Fighting Social Media Addiction Using e.ggtimer.com

You probably have ADHD and if you don't, it's been induced by the constant flow of small bits of information.  It's like candy.  It's sitting there on your desk, so you can reach out for just one more bite.  Even if it's bad for you and rots your teeth and keeps you from getting anything done.  (It's not a perfect metaphor.)

I never seem to get started writing.  I'm always in a state of "get caught up on Twitter".  Just need to check that Tumblr post, read that article on HuffPo, reply to some comments on a blog.  Check email one more time.  And don't get me started on Facebook!  (Which is why I never get started on Facebook.)

Social media may be lowering our attention spans from minutes to seconds.  There has been some criticism about the data used on that inforgraphic, but anecdotally, I know this to be true.  On a busy social media day, I give every piece of information about 7 seconds, and if it fails to interest me, I'm on to the next thing.

When I finally do get caught up, I open a blank Word document to get started on the next story.  I give that white page a whole 7 seconds.  When nothing happens, I check Twitter.

Fact: It takes more than 7 seconds to write a story.

Usually it takes way more than 7 seconds to even put down the first line.  This goes for most other writing tasks, like editing, revisions, reading, critiquing, outlining, brainstorming, and even blog-post-writing.

About the only activity that doesn't suffer is research.  Online research.  And only on Wikipedia pages that are shorter than 500 words.

To solve this problem, I first moved my writing area away from my "fun computer".  I made a rule to check Twitter only on the fun computer or on my phone.  So I started checking it on my phone.

I thought about getting a productivity tool, like LeechBlock, to filter my internet usage or even shutting off the internet during work hours, but I really do need to bop off for quick research checks mid-writing.  I also don't like the idea, the very appalling idea, that I'm not strong enough to resist on my own.

So what helped the most?

e.ggtimer.com is a simple timer website.  Enter a time, either in hours or minutes or even a time of day or a date.  The time becomes part of the link, so you can bookmark it.  At the end of the configured time, there's a loud beep.

Once I'm ready to start my writing day, I set the timer to 60 minutes.  During that hour, I'm not allowed, at all, to check Twitter, email, or anything unrelated to the writing.  My only goal is to not do anything unrelated to the writing for a whole hour.

Even if that means staring out the window the entire time.

(I do allow myself to quickly tweet ideas, snippets of prose, reports on how the writing is going, or links to interesting things I find while researching.  But even then I need to keep myself reigned in or I let too much of the energy out of my project.)

What happens is my attention span gets the message real quick.  During that hour, writing becomes the only interesting thing worth doing.  The ideas flow, and so do the words.

My daily goal is four hours.  They don't need to be grouped together.  After one hour, I'm allowed to do some social networking, but what I find is I'm in the middle of a typing frenzy when the browser beeps. The timer is really easy to restart -- just click in the address bar and hit enter.

It is much easier to tell how long I've been writing this way.  How many times have I reset the timer?  Four? Six?  I can't remember I reset it so many times?  That makes me feel productive.

Sometimes I get interrupted by life and have to stop the timer mid-hour.  For that reason, I almost wish e.ggtimer had a pause feature.  I've thought of sending that as a request (I am related to the author of the site), but I hesitate.  I'm afraid that if I can pause, I'll do it every five minutes so I can back to checking Twitter...

Waste Brains (photo)

Seattle, WA

Waste brains hurt fish.  Everyone knows that.

Science Realism in Fiction

I came across a great article last week about the science in science fiction.  It was written by Jenny Cabotage, who is both a fantasy writer and a biologist.  As a scientist who "knows better", how does she handle slightly unrealistic science in the spec fic she consumes?

She sits back and enjoys the ride.

That conclusion took me a while to come to.  Even as a kid, I reveled in finding technicalities in the science fiction I consumed.  Remember, this was the late 80's and 90's, when our TV scifi diet consisted of Star Trek and Quantum Leap.  Scientific errors were low-hanging fruit.  Explosions would never be very large in oxygen-free space, we could never upload a virus into an alien ship and expect it to be compatible, and if you go back in time and even breathe, you will change the future.

Or my biggest pet peeve: Why is the evil guy always ugly??

Maybe that's why I loved reading classic SF so much.  Isaac Asimov, a biochemist himself, always wrote stories that seemed at least plausible.  Even those I considered far-fetched, like the famous "stars" who recorded their dreams to sell as mass media, become more possible as time wears on.

As I learned to write, I promised myself I would never make the cardinal mistake of Star Trek aliens, where each race was basically a human with advanced makeup and appliances.  Aliens won't be humanoid.  They'll be weird!

As I got even older, I noticed that even fictional aliens who weren't humanoid tended to be modeled after earth animals.  You've got the stereotypical reptile race, the ape race, the insect race, the lion or cat race, the cute mammalian race, and the fish people.  Also lame.  Can't these people think of anything more interesting?

Then I learned about certain concepts of character development.  The reader must sympathize with the characters.  They need to feel connected.  They need to relate.  And it's really hard, if not impossible, to make a reader relate to a gelatinous blob with purple dots that thinks in binary and can merge with another of its species and come away as a different creature.

(Perhaps this is why Star Wars seemed so refreshing.  The cast of aliens is brilliantly diverse, and Lucas manages to make us relate to them.  The bad guys are still ugly, though.  And they speak with British accents.)

I think back to some of the scifi that went way too far away from my human values, my human desires.  For some readers, that scifi might have been thought-provoking, but for me, it was as unrealistic as too-human SF.  Or worse, I found the ideas distasteful.

To use Asimov again, and I'll try to do this spoiler-free, I hated how he "ended" the Foundation series in Foundation and Earth.  (More books have been written since, by other authors, and I've not read them yet, so I don't know if they fixed what I hated.)  Instead of leaving me feeling like they'd saved the universe, I felt like they made a huge mistake.  And more importantly, the novel failed to complete the promised plot arc that the previous books established.  The ending seemed to come out of nowhere.  The goal shifted and all the things I'd been made to care about were deemed unimportant.

Note that I read this when I was like, 17.  And haven't read it since.  Who knows what I'd think now.  The point is, that many humans have a certain set of values, and for some, Asimov violated those values in Foundation and Earth.  He failed to convince me that I should agree with the aliens, yet his humans went right along with it.

Are there aliens out there with weird and crazy values?  Yes.  Maybe those aliens are even right, even if their values are deplorable.  And we should explore them in SF, just as we should explore aliens with weird bodies, or science that is barely understandable, or not comprehensible at all.  The problem is, how do we tell those stories in ways that people can relate?

I ran into this problem in the early drafts of Emerald City Dreamer.  I wanted to be as "realistic" as possible. I wanted to be true to my characters as possible.  The result?  My characters came off completely unsympathetic.  They weren't even aliens.  Everyone in ECD has a humanoid body.  It's just their actions and values, even the actions and values of the humans, did not make enough sense to a large enough percentage of my critiquers.  So I had to make some major changes.

In fiction, the story is far more important than "realism".  The world has realism.  In SF, we use stories to explore ideas, and those can be accurate down to the letter.  Internally consistent, and even completely scientific.  But in the end, stories are, ultimately, about the characters.  What choices do they make in this world of new ideas?  The answer to that is what makes readers feel satisfied, or not, at the end of a story.  That is what makes readers interested enough to keep reading.  That is what separates this medium of fiction from academic papers and essays.  Because of the characters and their choices.

To pull that off, readers must relate to the characters.  Especially if they're aliens.  Especially if you must sacrifice some scientific realism or logic to make it happen.  You have to risk a couple of readers saying, "That would never happen", to make the rest of your audience love your story.

It helps me to think of SF as mythology.  Because, in a way, it is.  In the old days, the hero trudged into the underworld to save his lover from the torments of a god.  Today, he's got a high-tech costume and he's fighting aliens with quantum tunneling stabilizers.  So what if that costume could never contain all those gizmos and gears or make him actually fly or any of that?  Who cares if Black Widow, being thrown against a stone wall from somewhere in the sky would actually crush her dead?  (Ok, I cared for a couple of seconds.)  And who cares if the technobabble is technobullshit?

When you hear a myth, you're not rolling your eyes, saying, "Yeah, like the gods would ever talk to Orpheus.  He's just some dude.  And like Hades would give a crap about music.  Hell, there aren't any gods in the first place."  We accept it as myth.  As fiction.

Likewise for our science fiction.  Yes, it's great to try to include as much science in science fiction as we can.  But after a while, we have to accept that it's just myth.  At the very least, taking this attitude helps me enjoy movies more.

At best, it helps my writing.  I try to pack in as much realism as I can, without making the stories too inaccessible to readers.  In fact, realism is a great tool to generate ideas during world building.

I'm building a world right now, about a species that co-evolved with a fungus that produces a complex biochemical mix the aliens need to thrive and survive.  The themes are about classism and privilege and poverty.

Because there are no humans in my story, I walk a difficult line.  I cannot describe my aliens through a human perspective.  My aliens have to be sympathetic and relatable on their own.

My world building process goes something like this: "Assume X is true.  What would that do to their culture?  To how their bodies evolved?"  I take those answers, and say, "Now that Y is true, what does that do to their religion?  To their attitudes on war?  To how their reproductive systems evolved?"  Those kinds of questions help me brainstorm and hopefully come up with awesome details to set in my world, and perhaps even plot points.

At some point, I realized my creatures seemed a bit like otters, and they had two eyes, a nose, and a mouth.  They walk on two (sometimes four) legs, and have two genders.  And their personalities, for the most part, are strikingly human.  Why?  Why would aliens "just happen" to have all these elements, when they evolved so far away in a completely different ecosystem?  And why does their climate seem a bit like a swamp?

I could tweak those facets.  Give them alien faces and even more alien bodies and come up with strange surroundings.  But that would go too far.

They have faces because readers need at least a few anchors to the reality they understand.  I want them to love the characters and understand my message, so I give the aliens faces.  Enough of this planet is like Earth that readers have a context to understand the changes I've made.  So I can spotlight that which I want the readers to see.

You get to a point where it is mythology.  The point of my story is, "What happens when classism is biologically enforced in an obvious way?"  I want the unfairness of my alien society to be clear and emotional.  I want them rooting for my poor character, and hoping my upper-caste character does the right thing in spite of his cultural programming.

I don't want readers hung up on trying to picture a creature shaped like a five-legged walrus with no torso, or sort out their feelings for a protagonist with tentacles for a face.  I might explore those options in another story, where they don't distract from what I'm trying to do here.  Maybe in a different story I'll have human characters to be the lens through which we view the uber-strange aliens, or where the uber-strangeness is part of the mood I hope to establish.  Maybe I want you to feel confused or disturbed or unsympathetic or whatever.  (Hi, Kafka.)  But not here.

So as we consume fiction, it helps to let go a little.

As creators, learning to letting go a little, in just the right places, is part of the craft.

Druids in the Graveyard (photo)

Roslyn, WA

This is where they keep the druids.

What's So Wrong with Being the Healer?

Today an interesting conversation came up in my Twitter feed.  It echoed a conversation I had with one of my daughters yesterday, about the role of gender and the celebration of fighting over more peaceful activities.  With my daughter, we discussed girl cartoons vs boy cartoons.

Specifically, Jem, who uses science and technology to create music, vs. the Transformers, who use science and technology to cause devastating explosions.  Even though my daughter is female, she thought the girl-shows were lame.  Shooting things was much, much better.

The Twitter conversation was about gaming, specifically related to today's release of Diablo III.

I'm kind of excited about playing D3 with the Boyfriend. Are there healers? Can I follow him around and heal all the things?
— Oestrus (@OriginalOestrus) May 15, 2012

Oestrus is a woman.  For those who might not automatically guess, this statement is potentially controversial in a gender-politics kind of way.  Why?  Because stereotypically, women are healers in games.  Moreover, this reflects real life, in which women are healers, nurturers, and in general, sissies.  (The word "sissy" was invented to describe what weak little girls women can be.  Men can be unflatteringly accused of being in this state.)

One could easily imagine a man mocking a female gamer by making the above statement in a highpiched voice.  "And then my girlfriend was all like, 'Are there healer thingies?  Can I follow you around and heal all the things?  PLEASE?' and I was all line, no ho, get back in the kitchen!" (Cue bass laughter.)

I didn't see the original post first.  I saw the reaction:

@OriginalOestrus Either you are trolling, or you just validated a bunch of stuff. =/
— Andrea Jen. Shubert (@andrea2s1) May 15, 2012

This is an understandable response.  i.e. stop acting the stereotype, because you're going to prove what men have been saying about us all along!

This kind of thinking makes a few assumptions that bother me.  It assumes that being a healer is undesirable.

There are simulations of living things flying around on the screen and the healer is not helping them to die.  You're just going around making injured people feel better, and that is not very respectable.

There is a kernel of fundamental sexism rooted in this assumption, so deeply, that most people, even women, miss it.  It is such a basic part of our mental reality that we take it for granted.  The male paradigm of what is important, and what is not, is so accepted as truth that we will not question it.

The question should be: What's so bad about healing?

We assume it's weak.  We assume it is not very hard.  We assume it requires no skill.  We assume it doesn't help anyone win the game.

Yet none of this is true.  In most serious MMORPGs, there are basically three roles (sometimes broken into sub-roles):

• Tank: Takes damage and keeps mobs (monsters) from attacking other players.
• DPS: Deals massive damage.  Can be ranged or melee.
• Healer.  Heals people and buffs them (makes them stronger).

Anyone who has seriously played an MMORPG actually knows, deep down inside, that healing is essential.  It is a difficult skill to master.  A poor healer will cause a party to wipe far more often than a poor damage class or tanking class.  The tank's primary job, actually, is to keep the healer alive.

A good healer can often make up for poor performance on the part of any other class.  Our team is not doing enough damage?  That's okay.  I will keep you alive long enough to kill it.  It just means the fight takes longer, but we will live through it.

A healer in PvP (Player vs. Player, considered some of the most hardcore gaming on MMOs) is golden.  A team with good healers will beat a team with no healers or bad healers any day.

I rarely play a healer.  I rarely feel up to muster.  I know that the tank (who usually leads parties) will chew my hide if I fail as a healer.  Healers get yelled at.  Healers hold the life of the party in their hands.

My lovely girlfriend?  She is happy to take on this enormous responsibility, and I respect her for that.  And she is good at it.  And every time there are open calls for raid parties or in PvP queues, she is first in line.  All healers are.  Because there aren't enough of them to go around.

Maybe there aren't enough of them because the role is downplayed.  Because it's sissy.  That's a character only girls play.  Or the larger picture: The role of healing in our entire society is downplayed.  Who cares about healing when we can build stuff, or better yet, kill things?

So a lot of men don't want to play healers.  And a lot of women trying very hard not to seem like women don't want to play healers.  (I didn't want to give this video airplay by linking, but it is appropriate.)  What we end up with is a shortage of healers.  It should be obvious to everyone how necessary they are, when a party can't even do a raid without them.

Another gaming analogy went around today.  John Scalzi wrote about how being a white male is like playing an MMO on easy, while everyone else has to play on hard.  Games simulate life, and so it only makes sense to bring the metaphors back to reality.  What can we learn about real life from looking at how healers are perceived?

Think about our healing classes in real life: Teachers, nurses, mothers, day care providers, HR managers, psychologists, massage therapists, social workers.

Unless you're lying to yourself, or an alien, your idea of these careers evokes a reaction in you: One Big Giant "Meh!"  Who wants to do any of these things?  Compared to rocket scientist or police officer or lawyer or airline pilot, no one does.  They are weak roles, anyone can do them.  They are boring, at best necessary evils - the kids must be taught, and someone has to clean up after sick people.  Only janitors show up lower on the totem pole, in terms of respected careers.

(Doctors are an exception, a respected healing class.  Perhaps that is because it is still not a female-dominated career.  Many of the above listed careers more respected back when they were male-dominated.)

Is the problem that women act in nurturing ways?  Take nurturing jobs?  Are we too eager to be healers?

Or is the problem that we accept the sexist undervaluing of these roles?

Rearing children is amazingly cool.  It is difficult.  It requires skill, and it helps society win the game.

Psychology is awesome.  It fixes people's brains.  It makes people happy.  It is difficult.  It takes a lot of skill, and helps society win.

Social workers help lift people up, keep people going through hard times.  It is difficult.  It helps society win.

Admin assistants (aka secretaries) are awesome.  Like healers in MMOs, they juggle a thousand different things, run all over the place, get it all done in time, and get yelled at if they let anyone fall down.  It is difficult.  They help a company win.

We could "stop acting the stereotype", but that won't lift the oppression.  If we are reacting against the gender roles by stepping into male shoes, we validate the existence of those roles.  We continue to perpetuate them and allow them to oppress us.

If women are avoiding acting the stereotype so we can be "free" of oppression, then we're no more free than we were barefoot and pregnant.  Sure, it will lift oppression for women who would rather work in male-dominated fields (as I once did in IT, and arguably, still do as a writer).  It will help women who want to be successful tanks and damage-dealers.  And that's great.

But it won't help those people, both women and men, who want to be healers.

What we need to do is not question the stereotype, but question the value placed on the stereotype.  What's so wrong with choosing to be a mother, if that choice is available to you?  What is so wrong with being a nurse or an HR manager?  What is wrong with being a healer?

Women should be able to play whatever character we want.

This goes past gender politics.  This goes to the bedrock of some of the ills of society.  This world is in need of good healers.  Humanity needs more people (men and women) competently doing very difficult and valuable jobs.  If we respected the results of good healing as much or more than we respect skillful damage-dealing, perhaps we'd have fewer lawsuits and wars, and more happy, healthy, functional people.

Gaming shows us it's possible to heal and be competitive.  It is possible to heal and help everyone else win.  It is possible to cooperate and win in a competitive way.  Let's learn from that.

We've been programmed to dis peaceniks (hippies and sissies, the lot of them), just as we laugh at healers.  In the long run, shifting our values could make for a better society, one in which it is valuable to heal and be healed.

If you are a healer, you are awesome.