Pre-Criminal Education

Most people aren't going to agree with this, so we're going to start by explaining the basics: Our brains are smarter than we are.

Our brains are a wonderful tool, and we only consciously use about a quarter of it. Which is how it's supposed to work. If we had to consciously do everything our sub- and unconscious minds do our heads would explode. We'd never get anything done. And one of these things is reading ten million social cues a day so we can behave in a socially acceptable manner.

Unfortunately one of the cues in our society is this thrumming undercurrent of "they deserved it".

Let's use a movie as an example. It can be any horror movie in the last fifty years, but we're going to use Cabin Fever because what I'm talking about is really blatant. Victim blaming is par for the course in horror movies, which is sad because it takes most of the actual horror out of the equation, but that's a rant for another day. The premise of Cabin Fever is, a bunch of friends show up at a cabin, get sick with flesh eating rabies (or something) and try to quarantine themselves/get out/keep everyone from getting out/survive angry mob of townspeople. You'd think this would be horrifying, but then we meet the characters.

And you realize the world would be better off without them. They totally deserve it.

In any horror movie/movie about serial killers/movie where a lot of people are going to die, you can always pick the first deaths out of the crowd. They're the ones behaving in a socially reprehensible manner. In Cabin Fever the kids are heading up to the mountains to party over spring break. They all have responsibilities they've elected to dodge so they can get drunk on a mountain. The promiscuous girl? Dead. The kid taking a drag on weed? Dead. Final Destination 3 lets you know who's going to die by having a character declare her intention to break up with a devoted boyfriend within five seconds of her introduction (also: death by tanning bed).

The function of doing this--setting up an unlikable character to die--is a reflex on the writer's part. We don't want our likable characters to die. We don't want to be affected by death. If you're reading a book and you suddenly come across a lot of "She saw it happen" and "it seemed/almost/probably" it usually means the writer was REALLY uncomfortable with that scene and tried to add more distance between themselves and the action by having it almost happen through the character's eyes, not their own. I call them "filter" words. Unlikable cannon fodder serves the same purpose. We're protecting ourselves from the mayhem we're about to create by shoving the morally reprehensible under the bus.

The problem with doing this is it creates a social implication. That being that only the morally reprehensible get thrown under the bus. It's subtle and not something we pick up consciously. But our brains are smarter than we are. Subconsciously, we pick it up just fine. And if something bad happens to you? You must have deserved it. If you were good, and of upstanding moral character, you would be Final Girl, walking out of the dead zombie horde with a bloody chainsaw. Victims are the weak. The truely strong can fight it off.

It's bullshit, of course. You can take steps to protect yourself, but over and over and over again there are stories of homeowners who did everything right, who still got robbed. Women who carry mace and whistles and know you scream "Fire" still get raped. The people who trusted Bernie Madoff weren't idiots. They did their homework and got taken anyway. Victims cannot control what happens to them. Or to phrase it slightly differently: gazelles can't control when the cheetahs get hungry.

Thing is? People aren't cheetahs. Victims shouldn't have to be the one responsible for their safety, as the victim is not the person putting themselves in danger. The initial decision, "I'm gonna go hurt somebody", does not lie with them. They can choose how close to danger they get--don't walk alone, lock your doors, buy alarms, carry mace--but they do not choose when danger will exist. That choice lies with the individual committing the crime.

Imagine how effective drunk-driving campaigns would be if they were aimed at the victims, and not the drivers. "Know how to identify a drunk" would be one class. "Avoid these roads. Drunks use them" would be posted everywhere. Cops would be pulling sober drivers aside and say, "Don't go out tonight, there's a drunk in the neighborhood."

Why aren't we doing that? Because it doesn't work. It will never work. Educating the victims on how not to be a victim does not and will never be an effective social tool. We're educating the drunks because the drunks are the ones with the initial choice.

But other crimes, it's okay. Because we still have that social implication: You were asking for it. And that implication is why people laugh if an unchained bike gets stolen. It's why that FUCKING MORON from Missouri said women can't get pregnant from rape, why the rich white men in charge of the world keep saying "lie back and enjoy it, if you can't avoid it".

We need to educate the people who can actually stop crime: The people most likely to commit it. Right now all the materials say "Rape is wrong, here's how to avoid it". It might save my life, but it won't save every life. The day I see a poster with the message "Rape is wrong, don't do it", I'll know we've turned the corner.

Hey, and don't forget to check out the preview for my next book: Starbleached due out on Monday. 

Ideas--dime a bushel basket

So this one day I was on the bus, because, you know, no car, and I was trying to write. This was a couple years ago, so I had my nightshift damn-I-want-to-sleep hangover on, and there wasn't much I could do about it. This woman notices me, and starts talking.

First off, guys and girls? I don't want to meet you on a bus. and if you see me in public with headphones in? It means i don't want to talk. I want to listen to music.

So anyway, I was dumber back then, and I mentioned that I was working on a book.

The floodgates. fucking. open.

See she had this idea involving bigfoot. An idea that I think I read in a Frank Peretti book (there are two kinds of people who read Frank Peretti. Christians, and Fundamentalist crazies) with a couple of extra twists. And it was BORING and I just wanted to go HOME, and the thing that struck me the most? Was how when we started she was like, "Well, I guess you can steal this idea because God knows, I'll never do anything with it."

My former--THANK GOD!--stepfather was the same way. He was all like, "you need to stop working on that silly fairy shit and start WRITING STORIES FOR JESUS" and then he would lay out his Da Vinci Code rip off that also involved the antichrist and human cloning. So specifically, he wanted me to stop working on MY story and start working on HIS. Because his is something he actually wants to read.

Kids, a story is not an idea. An idea is not a story. An idea is the sperm it takes to get a story started. When it does its job, it goes away, and there are a lot of other little wriggly ideas that don't ever go anywhere. And an idea is easy to get. How easy?

"Angel Tractor". Go write a story involving those two words. Now. If you stare at a screen long enough, eventually you'll get an idea. Are you stuck? Here's two more words. "Glorious Pumpkin". Go back to writing.

If I were to go through the list of idea kernals in Silver Bullet, it would be: watching a true crime show about a sniper, a word prompt I got off Janet Reid's blog, a HORRIBLE horror movie that may or may not have had Kevin "I drink my own piss" Cosner in it, a boat named "No Compromise" sitting behind the restaurant that owns my life, and a chunk of my dead-yet-soon-to-be-ressurected novel, so "Winterlord" doesn't really count yet. Of those five stories, one, Silver Bullet, was written specifically to go into the collection, and it was the only one where I spent time desperate for ideas. And by "time" I mean half an hour. And I'm not saying there is anything special about my brain. Because there isn't. I just didn't waste time over thinking things.

The best thing you can do for yourself as a writer is to write. Not gather ideas, but rather force yourself into a position where you have to write, a lot, every day, for hours. If you do this long enough, eventually you'll learn how to make the ends of your brain rub together to create sparks. The next best thing, of course, is to edit what you've written into some form of coherance, of course, but to do that you need to have stuff to work with.

Do you have an idea? A little kernal of an idea that may or may not become a story?

Stop talking about it.

Stop outlining.

Stop researching.

Stop designing your alien race's anatomy.

And Go.

Fucking.

Write.

That is all.

Tipping on the credit change

Okay, so I haven’t posted in a while. This is due to my having nothing of either a positive or negative nature to report—seriously, what do you talk about when every day is the same, and same=tons of work for pretty decent money?—and having an internet connection that sucks so bad logging into Blogger takes about fifteen minutes and a TON of refreshes, let alone actually getting to the posting part of the dashboard. I’m switching carriers next week, I swear to GOD.

But that’s not what I wanted to talk about today. What do I want to talk about?

Tips. And how they can sometimes annoy me.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mind getting not-tipped. It’s a scum-sucking, selfish thing to do, not to tip your waitress, let alone your barista (coffee gals don’t get tipped as much as waitresses. So when I am in coffee-mode I am not as "FUCK YOU KILL IT WITH FIRE" about tables that don't tip as I am when I'm a waitress. Just an FYI) but I don’t mind. I don’t even mind small tips. A tip is a tip.

What do I mind? Well, I’m gonna assume that all of you have, at one point or another, paid for food with a credit card. And you’ve seen a nice little place on the white slip for you to write your tip in, so that the waitress can take it in the back and adjust it and you don’t have to screw around with cash. Some people leave cash and ignore it. Some people put a nice tip in there, some people put a small tip in there, some people just write the original total into the slot, which is really really stupid because I COULD interpret that as leaving a 100% tip—I’m smarter than that, but I could if I wanted to—and all of the above do not bother me.

Not even when I can’t read the tip because your handwriting sucks.

What bothers me are the people who tip on the credit change.

This is when you get your credit receipt, and instead of writing a nice, round number, like $1.00, or the obvious 15%, you write a tip that, combined with your total, adds up to a round number. You stick me with your credit card’s spare change.

Example: on a 29.17 bill, they tip 5.83. The new total is 34.00 even and I have to figure out what the fuck I’m going to do with eighty three cents in change. I do not mind if you have paid in cash and decide to leave your change in the tip jar, because I don’t like carrying change around either. But credit card bills are imaginary money. You are not getting any spare change out of my register. There is no reason to give me change. You have a little slip of white paper on which you are to either write a tip, or not write a tip. Today I sold a guy a cup of coffee. Cost 3.25 (hey, the boss does the pricing) and he decided to pay with a credit card. I did not expect a tip, because it’s a three dollar cup of coffee and he already tipped me on the other six cups of coffee he bought for his party. He writes .75 in the slot. I didn’t even bother processing it because I didn’t want his fucking imaginary spare change.

“But CW!” you say. “Surely, he was just being considerate. He tipped you!  He was trying to give you money! What’s wrong with being given money?”

True, but remember what I said: This is not real spare change. This is not that handful of pennies and dimes that you don’t want to stick in your pocket. This is any amount of money he wants to write in the total, from 0 to $100. So let me ask you this: Why couldn’t I have the other quarter? And if I couldn’t have the quarter, why do I have to take the seventy-five cents? Why couldn’t he just, like, not tip? Why do I have to deal with an uneven number?

Because he wanted to see $4.00 on the bottom of the card, and not 3.25 or 4.25. No. He wanted to see that nice, even 4.00. Wasn’t about giving me a tip at all. It was about making his life look neat and orderly, and so what if the barista doesn’t want another three quarters sloshing around on the bottom of her purse, or to have to make yet another trip to a Coin Star to get folding money out of her tip jar? He’s got a neat total at the bottom of his credit receipt, and that’s all that matters.

Tipping the change tells me you are a considerate person who wants to tip, and who also doesn’t want to carry six tons of change in your pockets. Tipping the change plus an extra dollar makes you my BFF and I will probably give you a free refill when the boss is not looking, and sometimes even when the boss is looking because we throw out a heck of a lot of coffee. Tipping on the credit change tells me you are an obsessive compulsive asshole who wants to look like a decent person who tips, but who can’t bother giving me a whole fucking dollar because then the total on that piece of white paper would bother you.  So thank you. Thank you for making my tip jar all about you.

There is no reason to not use round numbers on a credit check, unless you want to tip a full 15%. In which case I am still annoyed at having to lug change around, but I understand it. But if it is obvious you only gave me that fifteen cents so that your check will be a nice, even 67.00, you know what I’m going to do? I’m not processing the goddamned fifteen cents.

Yes. I know it’s self sabotage. Yes. I know it’s petty. Yes. I know I am throwing money that you willingly gave me away because I’m irritated over spare change. But you know what? Credit-change tippers are also the people who run me ragged wanting their beers “dressed” and their salad done with no-fat lactose free blue cheese dressing (seriously), and the meat cooked rare plus plus (Medium rare just not good enough for you?)  and the fish cooked with no seasonings, just oil, we like to taste the fish (Oh, hey. Let me quote our cook/owner: FUCK YOU.) (Seriously. That’s like asking the artist to leave all the paint off the canvas because you want to look at the fabric. If you want plain fish, save our time, save yours, go eat at a restaurant where they’re not going to charge you twenty bucks for the privilege.) They’re the ones who complain about the dish being tasteless (Again: FUCK YOU. THAT’S WHAT YOU ASKED FOR) after they ate every bite of it. They are the ones who look over the menu, see what we have, and then ask for a triple-shot no foam no-fat venti mocha latte (WE ARE NOT FUCKING STARBUCKS) but could I please leave room for cream? (Seriously.) And you know what? One of them is going to be so fucking OCD, they’re going to go down their credit bill with a red pen and check every single one of the totals, and they are going to see that I did not charge them for that fucking fifteen fucking cent tip, and they are going to twitch.

And they can’t do a goddamn thing about it.

And for the rest of you kind, considerate people: Tip, or don’t tip. Give us your tired (coins) your poor (pennies) your huddled masses (of real money) yearning (to be in my pocket). But if you have a credit slip, and you have to write something in it, put in your percentage, or a nice, round number. Don’t give me your imaginary spare change. I really, really don’t want it, and it makes you look like an obsessive-compulsive ass.

And if you really are that OCD, you can let me know. Mental illness isn’t fun, and I feel sympathy for you. I still won’t process your change, but I won’t call you an asshole either. And you could probably talk me into putting chocolate in your latte.