Business Musings: How Entertainment Fits Into Our Lives

Please note: This originally went live on my Patreon page on Sunday night, January 26, 2025. Since then, even more crap has happened in the world and people are freaking out. (Freaking out, btw, does not help. Calm, deliberate, and calculated action helps, along with…well, read the post.) If you want to see most of my business posts these days, you’ll find them on Patreon. I’m only going to post a handful here.

How Entertainment Fits Into Our Lives

I spent the day of 9/11 with the television pegged on CNN, while I talked on the phone and handled e-mail. At the time, Dean and I were traditionally published and a good 80% of our income came from New York City.

We had friends there, friend-family there, and so much business there. I spoke to people, searching for them, figuring out if they were okay or not (and, physically, they were). I informed my agent’s assistant that she was in an evacuation zone, and she needed to leave now, something her boss (who was in Connecticut) apparently hadn’t been willing to do. No one knew what the toxic smoke emanating from the buildings was going to do, so they were evacuating the entire area. I reminded her that she could work from home, because she was afraid she would lose her job if she left.

She got out and she got safe.

Dean, always the most level head in any emergency, grabbed every single extra book we had, along with the books and advanced reading copies that we had stacked up to trade in at Powell’s Bookstore in Portland, Oregon. At the time, we lived in Lincoln City, on the coast.

Dean packed the car and took off for Portland, over two hours away. Neither of us liked that he was going, but we felt he had to. At that moment, we had no idea if the attack was localized to the East Coast or if other major cities were going to get hit. We had no idea what would happen to the economy, especially if the attacks continued, and we had no idea if Dean would be safe as he headed to downtown Portland.

What he knew, and what I quickly realized, was that our entire income stream was about to dry up. We had some money in the bank, but not enough to get us through six months to a year (worst case).

Those ARCs and first editions that he brought to Powell’s were catnip for collectors and he got thousands of dollars for them.

The next morning, Powell’s shut down all book buying. Dean’s Hail Mary journey was prescient and would have been impossible if he had waited even 24 hours.

That money got us to January, which was when the first payments started trickling back out of New York City. He was smart, but he did have to spend the day listening to the chaos coming out of New York and D.C. We had cell phones, but most of us used landlines. Still, I kept him updated on what I knew, and after I reached everyone I could, I spent the day locked in horror, alone with the TV and all of those awful images—some of which no major network has replayed.

By the time he got home, we had to shut it all off. We couldn’t handle the stress anymore. We knew that the future was uncertain—bleak, difficult and frightening. For those of you who were children then or those of you who weren’t even born, this is what it felt like: We had no idea if those planes were the first volley in a war. We were catapulted from a familiar world with familiar patterns into one filled with chaos, uncertainty, death, and violence.

I do not remember what we had for dinner that night. Nor do I remember what we talked about if anything. I do remember that every single cable channel—even the ones that should have been showing classic movies—would break in with updates. Not that the movies were any comfort. Every one that had been scheduled was set in the before times, and some even had images of the World Trade Center—the still-standing World Trade Center, before the big disaster.

So there was no television option. But we had a streaming satellite radio subscription. I turned on one of the stations that just played music—no talk at all—and I think I left it on for days.

I had a book due in two weeks, which was almost laughable. That was the project I was working on. But I couldn’t focus on it. I did not return to my writing desk for ten days. By then, I knew that the book deadline was going to be extended (my editor was not in New York at that time; she had been in France), and I had time.

I wrote a short story called “June Sixteenth at Anna’s,” which was about 9/11 in a sideways way, but more than that, it was about worlds lost, moments that are forever gone, and are mostly impossible to recover. When it was published in Asimov’s in 2003, 9/11 was still close. The story finished third in the Reader’s Choice Awards and was chosen for a year’s best volume.

But I didn’t write the story for readers.

I wrote it for me. I had to clear my palate of the horrors I’d seen. I also had to work through that jolt of fear that happens to all of us when our life’s path suddenly takes a terrible turn.

After I wrote the story, I was able to return to the novel. I guess I had officially gone back to work.

But quieting my mind was harder. When there are blanket emergencies—things that happen on a national or worldwide scale—it’s hard to escape them. And sometimes, you shouldn’t escape them.

This past year, we had to deal with a lot of crap in a business we built lovingly for our own work. The betrayal and breach of trust that we suffered also had economic and practical ramifications, and we had to handle those quickly and with great attention.

I didn’t sleep much during that period (or after Dean shattered his shoulder or much with another emergency the year before that), and I didn’t have a lot of leisure. An hour of television at night, the occasional Aces basketball game, and then (stunningly to me) football in the fall provided a bit of distraction.

Mostly, though, I couldn’t afford to be completely distracted. I was in the middle of an emergency and I had to concentrate. When I was able to find a distractable moment, I needed to choose my reading wisely. I had to avoid the new or the challenging. I read a lot of mediocre romance and some rather terribly done mysteries, while waiting for my favorite authors to release new books. And even then, I would balk at some of the topics they had chosen and set the books aside for later.

I’m just getting to later now.

But this was an emergency that I was literally in the middle of. If I didn’t act correctly, make the right choices, and handle the problems in the right way, my business might crumble. Dean was right beside me as were Chris York and Stephanie Writt. I have no idea how we got through June, July, and August, but we did, and the business is better for it.

Friends of mine are going through something similar right now. I am writing this on Sunday night, as the City of Los Angeles and the surrounding areas are finally, finally getting rain after months of drought.

The fires that sprang up during the Santa Anna winds of January made many of my friends flee their homes. I followed on Facebook with some, because I’m not on Twitter. Others I communicated with by phone, and still others I couldn’t locate at all because they had a limited social media presence…and I didn’t feel comfortable calling them in the middle of an emergency. Let me rephrase: a fleeing for your life emergency. I contact friends during emergencies all the time, but if I know they’re in the middle of the crazy shit, I wait a day or so to see if they need something.

Most of my friends who are going through this aren’t hurting for money. They fled to hotels, and one friend noted on Facebook that he had paid for two weeks, just in case.

Not hurting for money makes one aspect of the crisis easier. It means that you have the ability to pay for two weeks in a hotel—any hotel. Sleeping in your car isn’t necessary. Trying to get to family or friends who can put you up (if they’re willing) isn’t necessary either. You can buy clothes and toothpaste, buy a carrier for your dog, and get food.

But it doesn’t help the emotional part. And that second weekend in January, when everything was burning, reminded me of the other disasters I’ve seen or been through: the TV coverage was relentless and it was almost everywhere.

People who had evacuated couldn’t find anything to rest their brains, if they wanted to, although it’s easier now with streaming. If they escaped with their laptops or their iPads or their phones, they could watch something.

At that point in a crisis, you need something mindless.

Eventually, though, you have to dig out. You have to repair the damage. You have to see the lay of the land.

For many, the presidential election has also precipitated a crisis. A lot of people unplugged and disappeared after the election, unable to face what was ahead. The rest of us soldiered on, although we’re handling the firehose of change differently than we did in 2017.

I know some of you are happy with the election. Please don’t tell me, because what’s bothering me the most right now is the blatant bigotry against anyone who isn’t cis, white, and male. If you can tolerate that, you’re free to leave without comment, because if you do comment about this particular point, I will block you.

I’m on social media and yes, in a bit of a left-wing bubble. And I’m seeing a lot of people call anything that is entertainment “bread and circuses.”

They’re wrong.

Entertainment is how we survive.

Yes, we all need to pay attention. We need to fight for our little corner of the universe, whatever that means. (You can see which corner of the universe I’m focusing on from my note about bigotry above.)

But we can’t be on alert twenty-four hours per day for the next few years. Or even for the next few months.

That way lies complete disaster. People can and do collapse from exhaustion in crisis situations (however they define that), and then they’re of no help at all. (Sometimes, as I mentioned above, you have no choice; you must run full speed ahead. But at a certain point, you have to stop running and start building.)

A surprising part of that exhaustion isn’t from lack of sleep; it’s from lack of rest.

The brain is an amazing thing. It can marshal defenses, activate the sympathetic nervous system, and get us through whatever we’re facing. But it’s taxing on the body, and not something we can sustain for years.

I wanted to dig a little into the science for you, but I’m not an expert. Instead, I found something from the Association of Critical Care Nurses. This blog post by Sarah Lorenzini explains the science of crisis response. She’s writing for critical care nurses, but the article applies to all of us.

She writes:

Maintaining your well-being is essential for mastering the SNS response. Practice self-care to mitigate stress and enhance resilience. Engage in activities that promote physical and mental well-being, such as exercise, mindfulness, hobbies and spending time with loved ones. Being tired or hypoglycemic exacerbates negative symptoms associated with the stress response. By nurturing yourself and prioritizing adequate rest, hydration and nutrition, you can maintain composure and sustain your ability to provide compassionate care in demanding situations.

Let me reiterate something buried in the middle of this post, for the “bread and circuses” crowd. She writes, Engage in activities that promote physical and mental well-being, such as exercise, mindfulness, hobbies and spending time with loved ones.

Hobbies. Reading, watching movies and TV, going to sporting events…are hobbies. And hobbies are essential for survival in tough times.

Understanding the science is important—at least to me—and I learned long ago about the importance of shutting off the mind and going “somewhere else” for a little while. Sometimes movies and TV do that, sometimes sports does, but nothing is better than a book or a short story.

(During the worst of our crises last summer, I could only focus on short stories. But they were a lovely distraction.)

I learned this during 9/11. I couldn’t read mystery novels or even romances because at that moment, I was so shaken I wasn’t sure if I believed in happily ever after.

I ended up reading made-up world fantasy novels. They are the actual definition of “somewhere else.” Not somewhere familiar either. Somewhere I’d never thought of.

Science fiction is the same, but at the time I couldn’t find anything long and immersive. I ended up reading a fantasy series that I had on my TBR pile.

It was that series that reminded me of the importance of escape.

Fiction is survival for people in difficult situations. Fiction is necessary.

And we can’t dictate what kind of fiction other people need.

When I was a child living in an abusive household, I consumed as much fiction as possible. Sometimes I needed the escape of a made-up world, but I also read a lot of scary books—many of the Gothic novels because I knew they had a happy ending. And those books reinforced that no matter how dark the world got, people could survive.

Interestingly enough, to me the reader at least, the people who survived were always the ones who took action. Yes, that’s a tenet of fiction. After all, who wants to read about a whining protagonist who does nothing and needs to be rescued at the end?

But it’s also consistent with our biology.

The critical care nurse writes this:

I understand the surge of hormones in response to an emergency and how paralyzing it can feel. However, I have learned to channel my SNS (sympathetic nervous system) to help optimize my performance as a nurse. Instead of perceiving the physical manifestations of stress as hindrances, I reframe them as signs that my body is preparing me for peak performance. I embrace the increased heart rate, rapid breathing and heightened senses as indicators that I am ready to act and make a difference.

Our job, as writers, is to give the people responding to a crisis—any crisis—that escape which will give them the right kind of rest. It might enable them to get an extra hour of sleep at night. It might help them relax just enough to calm down and then move forward.

What we do is extremely valuable.

We should not dismiss it as “bread and circuses,” something to be avoided in a crisis.

We should embrace it as the necessity that it is.

That’ll enable us to continue to write and it’ll allow us to make time for our own rest through whatever crises we experience in our lives.

Storytellers are essential.

So tell your stories, no matter what is going on in the world.

And read the kinds of stories you love, without guilt or judgement.

It’s a great way to take care of yourself and the world around you. Because we all need that little moment of rest.

“How Entertainment Fits Into Our Lives ,” copyright © 2025 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

Addendum added on February 1:

I’m currently reading the issue of The Hollywood Reporter that came out during the fires. It had this tidbit: Apparently LA Residents (even those who had been evacuated) flocked to the movies in the non-fire zones. People needed an escape.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/wildfires-movie-theaters-1236111782/

As one woman said, “What else are we going to do? I wanted to get away from it all.”

Just more evidence that entertainment is important, even in the tough times.