sam

The tail end of January isn’t generally well-loved.

More so than an impending storm, more so than climate change, more so than a swarm of locusts, people seem to have the ability to sense the coming of February and their dread for its arrival mounts with each passing day we inch closer to that most loathed of dates.

February 14th.

Valentine’s Day.

The day when society loads a heaping helping of You’re-Not-Normal-Unless-You’re-Buying-Flowers buckshot into its Passive Aggressive Cannon, aims it right between our eyes, and lets fire.  It’s the day when you’re made to feel abnormal if you’re single, inadequate unless you’re spending your life’s savings on your significant other and unwanted if no one buys you a giant novelty teddy bear that vomits joy into your eyes when squeezed.

Yes, Valentine’s Day is usually considered the most beloathed of holidays and for good reason.

But that all changes this year.

Because this year, you have someone to help you.

Yes, that’s right!  This year, two of the most well-intentioned misanthropes are back to help you negotiate the perilous, twisted trails of modern love and instruct you on how best to survive this Valentine’s Day with your heart intact and blood on your lips.

Last year, Kataria and Denaos answered many questions about love, life and relationships as honestly and unhelpfully as they possibly could.  Many good men and women found solace in their answers.  Many more went to prison.

This year, they’re hoping to be even more less successful in helping you in your quest to become the paragon of romantic exertion!

Do you have a question about love?  Do you have a question about the opposite sex?  Do you have a desire just to ask an alcoholic sociopath and an unwashed, be-fanged savage woman what they think of your situation?

Simply go to this Contact Form here and type “Dear Kataria” or “Dear Denaos” or maybe both in the header, then type your love-related question in the body.

Questions about how to land the perfect date, questions about how to approach that guy you’ve been coyly dropping hints to, questions about how to escape an amorous date once they have the scent of your fear in your nostrils, all will be answered by our relationship experts!

Questions will be answered on February 14th, just in time for you to enact the cunning plan they are doubtless to deliver to you!

The most interesting question will receive a signed copy of The Skybound Sea!

What constitutes “interesting?”  I guess Kataria and Denaos will tell us!

So what are you waiting for, you lovelorn fool?  Email today!

So, some neat new stuff to talk about today.

For one (and this is extremely short notice), I will be at Immortal ConFusion next weekend, January 18th through the 20th!  I’ll have panels!  Probably other stuff, too!  If you’re coming and would like to see me, please don’t hesitate to walk right up and tell me that I am just the bee’s knees.

I like it when people compare me to insectoid ligaments.

For two (and this is extremely important), a valued member of the SF/F community, Jay Lake, is experience some health concerns.  In a true display of the compassion that this community is always ready to prove they possess, a Fundraiser Page for his health has been brought up.  If you’ve got enough to spare, please consider helping out a fellow human being and an extraordinarily talented writer.

Thanks!

And finally, I’ve got a bunch of copies of The Skybound Sea.

What do I do with them?

There are many things I don’t like about new years.

The agonizing hangover, which I’ve deftly avoided this year, rounds out the bottom of my list.  Ever since the first night of 2011, when I chugged a bottle of cherry Gatorade before going to bed after heavy drinking and woke up to vomit that made me think I was bleeding internally, I’ve always hated the morning after as much as I’ve loved the night before.

Just past that is the general spirit of good will.  I can’t stand that we, as a society, have set aside a few days to out of the year to be kind to each other and are content to be nasty for the rest of the year.  I, at least, have owned up to my thorough nature and am vile 365 days a year.

But chief among my grievances with a new year is the whole aspect of resolutions.

I don’t make resolutions.  I never have.  But my reasons for doing so have evolved.

At first, I didn’t do them because I knew I wasn’t going to keep them.  I still think is sound reasoning.  I don’t change anything about myself I don’t want to.

Then, I said I wouldn’t do them because anything I did want to change about myself, I would just start changing.  I think this is even more logical.  To me, if it’s something you want to have happen, you might as well start doing it.

But ever since I became a writer, I’ve told myself that I don’t make them because I already know how the new year is going to go.

And if you’re a writer, you do, too.

You’re going to resolve not to let yourself get frustrated anymore.  You may get rejected a lot.  It doesn’t matter by who.  Publishers, reviewers, readers, whatever.  You’re not going to let that get to you.  It’s about the art, not the business.  If you let yourself start taking the rejection to heart, you’re going to drive yourself mad.  You cannot let yourself get frustrated.

But you will.

You’ll get rejected and there’s going to be a little voice in the back of your head that says “you’re not good enough.”  You could brush it off easily at first, but the more it happens, the more you start seeing a pattern and the louder that voice gets.  And not just loud, but heavy.  You’re going to feel it settle upon your shoulders and it’ll grow thicker and heavier until one day you just fall down and can’t remember a reason to get up.

So maybe you’ll resolve not to let yourself be envious anymore.  This seems reasonable.  You know that your fellow authors aren’t “competition” and that publishing doesn’t work that way.  You’ll tell yourself that the guys writing other stuff aren’t writing what you are, so it’s impossible to judge by the same criteria.  You’ll say that your career will advance as it does and that’s that.  The art is separate from anything or anyone else.  You cannot let yourself feel envious.

But you will.

You’ll see lists that don’t have your name on them, conversations between people you wish you were that don’t feature you, authors who aren’t you saying things you aren’t saying like “I was voted best of” or “I just got accepted to” or “looks like I’ll be.”  And in every thing you aren’t on, you’ll start seeing someone spiting you.  You’ll start telling yourself that you’re doing something wrong and there’s something terrible going on that’s keeping you from succeeding and every time you smile and say “congratulations!” to someone, you’re going to privately think “you fucking prick, you don’t deserve that.”

And having failed both of those, you’ll at least resolve not to give up.  You’ll see everyone else’s career seemingly skyrocketing while yours seemingly goes nowhere.  You’ll see awards on peoples’ covers and wonder if you can somehow hew out your latest rejection letter or negative review for a blurb on your cover (“Most…piece of…ever!” rave reviewers).  You’ll sit on your ass and wonder why you ever made this decision and whether you might just be better off doing something else.

You’ll feel the need to cry, and you will.

You’ll feel like you should be very depressed, and you will.

You’ll try not to wonder if you’re doing something wrong, and you will.

And then sometimes you’ll wonder if you just ought to give up.

And you won’t.

Eventually, you will dry your tears.  Eventually, you will fight back your despair.  Eventually, the desire to agonize over whether or not you’re screwing up will become less than the desire to actually tell a story that’s been banging around in your head for awhile and while you’ll never stop wondering if you’re a fuck-up, you’ll at least be able to wonder other things once awhile.

You’ll realize that rejections, if you take them well, will help you get better.  And even if you don’t, so long as you keep doing it, you will get better just by the nature of practicing something.  And you’ll realize that the best thing you can do is accept that rejection happens and take what you can from it.

You’ll realize that yes, a writing career is a lot like puberty and yours is going to go differently than anyone else’s and that’s okay, even if it doesn’t always feel like it.  And you’ll realize that nothing ever stays the same and, much like writing, you’ll get better at being noticed, too.  And you’ll accept that even if you can’t stop feeling petty and envious all the time, you can at least not let it be something that comes between you and other people.

You’ll realize that it gets easier, but it never gets easy.  You’ll realize that the sheer emotional toll of being a writer is something that no one ever talks about because no one ever wants to appear weak, envious, depressed or cowardly, even though everyone feels like that sometimes or all the time and that’s just something you can’t help doing.

You’ll realize, though, that writing is just one more thing you can’t help doing.

And if you’ve ever considered stopping, you didn’t want to do it in the first place.

Happy New Year.

I don’t like the word “relationship.”

No one does.

For one, it’s a long and soft word, full of hissing and seething noises, so it’s naturally unpleasant to hear.  We like our soft words to be short, the better to convey the impact of their message, like “love.”  And we like our long words to have hard sounds in them so that they seem to have a foundation when they start to wobble under the weight of their syllables, like “conflict.”

But the real reason we don’t like the word “relationship” is that it’s too weak to convey the dire severity of its meaning.  We have a warped definition of the word, one that conjures up images of Zach Braff agonizing through internal dialogue in a hospital cafeteria or an entire genre of books based around women standing around, waiting to see which werewolf or vampire will be the one to take her home.

I once received a review that bemoaned the sheer amount of “relationship stuff” in Black Halo.  It was distinctly critical of how much time was spent getting the characters to know each other better and what they were doing as despair set in.  His praise finally picked up when Lenk charged heedlessly onto a boat to save Kataria and kill people, which is when he said something along the lines of “this is what it’s all about.  Not relationships, but adventure and fighting.”

I kind of sighed.

Not that I blamed him.  I don’t blame any critic for their views.  But even if I did, I wouldn’t have blamed him for operating under a weird (if widespread) definition of the word “relationship.”

We are raised with the belief that “relationship” is a word that means “solution.”  You are not a normal person until you have a long-term relationship, according to the media.  You are not a well-adjusted human being unless you have a good relationship with your family.  You are incomplete until you can sit down, watch a shitty sitcom and get the “jokes” that revolve around a woman wanting a man to buy tampons and him wanting to watch football instead.  And if you are not normal, well-adjusted or complete, then you surely will be once you get a relationship, because that’s what normal people do.

And likewise, we are raised with the belief that “conflict” is a word that means “problem.”  Conflicts are things that do not occur naturally.  Conflicts happen because someone screwed up.  Conflicts are problems to be solved.  We define our stories with words like “Man vs. Self,” “Man vs. Man,” “Man vs. Manatee” and the like with the implication that they will be overcome.

Conflicts are what define our stories.

But “conflict” and “relationship” mean the same thing.

The reason we don’t like the word “relationship” is because society’s definition of it as “solution” does not actually fit with what a relationship is.  And what a relationship is is adversarial in nature.  It is there to change the status quo, to push people toward each other or away from each other, to disrupt what is comfortable and create something different.

And that’s painful.  Sometimes exceedingly so.

Because, win or lose, we don’t get to walk away from relationships unchanged.  We can underplay violence pretty well in society and especially in fantasy literature.  We throw in fight scenes with the expectation that victory for our heroes means the return of the status quo.  The dragon is dead, so everything can go back to normal.  We haven’t yet figured out a way to do this with relationships.

Nor should we.

Every story is about relationships.  Every boat, sword, laser, ghost, dragon, demon or zeppelin is just a means of pushing that relationship forward.

And I don’t think I really understood this when I started writing.

I think, when I began with Tome of the Undergates, I viewed battles and relationships as separate entities.  We had our fight scenes, then we had our talk scenes, then we had our fight scenes and then talking.  It was easily staggered and people could skip parts they didn’t like.  That’s not good writing.

In Black Halo, I think I stumbled around the truth a little.  I knew that fight scenes were just dialogue with fists, that there should never be a fight scene that didn’t change the conversation in some direction.  I knew that relationships were what broke people, not blood or swords.  I knew that a woman turning her back on you was worse than a knife embedded in your shoulder.  But I didn’t know how to express that.

It got better in The Skybound Sea.

But I think it’s only at my current project that I understand how to make “relationship” mean “conflict” mean “problem and solution.”  I only now understand what it means to make two people love and hate each other at the same time.  I only now understand what it means when battle is an extension of love, when swords are long kisses and blood drops are notes in a love song.

Love.  Hate.  Relationship.  Conflict.

They all basically means the same thing: change.  Change is scary.  But meaningful.

“Relationships” as we know them by the society’s definition are not meaningful.  Society tells us that a relationship is a comfort, a normalcy, a solution.

Were that true, we would never feel our hearts beat faster when someone took a step closer to us, we would never listen to the radio and wonder what they were talking about when they played a love song from fifty years ago, we would never lie awake at night wondering how long we could go on being alone.

“Conflicts” as we know them by society’s definition are not meaningful.  Society tells us that a conflict is a burden, an error, a problem.

Were that true, we would never spend our time consumed with thoughts as to how to punish those who have wronged us, we would never devote more energy to defining ourselves by what we want not to be than we do about what we do want to be, we would never look at an enemy and realize we were still alone.

But society is wrong.  Literature is right.

Relationships are everything.  Conflict is everything.  Comfort means nothing.  Change means everything.

We just need better words for them.

I think it’s pretty evident by now that I’m a pretty horrible person.

The list of travesties I have committed in the singular name of love and hate would, if made into a kite, fly across the sky and paint the wind with the words: “SAM SYKES ONCE TRIED HUMAN FLESH, SAM SYKES ONCE POOPED IN JOE ABERCROMBIE’S SHOES, SAM SYKES PRIVATELY THINKS KOALAS ARE A BULLSHIT ANIMAL” and other such stanzas of confessional poetry.

And that’s just what’s been annotated.

The real list of my sins goes far beyond that and, to avert the visions of a hell reserved for those few people whose eccentricities become just a bit too much to be bearable (haunted primarily by the ghost of Paul Reiser and Jerry Seinfeld), I have attempted to atone through a variety of ways.

Patrick Rothfuss has been critical in this endeavor and through him, I have the opportunity to brush the devil’s cold hand from my shoulder once again.

By checking out this link, you can see that a great award awaits you.  An opportunity to play Dungeons and Dragons with me and a few other detestable authors at this year’s Immortal ConFusion is up for sale.  All proceeds of this auction will go to benefit Heifer International, an extremely satisfying charity.

Think of it!  You could be in my company!  Me!  The very Sam Sykes!  And some other jerks!  And for a good cause?

Dare you dream of it?

Dare you bid on it?

Do it.

Do it all night.

That’s right, The Skybound Sea is very soon to release in the United Kingdom!

And if you have a blog and are interested in reviewing it, this is your chance to get yourself an advanced copy!

All you need to do is head over to my contact form and use that to send me an email!

Please include…

• A link to your blog.
• A shipping address.
• A picture of a turtle.

The link is important so that we know who’s getting this copy.  The shipping address is necessary for the ability to send you the book itself.  And the turtle picture is vital for my collection of turtle pictures.

Small blog?  Big blog?  Doesn’t matter!  Shoot me an email and we’ll be sure to get you a copy!

I usually try to avoid mentioning authors and their work by name when I talk about them here in a way that could be possibly considered critical.  In this case, though, I think it’ll be worth mentioning.

I’ve just started The Emperor’s Knife by Mazarkis Williams.

I’ll start by saying it’s very good so far.  I’ll continue by saying the prose is exceptional and the pacing is frustratingly brilliant.  And I’ll go on to preface that I only just started this book, so my opinion should be taken with that into consideration.  However, I’ll further preface that this post only tangentially involves the book, so please take that into consideration, as well.

Anyway, around the beginning of the book, we meet the character Mesema, daughter of a prominent chieftain of a tribe within the Felt.  Within her chapter, we are introduced to her sewing along with some other women, gossiping about marriage, men and having children.  By the end of the chapter, she is promised as a bride to the Cerani, a people to whom the protagonists belong.

And I very nearly put the book down.

Update: Mazarkis actually wrote on this subject and his post is well worth taking a look at.

And this is where things start getting a little more tangential.

Now, don’t get me wrong.  Mesema is no simpering, wilting damsel.  And the next chapter she’s in has her coming to grips with her situation and focusing on how she’s going to deal with it, emotionally and mentally.  And that’s great and all…

…but it almost feels like we should be past this.

Not past women characters coming to grips with situations, mind you, but past women characters having to come to grips with the same situation over and over.  That situation being the life of a woman.

Let me clarify for a moment.  In a lot of fantasies, I’m noticing the same theme of women generally being considered second-class, disempowered and otherwise not in control of their own destinies.  It’s quite often honestly portrayed as a very unpleasant situation by the authors and that’s great.  I certainly am not accusing any of these authors of being sexist by putting their characters in that sort of difficult situation.

But what I wonder is why we keep revisiting that situation.  The situation where the character’s biggest problem is being a woman, where she’s not in control of her own destiny (at first), where she is always struggling from that position to overcome the burdens placed on her by masculinity.

I agree that it’s an important subject to tackle and well worth discussion, but I’m wondering if that’s the only discussion we can ever have.

I’ve heard a few arguments in response to this.

“But that’s what women are most concerned about!” some say.  “Babies and sewing and being ladylike!”

To which I say: shut up.

“But that’s historically accurate!” some say.  “Women weren’t treated equal in those times!”

To which I say: read this excellent article by Tansy Rayner Roberts and then shut up.

“But sometimes, the author wants to talk about that!” some say.  “Sometimes, this is how the character or society is portrayed.”

And that’s true.  Like I said, it’s worth having this conversation.  I just wonder if we’re not retreading the same territory over and over by suggesting that women don’t have problems other than male expectations.  I will definitely agree that such a thing is a problem, but should we be asking other things?

I don’t know.  It’s possible I’m doing it wrong in the first place.

My writing with women characters is largely represented by my own two most prominent ones: Kataria and Asper.

Now, Kataria doesn’t start from this position.  She’s a warrior in a group where they all tend to be equally loathsome in society’s eyes (her maybe more so owing to her belonging to a race with a historic conflict with…well, everybody).  As she can solve a lot of her external conflicts easily (usually via one of several arrows through someone’s face), most of her important conflicts are internal: where she fits in with her people, where she feels she should fit in, where she feels she wants to fit in, how she should look at people she’s historically and culturally supposed to despise, how much time she can spend with a guy who probably harbors at least some resentment toward her for what she is and the like.  I leave her gender largely out of that conflict.

Asper is somewhat more fun to write (especially lately) in that her external conflicts aren’t easily solved.  She’s a healer (which, I admit, is usually the role reserved for women characters in fantasy), but rather than having it be something she does, it’s something that defines her.  Her job is her past is her life and when she can’t solve her external conflicts (say, saving someone who needs help), it affects her internal conflicts (wondering what good it is to devote her life to this if she can’t help those who need it most).  Again, her conflicts mostly aren’t gender-related.

It hasn’t been a big deal in my world and it’s not likely to become one.

Like I said, maybe I’m doing it wrong.

And I recognize the conversation keeps on going, regardless of whether I’m choosing to use my book to talk about it or not.  But maybe we’re not yet at the point where we can afford to step away from this conversation.  Maybe the problem is still so big that we all must still keep talking about it?

And yet, I can’t help but think that, even if we are still having this conversation, we aren’t making a lot of progress.  We’re acknowledging that life is unfair and that it often requires a lot of struggle and that it should often end with that struggle being overcome.  But we seem to do that a lot.

And yet, maybe that’s just my own experience talking?  Maybe this is easier for me to move past because I’ve never had any meaningful discrimination leveled against me because of my gender and thus, the conversation seems less close (though certainly no less important).

This is one of those blog posts where I’m really more asking than telling.  What do you think?  Where do we stand as readers, gamers, consumers of fiction where women characters are taking a more prominent role?  Are we at the point where we can afford for gender to be less of an all-pervasive issue?  Or do we still need to work on this more?

I have just finished Maus.

It’s difficult to read a book like that, subject material aside, because it is a story that demands self-reflection while at the same time suggesting you might be a bit of an asshole for doing so.

The reason it’s such an excellent book is because it draws you in and affects your life.  The reason it’s difficult to read is because it, at the same time, asks “who are you feel that this affects you, you who have never known hardship?”

There are many types of hardship.

I haven’t known many.

I meet up with friends sometimes.  Sometimes they’re authors, sometimes they are not.  They tend to have stories to tell: people they have loved and lost, ambitions they have never reached, problems they have always had or wish they didn’t have or sometimes wish they had.

Sometimes I talk about writing, sometimes about video games, but not often do I offer up stories of my own.

I sometimes wonder if I have any.

My parents are well-to-do and humble, still together after many years.  Both my sisters are successful, happy and talented.  I wasn’t abused, I didn’t have a hard life, there was no messy divorce or broken home to inspire me.  My relationships have all ended quietly and without a lot of agony.  My biggest concerns throughout the day are alleviating a crippling boredom that will turn into depression if I let it lie, but this is not so big.

To me, at least.

I have a good friend.  We have been friends since the sixth grade.  He has had a rough life.  His family life was difficult.  He enlisted in the Marines right before 9/11 and went to Iraq.  He has seen some stuff.  His family life is still complicated.  He has stories, many of them I am certain I have not heard yet.

His stories are also difficult to listen to.

They are good stories.  I can tell this because they invite me to think about what I would do in such situations, what I would not do, why I have not done them.  But because they are good stories, they are complicated and they say “who are you to reflect on this?

And sometimes, with guilt or depression or sadness, I ask myself that and I don’t have a very good answer.

I can’t really offer up a reply to “I saw good friends of mine get blown apart” or “I watched my family kill itself” aside from “today I felt kind of sad.”  This is not a reply I choose to offer.

So, when I am asked “who are you to reflect on this,” I am silent.

Sometimes, I meet people who very much want to be writers.  Sometimes, they say a lot of things about their lives and their problems.  They are stories, yes.  But they are not good stories, because they are not complicated.  They have hardships, I am sure, but they don’t know how to tell them.

But when someone asks them “who are you,” they are not silent.  They say “I am a writer, I have this qualification and this idea and I will do this and I will do that and the story will move people this way and this will happen and I know it because this idea is a very good story.”

I don’t think they are liars.  But I don’t think they realize they’re wrong.

Frequently, to say “I am a writer” means to be silent.

It’s very strange.  The people with the biggest, most fantastic stories rarely ever seem to write them down.  They tell them, sure, not always freely, but they never seem to write them down.  And the people with the strongest, most incredible voices never seem to have anything to write about.

Some folk have things happen to them.  Some folk put them to words.

There is the difference between some folk and writers.

And that difference is silence.

Veteran’s Day is very recently over.  When it comes, I advise people not to shake a soldier’s hand and say “thank you for your service” and then “see you next year.”  I don’t know if that helps soldiers.  I think they appreciate it, but does it help them?  I don’t know.  I’m not a soldier.

But I do know that silence helps them.  Listening helps them.  Sitting quietly and hearing what they’ve seen and what they want others to know helps them.  Giving them a moment to share a moment that they can’t otherwise share and have to carry forever helps them.

Not just soldiers.  Poor people.  Hungry people.  Sad people.  People who think they are not sad.  Hard working people.  People who think they are hard working.  Grandpas.  Grandmas.  Kids.  Young men who call themselves bad names because they want to cry because there is no young woman in their lives.  Young women who look always to a distant goal and keep walking toward it and every time they look up, it is a little further away.

Silence helps them.

I get uncomfortable when people ask me what I do for a living.  Not on the subject of writing (on that, I can go forever), but when it comes to me, when people say “who are you,” I have a hard time saying what that is.

When I started writing, I vowed I wouldn’t talk about it until I was published.  I didn’t want to be someone sitting in a café, sipping coffee as I stared at a blank computer screen, waiting patiently for someone to ask what I was writing so I could explain this vast, great idea I had and why I was staring at a blank computer screen instead of writing it down.

I wanted an unglamorous life.  I wanted to be hunched over in the dark, cans of diet coke stacked at my side, staring at the word “corpulent” and feeling sad that I couldn’t think of a better word.  I wanted writing to be a chore, to be a labor, to be something hard.

Maybe out of jealousy?

But from this, I learned that it’s silence, not words, that make a writer.  It’s listening, not talking, that makes a storyteller.  It’s other stories you draw from, not your own.  You can’t help this.  You look at the hardships of others, you read about people dying in camps, you hear stories about people who go to war, and you reflect on these and wonder how they affect you.

And then the story—or sometimes just yourself—asks “who are you to reflect on this?”

And if you are a writer, you say nothing.