Dear Internet,

Without getting into detail, I was asked today about the possibility of doing a very small run of stuffed fire-spiders as a promotional bonus type of item. (We also discussed the possibility of Smudge T-shirts.)

These wouldn’t be available for public sale; it would be more of a “Buy this stuff and get your own Smudge, too!” idea.

I love this idea. But since I know nothing about the world of stuffed toys, I was hoping the internet might have a suggestion on where to go for limited-run, good quality, hopefully-not-ridiculously-expensive stuffed fire spiders.

Help me internet brain! You’re my only hope!

If you don’t want to comment, you can also shoot me an email.

Thank you!

After yesterday’s post, I wanted to follow up with some examples of kindness, courage, generosity, and overall awesomeness from the past week or so.

The Red Cross of Eastern MA sent out a Tweet saying they didn’t need blood at this time, because so many people had rushed to donate after the bombing. (For readers not located in Eastern MA, your local Red Cross would probably still appreciate donations, though!)

From El Pelon Taqueria, a restaurant in Boston: “This week @Boston_Police @BostonFire and all Public Saftey–put away your wallets.” They’re one of many stores and restaurants to show this kind of generosity.

The sheer number of people, both first responders and civilians, who reportedly ran toward the chaos and explosion in order to help the victims.

The Chicago Tribune sent pizzas to the staff of the Boston Globe, along with a note saying, “We can’t buy you lost sleep, so at least let us pick up lunch.”

Several of you pointed to this photo of a Boston police officer delivering milk to a family with young children during the lockdown.

Google put together a tool to help people find their friends and loved ones after the explosions. I’ve grumbled about some of Google’s actions in the past, but this was a perfect example of using their skills, resources, and connections to do good.

Honey Nichols spent Wednesday handing out candy to residents of Boston. (Thanks Peter K. for this one.)

Check out this amazing list of Boston-area residents who offered space to sleep, transportation, food, and more.

This exchange between people in Syria and Boston.

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Please feel free to add more examples in the comments. If links get caught in the spam filter, don’t worry, I’ll be checking and unspamming those throughout the day.

I assume most of you are familiar with Wheaton’s Law? I suppose it should be no surprise when national tragedy brings out the lawbreakers, as it did last week. If I were a smarter person, I would have turned off the internet for at least the first 48 hours after the bombing. Alas, instead I ended up spending too much time jumping back and forth between the news and social media sites. While this did help me to stay informed, it also resulted in a fair amount of rage…

6. The “lamestream media” was scared to say what we all knew: the terrorists were Muslim. Political correctness is literally killing us by blinding us to the real enemy!

Go to the FBI’s terrorism report here. Scroll down to the bottom, and start working your way back. How many of those terrorist attacks in the U.S. were committed by Islamic extremists, as opposed to environmental extremists, Jewish extremists, anti-abortion extremists, etc.? Seems to me that if you hear about a terrorist act in the U.S. and your first assumption is IT’S THE MUSLIMS!!!, you’re pretty much just showing off your ignorance and bigotry.

5. You never see Christians doing this stuff / Islam is the religion of hate.

Um … y’all know the KKK is a Christian organization, right? Not to mention the Westboro Baptists. Or the Army of God. Or Hutaree. We’ve got plenty of Christian hate, both historically and in the present day.

You can twist any religion into an excuse for hatred and violence. And while it’s been a long time since I attended Sunday school, aren’t Christians supposed to have that whole, “Judge not, lest ye be judged” thing going on?

And as long as we’re talking about hate, please see this quote from a December 2009 study published by Duke University about the backlash after 9/11:

• Hate- crimes against Muslims rose from 28 in 2000 to 481 recorded incidents in 2001, and current levels remain about five times higher than prior to 9/11.

4. “I can’t believe that pair in the Boston bombing was NOT Towel Heads. They are Czechoslovakian. F*** Czechoslovakia!”

This is one of a depressingly large number of comments from people who don’t know the difference between Chechnya and the Czech Republic, but weren’t about to let ignorance stop them from spewing hate and racism.

3. I heard this thing on the internet, and even though I have no idea whether or not it’s true, I’m going to repost and retweet it to everyone I know!

There’s a lot of confusion and misinformation after something like this happens. In the first 48 hours, it felt like major news outlets were tripping over each other to get their facts wrong. We’re so hungry for facts–especially facts that might confirm our own biases and assumptions–that we end up spreading an awful lot of misinformation.

2. “I wonder how many Boston liberals spent the night cowering in their homes wishing they had an AR-15 with a hi-capacity magazine?” –Arkansas Rep. Nate Bell

Dude, I don’t care what your position is on gun control. You’re an asshole.

1. Pretentious, holier-than-thou bloggers getting up on their high horses to go on and on about other people’s dickish behavior.

Um…aw, crap.

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Because this was depressing, I’m working on a follow-up post giving examples of people being awesome in the aftermath of tragedy.

ETA: Wow, and thank you. I’ve got several emails I still need to reply to, but I think at this point I have enough beta readers to help me with the story. I very much appreciate all of your responses.

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Thank you all so much for the birthday wishes, and for sharing various positive and awesome things. I don’t know about you, but for me, reading your comments and hearing about the good things in your lives brought some much-needed hope and happiness yesterday.

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I’ve just finished writing a story about Nicola Pallas, an autistic bard from the Libriomancer books. This one is set many years earlier, when Nicola is unaware of the larger world of magic.

I’ve talked before about my son being autistic. To be blunt, this story is important to me, and I want to get it right. I want Nicola to be an individual, not the One True Representative of Autism. I want to avoid the various cliches and problematic storylines (there is no “cure” narrative in this one). And I want her experiences and perceptions to ring true.

So I’m asking for a few beta readers with autism, to take a look at this story and help me make it stronger. If you’re interested and willing to help me on this, please email me at jchines -at- sff.net.

Thank you.

I got older today. Which doesn’t really distinguish today from any other day, but today is when we celebrate it with cake and presents and jokes about the gray in my beard.

What I want today is for you to share something awesome. It could be a cool fact about the universe, the best book you read last year, something great that happened to you or your friends, or–if you happen to be a LEGO executive–a contract for your new goblin- and princess-themed sets based on my books!

The Challenge: I would love to see 365 Comments of Awesomeness, one for every day of the coming year. Which may seem like a lot, but I HAVE FAITH IN YOU ALL!!!

A few weeks back, my therapist pointed out that I was basically living my dream. Eight books in print, with a ninth on the way. A Hugo award sitting on my shelves. Guest of Honor gigs lined up for the coming year.

Forget Klondike Bars, do you know what 25-year-old me would have done to be where I am today? There’s always more to accomplish, and there are certainly things I’d change if I could (::cough:: day job ::cough::), but it’s easy to get caught up in where you’re going, to the point that you forget to appreciate where you’re at. I love being a writer, and I love that I’ve been able to do it pretty successfully, at least so far.

There’s an inspirational quote that gets passed around, usually misattributed to Confucius:

“Choose a job you love, and you will never work a day in your life.”

I’ve got a job I love, and I’m gonna come out and say this quote isn’t just wrong, it’s so fundamentally opposed to the state of “rightness” that if you put it together with a true quote, you’d create an explosion powerful enough to rip open spacetime and devour Kalamazoo.

I love being a writer, but if you try to tell me it’s not work, I’ll send goblins to eat your feet. It’s work I usually (but not always) love, sure. But we’ve got to move beyond the myth that dreams just happen. When I look around at my role models, the people who are living the kind of “dream life” I’d love to have someday, pretty much every one of them is working his or her ass off.

I don’t want to suggest that hard work will automatically make your dreams come true. That’s a different myth, and unfortunately, the universe doesn’t always play fair. There are no guarantees, and some of us have far more hurdles put in our way than others. In many ways, my dreams are a luxury, one I can afford because I don’t have to worry much about more basic needs.

None of which changes the fact that dreams, as a rule, are hard. And God forbid you ever complain about the work, because there are a hundred people just waiting to tell you how they’d happily trade places with you. Heck, if J. K. Rowling was venting about the stress and pressure of writing books after Harry Potter, I’d be tempted to say the same thing. “Just sign your career over to me, and I’ll take it from there, Jo! Happy to help!”

That “never work a day in your life” quote is nice and fluffy and feel-good, but I suspect the truth might be closer to this:

“Choose a job you love, and you’ll choose to work even harder every day of your life.”

I’m not complaining today. I reserve the right to vent some other day, but even if I do, that doesn’t mean I’d trade my life as a writer for anything else in the world. But I think the way we look at dreams is unhelpful and unhealthy. If we imagine our dreams to be this idyllic state in which everything goes perfectly and we never have to “work,” it’s gonna get pretty darn frustrating, since we’re never going to get there.

I’ve got a ridiculous (for me) number of projects lined up right now. I’ve managed to knock two of them off the list so far, but I still cry a little inside when I look at everything I want to write over the next 12 months. But you know what? This is what I’ve worked almost half of my life to achieve, and I love it.

Now if y’all will excuse me, I’ve got writing to do.