Social-media marketing is horrifying

I was sitting on the couch last week, watching an episode of the PBS series Frontline because I’m a geek, when my flatmate walked in the door.

“Hi!” Flatmate said, hanging up her keys. “Whatcha doin’?”

“Having an existential crisis,” I replied. “Wanna join me?”

“Sure!”

This exchange alone should tell you everything you need to know about Flatmate. But this blog entry is about the existential crisis.

The Frontline episode is called “Generation Like”, and you can watch it here. I highly recommend it. It’s a terrific in-depth look at social-media marketing, and how successful YouTube vloggers and the like do it ... and what major corporations do with the data, which is of course quite creepy.

The DVD, which I did not buy.

But the existential crisis had nothing to do with Big Data. No, the existential crisis came about because of a girl interviewed in the documentary. Caeli, she’s called, and she is approximately the 59^th biggest Hunger Games fan on Earth. Seriously. There’s a website that ranks them. She got this title by spending four or five hours a day obsessively clicking, tweeting, liking, reblogging, and generally spreading all things Hunger Games across the internet. She promotes The Hunger Games until her hands are sore, but it’s all worth it, she says, because she gets little electronic pips called “sparks” that advance her in the rankings of Hunger Games fandom.

She’s about sixteen years old.

This is her.

So here’s the existential crisis. My first thought when I met Caeli, via the Frontline crew, was, “Wow, I wish I had fans this dedicated. That would be cool, and it would make my job as a self-promoting writer much easier.”

My second thought was, “Holy crap, I would never ever EVER want my fans to be this obsessed! I want to hug this poor girl and tell her to go play outside! And I want to strangle the Lions Gate marketing team that’s using her as free child labor!”

Now, I’m not actually going to try to dissuade any fan from being a fan. If anybody ever decides they want to be a Caeli-level superfan for Masks or Teh Novel or Street of Bakers or even a new project I’ve working-titled The God at the Back of the Bus, I will not try to talk them out of it. If people want to geek out, about my work or somebody else’s, that’s aces by me. Hey, I’ve probably spent an unhealthy amount of time already geeking out over the upcoming Winter Soldier movie, and I spent five days last week dissecting the Guardians of the Galaxy trailer. My glass house would not withstand any stone-throwing.

But I can’t help feeling there’s a difference between geeking out because you genuinely love something and geeking out because a huge marketing corporation has manipulated you into doing their job for them. I’m okay with the first one, and I will always encourage my fans--whether there’s two of them or two million—to do that. It’s the second one that bothers me.

Yes, I am a Winter Soldier geek. Possibly even a megageek. I am planning to attend a midnight screening. I designed a Bucky Cap T-shirt just so I could wear one. I am helping a friend out with a Winter Soldier cosplay. I am so excited about this movie that I periodically find myself making little happy “eeee!” noises under my breath for no apparent reason. But honestly, all Marvel had to do to get that reaction out of me was make a movie out of one of my favorite comics, and not put any sucky bits in the trailer. I’m excited because I love the character, and I loved the character long before the marketing people got involved.

Say it with me anyway: Eeeeeeeeee!

I was a fan of the character back when he was just part of a batshit-crazy storyline running in Captain America comics in 2004, and everybody assumed it would end with the Winter Soldier getting killed off because he was one of those characters who always died. I followed the character’s adventures as he adjusted to life as a free man in the twenty-first century, and I thrilled to his every rise and fall because I connected with him on a deep emotional level. The reasons for that affection are complicated and very personal, but they boil down to this—I liked this character before he was a billion-dollar franchise, for reasons of my own, and I will go on liking him whether the movie’s any good or not, for the same reasons. It’s pretty much independent of the marketing. All the marketing has to do is tell me that this thing I already love exists, and I will buy it. Hell, I still own the Daredevil movie on DVD, and I knew it sucked when I bought it.

IT STILL SUCKS.

But I’m not reblogging stuff four to five hours a day. I have no interest whatsoever in being the  fifty-ninth biggest Winter Soldier or Daredevil fan on the planet. I’m actually fairly careful about that; my family has a big, nasty history of addiction, so I watch for signs of addictive behavior in myself. I switch off the computer before it gets creepy. I will never be the kind of viral marketer Lions Gate is looking for. I am not Caeli.

And that, I think, is at the heart of my discomfort. For all I know, Caeli loves The Hunger Games and obsessively reblogs all things Katniss because she connects to Suzanne Collins’ novels the way I connect to my favorite comics. But I think there’s something terribly sinister about a multi-billion-dollar media machine feeding Caeli’s enthusiasm to the point of addiction. The marketing plan for Mockingjay Part One includes on-the-hour scheduling of things like when set photos will be released, what production tidbits will be dropped when, and so on. I would never tell Caeli to stop being a Hunger Games geek, or stop doing things online that she’d probably do whether Lions Gate were involved or not. But I’m massively creeped out by the idea that the Hunger Games marketing crew is trying to create as many Caelis as possible ... and that this is, no pun intended, the object of the game.

I don’t like the idea that something I make--out of love, because there’s no other reason to spend years making up stories for people I’ll never meet--might be used to encourage addict behavior. I don’t like the idea of exploiting kids. It bothers me on a fundamental level. It’s creepy enough that I can legitimately say that I wouldn’t want to be Suzanne Collins, even though I know it’s not her doing it.

Not even for this much money.

I worked a marketing job once ... for all of one month. I discovered that while I was great at spinning yarns--I was a fantastic liar when I had the motivation--I was absolutely wretched at selling things I didn’t like, and didn’t believe in. That job ended because I was supposed to be hyping a suite of software that supposedly did everything its competitor did, and more--but the software didn’t actually work, according to the engineers who were building it. I couldn’t write promo copy for something that was never going to work. I all but stopped sleeping, my grad-school coursework took a nosedive, and in general I hope I never have to work a job that awful again. I still remember watching my stressed-out boss claw compulsively at his own skin, scratching until he bled, because he couldn’t take the pressure. And he had it easy. He thought the software worked.

I like my job now. I have a tiny, tiny fanbase and I love them. I don’t have a Caeli, but I wouldn’t want a Caeli who didn’t volunteer for the job, and I wouldn’t want a Caeli who was reblogging until her fingers hurt. I think I’d cry. Even if Caeli said she loved it and wanted to be doing it, I would cry.

She said it during this interview, and I still cried a little.

Much as I love interacting with my favorite artists and understand the desire to do it even more, I love my fans. I want them to be happy and well.

I’d like to have a larger fanbase. I’m trying to get better about posting stuff and interacting with my fans and all the good social-media things I’m supposed to be doing in this age of self-promotion. But my marketing staff consists of me and my laptop, and I can only control the message as long as I’m the only one sending it out. If Teh Novel takes off, and people other than me get involved in promoting my work, I am fairly certain that my biggest worry will be that somewhere out there, a Caeli is getting hurt because of something I created out of love.

Look at this picture again. She's like me at twelve, but cooler.

So here and now, before any actual money or marketing people can possibly come into the equation, is my promise to you. On this blog, on Pocket Coyote, on Facebook and Twitter and whatever other platforms come along, I will share as much of my life with you as seems prudent and interesting, and whatever I share will be true and will be me. If it shows up on this blog and it’s not signed with somebody else’s name, I wrote it. If I post a photo, I took it. If I say it, I thought it. No calculation, no hyperscheduling, no pressure. Just me and my keyboard, with ink on my fingertips and graphite smudges on my arm. That seems to be what you guys want, and it’s something I’m quite willing to give.

And in return for all that--however much or little it’s worth to you--this is all I ask, and all I will ever ask.

I drew this in a coffee shop because I was bored.

First, take joy in what I make. Have fun. I make this stuff because I love it, and I share it because I want you to enjoy it as much as I do. If you’re not having fun, go do something else. Seriously.

Second, share your joy with others simply because shared joy is increased. Go ahead and tell all your friends how wonderful my stories are--but only do it if you think your friends will enjoy them, too. There’s a reason I make the Masks chapters available for free, and it’s not because I don’t think I can get you to pay for them. Some of you do (and thanks for that, by the way). I make the chapters available for free because I never want to have to work a horrible marketing job again, selling software that will never work. I make the chapters available for free because it’s the ultimate truth in advertising--because I will never feel like I’m selling you a pig in a poke when there is no poke. I don’t post free chapters because it’s good marketing, or because I’m so confident that you’ll buy my stories if I give you a free sample. I’m not confident at all. But if I know you can read before you buy, and you do buy, I know you’re buying because it makes you happy. I know I’ve shared joy. And that’s worth more to me than any number of dollars in the tip jar.

Third and finally, I do ask you to pay for my work--to pay what you can, when you can, where you can. I’d like to pay my bills with this stuff, it’s true. One of my great dreams in life, second to writing the kind of stories I love best, is to own a home of my very own so I never have to worry about where I’m sleeping next month. I would be over the moon if enough people bought my stories that I could do that. So yes, if you enjoy my work, I’d like you to pay a reasonable price to support it. I’d certainly produce more if I could do it full-time. But I know that life happens and money gets tight and sometimes you can’t put a dollar in the tip jar. And that’s okay. The joy comes first. Money is on my wish list, but joy is a lot higher up.

And that’s it. Those three things, in that order, are all I will ever ask of you, my readers and electronic friends. Enjoy the art, share the art if you enjoy it, and pay for the art if it’s worth it and you can afford it. Have joy, share joy, and tip your server if you can. If by some bizarre twist of fate you ever encounter a multi-billion-dollar marketing campaign for my art, please don’t be Caeli. Take care of yourselves instead.

Sometimes it still happens

Terrible iPad photo of midnight sketch.
Don't judge; the scanner is misbehaving.

Something really cool happened last week.

I was doing the dishes, as I recall--one of my favorite ways to avoid writing--when the crazy voices started up in my head. I've learned to love my crazy voices. They're the ones that say things like All the superheroes are dead; isn't that awesome? and What's the craziest thing that could happen in Chapter 10, and how can you make it even more psychotic? The crazy voices make the best stories. 

I had been feeding the crazy voices of late. The crazy voices live on good stories--both the kinds of stories that literary poobahs define as good and the ones that I just plain like. The crazy voices love Shakespeare plays and awful B movies. They feed on old radio dramas and random articles about World War I and strange conversations with my friends. The weirder the better. If it's bizarre and it holds my attention, the crazy voices eat it for lunch. 

Most recently, I'd been peering at set photos for the upcoming Winter Soldier movie (I cannot begin to tell you how excited I am for that thing) and thinking about characters with interesting, complicated, slightly scary backstories. I'd also been kicking around an old question of mine--an author of my distant acquaintance, whose work I much admire and with whom I've corresponded a tiny bit, released a story a couple of years ago set in the universe that had inspired Masks, way back when I was a scrappy kid of fourteen. And in that rather more recent story was a character who was briefly, mistakenly, called Trevor. 

I'm pretty sure this author was, at some point, aware of Masks, though I doubt he read it--he's a busy fellow. And the brief misidentification of an interesting, complicated character with a slightly scary backstory as Trevor had gotten me thinking. I didn't pick the name Trevor for its great significance to pop culture or superhero lore; I pulled it at random out of an old yearbook. (I think Trevor was in kindergarten when I was in seventh grade, or something like that.) There wasn't much outside meaning to the name Trevor. So was this beloved author's name-drop a reference to Masks? Or just a coincidence? I didn't want to feed my ego, as it could always stand to lose a few points, but the idea was intriguing. What if the name was this author's idea of a gentle poke at my hero, who could very easily end up looking a lot like that author's beautifully broken and slowly healing character a few years down the road?

And then the crazy voices whispered: Who cares if he did it on purpose or not? It's a damn good story either way. Because guess what?

What? (My crazy voices love a good dialogue.)

You know how Trevor doesn't have much of a backstory?

What are you talking about? He's a psychologically damaged former sidekick with a history as long as my arm. He's got more backstory than anyone else in the series, with the arguable exception of the Black Mask and Eagle Eye, and maybe the Masked Rider ... 

Yeah, but there's a hole in it. A big hole. You know that big hole that bugs you sometimes?

I don't know what you're talking about. There's no hole.

Is too. Right ... here!

Ow! Right in the plot cohesion! You're mean, crazy voices.

Whine, whine. This is why you're doing the dishes. Anyway, look what we found to fill that hole.

Stop saying "hole". What is that, anyway?

We take this character over here ... and then do this ... and that changes everydamnthing. And it even fills the hole. Right?

But he hasn't said anything about this incredibly important event. Ever. You've got to load Chekhov's gun before you fire it, stupid voices.

That's the beauty of it. You love Winter Soldier comics because there's always some new twist on his past, and the reason they never have to load that gun is ... ?

Because he's got memory problems. There's always something he doesn't remember.

And of all the people who'd be involved in this, who is the most likely to tell the audience about it ... and the least likely to know about it?

Oh. Ohhhh, boy. You are evil, crazy voices. 

We know. You're welcome. Want to break some dishes?

I've been working on Masks for fifteen years now. It's rare to get a big new idea on a project that's been going that long, especially when it concerns a core character like Trevor. Maybe I don't know Golem's backstory until I sit down to write it for the bonus features in Volume 1, but Trevor? Him I know. 

Right up until I don't. 

People can always surprise you--imaginary people more than most. And I'm really excited about this twist. It's going to require a lot of reworking of the outlines for later books, and that's a good thing. They were feeling a little stale. This is going to be lots of fun. All of a sudden I don't know where I'm going anymore, and I'm throwing the car into overdrive.

It's not supposed to happen a lot, fifteen years in. But sometimes it still does. 

And now, if you'll excuse me, I've got to sweep up some dish shards that have mysteriously appeared on my kitchen floor ... 

Remember the Phantom Naked Guy!

This post is SFW, I swear.

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been working on agent queries for The Resurrectionist’s Song. I have no news on that front, obviously, but a random conversation about something completely unrelated reminded me of a lesson I’d learned long ago, and that I’d probably do well to remember more regularly as I wade through agent listings and try not to be intimidated by inanimate web pages.

Why am I intimidated by inanimate web pages? Because they’re owned by people who might reject me. Who probably will reject me, in fact, according to the law of averages. And rejection is scary. But here’s why I’m doing it anyway.

I give you now the tale, and the lesson, of the Phantom Naked Guy.

During my misspent youth, I misspent a single semester at an extremely conservative Catholic college that happened to be located near a national forest. By “extremely conservative”, I mean that the Mass was still in Latin and somebody suggested that I be burned at the stake for not being Catholic. That traditional outlook had major effects on the female population there; most of the girls in the dorm where I lived seemed to be planning to marry a nice Catholic boy and settle down in the middle of nowhere to home-school their twelve kids. A significant number of them had a never before attended classes with people who weren’t related to them (apparently there are a few Catholic communes out there that funnel their girls directly into this college). They had had next to no contact with men or boys who weren’t their fathers, brothers, cousins, and so on.

And then the Phantom Naked Guy burst onto the scene like a nudist in a nunnery.

I never saw him personally, but I talked to a few people who did, and a typical encounter would go like this: two or more girls would be hiking one of the forest trails near the campus, either for exercise (the school had no gym, and most athletic activities were men-only) or for pleasure. Suddenly, around a bend in the trail would come a man about 30 or 40 years old, about five foot ten and Caucasian, wearing absolutely nothing. Not a stitch. Not even shoes. He wouldn’t scream or jump out at anybody, mind you. The most offensive thing I ever heard of him doing, aside from being naked in a national forest, was wave cheerily to the girls. While naked, of course. Search parties never found him after these encounters, earning him the nickname of Phantom Naked Guy.

Naturally, the entire female population of the school collectively lost their minds.

Casual hikes ended. Now expeditions into the forest had to be planned like the Normandy invasion. Young women, terrified that the Phantom Naked Guy would leap out of the bushes and assault them, went into the woods in large groups, or (more often) not at all. Male escorts were suddenly in high demand, which perked up a lot of lovelorn Catholic boys considerably, but since many of the male students were planning to become priests, the girls didn’t get as many takers as they would have liked. The college staunchly refused to lend out either of the campus’s two sheepdogs (long story) as protection. And so, as a last resort, a nervous coed stopped me on my way into the dorm one night and asked me if I’d be willing to go along as a bodyguard. With my knife, of course.

The short explanation for my knife is this: when I showed up on campus in August, I had brought with me a small folding hunting knife with a 3.5-inch blade, covered in black enamel. My dormmates discovered this fact when they sneaked into my dorm room in September (they were throwing glitter around because it was my birthday) and discovered the knife lying on my pillow. (I had been opening a birthday package, then realized I was late for class, so I dropped knife, package, and contents on the bed and ran for it.) Even though I only used the knife for opening stubborn envelopes and cutting up fruit, I soon had a reputation as the campus blade fiend. And so it came to pass that when girl gangs, obliging college boys, and sheepdogs had all failed, my knife and I were called to action. And I had an interesting insight.

The conversation went like this.

Girl: “Hey, would you like to go on a hike this weekend with me and [name redacted]?”
Me: “Uh … why?” (We weren’t friends. I’m not sure we even spoke outside of class.)
Girl: “Because you have a knife.”
Me: “What?”
Girl: “We’re scared of the Phantom Naked Guy.”
Me: “And you want me to … stab him?”
Girl: “If necessary.”
Me: “To protect you.”
Girl: “Yes.”
Me: [Pause for thought] “Why are you worried about a naked guy?”
Girl: “Well, he’s naked. There’s got to be a reason for that.”
Me: “Right. So why don’t you just throw a rock?”
Girl: “Huh?”
Me: “He’s naked. He’s all target area. Throw rocks and pinecones if you want him to go away.”
Girl: “That’s gross.”
Me: “Grosser than stabbing him?”

Needless to say, I did not get that bodyguard job.

But I learned a valuable lesson from the Phantom Naked Guy. Until that moment, I hadn’t really thought about what I’d do if I met him and needed to get him to leave. (As an old theatre geek, I was more comfortable with nudity than the average Catholic schoolgirl.) But to most girls who had heard of him, he was a figure of terror. The Phantom Naked Guy, rapist extraordinaire (at least in potentia.) Except only an idiot would go hiking in that forest alone—there were mountain lions out there—so he was always outnumbered. And the guy was stark naked. Not actually that threatening, or even odd, once you got past the fact that typical hikers weren’t naked. And as I pointed out, he was pretty vulnerable to rocks and pinecones. It was a coniferous forest in earthquake country. It was practically made of rocks and pinecones. The proper solution was probably to just wave back, but if you were really that scared of the Phantom Naked Guy and/or he was really that threatening, you could theoretically drive him off with a handful of gravel.

Now, I know that indecent exposure can sometimes be tied up with a number of other, more problematic behaviors. I’m not saying the Phantom Naked Guy, who apparently enjoyed walking naked past Catholic schoolgirls, wasn’t going to be real trouble someday. But he might have been just a lone nudist; California has a few of those. And at least at the time, the problem wasn’t sexual assault, or any attempts thereat. The problem was a naked guy in the pine woods freaking people out. And pinecones are naked-guy Kryptonite.

So where’s the lesson in all this?

Sometimes your problem is a naked guy in the pine woods. Sometimes the thing you think is absolutely terrifying is actually quite vulnerable to pinecones. As I’m typing up query letters, trying to find the perfect combination of words that will persuade some agent to rescue Teh Novel from the slush pile, I need to remember the Phantom Naked Guy. This task looks scary. I don’t like being rejected any more than anyone else does. But I’ve been on the other side of this equation, too, and I know that the fear of missing out on a great piece of writing is sometimes almost as great as the fear of rejection. I am venturing out into the woods, expecting to do battle with Bigfoot … and I need to remember that sometimes it’s just the Phantom Naked Guy.

So as you go about your business this week, take a good, hard look at the things that scare you. There are scary things out there, true. Those woods had far more mountain lions than nudists. But sometimes your problem isn’t much of a problem at all. Not if you’re willing to wave back.

Or, at worst, chuck a pinecone.

Ode to a chair

This is my chair. It is a very important chair.

It doesn't look like much, does it? Under that heavy layer of cast-off clothes (including a Captain America baseball shirt that is far too big for me, and was even more too big when I bought it at age 15) is a chair that you probably wouldn't pull out of a Dumpster. The upholstery is cracked, the springs have never been replaced, God knows what's living in the seat cushion, it weighs nearly half as much as I do, and when I roll it around it sounds like a crippled Dalek. If you saw this chair by the side of the road, you wouldn't stop to pick it up. And if you did, you'd throw out your back trying to load it into the car. I'm fairly sure that the frame is all steel. This is the Sherman tank of office chairs.

When I moved into my current home, there was no talk of disassembling the chair. As far as anyone knows, it can't be taken apart without specialized tools. We carried it bodily out of one house and into another, grunting and swearing and trying not to bash holes in the walls. This chair doesn't like to travel unless it's by rolling. And it's not too keen on rolling.

If there's a way to adjust the seat height, it stopped working before I was born. The arms are welded to the frame and cannot be moved. This is a take-it-or-leave it chair. Either it fits you, or it doesn't.

And yet ... and yet ...

I've never known anyone to sit in this chair and not immediately feel at ease. Most people tilt it back a few degrees--it does tilt, without taking its wheels off the ground, though I'm damned if I know how--and try to put their feet up on something. If you close your eyes, you lose the sense that you're sitting in a cracked and battered office chair from the dawn of office chairs, half-covered in old clothes so you don't snag the cracked upholstery. Instead, you're sitting behind Perry White's desk at the Daily Planet, or maybe getting ready to yell at Carl Kolchak for turning in these cockamamie stories about monsters. If you grew up on old radio shows, like me, you're Randy Stone, waxing poetic on your old Royal typewriter before you pick up the phone and call for the copyboy. This chair knows you're here to work. It molds itself to you and tells you that you are, by God, the equal of any writer who's sat in it before you.

The chair's a bit of a funny story, really. My paternal grandmother was a writer for most of her life--a stringer for local papers, an occasional columnist, a would-be screenwriter and novelist. She was my first writing mentor, and I guarantee you've never heard of her (although an old colleague of hers, now working at the Los Angeles Times, once recognized my last name and asked 1) whether I was related and 2) how the hell she had scooped him on such a regular basis). And according to family lore, she got this chair by, er, liberating it from the U.S. Army. Or possibly buying it surplus. There was a lot of that going on, both at the end of World War II and in the early 1960s, when my grandfather left the service after 20 years. I suspect she bought it; she was an honest soul at heart.

But however you look at it, I spent a lot of my working time sitting in a World War II-era office chair, resisting the urge to put my feet up on a matching steel wastebasket. I inherited both items from my grandmother when she died, along with a desk of much more recent vintage. The irony appealed to me (well, the irony of the wastebasket did), and in any case my own desk chair was falling apart at the time. This one had survived a world war; it could probably handle the occasional fight scene.

If anything ever goes wrong, there likely isn't a repairman alive who can fix the darned thing. I've thought about getting it reupholstered, but I'm not sure that would work, either. Besides, there's a certain nobility to its rugged battleship-gray vinyl. It's literally been through the wars. Maybe that's what gives it its air of calm competence. I've seen worse than this, it seems to say. Try me.

I do need to get a proper footstool, though. It doesn't tilt quite far enough back to let me put my feet on the desk, and there's something ominous about putting them up on the wastebasket ...