Attention, My Books, Newsletter, Perception, Pipsqueak Articles

Living with Anxiety

by Olga Werby • March 25, 2020

We are week two into isolation, living in a social distancing dystopia. Everything is strange. Our eating and sleeping habits, our daily routines, our physical workouts, and our work and school schedules and setups are all completely disrupted. It feels like we are living in wartime, and yet it’s Spring outside. The bombs are not dropping on our heads. The flowers are blooming… This disconnect between what we experienced based on our higher-function reasoning (as presented by newsmedia, social media, crazy conversations with friends and family) and what we sense directly through our eyes and ears is very difficult to reconcile. People are dying (they really are) and yet you can take an evening stroll outside and smell the flowers. Doctors are sharing horrific tales of shortages and insanity in their hospitals, and yet the birds are singing and the sun warms our skin. It feels crazy! This is emotional dissonance. Mammals like us humans are not built for prolonged stress — it destroys our systems. We are “designed” for short bursts of adrenaline as a lion stalks us down the savanna. Worrying day after day is very destructive to our health. For those who would like to read more…

Stories in the Age of Pandemic

by Olga Werby • March 11, 2020

I moved from New York to California in 1989, the year the Bay Bridge collapsed due to a powerful earthquake, the year all those people died, the year I was run over by a car while crossing the street, the year I was supposed to have gotten married but learned that my fiancé was cheating on me with my best friend. Those were just the highlights, there was much more insane stuff that happened but if I wrote it down, no one would believe it to be a true story. My life, that year, was an overwrought soap opera. It was my year of emotional pandemic. But it got better. I learned to walk again. I got my doctorate. I met the love of my life. I had two amazing kids. And now I even get to imagine whole universes in my head. I live a pretty amazing life. I’m very lucky. But it was a journey. 1989 was my year of living dangerously — I read every doomsday apocalyptic dystopian novel I could get my hands on. Literature saved my life, literally! If not for the ability to escape into another world, into another life, I would have not…

Cool books, peril loops, tech talk, and other sci-fi reading traps

by Olga Werby • January 10, 2020

Rock? Or classical? Sometimes, good content is difficult to classify. But once you find someone good, it almost always works out (well, except for the last chord–what happened there?). I’ve mentioned before–when I find an author I like, I read everything they’ve ever written. This works for music, too. It’s a safe strategy, for the most part. But it does send me searching on a regular basis for someone new to love. Writers simply can’t write as fast as I can read. It’s one of the reasons that as a writer I don’t feel like I’m in competition with others in my genre–writing is a slow, slow process. So for the last year, I’ve gone on an adventure of searching for new authors to love. I’ve read multiple collections of short stories, old and new. And I also read a few biographies, notably Isaac Asimov’s last book, where he describes not only his life but also the history of the science fiction as it became its own literary category. [A bit of an aside: I met Isaac Asimov in New York many years ago at a science fiction convention. I thought he was a total *ss in person. His autobiography…

Jew-ish Sci-Fi

by Olga Werby • July 15, 2019

This month, I’ve jumped in head first into dark and cold waters of book marketing. I’ve learned a lot that was new to me but was probably obvious to any salesperson — other people (unlike me) like to read very specific genres of books. For example, if you are into a billionaire werewolf romances, you are NOT into werebear billionaire romances. Yes, people like what they like and there are many authors who are happy to write for very niche audiences. But I read lots of different things, fiction AND non-fiction. I read WWII spy novels AND science fiction. I like action adventure AND historical fantasy. My taste in books is as broad as the stories I like to write. But apparently, that’s not good for marketing. My books are all so different that I’ve been having a hard time zeroing in on a unifying theme for my stories. And then it hit me — I write Jewish Science Fiction…or Jew-ish Sci-Fi. So what’s Jew-ish Sci-Fi? It’s a hero journey to save the world, where the hero belongs to a tight group of outsiders forced to make their way in the world by their talents and smarts and who are…

Forty Years of Cultural Dissonance

by Olga Werby • June 10, 2019

This May was the fortieth anniversary of my family’s arrival in America. We came as refugees. My husband and I celebrated this momentous event (this marks over two-thirds of my life here) by visiting the Tenement Museum in downtown New York City. The biggest takeaway was the strong sense of “strangers in a strange land” mentality. People arrived not knowing the language or customs, not having a place to sleep or an ability to source work. It was scary. It took a very strong impetus to leave all that one knew and understood behind, to leave family and friends, to leave familiar food and places…to leave behind the mother tongue. (Did you know that the word “cow” is not under K in a dictionary? How are people supposed to find words when they don’t even start with the letter that they sound? Back then, I ended up drawing a cow in the middle of a sentence to finish my homework.) Without a language in common, it is very difficult to forge social ties. It is the main reason people “bunch up” by their cultural heritage into neighborhoods like “Little Italy,” “China Town,” “Little Russia,” “Jewishberg,” “Japantown,” “La Pequeña Habana,” “Little…

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