The short story is that I was supposed to meet a lot of friends in New York City this weekend. Those plans fell apart, but the editor of Hot Mess, Rachel, brilliantly realized this was an opportunity to set up a reading. When she suggested it, I enthusiastically agreed – enthusiasm is a good way to keep from realizing how panicked you are until it’s too late to back out. No matter how freaked out the idea of reading your story to an audience makes you, I don’t know many writers who wouldn’t jump at the chance. You have people. In a room. And they’ve come to listen to you read your story to them. Once you get past the anxiety attacks, it’s just about the best thing ever.

Speaking of panic and best things ever, I don’t know what to say about the awesomeness of my friends on Twitter. The support everyone showed for us was incredible. My appreciation is so appreciative that it wants to thank you. Thank you, everyone. I need to give a special thanks to NYPinTA, though, for coming up with what just had to be the official hashtag of Not Losing It During A Reading. #dontfuckup. I even marked the top of my reading with it.

Rachel did an amazing job emceeing the event, every reader was great (having not heard myself, I’m just assuming I was great, because, y’know, it’s no fun to assume the opposite) and the discussion that followed the readings was not the silent, awkward letdown that discussions sometimes are. It was lively! It was fun! Even if Rachel decided to put me on the spot right at the top of the discussion and lead me straight into an Eric Is Alcoholic joke.

Thank you to everyone who came (extra-personal thanks to CLImagiste, who I got to meet for the first time!) to hear our first reading. It was an incredible night, and worth all of the panic.

Since my wife is awesome, we have pictures of the reading and of the celebration at the Peculiar Pub that followed. Since I am benevolent, you get to see them. Enjoy.

When I brought up my mood issues, my depression, and my family’s history of mental illness to my last therapist, she told me, “You might be anxious, depressed, or a little bipolar, but medication is the easy way out. If you really want medication, you can decide that and talk to your PCP.” Even as scared and confused as I was, it was hard not to feel icky about the disconnect in her words. I might have a little chemical problem in my brain, but if so, it was on me to go to my doctor to beg for the “easy way out”. Unfortunately, I was about to go on vacation and couldn’t deal with any of it until I got back. I packed my bags and hoped for the best.

Chemical problems don’t accept vacation requests. The depression hit a week into my trip. I did what I always did. I tried to deny it was there. Denial never works. My depression is rhythmic and relentless. It rolls in, wave after wave, wearing down whatever meager relief that strength and resolve can provide. At lunch on the third day I used the last of my strength to hold myself together on the walk from our table to a bathroom stall so I could cry in private.

My first therapist was right about one thing. Medication sounded a lot easier than that. Crying in a bathroom stall on an otherwise wonderful vacation drove home how seriously I needed to take getting healthy. I lined up a new therapist from my hotel in San Francisco. I started mood charting; noting, day to day, the elevation or depression in my mood, how anxious and irritable I was, and how much sleep I was getting. Finally, I went to see a psychiatrist.

I don’t want to write the next part, and I don’t know why. Some of my friends already know. It’s not something I’m ashamed of or embarrassed about. I just don’t want to do the part where I say, “Here’s what’s wrong with me.” I want to write the posts after this one. The ones with the information I really struggled to uncover.  To do that, I need to push ahead. Let’s push ahead.

I’m bipolar. Specifically, I’m probably cyclothymic. Cyclothymic disorder is a less severe but faster cycling form of bipolar disorder. What does that mean? In bipolar I you get severe depression and full-blown mania. If you have major depression but a lesser form of mania (hypomania, meaning “below mania”), you’re bipolar II. If you have hypomania but your depressions don’t qualify as major depression (meaning they never, ever last more than two weeks) you’re cyclothymic.

Rapid cycling doesn’t mean you’re angry in the morning, elated at lunch and depressed by dinner. The diagnostic definition for cyclothymia is that you’re never symptom free for more than two months. For me, it’s meant my moods shift at least once a month, often more. My mood chart for March started with the tail end of my week of vacation depression, stabilized for a week and a half, pushed up into euphoria for a few days, then crashed back down into depression by the end of the month.

Frustratingly, cyclothymic disorder is often described as a “mild” form of bipolar. While technically true, that wording sends a bad signal if you already worry you’re making something out of nothing. The fact of bipolar is that being “a little” or “mildly” so isn’t something you should ignore. Nearly half of the people diagnosed cyclothymic are eventually diagnosed bipolar II. Bipolar progresses. Bipolar gets worse. Unless you get treatment.

It took weeks of research before I found an article that really nailed how I felt. When you’re cyclothymic, it said, you can still function. You just don’t function well. I wasn’t spending my depressive weeks in bed. I could still sort of work. It was just hard, and it hurt, and every bit of energy I burnt to stay up at work was energy I didn’t have to keep myself from being an awful human being in every other way. I wasn’t functioning well. In fact, I was doing an increasingly worse job of managing that much. That last sentence is what scared me the most. It was getting worse.

I have a mood disorder. It’s easy to be dramatic, to say it’s a prison sentence and that there’s something broken in me that will never be fixed. I could look at the medication – and yes, I am now on medication – as a shackle from which I’ll never be free. That’s not the truth of it.

I’m not changed. I’m not different. This is who I’ve been my entire life. My ups and down were here for as long as I can remember. It took me a decade and a half to put a name to it, but that doesn’t make me a different person. I’m still Eric. Eric simply knows that one of the problems he faces has a name. All the psychiatrist did was define a problem I already had and give me the means to treat it. I don’t feel trapped. I feel like myself. Myself is the best feeling I’ve had in years.

The last few years have been a subtle, slow acquiescence to the inevitability of failure and disappointment. I didn’t know I was doing it, I didn’t know why, and I was blind to the hole it was eating in my sense of self. I didn’t lack a plan because I was lazy or stupid. I’d just given up, in tiny increments, on the belief that having one would matter. I gave myself over to inertia, sending out requests for rejection because it was what I was supposed to do. Not because I believed it woud make a difference. I’d send out a letter, or two, or ten and wait silently for them to come back with the only answer they could: No.

I’ve been slamming myself against that non-answer ever since, hoping that in understanding how I’d gotten to this point I could bring myself to answer the question for myself. What the bloody hell is my plan? I’ve been talking with The Therapist about it, too – what with my tattered self-worth and fatalistic lack of optimism being at the core of what drove me there. Last week, something came out of my mouth that I’d never said as plainly until that moment.

When it comes to my writing career, I run from risk like it’s a giant spider with a taste for man-flesh. Not in my writing, mind you. It’s the part where I try to get paid for it that had me hiding. Risking something was the first thing I gave up without a fight, years ago, and in doing so planted the seed that I was so unlikely to succeed that I’d better get used to playing it as safe as possible. The house was going to win. Keep the bets safe and denominated in worthless Monopoly money.

It’s not even that I haven’t taken a risk. It’s possible the right risk never presented itself. The problem is that I’ve been avoiding them. Afraid of them. I banked on low stakes bets and hedged investments and told myself in the doing that boldness was simply a faster way to fail. The killer, of course, is pride. I let those side eye glances, the doubts and worries and fears of others become my worries. My fears. I didn’t want to have to answer to them, to their fears or mine, when a risk didn’t pay off. In safety I could fail quietly.

Failing quietly is killing me.

If you asked me right now if I had a plan, my answer would be the same as it was when this started. I really don’t know. I have a novel in progress. A web series I’m co-writing and producing. Those are things in front of me. On the table. Those are the start of an answer. Only a start.

This isn’t about selling my car and my house to live in an East Village flat and write between meals of peanut butter and ramen. When I say I need to be willing to take a risk i don’t mean I’m about to take a big one right this second. What I’m saying is there can never be an answer to that question, there can never be a plan, if I’m not ready to fail noisily. If there isn’t a crash and burn possibility (or a handful of them) in the plan, there is no plan. If there is no plan, ten years from now I’m still keeping servers running in the middle of a ticket on-sale. That is not happening.

Maybe I’ll be able to answer that question soon. Maybe the next time I get asked I won’t stammer my way through saying, “I don’t know.” Maybe, when the time comes to chance a real failure, I’ll be ready to honestly decide if it’s the right risk instead of looking away in fear.

That’s the plan, anyway.

(Caveat: If something drastic changes during the next month, I may not. Since I am unlikely to get a positive response on any of my existing queries – or, rather, any response at all as they’ve been out for a while – I’m moving forward under the assumption nothing will change.)

I’ve barely a clue of what self-publishing will mean for me. I don’t know how I’m going to market, what goals I’ll set for sales, how many times I’ll flog myself if I don’t make them…any of that. It’s up in the air, and will remain so for the better part of May. I’ve got a meeting in the works with The Smartest Marketing Person I Know to discuss some of the above (except for the quantity and quality of the self-flagellation, which I will have to determine on my own). I hope to have a stronger idea of what my plan is when that’s done.

The big thing beyond marketing is that the novel needs cover art. It needs awesome cover art, because I like art and I want people to have a nice looking book on their shelves should they buy it. Nice enough looking that even if they despise said book they’ll think, “Oh, but what a lovely cover. It shall decorate my shelf for a time until I find some poor sod I can trick into taking it.” I’m going to end up with a stack of these in my house, so I might as well not hate the way they look. The good news is I think I’ve found an artist who will be perfect, and his quote is in line with my hoped for budget.

Speaking of budgets.

One possibility for getting the (relatively modest) funding I’ll need is to use Kickstarter. For those who  haven’t heard of it: Kickstarter is a crowd-sourced funding tool. Someone (like me) sets an amount they need. They set up a bunch of funding levels, the way a non-profit does for donors. Each funding level comes with a gift – usually the higher levels get all of the gifts up to and including that tier. Give $5 and get an e-book copy. Give $10 and get a printed copy in addition to the e-book copy. Give $25 and get a shirt AND a printed copy AND an e-book copy. Like that.

My campaign will, probably, be asking for somewhere around $1,000. That means, I’d wager, that I’ll have a top funding tier of not more than $200-$250 with a bunch of decent tiers in-between. The question I’m trying to sort out is: what do I give as rewards for the tiers over the ones where I give the book? Assuming $5 gets you an e-book copy and $10-$15 gets you a print copy, where do I go from there? What’s at the $25, $50 and $100 levels? I’m not expecting many people to go for the higher tiers (Hi, mom and dad!), but I don’t want them to be insultingly crap rewards. They should, at the very least, make people think, “I wish I could justify giving that!”

If you were to give $50 or $100 to a book’s kickstarter campaign, what would you consider cool enough to make it worthwhile? Even if you don’t intend to give a cent to this campaign, what would get you to give at one of those tiers for a campaign you would support. Seriously, if you leave a comment with a suggestion, it is in no way setting an expectation that you care to actually support my kickstarter campaign. I’m just trying to brainstorm and I could use some help. Should I give posters of the cover art? If so, at what level?

It’s possible I decide not to do a campaign and to simply fund out of pocket. I’m a little squishy on the idea of raising money, but the part of me what wants to see how this Kickstarter thing works (as well as the part of me that knows that any money I raise means the money I’m going to put in out-of-pocket anyway can go even farther) is urging me to explore it. If you think doing a Kickstarter campaign is a putrid, silly idea, you can tell me that, too. I’m interested in your opinion.

If all goes well, I hope to have Broken Magic out by the end of summer. July, if I’m lucky, August if things drag out a bit. I’m really looking forward to letting you read it.

The bus lets me off at a place called the Glenfiield Viaduct. It’s a big mess of roads that let people on and off two highways onto a stretch of two lane residential road. I cross the street below an overpass and head down the road a bit to get to my Park and Ride. Because people are coming on and off the highway, they tend to drive like bloody maniacs. Crossing that road is an exercise in careful glaring at drivers to make sure they know I am in a crosswalk, I have right of way, do not even think of gunning it out of that stop sign until I’m across.

Yesterday, I was crossing the road with another rider. I’m one of those people that gets out of his seat way before getting to my stop so I can be off the bus first. Because, you know, people are slow and I’m impatient. Yesterday, another rider got up before me, and thus was a few feet in front of me when I stepped onto the street. I glanced over my shoulder, saw no one at the stop sign behind me, and started across.

That’s when a silver SUV came around the corner without slowing, hit the other rider straight on in the left leg and struck me in the left elbow and ran over my foot. The other rider was knocked off his feet and onto the road. I was simply spun around. Thankfully the driver stopped – not that he had much choice; a hit and run would have meant driving over the man laying in front of his car – and immediately called 911. I sat down with the other victim and talked with him and made sure he was ok. I asked if there was anything I could do for him. He told me he needed to call his wife to tell her she needed to pick up his daughter. It’s amazing how, even when badly injured, a parent’s first thought is to their child.

What followed was what you’d expect. Local police showed along with an ambulance. The EMTs immediately went to work on my fellow bus rider after making sure that my elbow wasn’t shattered. While the EMTs lifted the injured man onto a stretcher, the local police waited with me for the state police (since the accident happened on a state road). As my fellow rider and victim was being rolled toward the back of the ambulance he smiled, thanked me for sitting with him, and shook my hand. That moment, those few seconds of shared kindness and experience, remains clearest in my mind of everything that happened.

The Statie arrived, took statements, got back into his car and spent what felt like thirty hours writing up his police report. When he finished, he handed me the legal-sized, typed report – do they have printers in police cars? ’cause that’s crazy! - and said, “Normally I’d tell you to call your car insurance company, but you weren’t in your car, so…”

I’m not sure how the other man is. I haven’t heard, and don’t know when and if I will. As for me: my elbow hurts. Mostly it looks bruised (in two places, on opposite sides of my elbow) (no, I’m not exactly sure what happened in those microseconds, but I think my elbow may have hit the car and the side view mirror) and hurts when I bend it all the way. Ice and naproxin has kept the swelling down, at least. I have a doctor’s appointment this afternoon where I’ll get the elbow checked out and I should know more after that.

At the time of the accident it didn’t occur to me that on any other day it would have been me at the front of the line. Me in the direct path of that SUV. Me being lifted onto a stretcher. The randomness of that coincidence is going to stay with me long after my elbow heals.

To everyone who showed concern and checked in on me: Thank you. It meant a great deal.

The Genesis Riverside Run followed a gentle trail along the river, past both Heinz Field and PNC Park and back again. The morning was cool and sunny, which was a blessing considering I haven’t learned to run in real heat yet. The only time during the run when I knew my pace was at the first mile marker. 9:14. Slower than the pace I’d been hitting in the two weeks leading up to the race, probably because I’d hung back in the thick starting line crowd for the early part of the run. Passing people on a narrow path with a drop into the river on one side isn’t the easiest thing to do. From there I ran blind, figuring I was going to at least finish in less than 30 minutes. As I approached the finish line, I heard a father calling out to his son.

“Sprint! You can make 26!”

26 minutes? What? I looked up and saw the finish line clock. 25:58. I sprinted. Of course I sprinted.

I refused to believe that time until they posted my official chip time Sunday morning. There was no way I’d taken 30 seconds a mile off of my fastest time, was there? Not when that first mile hadn’t gone that well. Except that’s exactly what I did. 25 minutes and 46 seconds. That’s 8:18 a mile. 30 seconds faster than I’d ever run.

It’s the first time in a while – in years, probably – that I realized I hadn’t already reached my limits and that there was possibility within me I hadn’t begun to explore. There was an average runner in me, down there somewhere, just waiting for me to work my ass off to find it. If I can do this, if I can run a race when I literally never had before August, maybe it’s time to stop fearing I’ve hit my limit in the parts of my life that really matter. After a difficult two years, through which I’ve allowed the creeping tendrils of despair and powerlessness to wind around every part of my life, this is a lesson I desperately needed. I never expected an athletic event to be such an important step in finding a way to believe in myself again. Yet here we are.

I’d like to draw your attention to my awesome looking custom shirt in the pictures below. When I said I’d be doing this 5k back in January, someone went out of their way to ensure I wouldn’t back out. She made a joke that, in return, I should fly the colors of her empire. Did I say empire? I meant Asylum. Like a good lackey, I take the jokes of the Overlord very seriously and enlisted the wonderful, kind and brilliantly talented QuoterGal to make this a possibility. The result was the logo on the shirt you see in the pictures below.

Thank you, QuoterGal, for designing such an awesome shirt. To the Overlord: I’m proud to have run for the asylum team, and pleased as hell to have been able to express my gratitude publicly through my 3.1 miles of riverside racing. Thank you for making it more likely that I’ll die by your hands instead of heart disease.

Next: the grueling march toward my and Erin’s Disney Wine and Dine Half Marathon. Wish me luck.

What The Heck Is Mass Effect And Why Are You Writing About A Video Game’s Narrative Structure?

Because I’m a nerd? Fine, I’ll start with the first part of the question.

Mass Effect is a trilogy of video games. It’s a big, honking science fiction epic that not only takes you through a continuing story,  but allows you to import your character – along with all the choices and their consequences – into subsequent chapters. The level of investment this built in players was unlike anything I’ve seen from a video game. You ended up not simply caring about the plot. You cared about the people, just like you do when you read the best books or watch the greatest television series. I hopped in late. Mass Effect 1 never came out for Playstation, so I didn’t start playing until the second game. That didn’t change how deeply the game grabbed me, and how much I needed to see how my choices played out in the finale.

That level of investment is a double edged sword as the conclusion nears. It’s hard to end any story. Every story builds up a pile of conflicting needs that can’t all be paid off in a way that will satisfy everyone. Everyone’s prioritized what they want and how they think they want it by the time they’ve gotten there. It’s even worse in series writing, because at least when reading one book or playing one game you’re under the sway of the writers through the course of things. Between volumes people build expectations separate from the intentions of the author. Players coming into Mass Effect 3 had desires and expectations so varied that there was bound to be disappointment.

What I didn’t expect was the level and depth of that disappointment.

By the time I got to the ending, everyone else had finished,  gotten angry, talked about it at length, and pressured Bioware into releasing a Directors Cut version of the ending (to be released In The Future), so I knew people were upset. I just didn’t know why. I figured I’d either fall into the camp of detractors or be one of the quieter voices defending the ending against unfair attacks (much as I do for Battlestar Galactica). What I didn’t expect was a reaction so mixed that I needed to write a multi-thousand word blog post to make sense of it.

Let’s Get Something Out of the Way

You know what didn’t suck about the ending? The ending.

Stay with me for a second. The antagonists in Mass Effect are a Lovecraftian race of ancient, synthetic lifeforms. Old Machines – the Reapers -  from the dark space between galaxies who have been the architects of a cycle of galactic extinction events. This leads into a recurring theme in the series: the conflict between organic life and the synthetic, artificial intelligences they create. The end of Mass Effect 3 is absolutely focused on this theme. The choices Commander Shepard is given (Shepard being your main character) branch out from that conflict. Do you control and enslave synthetic life to keep them from one day wiping out all organic life? Destroy all synthetic life to protect it? Or do you bring the two together, leading to a hybridization of the two so that they might life in peace?

That ending is awesome. The way those choices grow out of both the subplots of the series and what we know of the Reapers was immensely satisfying, and those who’ve said this ending comes out of left field were not, in my opinion, paying attention. My friend Nick goes into this in a lot better detail, so I’ll let you read his thoughts if you want. For my part, I want to talk about how Mass Effect 3 botched everything else about this wonderful conclusion, both through gameplay mechanics and story structure.

The Stupidity of a Score

Let’s start with game mechanics, since it’s the least juicy thing we have to talk about. If you have zero interest in this, feel free to skip to the next section.

In all of the Mass Effect games there are certain things you can do that affect the ending. Specifically, doing a lot of things – or making certain choices – gives you a better ending than not. This might mean certain side characters survive, or whether or not your ship is lost in the battle, or even whether or not Shepard makes it through. Each game has had its own way of doing this, and it’s the difference in the way Mass Effect 2 handles the endgame in comparison to Mass Effect 3 where the problems begin.

In Mass Effect 2, the overall thrust of the story was gathering a team to take on a likely suicide mission. There were certain characters you had to pick up, but there were also a handful of teammates you could convince to join you or skip. Whether or not you’ve picked up a full team is the first thing that determines how the game ends. This leads to the suicide mission itself, which is, without a doubt, the single most intense and involving game ending I’ve ever played. At every step, you must choose which teammates must accomplish which tasks, like a general directing her troops. It’s not obvious at first, but who you choose to send on what task decides who lives and dies. Making the wrong call gets people killed. People you’ve come to care about. Getting a lot of people killed means you might not have enough of a team left to help you escape. The ending in Mass Effect 2 is based both on understanding who the people on your team are and the choices you make based on that understanding. It’s a totally character based conclusion to a game that’s essentially an action shooter.

In Mass Effect 3, none of your choices matter. Not one. At least they only matter in your head, carrying the value you’ve placed on them. No matter what choices you’ve made, how the game ends is determined by a number. As you rally the galaxy to war, this abstract numerical representation of your strength goes up. That number and that number alone determines not only who survives and dies, but determines whether or not Shepard gets all the choices presented in the endgame. It’s ludicrous and goes against the deep sense of choice and consequence present in the series. Why does the Super Machine Intelligence at the end care how many War Assets you’ve built when it offers you its final choice? It shouldn’t, and that it does is insane. Worse, fleet strength seems to change what the choice does. As in, if you don’t have enough ships, the explosion you cause blows up Earth…even though those War Assets can’t do anything to stop a Big Explosion. That everything in Mass Effect 3 comes down to an abstract score is devastating.

Yet, that still could be a minor problem if they hadn’t gotten their story structure all backwards.

What About Earth?

Mass Effect 3’s marketing focused on a clear idea: Take Back Earth. The game opens with the fall of humanity’s home to the Reapers, and there is a steady pulse of wanting to go back home, save the survivors and retake your world. Every human character talks about how much they hated leaving Earth behind. Every alien race you bring in to help offers assistance in the reclamation of Earth. When the endgame comes, returning to Earth becomes a necessity of galactic survival. The game is about Earth’s fall as much as it’s about the larger threat.

Yet, in the game’s final minutes, the salvation of Earth drops off the table entirely. Your final choice results in one and only one shot of people on the planet below. The fate of your home – whether it could be rebuilt, whether enough people survived to make the battle worth it – is left entirely up in the air. It’s just ignored, left as a side-note to history. This is a problem of the writers’ own making. Starting the game with the pain of Earth’s fall made the stakes personal. Because they neither pay off your efforts in an equally personal way nor pivot away from that goal earlier in the story, it feels like a cheap tactic to get players invested. If your story is not going to care, in the end, whether Earth survived or not – if it’s not going to really delve into what its fate means – then it shouldn’t make it the entire focus of the story. I cared about Earth. Really and truly cared about taking it back. When the end played out, it wasn’t obvious right away that the failure to give some kind of closure on it was such a problem. Over time, though, it became the core of the larger issue in the game’s ending.

No frakking denouement.

I Wanted An Ending, Not Just Rolling Credits

Here’s what happens at the end of Mass Effect 3. You make a choice. Music starts to play. You see about two minutes of stuff happening: Reapers blowing up on Earth, things exploding in space, your ship – the Normandy – outrunning an explosion and then crashing on some unnamed planet, and a couple of side characters walking out of the wreckage. If you’re lucky, you might also see your main character, Shepard, take a single breath, because She’s Alive. That’s it. That’s the whole ending. No matter what choice you make.

The problem isn’t exactly that the ending is brief, though that’s a factor. The ending of Mass Effect 2 is as brief as Mass Effect 3. The difference is in Mass Effect 2 most of what you care about – who lives, who dies, how screwed up they are – is addressed during the gameplay of the ending itself. All those side characters into whom you invested time and emotion live and die before your eyes. In Mass Effect 3, your team and crew stay offstage for most of the ending and disappear entirely in the last twenty minutes. We have no idea what they’re going through and how they feel about what Shepard is doing. Since we don’t get any resolution on them in game, that leaves it to the denouement to bring us closure.

Instead of a denouement, we get the Final Fantasy 7 ending: a shot of a vista with a few of our characters looking out over it. The end.

Look, not every story needs Return of the King’s thirty ending structure (though I am on record as liking the extended close of that movie). Sometimes things can stop in place and your mind can take the characters forward from there. I don’t need to see that this one got married, that one had kids, she became president, and he went crazy. What I do need is some sense that the people with whom I journeyed got an ending.

Proof that I don’t need Maximum Closure before I continue (this is largely spoiler-free): I recently watched Terriers, a show that was cancelled at the end of its first season, but whose final moments serve as a perfect ending. It basically cuts off just prior to a decision – drive straight or turn left – but works because that choice gives us a place to travel in our heads. It tells us their life will continue, in one direction or the other, and lets us think about what they might do based on what we’ve learned about them. The point was that this was an ending, not just a failure to give us context as things wrapped up.

What Mass Effect 3 lacked was that context. After 40 hours of gameplay in this game alone – that doesn’t count the time you might have put into the first two games – wanting to see what the lives of your comrades will be in this brave new world is not an unreasonable expectation. I don’t say this to mean that writers should ever make a story call based on giving readers exactly what they want or expect. The point is that an ending should both grow out of the story before it and comment on what it meant. An ending doesn’t just project the world forward. It reflects back on the events that led to it.

Terriers leaving us on a choice between friends does that. Ignoring a dozen people we care about at the end of a galactic war does not. Unless the point was that no one but Shepard actually mattered, which is the exact opposite of what the series seemed to be saying. Giving us closure only on Shepard and a few big ideas minimizes the importance of the individual actors that had been such a key part of the Mass Effect series. The lack of a denouement hurts the story by abandoning the relationships and people left behind. It goes against what the series stood for: That people matter, and that your definition of ‘people’ is far too narrow.

The End of the End

I liked Mass Effect 3 far more than I didn’t. It’s just that every story problem is backloaded into the final minutes. Everything up to Shepard’s desperate, limping walk into the final sequence is pure brilliance. I nearly cried three times during the game as characters exited the story. That’s how much they made me care. I was totally sold through most of the end. It wasn’t until the credits started rolling that I realized how little Bioware had done to make the choices and relationships I’d built matter. It left a hole in the story for me, a hole that kept me from doing what I love to do in the days after something ends: roll the memory around in my mind, feel out the texture of the completed piece and explore the emotions it left me with. The lack of texture and context died me this. I cared about those people, and I wasn’t given the faintest idea what life would be like for those who survived.

This is why too-brief endings can be a problem. Shepard made a galaxy-altering decision. That decision’s weight should have been felt in how it affected the people about whom we cared. The sad, slow endings of Return of the King showed us what a world handed over into the dominion of men meant to the non-humans left to witness it. The world changed, and we understood the change through their eyes. Mass Effect 3 leaves us with a scattered set of images – mostly of explosions – and not a clue as to what the repercussions and consequences are.

The ending of Mass Effect isn’t a failure, but it fails in the way so many endings do: in misunderstanding what it asked us to care about and why. It nailed the big honking plot it had set up, but did so in a way that betrayed the people, details and context that made the plot matter. The irony is that in another game, with lesser writing and weaker characters, I wouldn’t care enough to be upset.

It’s a reminder to writers and storytellers that how you leave your audience changes where they think you took them. Stick the landing.

Remember that short story I wrote? The one I said I was proud of? And remember how it was only out for Kindle at first, and how angry you were at me because you didn’t own a Kindle and couldn’t read it? (You were angry, right? I mean, you wanted to read it so badly that you just burned with fury, right? Right?) Let your anger fade away, for there is no longer any reason for you not to buy Hot Mess today! You can buy it in print, for Kindle, for your Nook, or through in any other electronic format you can imagine. You can read not only my short story, “She Says Goodbye Tomorrow”, but five other excellent speculative fiction tales about climate change.

It’s a great collection. If feedback can be trusted, you could even be forgiven for getting excited about reading my short, because people are saying nice things and it can’t be because they’re afraid of me. Not even ants are afraid of me. It’s one of the best things I’ve written, and it’s now available in a million formats. Let’s run the options down again.

• Buy a book! An actual, physical book! It’s available on CreateSpace from Amazon!
• Your Kindle is sexy, no? Mine is. It can be even sexier with a copy of Hot Mess in MobiPocket format.
• I don’t own a Nook, but you do, and your Nook demands you help the environment. Whatever the Nook format is called: Buy that!
• Finally, if you don’t want an actual book (why not, though?), and don’t have a Kindle or a Nook, you can still get a digital copy from Smashwords!

If you already bought a copy, thank you. Seriously. Thank you. A lot. If not, you really should give it a try. I’m not saying that for the 20 cents a copy I make, but because there’s good writing in this book and you should absolutely read good writing. Even when it’s written by me.

I found this video a few years ago on Andrew Sullivan’s blog, The Daily Dish (err…I guess it’s The Daily Beast, now). Like all cool things you find online, it lurks at the back of your brain until something reminds you of it and then you show everyone you know, they tell you they’ve already seen it (because you showed it to them twice already) and then it goes back into hibernation. But it is really cool, and so even if you’ve already seen it you should absolutely watch it again. Trust me. Think about how much work went into this thing, and how awesome something can be when someone with a vision puts in the time, money and effort to see it through.

One of my friends, @sporkening, went on a passionate and insightful tear on Twitter earlier this week, beginning with Vogue’s article about a mom putting her 7 year-old on a diet and moving into the body image issues of her family. She was hitting some really powerful notes, and I asked her to collect her tweets and to post them somewhere lest they vanish into the Twitter Ether before people could read them. That’s when she reminded me that I’m the one with the blog, not her.

I’m just going to let her take it from here. Sporks, thank you for sharing your thoughts, on an important issue which I could never discuss so personally and insightfully.

I got a Kindle Fire a bit ago, and recently made the mistake of signing up for the Vogue (I read it for the pictures!) free trial. The first issue I got had an essay by a mom about putting her seven-year-old on a diet. The article has been discussed here: http://jezebel.com/5895602/ and here: http://nymag.com/daily/fashion/2012/03/mom-reacts-vogues-fat-7-year-old-girl-story.html . It took me several days to even bring myself to read the article and it’s been in my mind ever since.

I’m the oldest of four kids, and I was always “the fat one,” even when I wasn’t fat. My parents’ weight has ranged from slightly overweight to obese. As far back as I can remember, they were concerned about diet and losing weight. My mom spoke proudly of grapefruit or cabbage soup diets she used to do in college; dieting was a badge of honor, a way to show off one’s willpower. If you were fat you were just putting all your personal failings on display for everyone to see.

One thing you have to understand is that body image pressure in Chile is enormous. When I grew up, the country was like living in Mad Men. But only for women; there’s a popular saying in Chile that a man should be “feo, hediondo, y peludo” (ugly, smelly, and hairy). Women are not allowed such liberty. Flight attendants were made to step on a scale to keep their jobs; classified ads for job openings asked for people with “buena presencia” (“good presence”) which meant “no fat or ugly women.” So my parents’ (and particularly mother’s, a working woman) obsession with weight was largely based on fear of what life would be like for us if we didn’t stay within the lines.

My mom didn’t forbid me to wear things because they were too revealing or trashy; she forbade me to wear things because she thought I was too fat for them. I learned early on about “slimming” colors, the right and wrong direction of stripes, and so on. As soon as I was old enough, I started joining my parents in their dieting. On the one hand, I desperately wanted to lose weight; on the other hand, I was always a rebellious child, so I avoided “diet” foods–I didn’t even taste grapefruit until I was an adult–and organized exercise. But secretly, I would plot to systematically eliminate most foods from my diet: start with starches, maybe; then cut out fats; then meats! And more, and more, until there was nothing left but lettuce. I came to think that anorexic women were lucky. To have such willpower!

So this Vogue essay hits close to home. I understand that as a parent of a young girl you make a lot of the decisions for her, and food is one of those decisions. I understand wanting to protect your child from a harsh world, and wanting to teach her about health. But health is more complicated than just “fat;” I have been fat and healthy, and fat and unhealthy–the difference is staggering. I can’t imagine ever thinking, “I wish my mom had taught me to diet harder.”

What I do wish my mother had taught me was that fat wasn’t the worst thing you could be; to not hate myself, in times both skinny and fat.

I’m 32 now, and I still struggle with all of this. Some days are better than others. I fall down a lot. And my parents? My parents are still fat, and still unhappy about it. This seems like a bad way to spend three decades.

Every time I speak to my mom on the phone, she tells me that this is the fattest she’s ever been. “Elen, but really, I’m so fat right now. I’m going to start working out. And go on a diet. No starches, no fats.”