The Management Myth (or Making Your Own Future)

About a year ago, I wrote a post about the importance of liking your own work. The post was about how writers should like the work they are writing enough to believe in it and stick to their vision of what that work should be, but that idea isn't limited to just writing. You should take ownership of whatever it is you're doing in your life, believe in it, and not submit it to the constant whims and validation of others. But, if you want to read more about that, go back and read the post.

In that post, I touched on an idea that proved to be somewhat more controversial than I'd anticipated. Well, since I had not thought it a controversial point, I was surprised to find out that it was. So let's talk about aspirations.

I grew up in the South in a state that had and continues to have one of the poorest education systems in the country. It is both poor in that it is bad, and it is poor in that it doesn't have the kind of funding many other states are able to devote to education. I grew up knowing a lot of kids (teenagers) whose greatest aspiration was to, maybe, one day be a manager at Wal-Mart. Or something like that.

Now, before I go on, this is nothing against retail employees or any denigration of them. I spent time at Toys R Us among other places, so I'm not putting anyone in retail down or claiming greater status than anyone who is in retail. In fact, for a long time, my goal was to work retain, in comic books and games, and I've worked in various capacities in those environments, too.

What I am saying is that it's unfortunate when teenagers, due to their circumstances, cannot dream anything better for themselves than to one day be a manager at Wal-Mart. Being a kid, a teenager, is time when you ought to be able to dream big. To aim for things that may not be probable but could, actually, be possible with the right toss of the dice or enough work. Working at Wal-Mart is the thing you do in the summer or at Christmas while you strive for bigger things. Sure, some people will never make it past Wal-Mart, but you certainly can't if you never had aspirations bigger than that to begin with.

And here's the trap:
The goal of "one day being a manager at Wal-Mart" is a lie. Not that the goal itself is a lie but the possibility of it becoming a reality is a lie. At least from the standpoint from which I'm approaching this, that of the teenager (the teenager who is not going on to college or any form of higher education) right out of high school entering the workforce by picking up a retail job planning to stay there indefinitely.

Here's the thing about being a manager at a place like Wal-Mart or Toys R Us: "Regular" employees cannot be promoted to manager. It doesn't matter how long you've been there or how good you are at your job; they don't promote up like that. I know, because there was a point where I was under consideration for management training when I worked at TRU. Here's the process:
1. Be really good at whatever low level job you enter in.
2. Get promoted all the way up to Department Head (the equivalent of assistant manager (and I don't think they call it that anymore).
3. Be so good at that, at being a Department Head, that the regional or district manager takes notice of you.
4. Be sent away to management school which is the equivalent of getting a degree in business. And you have to pay for it, so it's just like going to college. And, sure, if the company (TRU, Wal-Mart, whichever else follows this model, but my understanding is that it's most of them) thinks you're worth sending, they will give you loans and stuff to pay for their school (sometimes you might even qualify for some scholarships, but that's difficult), but, then, you have to pay them back.
5. Be transferred to some other store other than the one you were working in to avoid issues between you and people you used to be equivalently employed with.

So let's look at this a moment:
If you are good at your job as a Department Head, the store you work at is not going to want to put you up for management training. If they value you, they don't want to lose you, so they won't recommend you. You have to get noticed by someone higher up than the store director, and that's tough to do. Especially if you don't know you need to (which I didn't). So, then, if you're approached for management training (as I was), the first thing they're going to tell you is that you will have to go away to school. TRU, at least, has training centers, and you have to go to one of those. You don't get paid while you're off doing that, so that's the loss of your income (such as it is) to your family while you're off at school. Then there's the fact that you will be transferred to some other store once you've become a manager.

The point of all this is that you don't go to work at Wal-Mart or Toys R Us and work there long enough to finally, one day, become a manager. That's not their system. There was a woman that worked at TRU as a department head while I was there who had been there in that position for something like 15 years. That was as far as she was ever going to go.

Of course, the other way to get to be a manager at Wal-Mart is to go to school for a business degree and apply for a management position. You can do that without ever having to work at Wal-Mart or TRU as a "regular" employee.

The whole system is rather deceptive and designed to make people believe they have something that they're working toward when, in fact, in almost all circumstances, they do not.

It's not completely unlike the way the traditional publishing industry works these days: The want to find already successful authors before they're willing to look at publishing them.

[Note: All of this is based on how things worked about 15 years ago. That's when I experienced all of this and discovered TRU's system and that it was based on Wal-Mart's system, which nearly every chain store had adopted. Things may have changed since then, but I sort of doubt it.]

The Ghost Brigades ( a book review post)

The Ghost Brigades is the sequel to Scalzi's book Old Man's War, which didn't get the highest recommendation from me. You can check that review here.

I was hoping that I was going to be able to say that this one is better than the first and, for a while, a long while, I thought I was going to be able to say that. For one thing, Ghost Brigades is in third person, so that was a great improvement for me. For another thing, there is much less exposition about Scalzi's scientific ideas. And Jared Dirac is a much more interesting character with much deeper internal conflict than John Perry from the first book. Everything was there for this to be a better book.

Then it wasn't.

Actually, there was a pretty significant hiccup at the beginning of the book, and I was willing to overlook it when it was the only wrinkle but it becomes more noticeable when combined with how the book ends. I mean, when the opening is weak and the ending is weak, well... it makes it difficult to look kindly on the book.

The book opens from the point of view of an alien [and this is a bit of a spoiler, but it's only the first 15 pages or so, so it's not much of one], only we're not supposed to know that. The way we don't know that is that we're experiencing everything through the character's internal perspective without any external descriptions. That way, see, we're "surprised" to find out that this character was really an alien with animosity toward humanity. The problem I have with this is not the trick of it (okay, actually, I get annoyed with these kinds of tricks by authors where we're only fooled (if we are) because the author purposefully left out information which, honestly, we ought to know) but that the alien acts entirely human. His emotions and thoughts and everything are equivalent to what humans would have so, really, he's not an alien when he ought to be completely strange. Just on Earth, humans can have such cultural differences, while still being human, that we are, at least, disconcerted to be around the other person. That a species of an entirely different planet would think and act like a human so much so that we are "fooled" by it is mildly ridiculous at best.

But I got past that issue, completely forgot about it, once I moved into the story proper. That character at the beginning of the book is mostly inconsequintial and easily dismissed once we've gotten caught up in the mystery of Charles Boutin and Jared Dirac. And that was a good, engrossing story right up until somewhere around 75-80% of the way through the book.

Then the bottom falls out of it.

At least it did for me. And there will be a major plot point spoiler here, so feel free to skip past.

There's this bit of tech in the book (both of them) called the BrainPal. It's pretty much what it sounds like, a computer in the brain to assist the soldier and allow things such as internal communication with other soldiers with a BrainPal. Scalzi felt the need to disable the BrainPal en masse, so he went back to an 80s trick and had Boutin do it with a secret backdoor in the code. Now, I get that this a thing that we've been seeingin movies and books for about three decades, but, at this point, the idea of a secret backdoor in a program is ridiculous. Everything about it is ridiculous.

So, in the book, the reason the backdoor is there is to allow Boutin easier access to the program he's working on, but I think we all know that to access, well, anything all you need to do is input your password (or whatever the equivalent is). To get in through a backdoor, you have to input your password (or whatever the equivalent is). It doesn't allow any kind of ease of access or speed up the process, so, from that standpoint, it's pointless.

Beyond that, Boutin is not the sole architect of the computer program he's working on. In fact, he's not even the primary architect. He's just part of the design for one small part of the BrainPal, the consciousness transfer aspect of it. Asking us to believe that Boutin was able to put in an exploitable backdoor when working within a group and not even the lead in the group is asking us to believe something that is totally implausible, and it's easier to accept things that are plausibly impossible than implausibly possible. Basically, Scalzi is asking us to believe that everyone Boutin was working with was incompetent, in which case, the BrainPal wouldn't work, anyway. [This is on par with expecting us to believe that John Perry is the only one to understand the truth about the Consu in Old Man's War. It's just not plausible.] Scalzi does, at the end of the book, acknowledge (through the characters) that a backdoor like that shouldn't have existed, but it doesn't make it less of a contrived scenario to create tension at the end of the book. Basically, he had created a "Superman scenario" and used the backdoor as his Kryptonite.

So the book fell off of a cliff for me and plummeted to the rocks below. There's nothing that will ruin a book more than bad ending.

Sure, it might just be me, but anyone who knows anything about computers and how people work together and will probably find the contrived backdoor fairly laughable.

And I'm not even going to talk about how ridiculous the motivations of Boutin were. I thought as I was reading through the book and the obvious motivations were given that it must be a trick because it was so cliche. I figured Scalzi had something more interesting, more clever, up his sleeve but, no, it was all straightforward cliche and based on things that went against how given characters and races should have acted. It even had the super villain monologue at the end. To say that I was disappointed doesn't come close to how I felt at the end of the book.

Still, I will probably read the next one, though I'm not sure if I know why. I do want to find out what Scalzi has going on with the Consu, which is barely touched on in this book, so, yeah, I will probably read at least one more to get more of the meta-story. I just hope it's better than this one, though.

The Road to Fiction (an IWM post)

I was asked an interesting question recently. I like interesting questions; they make you think. Well, they make me think. I don't actually know about you. I don't actually even know if you do think, because so many people don't, though I like to think that if you're reading this blog then you're a thinker, so we'll just go with that.

Anyway...

The question was, "How do you write fiction?" Let me clarify that. I get the question, "How do you write?" a lot, but I've never had the question, "How do you write fiction?" Her contention was that writing non-fiction is easy; it just requires a bit of research and putting it together in a way that's easy for the reader to take in. But she didn't know how to go about writing fiction.

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I'm sure at least some of you have guessed that you need to hop over to Indie Writers Monthly to find out where "The Road to Fiction" leads.

The Cat Stands (Stays) Alone

My wife and I had a disagreement. It wasn't a huge thing; there was no yelling or fighting or anything like that; it was a just a disagreement. It all started with the cat. Remember him?

Yes, he is walking on the back of a chair. No, I'm not sure what he's doing with his eye. Aiming his deathray? It's always hard to tell with him. But I digress...

Two years ago when we went camping, our cat didn't have us. [Yes, I could say "we didn't have the cat," but, clearly, the cat decided that we belong to him, not the other way around. He did move into our house like a little, furry squatter.] We took the dog with us and there was no problem. In anticipation of the camping trip last year that didn't actually happen, I bought a leash for the cat.

The leash was so that we could take the cat with us, but we didn't go, so the leash just sat around and I never bothered to train the cat with it. He acts like he's dying when you put it on him except when he's walking backwards, which is what he's doing in the below picture.

One time he walked backwards right up the wall and only stopped when he was looking straight down at the floor, then he just stayed like that, like he was lying on the wall.

So, when we started talking about camping this year,

I resumed my plans to take the cat... right up until my wife let me know that she didn't want the cat going with us. The conflict spread to the kids at that point, because they, also, wanted the cat to go. There was a lengthy debate. Well, sort of. It wasn't a debate that happened all at once. It was spread out over about two weeks with occasional comments that were always interrupted by one of the kids saying, "I want the cat to go." That always ended the discussion, because we didn't want the kids getting involved in the decision since they wouldn't be the ones to be taking care of the cat.

Long story short: The cat stayed (because, man, who wants to have to lug a litter box with your camping gear?) at home. Alone.

Now, before anyone says anything about the cruelty involved in leaving the cat locked in the house for a few days, I didn't just decide to do that. At some point, I had done some research about cats and what to do with them when you're going to be away from home, and I found that this is what a lot of people do, just leave the cat at home. They are, after all, pretty self-sufficient and, before Jack (the cat) came to live with us, he had lived alone outside for a long time.

Still, it was not without some trepidation (and anxiety) that I did it. Going off and leaving your pet, unless it's a fish, locked in your house is no small thing. [And before you start giving me options, I considered them. (Especially the one about having someone come in each day, but Jack is an expert at waiting just inside the door and hopping out as you come in -- sometimes without you even knowing he's done it -- and I didn't want to have to deal with a missing cat while I was not home and able to deal with it).] But I made sure he had plenty of (dry) food (there was still some left when we got back, so I did okay on that), what I thought was plenty of water (that was almost gone, but I think that's because he normally gets wet food, so he drank more water to make up for what he wasn't getting from his food), and a big pile of fresh litter.

When we got back, the first thing we noticed was that the house was still here. That was a positive, because I wasn't sure the cat wouldn't box it up and run off with it while we were gone. Heck, that could have been his plan all along (that cat definitely has some kind of plan). I went into the house, first, and the cat met me as I came in the door and was actually more interested in seeing me than in hopping out the door (he saved that until a few nights ago to do to my oldest son as he was coming home from rehearsal). So all is well, and the cat has been way more affectionate this past week than he has been in a while.

And, hey!, the house wasn't even booby trapped Home Alone style when we got back, so I guess the cat really does like living with us. Or something.

Still, I'm going to keep working with him with that leash. Either I have to get him to go forward, or I have to learn to walk him backwards. That could be interesting. I'll have to try get some video footage of that.

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In other news, I have a new thing that I'm finishing up. The draft writing, that is. It's all in notebooks (because that's how I write when I'm off at softball practices or accordion lessons or whatever), so it still has to be typed up and all of that. Why am I telling you this? Well, as I have been doing, I'd like to add a bonus story by some other author to go with it, so I am officially taking submissions. Or requests. Or something. Look, if you have something that's, oh, say, around 5000 words and you'd like me to put it in with my new thing (which I'll tell you more about later), let me know. Or if you want to WIP something up. You still have time. Just leave me a message or email me or whatever to let me know you're interested.

Unexpected Applause: The Faerie Guardian (a book review post)

Before I get into the review for this book, I'm going to call your attention back to a post I did dealing with objectivity and subjectivity in responding to books. I'm having a very divergent reaction to this one, so I want to make sure I am qualifying it ahead of time. Remember these:

1. This is good, and I like it.
2. This is good, but I don't like it.
3. This is bad, and I don't like it.
4. This is bad, but I do like it.

"The Faerie Guardian" started off on the wrong foot with me. It's not really the fault of the book or the author. I mean, I'm the one with the thing against first person/present tense presentation. But it is first/present, and I couldn't stop myself from groaning inwardly when I started reading it. And this example is pretty typical of the stuff I've read using first/present, so it did nothing to distinguish itself for me. But, you know, I get that that style is popular, right now, so I can hardly fault the author for choosing the style. I'm just not into it.

So the main character is a "fairie" girl, and I say "fairie" because she's just like a human teenager down to the pop culture references that, as far as I can tell, she shouldn't have knowledge of. In fact, she seems more conversant in pop culture than she does in the culture of her own people. In fact, in her narration she refers to other fairies as "fairies," as in "the fairie stood there," which would be like me saying, "the human stood there," which is not a thing I would ever say nor have I ever heard any human say. Awkward. All of that to say that I had a hard time buying the protagonist as anything more than a human teenager with some convenient magic. And that doesn't even touch that the purple-haired fairie is named Violet.

The other main issue I had with the story also started right up front along with the first/present stuff. Violet is in a boy's room to guard him from a snake fairie thing, and, of course, she sees him sleeping. And, of course, she is smitten by him just from watching him sleeping. Maybe this is just a disconnect because I'm a guy, but the whole romance angle seemed more contrived than realistic to me. There was just no reason for it and it felt out-of-character to for Violet to react that way. I mean, there's no indication that she has a habit of instantly falling in love with sleeping boys, so I need something more from the story than that she arbitrarily had feelings for this one boy because she saw him asleep.

From a technical standpoint, the book was fine, and I can see why people like it (and based on the other reviews, I see that most people do like it); it just didn't appeal to me. The writing is fine. It's well edited. But it's not my story. This is one of those where I can see that it's (probably) good, but I don't like it. For this one, I'm being that guy at the party that goes over and gets a helping of whatever it is everyone is raving over, I put it in my mouth, make the yucky face, and spit it out. Everyone looks at me like I'm crazy. Eventually, like, one other person comes over and pats my arm and whispers, "I didn't like it either."

Lies Writers Tell... To Other Writers (Part Five -- It Shouldn't Be Work (Or "Waiting for Your Muse")) (an IWM post)

Those of you who have been following my blog for any length of time will know that my daughter plays the accordion.

In many ways, she has a love/hate relationship with it. She loves playing. She loves performing even though she doesn't like to admit that. She doesn't want to give it up. However, she hates practicing. She hates getting new, more difficult songs. She hates the work of it.

Now, let's go back to the beginning:
Learning to play the accordion was her idea. It would never have occurred to us to suggest to any of our kids that they ought to learn to play the accordion. I mean, who does that, right? But my daughter decided that she wanted to learn to play it. Of course, that meant that she had to learn to play it and that's work. Playing the accordion is not just picking one up and jamming it in and out.

At first, for the first year or so, she hated going to lessons. She also hated practicing, but the real issue was that she hated going to lessons. She wanted to play the accordion, but she wanted to be able to do it without putting any work into it. [How many of you know that feel?] Eventually, she got over hating her lessons and dislikes when she has to miss them. She still hates practicing. Well, not always, I suppose, but there are days when it's a huge ordeal to get her to sit down and put in the half hour. It's work.

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And, once again, here's the part where you have to hop over to Indie Writers Monthly to find out the rest. Of course, I encourage you to do that.

The Last 10 Days

Where I've Been

And on either side of where I've been,
Here's what I've been doing

It's been a very busy 10 days, and the 5 softball games each weekend are pretty rough. But there has also been some writing happening, so all is not lost!