I am calling for you to seek it for yourself.  But…you know, I’m not actually such a fan of education that I would myself stoop to the providing of it.  Again, my time is too valuable; I have better things to do.  Other, lesser beings must attend to that practice.

--I’M NOT ACTUALLY TALKING TO YOU; I’M TALKING TO THAT GUY OVER THERE.  This must be obvious; no respectful conversation in human history has ever included the phrase “educate yourself”.  Why would I engage you privately or directly?  No, this isn’t about you; it’s about that girl over there who’s certain to be impressed by my dizzying intellect and moral prowess; it’s about that judge in the back of the room for whom I am attempting to establish a claim of superiority; it’s about my observing buddies, with whom I will share a beer later as we celebrate my pwnage of your thick-skulled self.

I want to thank you for giving me the opportunity to tell you to “educate yourself”; deploying this phrase has been a highly enjoyable experience for me.  On the downside, society is a tiny bit more balkanized than it was before this conversation started; you will almost certainly do the opposite of what I’ve told you to do, as my disrespect for your beliefs and for people like you will engender the same opinions in you with regard to people like me.  But on the upside, I feel really smug and superior, and I’ve avoided the necessity of subjecting my own opinions to any form of analytical rigor or challenge.

And at the end of the day, isn’t that what education is all about? 

Sympathy for the Slytherins

You are eleven years old.

You've known all your life that mummy and daddy were wizards.  You knew that one day you'd be shipped off to Hogwarts, as is the family tradition.  That did nothing to ease the pain when, not long after your tenth birthday, they escorted you to platform 9 3/4, shoveled you aboard a train full of complete strangers, and waved good-bye.  A tiny child, you were shipped off into the unknown, into a land of monsters and mystery, without a single friend or guide.

At the end of the journey, you were brought into a massive chamber of cold stone in which hundreds of people you'd never met stared at you.  Propped up on a chair, you were told that your fragile adolescent psyche was crippled; that you were no good, because you possessed too great a desire to achieve.  This assessment was made not by an adult who carefully got to know you, but by a talking hat that sat on your head for a few seconds.  You were sorted, through no choice of your own, into Slytherin house.  At the moment this occurred, three quarters of the students observing, none of whom had ever exchanged a word with you, hated your guts.  You were shuffled off to the basement, made to live beneath the lake where the light is green, told to identify with snakes, and placed in the care of a pale, stringy-haired sadist.

What turned it around for you was the company of your peers.  Though the majority of the school despised you, you were not alone.  Those who'd been sorted as you had--the other adolescents whom the hat had cast away as too ambitious for their own good--took you in.  They taught you that to aspire to greatness was not evil, that to believe in yourself was no sin.

And with that in mind, you and your new friends--loathed and despised by all--set to work.

You worked your tails off.  You put your nose to the grindstone, day after day.  In the classroom, on the quidditch pitch, in every available environment, you dedicated yourself to mastering the school's objective system of achievement.  An objective point system, set in stone since time immemorial, tallied your progress.  Every student in your house--from those on the brink of graduation into adulthood to the tiniest first-form, yourself--gave what he or she could.

It was the hardest thing you had ever done.  It was brutal.  But your ambition--that which others despised in you--saw you through.  And in time, the system taught you that ambition need not be selfish, because every element of glory you sought also glorified your house--those who'd taken you in when no one else would.  You and your friends--the despised, the outcasts, those who'd failed as children to live up to the standards of a hat--won the day.  At the end of the year, after any achievement was tallied, after every professor's assessment was taken into account, you had won more points than any rival house.

The prize was justly yours, the great hall decked out in your house's colors, your house's emblem posted proudly behind the masters' table.  Every student and teacher gathered to recognize your achievement.

And it was at that point that the school's headmaster--a former member of your archrival house--arrived on the scene.  And he declared, "recent events must be taken into account."

He then proceeded to award a completely arbitrary number of points to three first year students from your archrival--again, HIS OWN FORMER HOUSE--for behavior which constituted a violation of the school's rules and his own explicit instructions.  To the leader of the brat pack--a priggish young four-eyed dolt who'd never spoken so much a word to you all year, and who was widely adored by the faculty by virtue of having had the right parents, and who wouldn't have even lived to the end of the year had your own head of house not repeatedly intervened on his behalf--the headmaster awarded a point total equal to a ninth of the points your house had earned all year.

Even this was not enough to elevate his old house--which by the objective standards of the game, had finished DEAD LAST--into first place.

Which was why, at that point, after awarding the rule-breakers an arbitrary point total to bring them nearly equal to you and your friends, that the headmaster ALSO awarded one of their housemates an equally arbitrary number of points for attempting to stop them from completing the tasks that earned them the points in the first place.  And it was these arbitrary points which, finally, were enough to put them past your house and into first place.

All of this chicanery could have been completed before the school assembled in the Great Hall, before your ten-year-old spirits were elevated by the promise of imminent victory, before your heart was given a chance to leap at the promise of some scrap of adult approval.  But that would not have been sufficiently theatrical. That would not have satisfied the desire of all those you'd beaten to see you and your friends humiliated.  So, instead, the pompous old gasbag declared, "We need a change of decoration."  And your banners were magically ripped from the walls and replaced with those of your archrivals, as the entire school applauded the justice of it.  Because all agreed:  you, ten-year-old you, were The Bad Guy.  Because The Hat Said So.

What did it feel like, to look across the hall, at the golden boy, beaming with joy, as all of his housemates clapped him on the back for having been born special?  How did it feel to know that your entire house's year of continual toil was deemed less important, by those in authority, than the illegal exploits of your rivals?  What was it like to know that your obedience to authority was held in such contempt by the authorities themselves--to see them punish you for obedience, and reward those who disobeyed?

That summer, why did your parents choose to send you back?  Why did they send these educators, who had demonstrated such spectacular disregard for your efforts, hundreds more galleons to put you through another year of the same?  Why didn't they transfer you to Durmstrang the moment they heard what had happened?

And now, a year later, you are eleven, in the Great Hall at Hogwarts, and the next class of first-years are being sorted, their destiny decided in an instant by an item of apparel without the slightest scrap of training in adolescent psychology.  And you glimpse Harry Potter across the hall, smiling smugly in the company of his friends...

...don't you, just for a moment, want to kill him?

When Good Isn't Good Enough

I’ve been asked by a number of colleagues and students why I’m choosing to invest myself so thoroughly in my writing projects.  I’ve asked myself the same thing.  To paraphrase the Wu-Tang Clan, a full length novel ain’t nothing to mess with, at least not lightly.  Three full drafts and continual minor revisions have taken up hundreds of hours that might have been more productively spent improving my teaching, or less productively spent wandering the wilds of Skyrim pulverizing butterflies with an axe.  So why do it?

I've come to the conclusion that the answer has to do with the difference with being good at something on the one hand and doing something great on the other.

I have a good mind, not a great one.  When I was younger, I developed the misimpression that I was a legitimately great thinker (it’s not an uncommon misperception among young men).  I was the product of a highly successful high school speech and debate program.  I was surrounded by good-to-great minds (including a couple of legitimate geniuses), all of us driven to maximize our talents; the dynamic was one of mutually reinforcing success, and I achieved at a level high enough to think myself a good deal smarter than I actually was.  When I went back into education as a coach, I expected more of the same.

If you’re not a great thinker, or if you’re not working as hard as you could, debate will let you know.  It's true of those who compete in the activity and equally true of those who coach it.  Whatever else may be said for debate, it produces a wealth of objective, empirical data on the question of whether a coach is an effective educator.  Eighteen years in, the data confirm what my own subjective assessment would suggest:  I’m a good coach and teacher, but not a great one.

There are going to be people who are going to read that sentence and accuse me of selling myself short, or even of beating myself up.  That's not an accurate assessment.  To say that I am not a great educator is not to deny myself any value. It is, rather, to recognize how thoroughly the concept of greatness has been debased.  Within the educational profession in particular there is very little incentive for teachers, schools, districts, and even nations to resist hyperbole when describing the quality of their work.  Words like “excellent” and “great” are reflexively used to describe mediocrity.  As Garrison Keillor aptly put it, "all the children are above average."  I don’t think that can be true.  I think that there is value in preserving the meaning of words.  Great is great.  Good is good.  Average is neither.

The school at which I teach, and its direct predecessors, have employed 94 years’ worth of debate coaches.  Many of them have been very fine educators, but never have the debaters achieved more than when under my instruction--in fact, they've never been particularly close.  Over the course of my career, I’ve built two competitively successful programs essentially from scratch.  The data support the claim that I am a good educator, and to be a good educator is no small thing.  A good educator will have great days, sometimes even great weeks.  A good educator can have attributes of greatness, such as my ability to adjust lessons on the fly to accommodate new or unexpected input, or to create teachable moments out of whole cloth.  A good coach can be instrumental in helping great pupils achieve great things, and a good coach can help any pupil be better than they otherwise would be.  And a good educator can make a meaningful positive difference in students’ lives; there are young people out there who will die happier for having crossed paths with me.  By any reasonable reckoning, my school is lucky to have me.

But I’m not the best teacher in my building, or in my department.  I have seen great teaching, and it doesn’t look like what I do.  I have too many bad habits.  I’m not lazy, but I have a hard time sustaining energy over long periods of time; I tend to coast.  I don’t have a great teacher’s focus; I don't engage in the painstaking attention to detail that characterizes great educators.  I have an unfortunate combination of a black sense of humor and bad judgment about when to deploy it; hence, I cause pain to students and co-workers without intending to.

And then there is my expertise in my chosen field--once a considerable strength of my teaching, and now, increasingly, less so.  The game which nurtured me is leaving me behind.  Competitive debate evolves and changes in unpredictable ways, and one can never fully understand an argument without actually having defended it in competition.  I remember, as a young coach, looking with scorn on older educators who weren’t fully versed in my contemporary, cutting edge tactics.  Now I have, unmistakably, become one of those older educators.  I learn as much as I can; I hire assistants who know contemporary theory and delegate to them; and every year, the game moves on around me, and I grow a bit less competent.  The slippage is inevitable. 

I’m a good teacher.  I probably always will be.  But not quite a great one.  Within my debate community, the torch is increasingly being passed on to a new generation of exceptional coaches with the energy of youth and the expertise of recent experience.  Greatness still resides in the old warhorses whose special genius and exceptional pedagogy makes them masters of the craft.  But my window to join them, it seems increasingly evident, has closed.

Even so, I’m not yet ready to concede that there's nothing great inside of me.

Every writer, I think, wants to believe that they can create something immortal.  We all want to create something that will survive us, to write a new top line to our own obituary.  And it’s that dream that makes the constant straining worthwhile.  It’s the same sentiment that made Michelangelo (the artist, not the ninja turtle) say that every block of stone had a statue inside it, and that the sculptor’s job is to discover it.

I’m not Michelangelo.  What I’ve written to this point isn’t great.  It’s not even close to great yet.  But I’ll just be damned if I can’t see the outline of the statue in there.  And that’s what keeps me chipping away―the desire to be the man that’s worthy to wield the chisel.  The belief that I can be that man.  It’s not despair over the person I’ve become, but the exultant expectation that I might also be something more, too.  That there might be something in there that only I can bring out.  Something that will bring happiness to complete strangers.  Something that will be worth all the extra hours.

I read everything put in front of me as a boy, but I might have enjoyed Choose Your Own Adventure books most.  I loved the sense of volition they gave me.  It may be because of those books that I’ve never believed in destiny, but in choice.  Some part of me still sees the future in terms of a series of branching narrative paths, all equally possible in a given moment, all dependent on the choices I make. 

I have a lot of choices to make where my writing is concerned.  I know better than to think that effort is a guarantee of success, or even that writing a great book means that the book will achieve greatness.  Down 99 percent of the paths ahead of me lies an unpublished novel or novels.  Down most of the rest lies a novel that’s published but mostly unread.  A debater would know how to weigh the potential costs and benefits.  A rational actor would give up the quest, focus on what he’s good at, and pour the extra time into improving myself at the job for which he’s paid.

But still there’s that voice whispering at me, from way down one sliver of all those possible pathways.  The voice that whispers, But it could be great.  It might be great.