Failure to Launch

The often-postponed launch party for Rhonda Wray: Raptor Wrangler (which grew to encompass my forthcoming book Approaching Storm) has been reconfigured to something small, intimate, and well-ventilated. Co-author Sally Smith and her husband are having some serious health problems, and the risk isn’t worth it. 

Thanks for saving the date. I’m not sure if I’ll be throwing any launch parties – ever – unless I can figure out how to make high tech socially distanced parties that are still fun. 

I’ve actually been re-thinking my novel-writing hobby over this. Originally it was an excuse to throw parties and travel, two things I normally enjoy doing, even more when they’re deductable business expenses. Covid has complicated that and made it hazardous. And on a different level, my recently-acquired agoraphobia has finally gotten me to start talking to a therapist. 

During the pandemic, I grew to love and appreciate my music friends even more. Music sustained me through all the isolation, confinement, uncertainty. At the same time, a lot of my relationships with my literary friends fractured, because science fictional people became my primary source of social anxiety. 

Author Stephanie Burke recently had an incident at a convention wherein a person known as Lisa Adler-Golden ambushed her in public to yell at her over what turned out to be bogus charges, Google it if you’re interested. I’ve run into a few of Adler-Golden’s clones over the years, this is the kind of performance art they like to do to people outside their clique, especially if they’re neurodiverse. Before the pandemic I could probably defend myself by discussing my litigation-related life experience, but these days I’m inarticulate and generally bad at verbalizing, and likely to start using foul language if an old nemesis suddenly appears. In fact, the person who was instrumental in my Single Instance of Workplace Sexual Harassment is going to be pontificating at Worldcon. Meanwhile, Nine Inch Nails is playing at Red Rocks that same weekend, so I’ve made my plans. 

I was still planning a smaller launch party at Baycon in San Mateo, but I’m no longer inviting the general public to that out of concern for Sally’s wellbeing. Plus there’s a very personal story, which I won’t tell with the O. Henry synchronicity intact unless/until I outlive all the other parties, but it involves a major life disappointment, which inspired me to dump all my strong feelings about it into Approaching Storm – only to have an Authoritative Science Fiction Dude tell me in no uncertain terms that I should not write a book like Approaching Storm – because it has sex scenes, and I admitted I’m an asexual writer who had someone with major erotica-writing experience go over those parts to make sure I didn’t write anything too cringey. 

I’ll probably keep writing, because I’m addicted to it now, even though it seems sort of like an exercise in existential absurdity – if I’m not doing it for the money, the rep, the socializing, what’s the point? 

That’s kind of the story of my life as a writer, though. I'm good at things like characters and plots, bad at figuring out what to say. Maybe someday I’ll get it. Until then, I’m just going to keep throwing spaghetti to the wall until it sticks, in a literary sense. And refusing to throw potentially lethal and/or stressful launch parties.