Lilith Saintcrow

You know, dear Readers, that I don’t comment on reviews for a variety of reasons. I’m the first to tell a fellow writer to buck up, ignore the effing reviewers, and be professional.

I saw Alice Hoffman’s Twitter fail the other day, where she called out a Boston Globe reviewer. I winced as I read it. Hoffman was irate because the reviewer had completely given away the plot of the novel–”spoiling” in a major newspaper. She called the reviewer a moron and posted the reviewer’s public email and publicly-posted phone number. Since Hoffman was new to Twitter (fifteen hundred followers when I looked, but I could be wrong and her Twitter account’s been deleted) the reviewer wasn’t deluged. But still, plenty of people have been gleefully trashing Hoffman since. Including people I used to follow on Twitter.

And you know…even though I think Hoffman was a noob for getting angry publicly, I understand.

One disclaimer: I am a big fan of Hoffman’s work. Seventh Heaven and Here On Earth are two of my favorite books EVER. She’s an autobuy for me, and I think she deserves the terms “genius” and “magical realist.” Plus I’m a fellow writer (though just a hack, and not in her league at all) and, well, I feel her pain. I’ve been tempted to sound off many a time, even knowing what a bad f!cking idea it is.

Here’s the thing: we are awash, on the Internet, with people calling themselves “reviewers.” Pretty much everyone’s got a dog in the fight. There’s Amazon reviews, which are a sinkhole of comments that may or may not be about the book or item in question. There’s Internet “review sites” that do follow Sturgeon’s Law–many of them are there to stroke the “reviewer’s” ego, and end up being crap. There are group review sites where the group dynamic has more in common with the locker room or a Plastics clique.

I think a review site that does low-bullshit, high-quality, and scorchingly funny reviews is Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. Looking at it and comparing it to other sites of its ilk, you might be tempted to see the foul-mouthing and the bad grades and the cover snark as all alike. But I have always found the Smart Bitches to stand out from their contemporaries for two reasons: honesty and professionalism, both in short supply when we’re talking about “reviewers.”

Candy and Sarah have reviewed some of my books. They put disclaimers on the reviews because both Candy and Sarah have a personal (well, in Sarah’s case, as personal as emailing a little bit over personal questions etc. can make it) relationship with me, and they put that up front for other readers to be aware of. They savaged the books on some points (rightfully so, I might add) and noted their good points too (which I was grateful for.) I did not feel like the reviews were personal attacks, or that Candy or Sarah had anything to “prove” by the reviews. I was happy with them, even if they stung.

Such is not always the case. I’ve read reviews where the reviewers obviously had a personal problem with something I’d said on my blog, or something they thought I said, or even something someone else said or a bad hair day or something, and they took it out in the review, on my book. I’ve read screeds that don’t even spell the characters’ names right, where it was obvious they didn’t even read more than the cover copy, spoilers galore, and a whole host of inappropriate and highly inflammatory reviews. They stung, yes. They were out there on the Net for everyone to see. And in some cases there were the usual blog swarm of Yes Men piling on to show how cool they were by trashing the subject du jour. Which just happened to be my book on that day.

Yeah, it made me mad. Yeah, I’ve bitched about it to the Selkie over drinks. Yeah, I’ve written private, flaming responses and deleted them lest I be tempted. Hey, I’m only human.

This is why I understand Hoffman’s frustration. We are literally drowning in reviewers, online and off. The Boston Globe reviewer did give spoilers, and did clunk through an embarrassing (and in my opinion, unwarranted) bad review. (The review reads to me like the reviewer wanted to cause a bit of ruckus by panning the book, for her own reasons. But that’s just me.) The seduction of the easy response was there on Twitter, and Hoffman took it. When you’re mad you don’t think straight. I’m pretty sure that at some point in the future I’m going to be mad enough to break my own rules and cause an Internet kerfluffle. The flesh, alas, is weak.

But still, I’ll say it again: I understand and share Hoffman’s frustration. Being a writer means getting rejected and judged over and over again. We’re judged by agents, editors, publishers, and finally reviewers and readers. Every time we turn around we’re told our manuscript could be better with X or isn’t good enough because of Y. The prevailing attitude in our culture that devours the content we produce and kicks us in the teeth in myriad ways for being “artists” and producing it does not help. “Don’t be such a big baby! You chose to be a writer, you gotta have a thick skin!”

Just because I have a thick skin doesn’t mean someone has to attack me to prove it, and it doesn’t mean I need to put up with inappropriate crap. It also doesn’t mean inappropriate crap hurts less. And just because a writer chooses to write those books you do or don’t love does not make them your bitch, your property, or your punching bag/whipping boy. A lot of people, however, did not get that memo. A lot of people will never get that memo, and dealing with it as a writer is wearying.

“Wait!” you could say. “Alice Hoffman is (that magic thing) a NYT Bestseller! She doesn’t have anything to prove! Why couldn’t she just keep her mouth shut?”

You know…I try to feel better when I read reviews by people who obviously read and loved my work, people who got it and liked it, who maybe had some quibbles but overall liked it. The problem is, we’re trained to accentuate the negative, so to speak. We’re trained–and I don’t know if this is writers in general, or women writers because we’re women and taught from the cradle to make nice–to give greater weight to criticism, warranted or not, than to praise. Praise seems evanescent, while the hurt lingers.

I don’t think a writer ever feels like they’ve proved themselves. If they do, they tend to go down what I call the Anne Rice Road–I’m thinking about her famous comment (I can’t dig up a link, so this is as best as I remember it) about how she’d worked her ass off for many years to get to the point where she didn’t have to let an editor touch her beautiful prose. If you, as a writer, understand the danger of that line of thought and choose not to go there, the alternative is to listen and be vulnerable over some things. Including a crappy-ass review that dumps, for reasons that do not seem to you to be justified, all over work you spent years producing and agonizing over while it’s in production.

Which brings me back to the Internet. A lot of writers from even just-slightly-older generations do not get that the Internet is a huge effing echo chamber that isn’t ubiquitous even though it seems like it is to everyone on it. About the fiftieth time I saw a review site where the dominant tone was “we’re too smart for anybody, especially the writers whose work we’re gleefully insulting” and saw the long line of Yes-Men comments, I flashed back to high school and though, haven’t we f!cking outgrown this?

I think that a lot while reading a lot of reviews–and not just reviews of my own work, thank you.

No, we apparently haven’t outgrown high school. When I worked retail I was pretty sure 60% of the population never does. Since I’ve been on the Internet I’ve modified that slightly–I’m pretty sure 75-80% of the population never does. (What can I say? I’m an optimist.)

So, while I winced when I saw a writer I adore and consider a class act losing her sh!t a little on Twitter, I understood. God howdy, how I ever understood. The thing that comforts me is the cyclical nature of such things–in fandom, for example, you stick around for a year or two and you start seeing the patterns. “We’re having this argument again?!” is a cry I’ve heard many a time in fandom, and it seems to repeat itself on the Internet ad nauseum.

It doesn’t take the sting out of a vendetta-review, or even out of mildly bad reviews that hit on a really bad f!cking day and make the top of my head fly off. Still, it provides a grain of salt that keeps one from losing one’s mind some days.

That is, I’m afraid, the best I’m going to get. I am not resigned to it, but I am a realist. I don’t know if it’s ever going to get better, due to the nature of the Internet as a nondiscerning echo-chamber. But I do know that in a couple weeks it’s going to be something else, someone else losing their sh!t on Twitter, and another crop of reviews flooding around the bilges. There will be ones that hurt, and ones that don’t. In the end, the ones that hurt are just like every other voice in your head or elsewhere that picks at one’s self esteem and tells you to quit. You can’t let it get so loud it drowns out the story.

The trick is to just keep writing.

Play nice in the comments, folks. Thanks.

Good news! Night Shift, the first Jill Kismet book, is now part of Hachette Book’s Open Book program! (There are other cool books you can read for free, including Jeff Somers’s most excellent Digital Plague, here.) Go, read, enjoy!

I finished the zero draft of the third Strange Angels book last night. It’s bitty, weighing in at about 54K, mostly because there are significant chunks of it that I had to have the ending before I could go back and fill them in. So now the book can rest for a little bit, and I can start (probably in a week or so) at the very beginning and get it into reasonable first-draft shape. Which is the last huge push before I send it off to the editor and start chewing my nails while thinking they’re going to hate it and hate me and oh god oh god oh god!!!!!)

In other words, business as usual.

I really should not have bombed out to the store to get milk and bread before having my coffee today. Not only do I not deal well with the world while I’m precaffeinated, but there was a whole swarm of overentitled people on cell phones–I counted five while driving all the way to Trader Joe’s, seven in the store, three in the parking lot, another two driving to another store closer to home for other stuff, four inside THAT store, and another two on the two-block drive to get back home with my trunk full of perishable purchases. WTF, people? It’s like some sort of disease. PUT THE DAMN CELL PHONE DOWN WHILE YOU DRIVE, MMMKAY? And furthermore, don’t stand blocking a whole grocery aisle while you discuss every. goddamn. item. with. your. significant other. Just don’t do it. And I really don’t need to hear about who got the clap from who at what party. (I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP.) It is just insane.

All right, I’m going to take my Ranty McRantypants self elsewhere. Which is a huge relief for everyone, I suspect.

Over and out.

Cross-posted from The Deadline Dames.

This Friday writing post starts out with a question someone asked me on Twitter. (Look, I know–the publicity guy made me do it. I SWEAR.) Anyway, I often answer industry questions in my own little idiosyncratic way. This time someone asked me “Is writing a good book all you need to get an agent?”

Erm, well, how can I put this politely?

Oh, hell no.

A “good book” is not all you need. You also need discipline, people skills, the ability to follow directions and work well with others, patience, a thick skin–the list goes on and on. This is not easy, and the people who gain representation from agents or an editor’s attention do not “just write a good book” any more than Olympic athletes “just practice a little.”

It is important to “write a good book,” one that is as polished as you can make it. But that’s just a first step in a long journey. I won’t be talking about grammar, punctuation, or story here. I’m going to be talking about the process you need to go through to get other people excited about your work–excited enough that they will spend time and money promoting it and bringing it to other people. This is what agents and editors DO.

* First, recognize that agents and editors are not your adversaries. They are people who love books, love reading, and love the process of bringing a book to print. (They wouldn’t be doing this otherwise.) They also have to make a living, just like writers do. I’ve seen a lot of writers shoot themselves in the foot by getting combative about agents or editors. (Here’s a note to authors, aspiring and otherwise: the Internet is not private. ‘Nuff said.)

* Also, recognize that agents/editors read a LOT of CRAP. Let me tell you something. I read slush for a small press once. 97% of everything that made it past the first hoop (see below) had egregious spelling/punctuation/other errors in the first page–hell, mostly in the first paragraph. Those errors, which could have been fixed with a little bit of care, time, thought and effort, got those manuscripts ungraciously tossed. I am constantly amazed at people who think turning in a manuscript is like shooting off an email. (Or even a blog post. Ha.) It isn’t. I would bet that most of these were first drafts, and that none of them had been spell-checked; the authors thought they could speak English just fine, so what did they need to study sentence structure or punctuation for?

It’s enough to drive a reasonable person right off the cliff. No wonder slush-readers get dyspeptic.

* Follow simple directions. The 97% I refer to above was actually only about 10% of manuscripts I received. The initial 90% arriving at my desk did not follow submission guidelines. So they didn’t even make it past the starting gate.

Let me be ruthlessly honest here. (You knew I would be, anyway.) Submissions guidelines exist for two reasons: to make it easier for the agents to organize, and to find out which “writers” can obey simple rules. If you cannot follow simple submissions guidelines (here’s an example of simple guidelines,) how in the bloody blue blazes can an agent or editor trust you with complex revision tasks, overlapping schedules or in-house proofing rules?

Do not underestimate the utility of a brief, polite email or long-distance call to simply inquire if the posted submissions guidelines are still relevant or if they’ve changed. Do your homework, read the directions, read the listings in Writer’s Market. It will get your manuscript past the first gate.

* Be a flippin’ professional. (This is part of the SECRET-that-isn’t.) You expect an agent to spend his/her time (which is money, because they get paid according to what they sell) pushing your book? You expect a publisher to lay out an advance, the cost of paper, the cost of man-hours editing and typesetting, and the cost of marketing to publish your book? When they don’t initially know you from Adam?

Puh-leeze. You have to EARN that trust before they open their checkbooks. Part of earning that trust is acting like this is a job, and acting according to reasonable rules of human politeness.

A lot of people try to break into publishing because they have a bone-deep belief that they are Speshul and that regular rules don’t apply to them. A teaspoon of that self-love might be healthy, but more than that is like too much pepper–it turns a tasty dish into an inedible mess. Yes, you’re Speshul. Just like everyone else. And like everyone else, you need to get along with other human beings or you won’t get what you want.

Writing is a weird Jekyll-and-Hyde sort of career. There’s just YOU and THE PAGE for a great deal of it. Then there’s the other bit, where you have to get along with agents and editors, not to mention readers at conventions and signings. People skills are necessary, as are patience and a thick skin. You have to avoid and deal with the hard sell. (Hint: it doesn’t work.)

* Be patient, and continue. Agents and editors are constantly looking out for new, fresh voices. They are also constantly swamped. Publishing is a waiting game. While you’re waiting for a rejection letter, you could drive yourself crazy–or you could be working on the next book. The former will drive you, well, crazy. The latter gives you something to do, gives you practice, and widens the number of manuscripts you can have out in the world looking for a home. I call this the “shotgun theory” of publishing. If you keep writing and submitting properly, the chances keep going up that something that you’ve written will find a home somewhere.

I often mention that I was lucky, because a lot of things fell into place for me career-wise. What I say right afterward (and what a lot of newbie “writers” ignore) is that I worked very hard for eight to ten years before my first moment of luck, and worked my ass off afterward so that when more luck came, I was ready to take full advantage of it instead of letting it wither. Flogging just one manuscript is a fool’s game, despite the occasional lottery-winning one-manuscript wonder. I’d rather pay the rent consistently.

* Don’t be precious. I guarantee you, the agents and editors have seen it all before. They’ve had people try to bribe them with chocolate and other assorted things. They’ve had manuscripts arrived on scented, colored paper. They’ve been the victims of well-meaning but incredibly creepy self-promotion from anxious and overeager writers. Don’t be That Guy.

No, you don’t “just need a good book.” You need hard work, professionalism, people skills–all those things you need to be successful in any career, and especially any freelance arts career. Mind you, I’m not saying that people skills can cover up a pile of crap in manuscript form, either. But when I’m working as an editor and I’m given a choice between a Werke of Geeenyus from a Preshus Speshul Snoflake Who The Rules Don’t Apply To or a reasonably solid and decent manuscript from a Professional, I will inevitably take the latter. Because manuscripts can be revised and edited and helped. Speshul Snowflakes…can’t.

Over and out.

I’ll keep food out of politics when politics stay out of my food. (nonhipster mom)

I came across this NYT food blog (hat tip to Kitchenbeard for the link.) The comments are the most instructive part of the piece, don’t skip them.

As someone who delights in (you might almost say, is obsessed with) food, I think about this issue a lot. Food accounts for a huge bit of my budget, and I’m supporting three other people. Right now things are pretty easy, because there’s a supermarket within walking distance, a Trader Joe’s ten minutes down the road, and a working car at my disposal. Not to mention a few bucks from the writing to keep us fed and warm.

Things were not always so good. I remember being poor and I suspect, the vagaries of the writing career being what it is, that I will again confront the problems of the hidden costs of food at some time. Those costs include time, transportation, storage. I’ve invested in a secondhand freezer (dude, twenty bucks for a working freezer? Plus delivery to my house? You bet your sweet bippy, neighbor!) and I have high-quality cookware that is going to last a while. Still, the two huge things necessary for “cheap” home cooking are transportation (got to get the food home) and time. The investment of energy is also a function of time. If you’ve worked for fifteen hours and spent two hours on a bus getting home, you’re not interested in cuisine. You’re interested in cramming something in your mouth and getting to sleep. There’s also the problem of keeping the electricity/gas on.

On the NYT piece above, the commenters seemed largely split between: Those who thought being poor automatically means you’re lazy and obese and so, your food problems are your own concern, quit whining; those who thought a year at college eating Ramen meant they were qualified to talk about what being poor really means; and those well-meaning souls who wanted to help the poor by suggesting they find the time to make beans and rice.

In the course of this I came across the Nonhipster Mom’s analysis of the whole thing.

I think we should have a real discussion about the politics of food in America’s poorest communities, but I think that when the focus of this discussion is about why America’s poorest communities aren’t growing their own microgreens or baking their own bread, we are missing the point so massively that it makes me sick. I want to talk about why there aren’t incentives for major grocery stores to move into neighborhoods where accessability to fresh, affordable food is a major roadblock. I want to talk about the correlation between food and education, especially early childhood education. I want to talk about why people whose food budget exceeds $1200 a month think it’s okay to tell someone who doesn’t own a car that they shouldn’t eat junk food and only does so because that person is stupid.

I want people to understand something about modern poverty: the solutions to this problem aren’t fixed by organics. They’re fixed by understanding what the problem really is.

The problem is the deck is stacked. The deck has ALWAYS been stacked in favor of the rich, and even in countries with social safety nets the game is still rigged. (Incidentally, we like to pretend America has a HUGE social safety net. Thanks to well-fed conservatives dismantling a ton of programs from Reagan’s time to today, we really don’t.) The rigging of the game happens in various ways–John Scalzi wrote about what it’s like to be wrenchingly poor, and Barbara Ehrenreich wrote about the hidden costs of being poor. There are hidden costs everywhere when you’re trying to live on $8-$10 an hour.

The problem is manifold, and it includes (but is not limited to):

* The idea we have that in America, if you’re poor it’s your own fault. Against-all-odds success stories do not prove this any more than spending a dollar guarantees you a lottery jackpot. We have (from most conservatives) the idea that the poor are all lazy, shiftless assholes and (from some liberals) a woolly-headed “Noble Poor” thing, not to mention (from other liberals) the idea that organic or microgardening is the solution. Sound bites like this don’t help, and our social habit of sound bites over reasoned, nuanced analysis doesn’t help either.

* A prohibition against safe, cheap, effective birth control for all women. Don’t even get me started on this. Plenty of people who go on and on railing against abortion and birth control don’t give a damn once the baby’s actually born and needs to be fed and raised. And then there’s the Mommy Tax.

* Decades of corporations and the top 1% of the wealthy systematically throwing money at their interests in our government, and getting concessions to make them richer and the rest of us poorer. Money well spent for them, reasonable to expect them to spend it, not so reasonable for the rest of us to roll over and let them buy the advantage.

* The idea that it’s filthy to organize for better working conditions, and that it’s just “natural free trade” when corporations outsource to countries where worker protection is even more dismal, because it improves their bottom line in the short term. Don’t even get me started about this, either.

* Complete and utter separation from, and ignorance about, how most of our food is produced.

* A collection of junk-food and huge agribusiness lobbies that throw a bunch of money at Congress to make things more comfortable for themselves, and consumers who, due to the above separation and ignorance, don’t see how they can begin to protest.

That’s a very short list. I could go on and on. I have ranted about this many a time in the privacy of my home. I’ve struggled with my weight and with the cheap junk that was sometimes all I had energy for, sometimes all I could “afford” because I didn’t have the time to cook cheaply. I’ve also been poor enough to have a bag of flour and that’s IT, to somehow feed myself and another person on. Right now I’m staying up late at night, going over and over the fact that I have the money now, but if I get sick and can’t work…or if someone in the house gets sick and we get medical bills…or, or, or. Right now this is only a passing fear, one I save against.

I’m goddamn lucky it’s not a reality. I know what it’s like to feel that fear every day, to have it gnaw at your vitals. I understand both that I am in a position of privilege now, and that I may not always be. I’m lucky to have decent cookware, access to the raw materials for cheap cooking, and a freezer. I’m lucky that I don’t have to make those choices. But that does not mean I think those who don’t have all those things are lazy, or stupid. I think the majority of people are doing the best they can and looking out for their own interests. The rich just have more money to throw at their interests, and in our world that speaks louder than altruism or justice most of the time.

But it doesn’t have to, and the solution starts with you and me.

Like I said, I could go on and on. But I’ll content myself with offering a couple of links about cooking on a budget, even though it largely doesn’t approach the problems I’ve been ranting about here. And a couple links about hidden costs:

* CookForGood. If you’ve got access to the raw materials, this is a good site about cooking cheaply.
* The BrokeAss Gourmet: Advice on how to stock a “pantry” and then make meals for under $20. The pantry-stocking section is great.
* The hidden cost of cheap food.
* Nickel and Dimed. Really, if you haven’t read this and you think poor people are “just lazy”…please, please consider reading.

Now I’m going to go hug my kids. Over and out.

Cross-posted to The Deadline Dames.

To round off last week’s post from the vaults, here is the post that immediately followed a year ago. I had planned to wax rhapsodically bitchy about how everyone puts genre fiction down, but others have done it better. So, here’s what I came up with a year ago, instead. Enjoy.

I woke up this morning with a serious case of the crankies. So if I seem a little bloody-minded, dears, that’s why.

I had a whole post about genre planned, but it would probably devolve into a huge slaughter of innocent verbage, full of recondite brimstone and unfounded combative assertions. Such is my mood. So I’ll content myself with two small things this Friday and go vent some of my spleen in fiction.

First, I’d like to make a small observation. An overwhelming number of what we consider “classics” today were seen as “genre” or “trash” fiction in their time. Novels were considered women’s reading (and hence, unSerious) for a very long time; plenty of novelists were supposed to feel ashamed of their success. Lots and lots of things we see as classic (because they have survived) started out as, for want of a better word, schlock.

This hinges on a theory I have that lit fic–the “highfalutin litrachur” genre is supposed to be the redheaded stepchild of–is actually a pretty recent invention. The Selkie and I were talking this over last night and she observed that lit fic is actually so diffuse it can’t be pigeonholed into a genre. There’s a fair amount of accuracy in that observation. I wonder if that diffuseness makes it easier for critics and reviewers to drown it in academese and impress each other, therefore making lit fic “serious” and genre “unserious”.

This is still a foggy idea of mine, so I want to invite other people into the conversation. I’m going to be thinking all week about what genre means, what lit fic means, and where I think the two differ. I don’t think it’s just in shelving or cover art.

Further bulletins as my thoughts coalesce. What do you think, dear Reader?

The second thing I’m going to mention is artistic compression. I use this term to describe the sense of pressurization I feel right before I dive into a big project–in this case, the fourth Kismet book. The outside world becomes an irritation and chores are something to be rushed through so I can get to the real work, which is the boiling of the book inside my head until it’s ready to slide out at varying speeds.

Ugh. That’s a nice mental image, isn’t it.

The sense of compression often returns, as Caitlin Kittredge so aptly describes, near the end of a book. (She calls it “Hibernation Mode”.)

A lot of the creative process seems to involve varying feelings of pressure. There’s the pre-boil of a book, the stages of writing (including the MY GOD THIS BOOK WILL NOT DIE slog halfway to three-quarters of the way through) and the sudden decompression after a book is finished, which involves a lot of spinning aimlessly. There’s a sense of pressure in revisions too, and sometimes after a particularly intense round of revisions I feel drained and bug-eyed as if I’ve just rewritten the goddamn novel.

It is really, really important to think about those feelings of pressure and to identify one’s own creative process, so it isn’t a huge deadly thing each time. A lot of writers seem surprised each and every time by the intensity of the feeling and the emotional drain. No doubt it is surprising, but not analyzing the feeling and reminding oneself that it’s normal can lead to a whole lot of inefficient flailing.

And while I enjoy a good inefficient flail as much as the next person, there’s always the timesuck factor involved. Figuring out your emotional reaction to your artistic process is one of those things that can make you a better writer–or at least, a more productive one. If you’re not blindsided by the compression, if you can take a deep breath and remind yourself that this happened the last few times you worked on a project, the physiological effects (mine include sweating hands, headaches, backaches, feelings of crankiness only rivaled by PMS, and a great deal of synesthetic irritation*), while not receding in intensity, can at least approach the realm of something you can deal with instead of a Huge Fricking Unworkable OMG Problem.

I tend to view the creative process as a technician. If I can figure out how this engine works for me I can get, if not standardised, then at least consistent results out of it, which is what I want. I know a True Artiste is supposed to wait in agony for the numinous descent of the fickle Muse, but I don’t have time for that. I’ve got books to write NOW, dammit.

So, fellow writers, how does your (if you feel it) artistic compression work? Any strategies, tips, tricks to get yourself through? I’m curious, and hoping I’m not utterly batzoid nuts.

Of course, the way I feel this morning, I just might be despite all my hope.

* I use this term loosely, of course. Most of the time my borderline-synesthesia is a happy fillip to daily life, a source of joy and creative connections. But there comes a time in the compression cycle when it just gets to be too much input and I get seriously frazzled, feeling like a delicate sensory instrument being mercilessly whacked by reams of static and messy data pouring in. GAH.