My Zombie Hamster, by Havelock McCreely

My Zombie Hamster [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy], by Havelock McCreely, is … well, it’s pretty much exactly what it says on the box. There’s this hamster, you see. And he’s a zombie…

Naturally, there’s more to it. Let’s start with the official synopsis:

Matt Hunter and his buddies are looking forward to Christmas — actually, they’re looking forward to receiving the latest sword-and-fantasy video game. But Matt’s parents have other thoughts — they give him a fluffy little mammal, a hamster called Snuffles, for the holiday. And his grandmother makes it worse by giving him a hamster cage and wheel. But the hamster isn’t all that cute — at least not after part of its cheek and belly fall right off — without bothering it a bit! And why is it staring at Matt with black beady eyes and a lean and hungry look?

Say hello to Anti-Snuffles, the zombie hamster! Or better yet, run!

This is a middle grade book set in the very near present. The zombie apocalypse has led to a society of walled cities and towns, but aside from the zombie-hunting cops wandering around to make sure you’re still alive, and the presence of life chips that go off when you expire (alerting said zombie-hunting cops to come and dispose of your potentially brain-hungry corpse). On the other hand, Matt still has to go to school, still references present-day pop culture, and still lives a life that’s in many ways pretty similar to most kids these days.

Similar except for the never-named-but-clearly-hinted-at ex-movie star who’s come to town to take charge of zombie security, of course. And the mayor’s big pet contest. And of course, Anti-Snuffles, who may or may not be building an army of undead critters…

It’s a quick read, one the author describes as “a cross between Shaun of the Dead, The Goonies, and The Diary of Adrian Mole.” The short, daily chapters are interspersed with Matt’s lists of things to do, whether it’s his plan for breaking into [SPOILER] or the things he plans to do once he becomes a megamillionaire.

Despite the undead hamster, the book isn’t particularly gross or scary, so it shouldn’t give young kids nightmares about the family pets. On the other hand, reading it as a not-quite-40-year-old, that also meant the stakes didn’t feel quite as urgent to me.

One of my favorite parts was a subplot with one of Matt’s friends, something I can’t really talk about without spoiling things. But it was an unexpected development, and I really enjoyed the way the characters handled it.

It’s a light-hearted story about a boy vs. his undead hamster. What else is there to say?

The book comes out on July 8, 2014.

ETA: And the author has confirmed a sequel is in the works, set about six months after the events of book one.

Update and Release Date for Invisible

I’m aiming for an April 15 release date for Invisible, the collection of essays on representation in SF/F. Everything is put together except for three pieces, one of which is my own afterword. (Oops!)

Contributors should have proofs in their email on or around April 1. I may also try to query a few folks about sending review copies. If you know of a good place that might be willing to review an ebook collection like this, please let me know.

Mark Ferrari was kind enough to lend his expertise to the cover art. This isn’t 100% final, but it’s relatively close, and has a bit more visual punch than what I had originally put together. What do you think?

Invisible - Draft

The order of the contributors may change. I still need to go through and look at the flow of the whole thing.

All in all, I’m really excited about this!

Website Update

I spent the past week or so rebuilding www.jimchines.com. I had two main goals:

  • Set up a theme that would work on mobile devices.
  • Make everything as clean and readable as possible.

I went with the Simfo theme and trimmed a lot out of the sidebar content. I’m pretty happy with the home page. I like the slider, the thumbnails for the different series, and the recent blog posts. But some of the other pages, like the bibliography, look a little too stark now.

I know I need to clean a few things up, like the Press Kit page. But I think I’m at the point where I’d love to have folks poke at it a bit to see what works, and if there’s anything that either breaks your browser or just makes you gag in disgust. So far, it’s worked well on my phone and my internet browsers. It gave my parents trouble on IE8, but I think that might be something weird in their system setup.

Anyway, feedback is very much appreciated for anyone who has time to go exploring…

Website Update, Hugo Deadline, and Con Crud

Some of you have noticed I’ve been messing about with the website this week. My main goals are to set up a theme that’s cleaner, more mobile friendly, and generally just looks better. It’s still a work in progress, but so far I’m pretty happy. I’ll probably ask for feedback once I finish figuring out how all of these new-fangled buttons and features all work.

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Hugo Award nominations close at the end of the day on March 31. If you’re interested in a copy of my short story “Stranger vs. the Malevolent Malignancy” for consideration, just email me at jchines -at- sff.net and I’ll be happy to send it your way.

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In other news, this week continues to kick my butt, courtesy of con crud, work deadlines, and a conspiracy among various appointments and activities that won’t ease up until at least Sunday. Which is why you get a few short updates in lieu of a real blog post.

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But on the bright side, remember the (overdue) story I was working on this past weekend? Well, the editor liked it, and it sounds like “On the Efficacy of Supervillain Battles in Eliciting Therapeutic Breakthroughs” will be appearing in Unidentified Funny Objects 3. This story features the return of Jarhead, therapist to the superpowered set, from my UFO2 story.

Back from Millennicon

Millennicon was great fun. Unfortunately, both the kids and I seem to have come down with post-con crud, but the convention itself was awesome … if a little dangerous for the blood sugar. (There was a birthday cake for my son, and another cake a few hours later at the GoH reception.)

My wife Amy was kind enough to do most of the driving, which gave me time to finish a short story for that blown deadline I mentioned the other day. Story is off to the editor, and I owe Amy many, many hugs.

As always, there was far too much cool stuff going on for any one human being to do. I missed the launch party for Stephen Leigh’s newest book, Immortal Muse. (I did get to see him receive the Hal Award, given each year to “an educator who creates a program utilizing science fiction literature to improve children’s proficiency in science and math.”

I also missed the Detcon1 takeover of the consuite on Saturday.

On the other hand, I got to do a reading that went rather well, a panel about dumb questions (which Laura Resnick TOTALLY SABOTAGED by prohibiting any and all sex-related questions, just because her father was on the panel with her…sheesh), had my son thrown into Klingon jail, heard a new (to me) Tom Smith song, and finally got to wear the T-shirt I got for Christmas in public.

(Photo by Hugh Staples. Cape assistance by Stephen Leigh.)

Huge thanks to Christy Johnson, Cheryl Whitford, and everyone else who put so much time and energy into making the convention happen.

As is often the case, the only downside was having to come back to the real world. Not only was there housework and day job work waiting for me, but apparently at least one mouse moved into the house this weekend and was throwing a little convention of its own. Taz the cat spent the whole night trying to get at it, and actually caught it briefly this morning, but when I tried to get cat and mouse outside to let the little rodent go free, it pulled a Houdini and managed to disappear beneath the couch.

And how was your weekend?

Millennicon Schedule

I’m thrilled to be heading over to Ohio this weekend to be a Guest of Honor at Millennicon. Here’s the schedule, just in case you want to come say hello or make sure you know how to avoid me all weekend.

Friday

  • 6 pm,  MR 1210, HAPPY BIRTHDAY! (In which the convention throws a birthday party for my son, because they are AWESOME!!!)
  • 7 pm, Harrison, Opening Ceremonies
  • 8 pm, Con Suite, GOH reception

Saturday

  • 10 am, Harrison, GOH Reading
  • 2 pm, Hotel Lobby, GOH Autographs
  • 3 pm, McKinley, There are No Dumb Questions (Moderator)

Sunday

  • 10 am, McKinley, Fan Fiction and “Real” Writing
  • Noon, Hotel Lobby, GOH Autographs
  • 2 pm, Harrison, GOH Q&A
  • 3 pm, Harrison, Closing Ceremonies

Tom Smith will be there as Filk Guest of Honor, which should make my wife happy. She tolerates me, but she’d much rather hang out at one of Tom’s concerts 😉

There are a lot of great people at this one, some of whom I haven’t seen in a while, so I’m expecting this to be a lot of fun.

Graphing Depression and Anxiety

My therapist shared something interesting earlier this week. With the caveat that this is all a bit simplified, and human brains don’t fit into neat lines and graphs, it still helped me to think a little differently about depression and anxiety and stress, and to understand both myself and certain other people in my life a little better.

She started by drawing the following graph:

This fits pretty well with my experience. There’s a relatively straightforward relationship here. The more depressed you are, the less productive you are. (Giving lie to the myth of the tortured artist who’s most productive when they’re depressed.)

Next, she drew a graph of anxiety.

This one also made sense, once we talked about it a bit. If you have absolutely no anxiety, you end up with a lot less motivation to produce anything. Take away all of my deadlines, and I’m definitely less productive and more likely to spend an evening bumming around on the couch watching Doctor Who. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

On the other hand, too much anxiety can be crippling, with the far extreme being someone who can’t even leave their room or home.

So basically, we want to minimize depression and find a healthy and moderate level of productive anxiety. Got it. So far, so good.

What gets interesting, at least for me, is looking at the implications of the two models. If depression is more of a linear thing, it means you have that straightforward goal of getting as far to the left as possible. This also means small steps to fight the depression are more likely to have small steps in improving your productivity. It tends to be a long, slow battle.

I’ve been in therapy and on medication for depression for about two years now. This has had a pretty large impact on the depression, and when you look at my productivity these days … well, I’m doing two books in 12 months instead of my usual one. Smaller improvements have led to smaller changes in productivity, like being able to keep up with washing the dishes. Again, it’s not a perfect graph, but it makes sense to me.

I sketched in two sample changes in mood. If the depression improves by X, productivity also improves by X. That tends to hold true whether you’re really depressed or in a generally good space. (Yes, I’m simplifying the math and assuming a 1:1 slope.)

Anxiety, on the other hand, resembles a bell curve. That means any given change in your anxiety can have drastically different results, depending on where you happen to be on that curve.

Look at this next graph. Both of the horizontal lines, indicating a change in anxiety, are the same. The vertical lines, showing change in productivity, are not.

For someone near that ideal middle-ground, a small increase in anxiety of amount X could have a relatively small impact on productivity, perhaps X or even X/2. On the other hand, if you’re more anxious, the same increase of X in your anxiety could have a much larger impact, hurting productivity by a factor of 2X, 3X, or more.

Likewise, for someone who’s struggling with anxiety, removing just a small stressor could have a very large impact, and help exponentially.

And the exact same increase in anxiety can actually boost productivity for someone to the left of the curve as much as it hurts someone to the right.

This was an AHA moment for me. I spend a fair amount of time working with people and trying to motivate them, whether it’s my employees at the day job or my children at home, and looking at that Anxiety graph helped to crystallize why the same tactic can have very different results for different people … or even for the same people at different times.

Someone on the left side, who seems to be slacking because they don’t really care? Maybe their anxiety needs to be turned up a bit, by talking about potential consequences. On the other hand, for someone on the right side of the graph who’s already close to a panic attack, potential consequences are likely to push them even further, making things that much harder for them. In that case, trying to take a little of that anxiety off their shoulders can help tremendously.

I see some of the same effects with the way stress and anxiety intertwine in my life. There’s a certain middle ground where I can add or remove things I need to get done, and it doesn’t have much of an impact. But once I hit that tipping point, just a small increase in stress can drag me down hard.

Like I said at the beginning, this is a bit of an oversimplification. Human beings tend to be pretty complicated and messy. But seeing depression and anxiety drawn out like this was really helpful for me, so I figured I’d share it in the hope that it might help a few of you as well.

Manufactured Outrage and Choosing to be Offended

Over the weekend, I had another clueless dude try to give me crap for “working so hard to manufacture outrage,” and for always “choosing to be offended.” It’s a tired and unoriginal refrain, but I’m going to try to do something a little different this time. I’m going to agree with clueless dude, at least to an extent. Because he’s right. For me, a great deal of the things I write about, and the fact that I’m upset by some of what I see in the SF/F community, these are choices.

A few of the things I’ve chosen to be offended about lately…

  • Big name authors publicly mocking and belittling people for asking for representation in SF/F.
  • The rewriting of history to present last year’s SFWA Bulletin mess as being about a single cover as opposed to an ongoing problem, one that culminated with two big name authors using the Bulletin as a platform to accuse those who disagree with them of being “liberal fascists” and anonymous cowards.
  • A major convention belittling concerns about sexual harassment and refusing to implement a policy … and then minimizing and belittling the experience of multiple individuals who reported being sexually harassed at that convention.
  • The backlash against a Hugo host being transformed into a factually incorrect narrative that rakes an individual woman over the coals in major media outlets for the crime of expressing her fear and anger.

Generally, when folks recycle the accusation that people are looking for things to be offended by, the word “offended” is used as a minimizing tactic. It suggests overly fragile and sensitive individuals with bruised feelings. A more accurate choice would be “pissed off,” “hurt,” or “sick of this crap.” Kameron Hurley uses the term “rage” when explaining that the anger doesn’t come from a minor, isolated incident.

The thing is, most of these incidents don’t hurt me directly. Representation in SF/F? As a straight, white, American male, I’m incredibly overrepresented in my genre. Conventions that don’t take steps to reduce sexual harassment? I’ve been harassed a total of once in more than a decade of congoing, and it’s not something I’m particularly worried about happening to me again. The threats, hatred, and vitriol aimed at women online and in the real world? Hey, it’s not coming toward me, so who cares?

When you’re not the one being hurt, you might not even notice the problem. You might decide it’s all blown out of proportion. Or maybe you admit that yeah, there might be a problem here, but you blow it off because the solution would inconvenience you in some way, or make you uncomfortable.

When you see someone saying they’re hurt or afraid, you can choose to mock that person. You can choose to ignore their concerns. You can choose to blow them off by saying they’re manufacturing outrage and looking for reasons to be offended, as if pain and anger and fear are just another hobby, like collecting spores, molds, and fungus. You can choose to ignore the evidence, to disbelieve the repeated stories of ongoing harassment and the countless people speaking out about specific incidents that make them feel unwelcome and unwanted in your community. You can choose to interpret anger as “bullying,” and calls for inclusion as “political correctness run wild.”

You could also choose to listen. You can choose to believe that when someone says, “Hey, this is hurting me,” they’re telling the truth. You can look around at how racially homogenous most conventions are and believe the people telling you why they feel unwelcome, instead of dismissing it as a coincidence or making up falsehoods about how “those people” just don’t read or don’t care about SF/F. You can recognize that just because a problem might not directly affect you, that doesn’t mean it’s unimportant.

You’re right. I choose to be offended angry. I see people talking about how finding someone like them in a SF/F story literally saved their life. And then I see people responding with mockery and derision to calls for broader representation. I see people who have traditionally been ignored and silenced raising their voices to speak about their experiences, only to have those experiences dismissed as “butthurt” by those who haven’t had to live through them.

When I choose to be angry, and to speak out about things, it’s because I see people hurting.

No, that’s not quite right. It’s because I see the that the things we’re doing are hurting people. That pain isn’t imaginary. It’s not a cover to try to take over the genre and control everyone else, as one commenter suggested. It’s real. And I’ve got to believe that if more people could get over their discomfort and defensiveness and just listen, they might see it too. They might even be able to help solve some of the problems.

Basically, when people talk about something that’s hurting them, you can choose to care. Or you can choose not to.

The Lives of Tao, by Wesley Chu

The Lives of Tao [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy], is Wesley Chu’s first novel, and I kind of hate him a little bit for that. I picked up and started reading the book because I had met Wesley a while back, and he seemed like a pretty cool person. I finished reading it because it’s such a fun read.

Tao is basically a symbiotic life form, one who requires a human or animal host to survive on Earth. His people crash landed on our planet ages ago, and are now at war. Tao and the Prophus want to peacefully encourage humanity’s evolution until our technology is advanced enough to help them get home. The Genjix are believed to have similar goals … minus the “peacefully” part.

After a mission gone wrong results in the death of Tao’s human host, he’s forced into the body of an unambitious, insecure IT technician named Roen. This is the time, when he’s stuck in an untrained host, that Tao is most vulnerable. He has to keep Roen alive long enough to get him trained, and eventually to try to figure out what the Genjix are really up to this time.

Like I said, the book is a lot of fun. Tao is a great character, one who has existed in some of the greatest hosts in human history. (Genghis Khan, for example.) Tao tells Roen dream-stories about some of his past lives at the start of each chapter, which gives him (and us) the background of both Tao and his people.

Tao has tons of experience and knowledge, but upgrading Roen to superspy status isn’t as easy as simply plugging him in. There’s plenty of banter, entertaining training scenes, lots of action, and characters you want to keep reading about.

The only real complaint I have isn’t about the writing so much as it is one of the tropes Chu uses in the book. He’s created a world in which many of the wars and tragedies of human history were actually engineered by the Genjix. While it makes sense in the context of the book, I’ve never liked that particular trope, since it would seem to excuse us for our own atrocities. I know it’s fiction, but it still bugs me. Humans are capable of amazing things. We’re also capable of horrible, evil things. Pretending otherwise feels like lying about human nature.

Like I said, it’s a personal peeve.

There’s a twist in the ending that I saw coming pretty early on, but overall, it’s a good ending, one that wraps up the events of this book while making it clear there’s more to come in the series.

You can read an excerpt of the book at Tor.com. I’m looking forward to reading the sequel, The Deaths of Tao.

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