Gratitude: a Necessity

When I started my blog a little over a year ago, my first post of substance was about gratitude. You can read the whole thing, but the gist of it was that it's not natural for us to be grateful. We tend to take for granted everything that goes right and spend most of our time trying to improve and fix the problems, whether real or imaginary. It's not bad, necessarily, because it motivates up to aim higher and work harder, but appreciation for what we do have is also a requirement for a truly fulfilling life.

There exists a type of person almost pathologically incapable of gratitude, and we seem to have more of them lately. From an overpaid feminist professor decrying the patriarchy to a successful musician disappointing his fans to make a political statement to an athlete denigrating the country that offered him fame and fortune, new examples appear on a nearly daily basis.

The phenomenon of ingratitude, of taking gifts for granted and spitting at those who provide them is far from recent and not unique to wealthy Western nations. It is, in fact, old and universal enough to have been immortalized by a Russian 19th Century poet in a tale of The Fisherman and the Golden Fish.

For those unwilling to struggle through the valiant yet clunky attempt at a translation, it's a story of a poor Fisherman who catches a magical golden fish. In exchange for sparing her life, the fish offers the man anything he desires. At first, being kindly and humble, he simply lets the fish go. However, his wife repeatedly forces him to make ever more extravagant demands, with predictable results.

On its face, the tale cautions against greed and pride. But the character of the Fisherman's Wife is all too familiar. Her first request is modest (a new wash-tub), and even the second is understandable (a nicer house). But the more she receives, the more unhappy, demanding, and cruel she becomes.

Why is that? Do the newfound material possessions make her dissatisfied? Does she subconsciously miss poverty? More likely, she simply didn't have the ability to appreciate what was given to her. Every new gift only brought on the thoughts of what she was still lacking, and she kept asking for more, meeting no resistance, no indication that there might be a limit.

But of course, whether in fairy tales or in life, there is always a limit. Whether it's a magical benefactor or luck or true productive ability, there is only so much tangible success available to us within a lifetime. On the other hand, the amount of satisfaction and joy we achieve is very much ours to decide. The difference between happiness and misery very often comes from appreciating what one already has.

Can gratitude be learned? Perhaps. As a counter-example to the tale above, there is a Jewish joke that has been a favorite in my family. It tells of a poor Jew who comes to the Rabbi to complain about his small house. The Rabbi tells the man to buy a goat and bring it inside for a month, then get rid of it. Needless to say, after the month is up, the man appreciates all the "extra" space in the house and stops complaining.

Most people experience something similar throughout their lives: an event so traumatic that normalcy seems like a gift. Cancer survivors know of what I speak, as does everyone who watched the towers collapse on 9/11. Just living seems enough. Having family and friends around feels like a luxury. Yet it doesn't last. After a while, we start taking it all for granted again and seek more. However, any time we start to feel low, we can look back and say, "Today is not so bad, for I had been through worse. And thank goodness for that."

That is one way to learn gratitude. Another is to look around and see those less fortunate than us, whether in this country or around the world, not to feel guilty and self-disgusted as some activists would have us do, but to appreciate how rare our "normal" really is. Another is through religion. As a relative newcomer to religion, I was quite surprised how many prayers center around thanks. After all we usually think of prayer as a request rather than an expression of gratitude, but clearly the two go together.

Whatever the path to gratitude, it is my hope that more people in this world find it, for is not just a societal convention we learn as children under the umbrella of good manners. It's more, even, than a form of repayment to those who help us as we face the challenges of life. Fundamentally, it's a key to lasting happiness, available to all just for the asking.

The choice for the appropriate music video was between Martina McBride and this. Sorry, Martina.

Book Review: Set to Kill by Declan Finn

Take an Agatha Christie murder mystery. Make it THREE murder mysteries.

Replace the middle-aged Inspector with a security expert who happens to be a martial arts guru/all-around killing machine still dealing with the aftermath of saving the world as we know it.

Replace upper-class Brits with a collection of endearingly and/or annoyingly (depending on your perspective) odd characters inspired by real-life players in the sci-fi publishing world.

Stick it into the naturally insane environment that is the world's largest Sci-Fi/Fantasy con (fictionally renamed WyvernCon).

Add 'splosions, hired killers and enough weapons to run a minor war.

Oh and also make it funny enough to qualify as satire.

OK, so maybe it's nothing like an Agatha Christie mystery after all. But it is a darn good read. The reason I was thinking of Christie is because, underneath all the fun and goofiness and inside-baseball sci-fi literary community references, there is a solid plot worthy of an old-fashioned detective novel. As with any good mystery, the final reveals were surprising yet backed up by clues sprinkled throughout the story.

The pacing is good, and while some sidetracks and background sections slow down the main story, they're still amusing enough to keep the reader entertained. The violence is not as plentiful as Declan Finn's fans might expect, but there's still sufficient to keep the adrenaline flowing. The fully fictional characters are well enough developed that you can go into the story cold and still care about what happens to them; and those inspired by real life are easily recognizable while changed up just enough to still fit into a satirical fiction environment.

I can't find anything particularly "wrong" with this book to explain why exactly I'm only giving it 4 stars on review sites. Perhaps Mr. Finn set my expectations for his work too high and I've become stingier with my stars. That having been said, it's still very much recommended, if only as a palate cleanser in between his more traditional novels because it's just so very different. Enjoy and as always, Happy Reading!

Purchase Set to Kill on Amazon

#GabWriters Interview with Everitt Foster

For those who haven't heard, Gab is the new and exciting alternative to Twitter that offers those of us who believe in free speech an opportunity to meet and socialize with the like-minded. Naturally, the site is fairly heavy on creative types, and a Everitt Foster was nice enough to include me in his series of #GabWriters interviews. Unlike most blog interviews, this one has personalized questions based on my biography and other internet data. Topics cover growing up in the Soviet Russia, politics, religion, writing, my newly released novella and I don't quite remember what else.

Please note that I wrote most of the answers while watching the Presidential Election, so emotions were running high and the brain-to-fingers filter was only marginally functional. Thus you get to see as close to real me as you'll probably ever get, and also, unfortunately, wild typos abound. Apologies in advance, and enter at your own risk!

Gab Interview with Marina Fontaine

Marina Fontaine is… not a French tennis player. So let’s not make that mistake, (Thanks Google and FaceBook for your screw-ups). She’s a writer, and Gabber and all around interesting person! Check our her books here on GoodReads, and here on Amazon, and she gabs at gab.ai/mashak99

1. You grew up in Russia, what was it like for you and your family? What types of struggles did you endure?

I would hesitate to use the word “struggles” because the hardships of everyday life were so completely internalized. It only became obvious in retrospect, and by comparison with what is considered normal in the West, just how wrong the system was. I’m talking of the little things, like being able to get decent quality food, or reliable transportation to and from work, or hot water from the tap any time you turn it on, or medicine when you are sick. When you can’t rely on the basics always being there, it adds up, it takes up the mental and physical energy that could be spent elsewhere. Mind you, we were an equivalent of a middle-class family, living in one of the better-supplied cities. It wasn’t temporary. It wasn’t poverty. It was normal.

So you take people who already have trouble just getting to a physical comfort level, and then you add what most of us commonly think of as oppression. By the time I was growing up, the mass arrests and purges were already over. So pretty much keeping one’s head down was good enough. But what comes under that umbrella? Not asking questions. Not speaking your mind outside a very narrow circle of friends. Having very limited access to news and entertainment. There were ways around the last one (Voice of America was huge at the time, and samizdat books, and “unapproved” music), but again, that’s a lot of energy spent on something that should be taken for granted.

Also, just to get through life, more or less everyone had to break the law. The reason the country held as long as it did was from underground economy. So in theory, anyone could be jailed and any time. What better way to keep citizens in check?

I heard someone say not long ago that Americans move like free people, and it’s probably hard to understand unless you’ve seen how non-free people move. The day-to-day drudgery, the constant looking over one’s shoulder, being suspicious of strangers—it all adds up, and it does feel like physical weight. Or at least once it’s gone you realize it was there. I liken it to having a chronic health condition, being adjusted to it, and then having it fixed.

I suppose you can in fact calling this experience a struggle, just not the way people think of the word. It’s not glamorous or heroic or particularly interesting (unless you distill into a fictional story, and then it could be made interesting, in the right hands).

Read the rest of the interview here.

And as a bonus to my blog readers, since we're getting personal today, here's my favorite Russian song of all time. The fact that the first boy I ever kissed sang it to me might have something to do with it, but I also love the not-quite-Russian theme of holding on to light and hope no matter how dark it gets.

A Plea for Perspective

I try to stay away form politics on this blog, except for occasions where politics intrudes on culture, and sometimes not even then. There is a proliferation of political blogs and new sites, and my motto is, "If you don't have anything new to say, be quiet." My readers' time is limited, and they don't need yet another post on their newsfeed repeating something they already know.

However, in light of the happenings this week, I do in fact feel the desire to weigh in. Escalation of rhetoric during a Presidential election is nothing new. Both sides throw around words meant to paint the opponent in the worst possible light, and in spite of all the complaints about negative ads and not focusing on the issues, fear and negativity are always weapons of choice because they are the weapons that work best. It's not even new to paint the supporters of the opposing candidate as somehow lacking in either intelligence or common decency. That's how you shame people into staying home on Election day, or at least into being quiet about their views so they don't influence their friends and neighbors in the direction you don't want.

It's different now. Why? In short, because so many of us have lost the distinction between words and actions. Disagreement equals hate equals threat equals violence. Is it so shocking that, having convinced certain segments of the population that a certain candidate's victory will cause them physical harm, we are now seeing them scream in terror and lash out at the nearest, often innocent, targets?

It's true that the worst of the violence we are seeing is not organic and spontaneous, but an orchestrated attempt by George Soros and others like him to break our system of government and replace it with a dark visions of their deranged dreams. But enough of the strife is real, and it can lead nowhere good.

Below is a link to a blog post from an online friend of mine who writes under the name of Dedicated Tenther. I'm sharing it in the hopes that his words might begin to bring down the temperature of our collective disagreements so that the country we all love so much doesn't go down in (possibly literal) flames. As we are nearing the Holiday season, it might be a good time to step back and appreciate what we do have here, as Americans, and how important it is to keep it.

Please consider…

I’ve been lectured and spoken at.  I’ve been told I’m insensitive.  I’ve been told that I just don’t understand.  Donald Trump was elected president, and now people have all these feelings and I’m not taking them seriously.

Believe me, I do.  I understand that you are hurting and scared.  I completely get that.  My problem is not with your feelings themselves.  My problem is two-fold.  

First, and most important for my friends and family, my problem is that your fear and pain is based on lies.  You have been fed a diet of lies for months, and you believe them.  Indeed, why wouldn’t you?  It’s not like anyone has been denying them.  Indeed, much of the supposedly Conservative media (which obviously means something different than I thought it did a year ago), is engaging in the lies just as much as the “mainstream media.”

Second, and less important personally, but more important from a practical standpoint, your engagement in this very public hysteria is dangerous.  Because good and decent people like you believe the lies, too, bad and dangerous people have the moral cover to do horrible things.

Read the rest of post here.

The Catholic Geek Interview: Superversive Press and The Product

Below is the link to my appearance on The Catholic Geek radio show, originally aired on October 30th. Jason Rennie gives the background on the Superversive Press and why he chose to publish my novella. We also talk dystopian novels, the joys of living under Communism and the difficulty of creating fiction that makes sense when so much of reality doesn't. Enjoy!

Listen to the full podcast here.

Guest Post by Henry (Hank) Brown: Peace on Earth, but Please, Not in Fiction

Hank Brown is a long-time online friend of mine, and one of the original members of my Goodreads Small Government Book Fans Club. So when I heard that he had a book to promote, I was happy to invite him to do a guest post on my blog.

It is my policy to allow my guest bloggers complete freedom as to the topic and style as long as it's related to either culture or writing. In this case, I can't overstate how much I like this post because it is very much in line my own feelings on the subject. I hope my readers agree, or at least find it a good subject for reflection and further discussion. Enjoy!

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PEACE ON EARTH, BUT PLEASE, NOT IN FICTION

By Henry (Hank) Brown

To hear people talk, whether at the United Nations or the Miss Universe Pageant, everybody wants world peace. Maybe most of us really do—I haven’t conducted that poll. But with the exception of the My Dinner With Andre fans out there, nobody finds peace very entertaining.

Let’s face it: peace is boring! When you watch a movie or read a book, you’ll tune out if you go too long without some form of conflict. It’s conflict that keeps us turning pages. It’s confrontation, and tension, and anticipation of the showdown that inspires us to hold our bladders until the next commercial break.

As any would-be creative writing teacher will quickly tell you, there are many forms of conflict. You can find a lot of these in the movie Rocky III: Internal; external; physical; emotional; psychological. The conflict pickings are a little slimmer in Gerry. What’s that? You’ve never heard of Gus Van Sant’s cinematic masterpiece, Gerry? Yeah, there’s a reason for that.

Here’s a rule you can apply generally to fiction: the more literary a novel is, the more internal and psychological the conflict. In chick-lit, for instance, the conflict may never get much more intense than a protagonist forced to choose between visiting her dying mother with Alzheimer’s, commiserating with her recently-divorced BFF, or taking her present romantic relationship to the next level.

The more that critics turn their noses up at a given genre, the more overt the conflict. Take bodice-rippers and Harlequin romances: the conflict is either romantic or sexual…or both, but there’s nothing subtle about it. They are the embarrassing crazy aunt of the publishing world. No, make that the embarrassing crazy cash cow. On the other side of the chromosome fence are the male counterparts: westerns; military fiction; heroic fantasy; hard-boiled…all of which either became extinct, or changed so drastically that they might as well be extinct.

Untold millions of men turned to videogames or sports and gave up reading altogether in the 1990s. And it shows—peruse any social network for more than a minute and you’ll find that most males of Generation X and younger are incapable of writing, or comprehending, a coherent sentence. Punctuation? Conjugation? Spelling? Forget it. Vocabulary is shrinking. Contestants on Jeopardy look like geniuses because they are not intimidated by words with more than two syllables. Reading is for weirdoes. Why look up something in the dictionary when you can just wait for the movie to come out? In fact, reading a book quietly is suspicious behavior (but I’m sure it can be treated with therapy and medication).

No doubt traditional publishers would claim they were just “putting out the trash.” Okay: to be honest, some of it was trash. Maybe even some of the stuff I loved, and remember fondly. But some of it was well-written, tightly plotted, thought-provoking, and defied formulaic constraints. Is it still to be looked down upon because it’s escapist in nature?

Hey, I need to escape, and on a regular basis.

Every bean counter in traditional publishing should be forced to watch Sullivan’s Travels at least once. In that Depression-era classic, a self-important film director who fancies himself a champion of the downtrodden masses learns via misadventure that the downtrodden masses don’t need to go to the movies to experience suffering. Nor do they want to. There’s more than enough suffering in real everyday life, thank you very much. At least for those of us who are not film directors or publishing moguls.

At roughly the same time I became a published author, I became a sort of crusader, as well. A knight-errant on a quest to restore the glory days of the forgotten genres listed above. An armchair Indiana Jones—that’s me: Henry Brown and the Lost Audience. I spanned the globe (or at least the Web), cherry-picking what few literary nuggets there were that could help us relive the glory days. When my searches proved fruitless, I turned to my private library, blew the dust off some of my old fond memories and gave them what publicity I could. I began adding one-liners to some of my own promotional copy like: “men’s adventure is coming back!” Lo and behold, some of my fellow revivalists began espousing variations on that theme.

I wanted to overcome the stigma associated with labels such as “men’s adventure” and “men’s fiction.” When people heard those terms, they conjured  images of alcoholic hack writers banging out uninspired, poorly-written, chauvinistic pap full of pointless violence and purple-prose graphic sex. Or is it purple-prose graphic violence and pointless sex? No matter. The point is, there were some guys riding Don Pendleton’s coat tails who fit that description, more or less, and everyone writing men’s adventure suffered guilt by association.

I came up with an alternate name for the umbrella all those resurrected genres could fit under: dude-lit. My intention was that the term would become household, used for fiction rife with overt, physical conflict, but well-written and devoid of those stigmatic stereotypes.

I began using the term. So did maybe a couple other uppity new authors I met and conversed with. I routinely checked Bing and Google to track how the term was catching on. That’s how I learned “dude-lit” had been coopted. Evidently it is now being used to describe fiction with male characters in which the conflict may never get much more intense than a protagonist forced to choose between visiting his dying mother with Alzheimer’s, commiserating with his recently-divorced BFF, or taking his present romantic relationship to the next level. Chick-lit that pees standing up, in other words.

I should have trademarked it.

So “men’s adventure” it is, and to blazes with the stigma.

My Retreads series is full of overt, physical conflict—chases, martial arts, firefights—but there’s a helping of internal conflict too. After Hell and Gone (the first one) there’s even a dash of sexual tension, to give the reader that warm, squishy feeling in between dollops of brutal violence. In that respect the series is a lot like my other published fiction.

True peace is a goal deserving of universality; but that doesn’t make it reality. Peace has to be won, then protected, or what you wind up with is not peace at all—just something labeled as such. It’s an age-old truth, and it makes for great fiction.

Reality sucks. There are too many wrongs and injustices to document, and society’s solutions to them are usually inept at best. At the core of most decent men is the hope that one man, or group of men, could act to change some aspect of the world for the better. Men’s adventure is an expression of that.

With that in mind, I predict there will always be a demand for such books, as long as there are men who know how to read.

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About the Author:

I've always been an action-adventure guy. Normal, well-adjusted people may have grown too mature for movies like Star Wars or The Road Warrior; or fictional heroes like Conan, Tarzan or Mack Bolan. Well, that stuff left a permanent mark on me.

So much for being normal and well-adjusted. (Or mature.)

My own real-life adventure began as a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division, at 18 years old. OK, maybe it wasn't such a great adventure, but I'm proud to have served my country, and to kick off that service in an elite unit with such battlefield distinctions. My military escapades eventually led me through experiences in other corners of the US Army, as well as the USMC and Naval Reserve. My travels in life have taken me to the Caribbean; Central America; the Middle East; Alaska; Hawaii and all over the USA. I've traveled on trains, planes, automobiles, helicopters and ocean-going vessels. I've been trained in the use of rifles; bayonets; hand grenades; automatic rifles; machineguns; grenade launchers; anti-tank rockets and missiles. I even got to play with artillery and tanks. I also had plenty of opportunity to observe the behavior of my fellow human beings at their best and worst.

My aspirations now include a quiet civilian life spinning enough yarns to pay all the bills.

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Purchase Hell and Gone on Amazon, iTunes, in Kobo Store or on Barnes and Noble site. 

Visit the Hank Brown's book page on Virtual Pulp for more information. 

(Belated) NY ComicCon Report

:Checks calendar in dismay: Yes, it has been two weeks since my single-day ComicCon visit, and I'm just now getting to write about it. It's been that kind of week. Make it two weeks. Anyhow...

This was my first visit to ComicCon, and it was pretty much as insane as I expected. The schedule was driven by two tween girls (my daughter and her friend), so we ended up spending the morning and early afternoon in two panels before moving on to the real fun on the floor.

First Panel: Gravity Falls.
My kids watched the show religiously, so my daughter insisted on attending the creators' panel. It was surprisingly interesting for me, even though I only heard of the show second hand. The writers and artists provided a lot of insight into the general creative process, both in storytelling and in bringing ideas to life in visual form. One of the longer discussions that stuck with me as a writer was the difficulty of ending a complex, emotionally charged story in a satisfying way. Do you tie up all the loose ends, or do you leave some of the answers to the fans' imagination? How much information is too much? One of the examples they gave was the ending of the Harry Potter series. On the one hand, it's good to know exactly how everything worked out for the characters, but did we really care about Harry's adult job, or how many children he had? Would we be better off filling the blanks with our own suppositions? Maybe, maybe not. I do remember agonizing over just this question when I settled on the ending to my own novel, choosing to leave the world and the characters before all the problems had been solved. To hear accomplished creators, working in a different medium, address a similar dilemma was fascinating, and frankly much more than I expected to find in a panel about a TV show I had never seen.

Second Panel: RWBY
This one was less a creative discussion and more of a combination of new season reveal and merchandise promotions. Also, although the audience was mostly underage, the panelists were too foul-mouthed even for my grown-up taste. However, the fans were ecstatic about the sneak peek trailer, and as someone completely unfamiliar with the show, I have to say it looks good. If I had more time, I might even consider watching. So from that point of view, I guess the panel achieved what it set out to do.

At that point, having decided not to spend an hour sitting on the floor to wait for another panel, we headed out in search of food. Long story short: next time, bring your own. $5 Snapples and $10 pre-packaged cold cut sandwiches were pathetic offerings for such an esteemed venue. They would've been better off with putting up a bunch of well-stocked vending machines. Fortunately for our wallets, the girls were too excited to eat so we grabbed some drinks and kept going.

The Floor:
Maybe it was a function of the event being in New York City, or maybe it's just how all cons work, but it was fairly impossible to find any information or directions from staff. So we ended up pestering random fans until we got the general idea of the setup. Yes, there are maps online, but they don't give a good representation of the architecture of the building. Nevertheless, we did somehow manage to find all we needed, which luckily wasn't that much. My daughter is now a proud owner of an autographed Gravity Falls Journal 3 (a huge deal to hardcore fans, and I was pretty shocked at the reasonable pricing of about $20 for a very elaborate hardcover) and some RWBY plushes. As for me... Yeah, it was a good day.

In case you're wondering, I was culturally appropriating Zoe from Firefly: brown coat, leather pants and a broken toy shotgun that I fixed up with masking tape. Hey, it's the thought that counts.

Conclusion: A fun experience that would've been better with preparation. You really need to plan it out if you want to hit more than just a couple of spots. I'm guessing repeat visits (or visits with a friend who had gone before) are more productive and less stressful, but anyone can enjoy spending at least a day there.