Category: society

November

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

November used to be my favorite month, because it was the month of my birth and because it was the time the lights went up for Christmas in the city of Porto and also because it was cold but not really cold, so the sort of enjoyable cold that makes it pleasurable to curl up by the wood stove with a cat or three. (Grandma had a big armchair by the stove, and I read in it and the cats slept on me.)

The lights were important because dad used to take me out to the city for a whole day.  We usually went and watched some sports event.  Didn’t matter which, because what mattered was I got to be daddy’s girl for the whole day.  And then we’d eat out, and then we’d walk around the city watching the workmen put up lights.  This was also when street vendors first set up for the holidays, and dad used to get me a toy, which was a big thing because I’d been trained early not to ask to be bought things.  Mind you, the toy was on the level of a macdonald’s toy, but its selection and decision on what to buy made it lots of fun.  The one I remember was a little plastic chicken that laid plastic eggs when you pressed on its back.

Then as night fell, dad would get me a rolled-newspaper-cone of chestnuts and we’d walk around seeing the lights light up.  And then we came home on the double-decker bus and unless it was really full, we sat upstairs, on the seat over the driver so I could pretend to be driving.  Sometimes dad got me chocolate coins or chocolate cigarettes but I had to be careful and not get any on my clothes, because chocolate was one of the things mom was sure I was allergic to.  (Yes, she had some excuse, but also was not very scientific in her observations.)

I wonder if dad had or has any idea how important and magical that annual day out was for me, magical enough that I still warm myself at the memory almost half a century later.

I find my kids have this sort of magical memories, sometimes from things I did just because it was convenient, like take them for high tea after school because Dan was working out of town and neither of them liked the same foods, so cooking dinner was a pain and it was easier to take them for high tea (the shop was on the way from from school) and then give them an egg or hotdog for dinner.  (Instead of cooking three separate dinners.)

Today I start NaNoWrimo to finish Through Fire and Darkship Revolution and — if it works out — to write To The Dragons in full. That way I can send it to Toni while I’m in Portugal for the holidays.  Yes, it’s insane, but one year I wrote two novels — The Musketeer’s Seamstress (might be apprentice) and Plain Jane — so it should technically be possible.

A bad start though.  I woke late because I had disturbed dreams all night of being woven into a wicker mannequin of the sort you use for dresses. I think because my asthma has made a come back in the night.  So I shall use the pump and caffeinate.

And meanwhile you might want to read Amanda Green taking down the Telegraph (it got jealous of the attention the Guardian gets from us and decided to be stupid about Amazon) on Book Plug Friday.

Speaking of Book Plugs, I hope you’re doing better than I because October was dismal.  Mind you, I have nothing new up.  But I’ve heard this complaint enough that I wonder if Amazon saw this downward trend in indie sales, too and hence created KU.  If so, they really need to make it independent of your exclusive status and somehow pay more to the authors, because I don’t think they’re getting enough people in it or enough quality.  The books I’ve got from it tend to be very mixed. At any rate, tying things up in the Kindle exclusive is a bad idea.  Bezos doesn’t need it to beat the competition; all it does is limit the offerings.

Oh, and if you read nothing else this November, go read this John C. Wright gift to his fans.  And then tip him or something, because in a just world this story would win ALL the awards.

And now I go caffeinate.  And write.

 

Will You (Also) Tolerate This?

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

As some of you know, I’m not only American, I’m Coloradan.

Mind you, the South will always be a part of me. It was where I first lived in the US and the place I was naturalized.  The voice in my head has a Southern accent, and I love going back to the South East for cons. But Colorado is where I was meant to be.  We came into Colorado the weekend before Thanksgiving 1993 (it’s been pointed out to me I had 2003 which is both a bit of wild flattery on my age, and my lacking coffee.  I’ve only had one cup),   and just ahead of the Thanksgiving Snow Storm TM which dogged our steps all the way, with the gates clanging shut just after we passed.  And then we crested a ridge above Colorado, and I saw it for the first time, and I knew it was where I was supposed to be.

Which makes sense since, at the age of eight, I knew I wanted to be a writer and live in Denver.  (Of course I thought Denver was by the sea, but we’ll avert our eyes there, right?)

This feeling of belonging has never changed, even though Colorado has changed.  But the most marked change was in 2008 when the legislature flipped dem, and they took the bit between the teeth.

I’ve said before and I’ll stand by it, that there was massive fraud in 12. Unless you REALLY believe 1/3 the people had already voted by mail and forgotten.  People of all ages.  And then there’s this.  I don’t think people willfully forgot voting for Obama.  I think only 45% of them did.  It matches what I saw on the ground.  And heck, that might be inflated.

But apparently it came close enough that it scared them.  The fraud wasn’t easy enough.  They couldn’t manufacture hundreds of thousands of votes as they could in Detroit and Chicago, in California and in Oregon, in Washington, and in the other lovely bastions of Democrat rule.

And so they changed two things.  Now all elections are by mail. And there’s same day registration.

Of course, elections by mail, we’re told, have nothing to do with fraud. The whole purpose of it is not to commit fraud.  Why, voting by mail is good for all sorts of things, like… like… like.  It saves money.  Yes, that’s the ticket. And gives work to printers.

But even with the voting by mail, they’re desperate. You know they’re desperate because every other commercial on the radio is about how Cory Gardner denies Global Warming AND eats Puppy Shakes.

And they need cover, for their massive fraud.  They need to say “A bazillion more people registered on election day!” So…

So yesterday they left this on my front porch.001

Will you look at that? Register the same day! In case, you know, you never wanted to vote, and were seized with a powerful urge on the first day.

What on Earth is this for except as a mask for fraud?  WHO ignores the elections till the day, and then has a desperate need to vote? And is informed?

And, oh, yeah, if your driver’s license doesn’t have the address you have to pinky swear you live there.

This is not a banana republic.  Banana republics have more voting security.  Portugal, a land that is a stranger to organization, a land where anyone queuing for everything instead of jumping into it in a bunch, will be laughed out of the country (yeah, that’s what happened to me) has better voting security than that. You have to register ahead of time.  You have to show your birth certificate or passport.

Oh, yeah, note above, none of this verifies citizenship. Not only that, but it doesn’t say ANYWHERE that you have to be a citizen.  Honest but dumb people might register to vote not knowing that it’s for citizens only.  My son registered to vote with only his driver’s license.

All of these laws, starting with motor voter were to “make it easier” to fulfill your “obligation” to vote.  And no one is supposed to ask if you’re a citizen, because that will hurt the feels of dark people or people with an accent.

First of all, I couldn’t care less about feels.  I care about law.  I’m a dark person with an accent.  I EXPECT them to ask me to prove I’m a citizen.

Believe it or not the right not to have your feelings hurt has never been enshrined in the constitution.

Second, there seems to be this cringing, implicit thought that not letting foreigners vote in our elections is discrimination.

Say what?

A vote is something that pertains to a citizen, who is expected to live the rest of his life in the country, and for whom that vote matters.  Why should people wholly unconcerned with us, working in the country for a few years have the right to tell us how we should be governed?  Why should people who know nothing of our history, our civics, our traditions, have a say?  Do you want to vote/would you vote in another country’s elections?  France? Somalia? Brazil?  WHY?

And then there is this belief that a vote, no matter how uninformed, how misguided is an “obligation” and you should treat them all as precious.  And more votes are always good.

This is what leads to all these “opening” of the vote measures.  The idea that voting should be easier than… buying a bus ticket.  Paying for shipping something at the post office. (Both of whom ask to see ID, at least a long-distance bus.)

Americans have been raised on the idea that a poll tax or a voter test are wrong.  (Are they?  I don’t know.  All I know is that I’ve been told the same.  And of course you can see how it could be manipulated.) And so we are to let anyone vote, with no verification, no security, no proof of citizenship.  Because that’s somehow better.  Even though it’s just as open to manipulation.

(I will note the people who manipulated poll taxes and voter tests to exclude their “enemies” were the democrats, too…  It’s almost like they can’t win without fraud.)

So we’ve run the other way, and now everyone can vote.  They want to teach the world to vote in our elections.

And we have been disenfranchised.  We the real citizens of the state, the ones with skin in the game, who are neither cartoon characters nor bused-in-people.

There are two ways to steal your vote.  One is to deny you access.  The other is to dilute your vote with fake votes till it counts for nothing.

Will we tolerate this?  For how long?  Why doesn’t anyone else realize that under the cover of seeming openness they’re making our votes mean nothing?

And why don’t the clever fools in the Democratic party realize that when you block the ballot box, people will come at you another way?

I’m not calling for revolution.  I’m hoping very much we can avoid it.  I’m exhorting those of you in CO and similarly blinkered states to vote and to vote Republican.  Yes, even if you are a Libertarian.  Vote Republican because the press hates them and will magnify everything wrong they do, if for no other reason.

And vote republican this year, while we can still turn these election rules around.  And do it before they become cemented in place. Even if we have to hold the squishy Republicans’ feet to the fire.

I don’t want to leave Colorado.  Like Thorby in the Sissu, a bit of me has gone into Colorado a bit of Colorado into me.  I am Colorado.  And we can’t keep letting them take states because first time they get a solid foothold they corrupt the voting and it’s game-over.

This is our country.  No one should dilute our vote who isn’t with us for the long haul.  No one should vote who isn’t a citizen.  I’d go further and say no one should vote who doesn’t believe in the constitution and the bill of rights, but I know right now that’s a pipe dream.

The hour is late, the need urgent.  If we don’t fight at the ballot box now, we’ll be taking another step on the road to Boston Commons.

And at some point there will be no return.

UPDATE: Welcome instapundit readers.  (I thought I’d done this already, which tells you how my mind is working. )  Thank you to Glenn Reynolds for the link.

While you’re here look around, but most of all buy my books! (Hey, writer got to eat.)

 

It’s Time The Gloves Came Off

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

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So yesterday Jason Mattera went off after IRS crap… oh, sorry, ex-IRS crapweasel with questions on her front lawn. Instead of standing and facing the music – and yes, I know you’re surprised to hear the woman who took the fifth with her nose in the air, the woman who miraculously lost two hard drives to avoid proof of her malfeasance surfacing – she ran and with her usual respect for other’s property tried to barge into someone else’s house to escape mattera.

Glenn Reynolds posted the link with the question, “Is it right for him to do this?”

I will own myself surprised. I’ve been in the US for thirty years, just about, and I’ve haunted the forums of the libertarian right since there have been forums to haunt, starting with Reason magazine back in the day.

The proportion of those saying that no, no one should do this, that it’s bad when we descend to the same depths as the liberals, that we have to be better than that was lower than I’ve ever seen it on a forum “of the right” EVER.

But of course it was still there.

There were people still telling us we ought to be ashamed of ourselves; that the video was cringeworthy; that no one honorable would do that; that no true journalist would thus confront a defenseless crapweasel woman.

I tell you three times, they are not only wrong, they are very, very wrong.

I will repeat again: I came to the US thirty years ago. (Actually thirty years next summer, but close enough.) This was, in case some of you are barely older than that, at the height of the cold war.

When I came to the states as an exchange student (for a year) four years before that, I went to the consulate to get my Visa I was carrying music CDs by a French anarchist (my brother had just given them to me, and I was carrying them in hand.) My brother tried to convince me to hide them, lest I should be denied a visa.

Of course I wasn’t. In fact one of the gentlemen I talked to told me he liked the singer.

However, I’ll confess in the Ohio of my exchange student year I met with very little of what I will call “left wing snobbery”. While some of the left’s pet causes were half-heartedly endorsed, no one was breaking themselves in two to decry the evils of patriarchy, and certainly no one was endorsing communism. Not openly.

In fact, in the last year of Carter’s presidency, many people who I’m sure were otherwise democrat had about had it with appeasement of communism.

Four years later, when I returned and got married, the tide had changed. Not just among the people I met in North Carolina, but even our old friends back in Ohio. What we heard (just before the wall came down) was that you know, both the US system and the USSR had problems.

In fact, the more educated the person, the trendier his/her profession, the more likely that there would be some sideways defense of socialism at least in the “soft” socialist version practiced in Scandinavia. The proponents of the third way were out in full force.

To support Reagan, to quote him, to say anything in defense of a strong stand in the Cold War was more gauche (socially) here than in openly socialist Portugal.

What had happened was that leftism had become a positional good. They had, through continual repeating, through command of the media and entertainment (books, movies, tv, etc.) somehow managed to get across the message that to believe in American exceptionalism; to think communism was wrong; to believe socialism a soft slide down to the hell of communism; to believe that the US shouldn’t unilaterally disarm – all of this was to demonstrate a low IQ and a lack of cosmopolitan understanding of the world.

Oh, yeah, the left had tightly secured another center of opinion-creation: universities. And I guess having educated idiots with a string of letters after their names pronounce on something they didn’t understand and claiming the left was better made it the “smart” position.

It didn’t take me long to understand that. As a stranger in a strange land and, further more, one who aspired to break into one of the fields tightly under control of the left, I tried to smile at all the right places, I tried to make noises of agreement to the most stupid of points, and I tried to sound “smart.”

Apparently I didn’t do it very well. I have stories from the time, and it doesn’t take an expert to see how bad I was at hiding. Also, my face is apparently glass fronted when it comes to my thoughts. But I did my best to fit in with the “left is smart” status quo.

In my defense, I didn’t take them seriously. You see, I’d seen them in action in Europe. I’d seen how transparently evil and… well… stupid they were.

I thought that this was just a cultural phase and then, once the USSR fell…

I never saw that by then they’d be so culturally entrenched, so established in people’s minds as “the thing to be, if you’re upper class” that after the fall of the USSR they’d only become louder and redouble their assaults people who disagreed with them or pointed out how wrong they were.

I never anticipated they’d persist in the face of the collapse of the fields they held, from the teaching of humanities to the sales of fiction books.

By the time I realized that, I’d “broken in” and was holding on tight to a precarious mid-list career and I knew with gut-certainty, that if I spoke up it would be the end of my career. I wasn’t making much. My income was, however, the difference between being absolutely tight and having a little extra for emergencies and/or a little extra: books for the kids; that music cd that we wouldn’t otherwise get; the museum memberships.

I wasn’t willing to sacrifice it. I wasn’t willing to give up a career (such as it was) sixteen years in the making.

And yet—

I should have done it.

You see, my unwillingness to speak was the reason we’d come this far in four years and then so far in the last twenty nine that some people get upset at you if you run down communism – a system responsible for the death of over a hundred million people. No, I’m not saying my personal unwillingness to speak. I mean my unwillingness and those of others like me.

By staying quiet, by making aping sounds when we could, we enforced the silence of others like us; we reinforced the power of the leftist thought police; we made it possible for them to control entire fields.

This was helped by the fact that the left has never apologized much less felt bad for hiring according to politics; promoting according to politics; firing according to politics.

That is in fact how they’ve managed 98% prevalence in journalism, entertainment, teaching, and all the fields they control.

For the last ten years or so, they’ve stepped up their game too. Say anything – anything – they disagree with and you’ll be slandered and attacked in ways that boggle the mind. It started in politics, but right now it is at every level they control or would like to control, including even sf fandom and (they wish) gaming journalism.

Say something they disagree with; castigate one of their crazier pronouncements (“the future is queer,” said the man who doesn’t seem to understand how reproduction works) and you’ll be called the worst things they can think of: racist, sexist, a Nazi. (No, it doesn’t need to make any sense, though I’ll go to my grave cherishing the fact I was called a Nazi by a chick in East Germany. It beggars the mind. If they were not utterly without self-reflection, they couldn’t do this stuff.) Say something they disagree with and Larry Correia, the man who has built three successful careers by starting from very humble working class beginnings, gets called a creature of privilege by white, pampered female college professors who never SWEATED except while tanning.

They can do this because they have taken over entire fields. And because many of the fields they have taken over are those that inform the public about movements and public concerns.

They can act like bullies and they can scare people, and who is going to report on this, or on their seriously unfair hiring/firing practices? No one, that’s who. Because they are the establishment. And they control everything.

Or they did. The new media allows those of us who weren’t fully aboard with their program to have a voice. It’s a small (relatively) but growing voice. And what’s more, it’s way cooler than the old media. And they know that. And it annoys them beyond belief.

So they’ve redoubled the insanity and tried to shut down all the niches from which the new media comes. (Hence their attack on gamers. Oh, and science fiction.)

They can’t win, of course. The whole thing about slipping between their fingers like sand was never as true, as obviously true as it is with the dispersed, distributed new media.

But they hold on, to a great extent through two things: the power to hire and fire in the fields they control, and their now hysterical assertion that all the smart/honorable/idealistic people agree with them.

They need to be exposed for what they are, because, as everywhere where the left gets power, they’re a weird, misshapen assemblage of overreaching bureaucrats, twisted control freaks and lamentable human beings.

Illegal mistreatment of their political “enemies” and hatred of western civilization is what they DO. And the bizarre politeness of those who disagree with them is what allows them to do it.

People criticize Mitt Romney for saying that Obama was a good man. How could he have said otherwise. If he’d called the man the rabid crapweasel he is, half the right or more would have risen to dissociate themselves from him, because they’ve been trained to think it’s somehow not fair or impolite to expose the left.

This is not belief. This is social conditioning, through all the years when it was accepted the “smart” and “nice” were on the left.

Even I was shocked reading a biography of Carter – did you know he tried to sell us to the Russians in return for help with his second election? – because I too had been sold on the idea he was only ineffective because he was so nice.

They’re not your friends. They’re not nice. They’re no idealistic. No idealistic left survived the combined blows of Stalinism and the fall of the USSR. There’s only, now, cynical left pretending to be idealistic to hide their grossly swollen appetite for power.

They’ve lost even their power of self deception.

All they have now is the naked will to power and you – you who dare stand in their way.

This is not a gentlemanly fight. You are NOT to use the Marquess of Queensbury rules. The other guy is holding a broken bottle.

No one is asking you to make yourself into a mirror image of the crapweasels.

But you should not be ashamed to expose them, make them uncomfortable, scream at them or point their vapid intellectual contradictions and contortions. Breitbart wasn’t afraid, and look at the difference he made.

Stop trying to be nice. They aren’t.

Expose, mock and shame.

Being nice is a poor substitute for being good. And you’re called upon to be good. If you’re merely nice, evil wins.

Durance Vile

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

It’s an alley or perhaps a broad street, or perhaps a docking station in the middle of trackless space.

Where ever it is, if you’re one of this crowd, you know where to find it.

You knock.  The door opens a fraction of an inch.  “Hun, Hoyden or Dinerite?”

“I er… don’t know?”

The person — you presume it’s a person, though all you can see is one enormous eye peering out at you — sighs with a gust like the wind of a thousand bellows.  “His Grace Seraphim Ainsling, Duke of Darkwater is?”

“The King’s Witchfinder?”

“I see.  Athena Hera Sinistra, just another cuddle bunny, right?”

“OMG, no.”

“I see.  And if you’re a Usaian you have…?”

“A fanatical devotion to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of happiness?”

“Yes, but that applies to the Huns and Hoydens too. What else do you have?”

“My scrap of flag!”

“Right.  Come on in.”

The door opens wide, allowing you into a space that’s a medieval tavern, unless it’s a space bar.  Two things you can’t avoid noting.  The person — it’s a person, right? — who let you in is a huge dragon wearing a t-shirt that says Drak.  And over the bar/counter/serving table, a board/electronic board/blackboard says “Try our Cthulhu- Mari.  It’s to die for.”

As you edge further in, an orange cat rubs around your ankles, and you wonder if he’s a pet or a guest.

The dragon catches up with you and puts a friendly claw around your shoulders, “Okay, this is all self-explanatory.  If the floor looks shaky, wait till it solidifies to step — we’re between dimmensions.  That guy over there is Statist Josh.  Don’t get in a government discussion with him.  He gets odd.  Other than that he’s perfectly fine.”

“Oh, I see.  He’s a big government fan?”

The dragon looks at you with an immense eye.  “Oh, very no.  Why would you think so?  And that,” Points at the nice lady in the corner with a laptop.  “Is Celia Hayes.  Don’t interrupt her.  We like her writing.   That,” he points at a young woman surrounded by kids, “Is Foxfier and the royal family of elvenland.  Don’t ask.  It was a merger deal.  That,” He points at a wallaby sipping something that foams and bubbles and occasionally tries to crawl out of the glass.  “Is RES, which, it will not have escaped you, is Latin for thing.  Don’t have a punning contest with him when life is on the line.”

“But what about that guy sitting across from him?  Who–  He looks…”

“Oh, yes, that’s SPQR.  He’s a vampire and sometimes a wear feline.  He denies that he’s in fact undead Julius Caesar.”

“Denies it?  How can–”

“Well, he’s had a lot of practice as a politician, right?”

At that moment, the entire place shakes and a roar echoes.

You ask, “Transdimmensional earthquake?”

Drak looks unconcerned.  “That?  Oh, no.  THAT is just herself.  We locked her in the basement until she finishes Through Fire.”

“Yeah,” an athletic man says, as he walks up wiping sweat from his brow.  “She almost got loose that time.  She tried to turn into a hedgehog and cute her way out.  When that didn’t work, she tried to become a dragon and bite her way through the door.  I don’t know how much longer we can keep her locked up.”  He extends a hand to you, “I’m William O’Blivion, btw.”  He turns back to Drak.  “Knighton and Jeff Gauch and Garsys and I really need something to drink, if we’re going to keep holding the fort.  She keeps demanding to see the political news now.  And poor Dr. Mauser was flamed in the fracas.  He’s trying to recover, but you know what it’s like.”

Drak sighs.  “Yeah, I hope she finishes Through Fire soon, or we’re going to have to get reinforcements.  Also, thorazine.”

Of Despair, Hope, and Climbing Paths

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

It’s not a secret to anyone that I’m of a depressive turn of mind. This does not mean I’m depressed – at least not right now – but that when faced with a stress, my mind tends to head down towards depression. When faced with a question of guilt, I tend to blame myself.

Now I hear you clucking and saying something about medicines for that. Of course there are.

But here is something our overly therapeutic age misses: guilt and fear of being terrible have a purpose.

I’m not going to link the book, because I think it would bring on us the mother of all trollings, but those of you who are on Sarah’s Diner on Facebook know EXACTLY what I’m talking about.

There is a man who wrote a book that he claims he’s been writing both since 75 and for twenty years. (We didn’t ask what year it is in his world, so it’s our fault.) He painted the cover himself, and the drawing isn’t bad for a 12 year old or so.

Anyway, he thinks the book is the best thing since sliced bread. You see, it’s not about one of them troubled teenagers. It’s about a good girl who does everything right. He thinks this puts it on a par with several greats of literature (though how he got there, since the greats of literature all write characters with flaws and the ones he mentioned surely didn’t write about good girls, is beyond me.) His book is so much better than all that trash featuring vampires and werewolves, because those are unimaginative. His is the first time that story got told. And it should be assigned to every high school student.

If you’re already seeing the several threads of delusion there, it gets worse. Though a lot of the comments made about his grammar do not in fact make any sense (and enlightened for me why so many people think that all indie books are full of grammar errors. It’s because they learned grammar on Mars or something) some are spot on. He certainly has typos. But beyond all that, his stuff is stilted and weird, impossible to follow and there’s no narrative line to attach to.

And then he put his magnum opus out. And waited for praise, accolades the Novel [sic] prize and the Oscar [?] to just roll in.

What he got instead was a whole bunch of people pointing and laughing. And he can’t understand it, because after all, his book is the most original, most uplifting, most everything EVAH. So these people must be jealous of his brilliance.

Some of the Huns had great fun baiting him in the comments, but here’s the thing: I could grin at their comments (and his behavior is horrible enough to make one want to hit him) but I also felt that little cringe one feels when one sees a bit of oneself in a crazy person.

Because I started out like that. Oh, not under the impression what I was writing was so original or that everyone who writes vampires and werewolves is “unimaginative.” I’d read way too much for that. (Which I think Mr. Original hasn’t.)

But I started out writing things that had no discernible plot, characters only I could love, and hamfisted prose. [Okay, the last one was not so much “started out” as “last week”.]

I got rejected.

And then because I don’t have a healthy self-esteem (or much self-esteem at all, really, though the audience is helping me) I bought a bunch of books on how to do it, and I started analyzing it.

So, I couldn’t just self publish them, and yeah, that’s a difference. BUT I suspect if I had self-published and no one bought, and I’d got awful comments (except given what I was writing at the time it would probably sell on kink. Aliens. No I’m not telling.) the process would have been the same.

Because my idea of myself is not diamond-hardened and fire proof, I’d have gone “Oh.” And I’d have considered the idea that maybe my stuff really did suck and I only didn’t see it because it was mine. And then I’d have got the books/followed the same road.

So, to an extent, this depressive turn of mind, and this self doubt serve a purpose. The reason I run so hard is that me is following me, and I know the b*tch. If she catches up to me with all her doubts and insecurities, I’m going down for the count.

But sometimes she does catch me. And that’s an issue too.

My books take an average of two weeks to actually write – active writing time. In between there is a needed silence of two weeks to a month. The “battery recharging/ideation” time.

So how come I average two books a year (and some years I write six?) Well that’s the silences that aren’t necessary.

This is going to sound completely crazy considering I make a living at this, but I go through entire months of being convinced everything I ever write is drek. And then I can’t write at all. Extracting words from my mind becomes sort of like passing a novel out through a narrow crack in a wall, in papers the size of fortune cookie fortunes.

I could do without those silences. I could do without the fears so bottomless that I will accept any suggestion/criticism, no matter how ridiculous. I’ve learned over the years to do nothing to past works when I’m in this mood, and certainly not to read reviews/comments. Because if I read them at that time and then go and change my work, I will kill it. At best, I make it into soup without direction as I try to be all things to all people. At worst… You don’t want to know.

Now imagine someone with this turn of mind and the years of apprenticeship required to write something halfway decent. (I think I achieved that last week!)

Don’t nobody call no ambulance (yes, the grammar is intentional. Yes, I know. Nails on chalkboard) because it’s been years since this happened – but sometimes I felt I was spiraling down, with each level of shame/guilt worse, and constant memories of every humiliating/stupid mistake I’d made, to the point where often the only thing keeping me from committing suicide was knowing I had kids, and a duty to them.

It occurs to me that most of you are more of my stamp than of Mr. Greatest Thing Ever Written and You’re All Envious Hacks. And also that even for those who aren’t writers, these are tough times.

Not only are many of us struggling to make ends meet in Summer of (no) Recovery Six, but technological change is doing to the texture of our everyday life what hormones do to a pre-teen boy just before the jump.

You know the change is needed and largely beneficial, but we’re not a teen boy, and we don’t know where it leads. Everything is changing, and we’re caught in the middle of it. Unlike our “elites” we aren’t trying to take the world back (way back. Into feudalism) to where we feel more comfortable. But we do get scared and confused and wonder if what we’re doing is really for the best, like a beginner writer caught between two ways of writing and not sure which one is best (since it’s not just what he likes.)

In both cases: be good to yourself. Do the best you can. Few things in life are permanent. If what you are trying proves wrong, try something else.

And yeah, most of us have been tightening and tightening and tightening and cutting out all entertainment. And no, it’s not by choice.

But here is a suggestion: let that belt out a little bit. Shop advisedly. Buy bang for the buck. Amazon Prime furnishes us with a never-end of free movies and tv series, for instance. They’re a little old, but hey, we don’t have cable (expensive) so they’re new to us. And I’ve just joined Kindle Unlimited Lending Library. Now I know they pay a little less to writers, unless the story is 2.99 or under but here’s the thing: with it I read more than I could otherwise. So I don’t feel too bad for my fellow writers. $2 or so is better than what I would pay them otherwise (nothing, pretty much) and it allows me to read back up to the levels I like.

We also got a zoo membership and a membership to a couple of museums. These are expensive, relatively, but they give us a chance to run away every time things get to be too much. Weirdly, my family (each working three jobs or so) hits that wall at the same time. Most weekends we’ll all be working, catching up on things, maybe stopping for a movie in the evening (though not often.) And then one Sunday, usually dark and dreary with snow on the ground, we all go “this just isn’t working. I’m not getting anything done. Let’s go to—” And at that time it’s good to think “sure” and not “Do we have the money.” (Besides, when you have four people, one entry to a museum for all of us is half a year’s entry.)

That usually keeps the worst of depression away, while you’re working and don’t see an end in sight, and aren’t sure you are any good or will ever get anywhere.

When it doesn’t…

We humans are tormented/followed by the idea that our life must have a purpose. What I mean is, even the most irreligious of humans feels that he must be here for some reason.

Last week I posted the free book by James Owen, which I really do think is a wonderful pick me up if you’re trolling the depths. A couple of hours later, I had a thank you in my email. One of you – not a commenter, but a reader here – thanked me, because he’d been spiraling down the pit of hopelessness and trying not to think of doing away with himself. The book came just at the right time, and it stopped the spiral.

And suddenly I thought “Wow. What if my entire life, everything I’ve done, everything I am, was just for that purpose? To give a man a rope as he was slipping down the slope?”

Then I remembered an Agatha Christie story (in her bio) which I now don’t remember if it was a family thing or something that was told to her (I know she used it in a short story, later on) of someone who goes out to a cliff intending to throw himself down. Only there’s a woman there, sitting and looking out at the sea. And he can’t kill himself in front of someone. So he doesn’t. He goes back to life and it gets better.

I don’t remember how she explained it, but the thing is that the woman was also there, contemplating ending it all, and then (she somehow finds out what happened) she realizes if she’d killed herself before he arrived, he’d have been lost.

What I’m trying to say is even if your purpose in life is to just sit there at the right time and the right place (or if you don’t believe in purpose, your usefulness) there is something only you can do. It might be what you intend to do or it might be an entire accident (Instapundit, asked how he became instapundit “Like most things in my life, it happened by accident.”) But just by being here, you can become a lifesaver, and the life you save might change the world for the better.

In the same way, just by trying the best you can – at writing or life or whatever – you can sometimes become extraordinary. Perhaps most times. Yes, there is survivor bias in stories of “I tried, and I succeeded” but perhaps the arrow goes the other way. Perhaps if you really try, and are willing to admit you’re not perfect and to see clearly, you mostly succeed.

It’s just most people don’t. Because either absolute self confidence or its lack (yes, even that) are in a way far more comfortable.

But if you neither leap into the abyss, nor stand there frozen at its edge, telling yourself there is no abyss, if you learn the paths down and up the cliff, and if you lend a hand to those on the same road… perhaps, just perhaps that black cliff can become an enchanted cove where many find solace and life.

It’s worth a try.

Meet the Character

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

*The lovely and talented Jagi Lamplighter tagged me for a “meet the character” blog tour.  Her own can be found here.

So you can either blame her or thank her for what follows:*

Meet His Grace, Seraphim Ainsling, the Duke of Darkwater, main character of Witchfinder.

The duke comes into his study wearily. He’s not at all sure about this strange person who wants to interview him, after all. It’s all very well to say she is the author, but the Duke of Darkwater is a proper Christian, raised as such, and really, he doesn’t believe in this whole thing about the Author being a woman sitting in another parallel world.

It’s not that Seraphim Ainsling, Duke of Darkwater disbelieves in other worlds. He’s a magic user, after all. What’s more, since his father’s shameful and still unexplained suicide, he’s been reading his father’s diaries.

He has discovered that his father was the King’s Witchfinder, which means the man in charge of a service that traveled to other worlds where magic was forbidden to rescue magic practitioners or, often, shape shifters, most of them children, most of them condemned to death.

And Seraphim, with the help of his half-brother, Gabriel Penn, has been doing the same work.

So he knows without being told that the woman slouching on one of his straight-backed chairs, wearing really quite indecent breeches and a far too molding shirt is from the world he and Gabriel nicknamed The Madhouse. It’s a barbarous place without magic, which, in its place has developed a lot of machinery, most of it bewildering.

The Duke comes in and bows, very correctly, and the wretched woman has the decency to stand, if not to curtsey. On the other hand, he wouldn’t like to see her attempt a curtsey. She looks rather… unbalanced, as is.

“Ah,” he says. “Lady Sarah Hoyt?”

She pushes her spectacles up her nose and tries to frown at him, but really looks like a cat about to cough up a hairball. “Not lady. Mrs. I’m an American. We don’t have titles of nobility, and I rather like it that way.”

He has time to do no more than say “Ah!” in a tone he hopes is interpreted as “Who let you in my study without knowing the most rudimentary mode of interaction between human beings,” before she explains, “Of course, I understand it’s different in your world, Avalon, where the land is bound to people by magic, and magic makes everything different. It’s strange, you know, because on Earth we tend to think of magic as an easy way to get things. But magic is really duty in your case, isn’t it.”

He inclines his head. Duty about covers everything he does, from trying to restore his house’s financial fortunes which his father quite squandered in wine and women and more wine and more women and occasionally even women and wine. There are the younger children – Caroline and Michael – to provide for. And something must be done about Gabriel, who had to leave the university over that unfortunate scandal involving the necromancer.

“So,” Mrs.-not-lady Hoyt says, smiling dementedly at him and waving around a notebook and something that looks like a stylus. “So, what would you say is your personal goal?”

“To try to bring my family through financial ruin and the implications of my father’s dangerous doings unscathed,” he says.

“But what about your illegal rescue missions? Didn’t the king forbid travel to other worlds? And don’t you and your half-brother do just that? What if they discover you?”

“Oh, you know about that?” He sighed. “If they discover us, attainder and perhaps death follow. At least imprisonment.”

“Then why do it?”

“Because we aren’t put in the world – any world – Mrs. Hoyt, to please ourselves and ignore our duty to other human beings.”

“Isn’t that a problem, though, approaching life as nothing but duty?”

The Duke’s green eyes look world-weary, suddenly, “The only thing—”

“Yes?”

“The only thing I resent is having to marry Honoria Blythe. But if I understand my father’s notes correctly that was his plan to restore our fortunes. And Blythe’s Blessings is a huge magic house. If only I were sure it wasn’t tied in to the Others.”

“The Others?”

“People who seem to be … ah… involved in shady financial and magical dealings in low magic worlds. We… they’ve attempted against Gabriel and I more than once, including setting traps.”

“I see.”

“Well, Mrs. Hoyt, I’m glad you do because I don’t.” He rustles some papers on his desk, “If you excuse me, Madam, I am extremely busy.” If only he were sure that Gabriel’s half-elf origins weren’t part of the problem.

He looks up to see if the intruder has left, but his office is quite empty and suddenly he isn’t sure why he thought he was talking to the Author. At any rate, surely if his lifestory were a book, surely it would be written by someone with more aplomb than a middle aged woman with neither style nor manners.

He stands up to ring his bell and summon Gabriel to his study for a discussion.

But pinned to the bellpull is a card. It says Witchfinder – in which Seraphim Ainsling, Duke of Darkwater discovers there is more to life than duty, and that his family can often rescue itself.

He frowns at the card, then drops it, fluttering, to the floor, and rings the bell.

WHOM TO TAG:

Being myself, which is a bit of a liability, I got busy writing and herding cats or in this case family members, and forgot to give people I wanted to tag a heads up.

Given all that, I got lucky three had responded by tonight.  If others respond tomorrow, I’ll add them here as the day goes on.

The three that answered are:

Amanda Green –

I’m older than 20 and younger than death and that’s all you’ll get from me about my age. After all, it’s not polite to ask a woman how old she is. I’m a mother, a daughter and was a wife. I’ve spent most of my life in the South and love to travel. The only problem with that is my dog always thinks I’ve abandoned him when I do and it takes weeks to reassure the poor thing and my cat resents the fact I came back before he could figure out a way to kill the dog and hide the body. My house is haunted – it is, really. I swear it. What else explains the table that plays music and the light that comes on by itself? – but it’s mine and I love it. Okay, I’m a little strange. But that makes life interesting.

When it comes to writing, I’ve been doing it for as long as I can remember. It’s something I can’t not do. Nor, it seems, can I stick with one genre. I have books out that are urban fantasy, romantic suspense, paranormal romance and military science fiction. I will soon be releasing in episodic form an historical fantasy set at the turn of the 20th Century. There never seems to be a dearth of ideas, only a severe lack of time to write them all.

Amanda blogs at Nocturnal Lives.

Dave Freer:

Dave Freer lives on Flinders Island in the Bass Strait, off Australia, being about as far into the remote backwoods as he could put himself or be put (let’s not ask which). There he lives a sort of chaotic experiment in self-sufficiency, involving a lot time at sea in small boats, doing remarkably silly things with spears and nets in water cold enough to freeze an impure though solid. His real talent is the fine art of making one vegetable grow, sort-of, where fifty plants flourished before. He’s the author of a slew of books (19?), a few of which blundered onto bestseller lists, until thrown out by respectable literature. He’s a disgrace, really. You can read of his misadventures at Flinders Freers.

Doug Dandrige:

Doug Dandridge was born in Venice Florida in 1957, the son of a Florida native and a Mother of French Canadian descent. An avid reader from an early age, Doug has read most of the classic novels and shorts of Science Fiction and Fantasy, as well as multiple hundreds of historical works. Doug has military experience including Marine Corps JROTC, Active Duty Army, and the Florida National Guard. He attended Florida State University, studying Biology, Geology, Physics, and Chemistry, and receiving a BS in Psychology. Doug then studied Clinical Psychology at the University of Alabama, with specific interests in Neuropsychology and Child Psychology, completing a Masters and all course work required for a PhD. He has worked in Psychiatric Hospitals, Mental Health Centers, a Prison, a Juvenile Residential Facility, and for the past five years for the Florida Department of Children and Families. Doug has been writing on and off for fifteen years. He concentrates on intelligent science fiction and fantasy in which there is always hope, no matter how hard the situation. No area of the fantastic is outside his scope, as he has completed works in near and far future Science Fiction, Urban and High Fantasy, Horror, and Alternate History.

You can find him here.

UPDATE: Jody Lynn Nye has also answered in the affirmative:

Jody Lynn Nye lists her main career activity as ‘spoiling cats.’ When not engaged upon this worthy occupation, she writes fantasy and science fiction books and short stories.  You can find her here.

I won’t inflict Caturday on you

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

UPDATE: I have updated the subscriber page with chapter 2 of To The Dragons.

Though the temptation is massive.

Our Free Range Oyster is still dealing with family issues.  I’ll have a chapter of To The Dragons in the subscriber area later, as well as another chapter of Rogue Magic.  (The To The Dragons one is written.)

It’s cold, it’s dark, it’s dreary and I have a cat (ah! snuck Caturday on you) and a husband wishing to snuggle, and what’s more, my internet connection is SLOOOOOOOOOOOOW, which is why I didn’t put up chapter last night.  I don’t know why, but I’m going to reset to before the last critical update and see.  To be fair, I’m not sure it’s the internet.  Everything seems to have slowed to a crawl.

Though to be fair, at least my computer isn’t smoking, so it can’t be that bad.

Until they achieve this on a mass scale, we’ll have to use the internet (my love.)

But you think at least they do this brain-to-typing, so I could get these novels out of my head?

Anyway, it’s taking forever to type each sentence, so I’ll be back in a couple of hours after I do a restore on this thing.

And meanwhile, I was going to inflict cat pictures on you, but the doggyness of the internet won’t let me upload them.  Even in small version.

I’m going back to bed and restarting the day in a couple of hours, okay?

 

 

 

The promo post! Good for What Hails You!

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Happy Saturday, Huns & Hoydens! We’ve a good load of books again this week, including an entry from the elder scion of the House of Hoyt! Go, read, review, enjoy; that is all. Well, except to note that future entries can (and should!) be sent to my email. Happy reading!

Jason Dyck, AKA The Free Range Oyster

Horde Herder, Mercenary Wordsmith, and Keeper of Useless Secrets

Robert A. Hoyt

Cat’s Paw

King of Cats Book 1

Many humans know there is a mountain at the end of the universe to which a bird flies every thousand years to sharpen its beak, until the end of the mountain comes, and thus the end of eternity. What few of them know is that of the mountain only a few small grains of sand remain. And the bird that is to end eternity is alive and ready to fly. At half past noon at the end of the universe, the last great hopes of everything that exists, ever existed or has yet to exist, rests with a stray cat with alcohol issues, a Siamese cat with gender issues, and a Persian cat with pregnancy issues. Things are just about to get fun.

Alma Boykin

Cities and Throngs and Powers

Honor or freedom or yes?

The Salazar family lost everything in the Collapse of 2015 except their pride. Two years later, Mr. Salazar pays a debt with his youngest daughter, Alicia. She must work at Illif House, the mysterious mansion on the plains near the Flatirons. Alicia discovers more than she could have guessed, including a chance at independence. When blood ties threaten to drag her back into the world she’d hoped to leave forever, Alicia must choose between her family’s honor and her heart’s desire.

Laura Montgomery

The Sky Suspended

A generation has passed since asteroid scares led the United States to launch its first and only interstellar starship. The ship returns and announces the discovery of another Earth. People are star-struck, crowds form in Washington, DC, and a boy from Alaska and two lawyers grapple with questions surrounding whether ordinary people will emigrate to the stars. Calvin Tondini is one of those lawyers, and he works his way to the heart of that question.

This is human wave science fiction.

Michael Kingswood

Glimmer Vale

Glimmer Vale Chronicles Book 1

Free this weekend!

Lydelton, a small fishing town in a remote valley called Glimmer Vale, is the perfect place for two fighting men on the run to stop and decide on a plan. But when Julian and Raedrick arrive they find the town besieged by a ruthless band of brigands. Worse, the brigands have taken up station in the mountain passes, blocking the two friends’ escape. With no way around the brigands and no option of returning the way they came, Julian and Raedrick accept an offer of employment. Their mission: defeat the brigands and restore peace to Glimmer Vale.

They are outnumbered at least twenty to one, long odds even if they recruit help. But that help may not be enough when the specter of their past rears its head, forcing Julian and Raedrick to openly face what they are fleeing or risk losing not just their freedom but the lives and fortunes of Lydelton’s inhabitants.

Glimmer Vale is a short, fun fantasy adventure novel, the first installment in the Glimmer Vale Chronicles.

Also available from these fine booksellers:

Tollard’s Peak

Glimmer Vale Chronicles Book 3

Winter in Glimmer Vale – a time to remain close to shelter or, preferably, indoors. Most definitely not a time to brave the mountain peaks surrounding the valley. Raedrick and Julian certainly have no intention of doing so until a man from their past, nearly dead from exposure, appears at the outskirts of Lydelton. Once recovered, he tells them of his friend who lies injured on the flank of Tollard’s Peak, the tallest mountain in the region. Unable to ignore the stranded fellow’s need, the two Constables form a party to rescue him.

But there is more to the story than it first appeared, and very soon Raedrick and Julian find themselves struggling against far more than the elements as they brave the perilous peak. It will take all of their strength and resolve to survive their quest and get to the bottom of the mystery that drew these men into the bleak cold of the mountainside. And they are not the only ones who are searching.

Also available from these fine booksellers:

C.J. Carella

Bad Vibes

Occult consultant Dante Godoy arrives to the small town of Redemption, Nevada, just in time to help Sheriff Matilda Knobb deal with two impossible murders. Together they will confront unspeakable evils in the night.

“Bad Vibes” is a 7,900-word short story introducing a horror setting that will be explored in future novels by C.J. Carella

Steven G. Johnson

Keep of Glass

Girls can’t be knights. Not in the real world. But lately, with all the strange things happening, the real world’s gotten a lot less predictable. So why can’t Galehodin fight for the King like her brother? Well, besides the strangers trying to kill her, there’s always the angry immortal who wants her soul… literally.

Michael A. Hooten

The Curses of Arianrhod

A Bard Without a Star Book 4

There is no magic strong enough to break a mother’s curse.

On the day Gwydion ap Don discovered he had a son, the boy’s mother Arianrhod cursed him to never have a name unless she gave him one herself. Now he wanders Bangreen, exiled from his home, and trying everything he can think of to break the curse.

Left with no other option, he takes the boy to Caer Sidi, where Arianrhod lives in her own exile. But even when confronted, she refuses to name the boy, or even acknowledge him. She wants to punish Gwydion for the rest of his life, despite the fact that he still loves her.

Gwydion almost loses hope, but a tiny sparrow leads him to the wise Ousel of Penwyth, who tells him not to break the curse, but fulfill it. So Gwydion and his son return to Caer Sidi, disguised as shoemakers, to trick Arianrhod into giving the boy a name. She calls him “the fair one with the sure hand”—Llews Llaw Gyffes—and the curse ends. But in her fury at being tricked she curses him again, this time that he will never bear arms until she gives them to him herself. Gwydion swears that he will trick her again, but can he come up with a plan that both fulfills the new curse and keeps his son safe from his mother’s wrath at the same time?

Letting Bureaucrats Run With Codes

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

For everyone who has ever thought “this would be best done by a centralized bureaucracy” let me remind you that when you let things be done by “the government” what you’re doing is giving power to people who have sat behind desks so long they’ve turned into Terry Pratchet’s auditors and think reality is classifiable into codes and numbers.

Perhaps it is because I’m one of those people who whenever she runs into a carefully coded system that I feel leery of such systems.  Though with National Health Care to give them credit (it’s credit, right?) they’re trying to cover every possible instance…  Except I bet I still fall between the cracks.

They’re also classifying as pathologies things that… you’ll see.

So, this started because son shouted from his room “WT ACTUAL F People?”

In such circumstances I run to see what he’s looking at.

It was this!

We’ll start with the codes that most affect our people, shall we?

​1. R46.1: Bizarre personal appearance.

The Funny Take: We call this a Science fiction convention!

The Serious Take: Bizarre according to WHOM?  Perhaps I don’t like your mustache, doc!

From the other side:  We call this a Science fiction convention!

W5609XA: Other contact with dolphin, initial encounter

Funny Take: Don’t do it, Lady!  Make him buy you dinner first!

Serious Take: Well done, you.  Now all the employees of Sea World are covered when a dolphin gets amorous.

The other take: What happens at the convention pool stays in the convention pool.

2014 ICD-10-CM Diagnosis Code W53.21 Bitten by squirrel W53.21 is not a billable ICD-10-CM diagnosis code and cannot be used to indicate a medical diagnosis as there are 3 codes below W53.21 that describe this diagnosis in greater detail. ICD-10-CM codes become active beginning October 1, 2015, therefore, this and all ICD-10-CM diagnosis codes should only be used for training or planning purposes until then

Funny take: Bitten?  Bitten?  The bastards had lances!

Serious take: seriously wouldn’t “animal bite” do?  What is it with the weird specificity?  Is this how you justify your sucking at the tax-payer teat?  And really, really, THREE more specific codes?  And guys, no one get bitten by a squirrel for another year, okay?

The other take: Were you at one of those Science Fiction cons?

5. Y93.D: V91.07XD: Burn due to water-skis on fire, subsequent encounter​.

Funny Take: Yes, I know you discovered the formula for Greek Fire.  Don’t use it to make water skis

Serious Take: Someone turn off the Merry Melodies cartoons in this bureaucrat’s office.

Take from the other side: Was this Sunday morning, at worldcon?

16. V97.33XD: Sucked into jet engine, subsequent encounter.

Note for those not speaking the lingo — subsequent encounter means the patient came to the doctor who wasn’t on the scene of the accident.

Funny take: Does the code cover that much superglue?

Serious take: Dude!  Dude.  A jet engine is a blender.  A really large blender.  With fire in it.  If you get sucked into it, you’re not going to need a code.  You’re going to need a coffin.

Other side take: Well, we call it a jet engine, but it was really Mike down in the Klingon party after, you know–  Ahem, anyway, you get him a couple of drinks, and he can get a little rough.

W22.02XD: V95.43XS: Spacecraft collision injuring occupant, sequela.

Funny Take: Was this a Star Trek “sequela”?

Serious Take: Another code that affects millions, no, mayhap billions of people a year, and so totally warrants its own code, right?

Take from the other side: It's all true

S1087XA: Other superficial bite of other specified part of neck, initial encounter.

Funny take: I don’t think it’s billable.  Do you know a chick named Buffy?

Serious take: How serious was this bite?  How often does this happen?  Or do people go to the doctor for a hickey

Other side take: What do you mean those fangs weren’t fake.  Kate Paulk SAYS she writes FICTION.

Z63.1: Problems in relationship with in-laws.

Funny take: Wait, what?  You go to the doctor for that?

Serious Take: No, seriously?

From the other side: They found out you go to science fiction cons????

Y34 Y34 Unspecified event, undetermined intent

The funny take: At last.  A code to end all codes.

The serious take: W the actual F people?  REALLY?

From the other side: It’s okay.  You can admit to us you go to science fiction conventions.  It was Mike, wasn’t it?

And that is a small sample.  If you search ICD-10 codes and are willing to part with a good portion of your time, you’ll find many, many more instances where you’ll laugh out loud.  Mostly because, paraphrasing  what Heinlein said in Stranger in a Strange Land, laughing is what you do when the situation is too sad to cry about.And perhaps the most laughter/crying worthy of all is this comment on this site after an article about the codes:

#Cassie Kiehl commented on September 25, 2011:While the Wall Street Journal may think it’s a laugh, with over 300 million citizens, macaw mishaps are going to happen. The specificity of the codes helps to track public health hazards that could occur in pockets due to particular services, vendors, products, or even the pet de la mode. Interestingly, the US pioneered injury coding , changing our ICD-9 version to include causes of injury. Clearly the WHO ran with it in ICD-10. Fortunately, there are software solutions to speed iCD-10 coding like SpeedECoder, http://www.speedecoder.com. There’s no difference in time typing macaw than dog when someone comes in for an animal bite.

Yes, indeed.  But the specificity in codes betrays the type of mind where EVERYTHING must be classified.  What this person doesn’t seem to understand is that once the code exists, you become the code, and if you fall outside the code, you stop existing.

And that, ladies and gentlemen is the evil of letting bureaucrats run with codes.  They poke their moral sight out, and start seeing people as things: Classifiable, measurable widgets easily pluggable into the system, each intrinsically valueless.

I hope laughter is the best medicine, because a lot of us are going to die laughing.

The Future — it is Open

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

There is no sword about to fall on your shoulders.  The world isn’t coming to an end.

To those of you rapidly paging down to yesterday’s blog, no there is no contradiction.  The people – at least for now – in charge of our destiny as a people are performing acts of astonishing malpractice.  Things can get very, very sticky.  As sticky as a wad of chewed up gum that got covered in stickfast.

So?

So, what am I talking about now?  Do I really expect you to think there is no problem?

No, of course I don’t.  Look, you silly critter, when did anyone ever promise you a problem free time to live in?  Not only was that always highly unlikely – you have read some history, right? – but you’d probably end up finding it boring if it came about.

We are in an exceedingly tight spot and our foreign policy of speaking softly and carrying an apologetic stick is going to get us in wars.  On the other hand we are and have always been the most innovative civilization in the history of mankind and we have some awesome fighting machines.  (And those are just our guys.  You should see the mechanical ones.)

What I’m trying to say here is that there is no predetermined outcome.  Decay and loss of power and civilizational strength is a choice, not an inevitable destiny.

The big difference between 1984 and Friday is that no one dropped a Heinlein character in the middle of 1984.  The big difference between The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress and Brave New World is not much greater.

In other words, you’ve been sold a bill of goods by the cultural elite that kept all the entertainment and information industry locked tighter than a drum until very recently.  Not that they wanted to consign you to depression and despair, mind.  No, they had a bright dream of their own (some of them still do) which went something like this: capitalist society is doomed, therefore it collapses, and beyond it arises the great day of equality and perfect communism, where we shall all be like onto gods and—

The problem is that capitalism proves remarkably hard to kill, and then when you manage to kill it, SOMEHOW the bright day of perfect equality never dawns, possibly because a society that makes humans into things can’t function because humans aren’t things.  But I digress.

So the poor dears have to try harder to show you how bad capitalism is, and then when communism doesn’t work, well, frankly they’re just fed up with humanity, so they show you how that doesn’t work either, so that in the end what passes for all literature and entertainment and art becomes the loooooooooooong sustained whine of a two year old who’s just found out he can’t have a pony and (appropriately) a little red wagon “But I waaaaaaaant perfect communism!  You promised you’d give me perfect communism!”  followed by “I only can’t have perfect communism because capitalism is a poopy face, humans are poopy faces, reality is poopy face.”

Or, if you prefer the “high end” of that kind of expression, as translated to science fiction, the future is rusty and closed to the possibility of new invention and technology and nothing works, and it feels like the 1930s redux, and then they all die.

These are the people who say space travel isn’t really sf, and no one would have adventures in space, but of course, if you read them these are people who grew up in comfort unimaginable to kings and princes of even a few years back, and who think you can’t have fun anywhere, and that, frankly, we should all listen to them when they say incredibly stupid moralizing things like “you can’t go to space until you learn to take care of the Earth.”  (Why?  The Earth might very well turn out to be the least of our worlds.  Our cradle, sure.  But anyone who knows how reality works, knows if we had had to stay in Europe till we learned to take care of it, we’d never have expanded to the New World.  Because part of learning is to experience new things.)  This is sort of like SF written by the devotees of a scatological cult.

Wait, it is SF written by devotees of a scatological cult.  They believe the Earth is overpopulated, human invention has finished its run and we’ll never get further technologically, and besides, no system of society works.  (What they mean is that no system works perfectly, which is how they demand that all systems but socialism work, and of course socialism doesn’t work at all.)

They got hold of the publishing houses late seventies which is when most people say they stopped reading SF – though they don’t tell you why, because most of them don’t know.  They just know that there was nothing on the shelves for them.

Well, I’m telling you why: because at that point the supposed writer-entertainers started selling gloom and doom as our only future, the same gloom and doom people were getting from their schools (we were all going to freeze to death) their newspaper (coming ice age because of the sins of industrialized society) and even their scientific publications (coming ice age for sure, the only good thing was that it would probably exterminate humanity.)

I think I was twenty nine when I realized that all these prophecies of doom weren’t true.  I remember the big sigh of relief when I realized the Earth probably wasn’t overpopulated (Statistics suck, overpopulated is not what you think it is, when tech allows us to survive on the produce of smaller and smaller areas and at any rate, the world, MOSTLY is full of empty space) and that even if it were, that was just a spur to invention and with more people we had more minds to invent things.  I’d assumed till then I was living in twilight years (and sparkly vampires hadn’t even been invented yet.)

Yesterday a lot of people in the comments said they hoped the feeling of doom would pass, just like it passed before.  I agree.  I mean, I remember the Carter years, and the people preparing to go back to the Earth.  There’s always something a little silly about that, anyway, because when a crisis like that hits, it hits in ways you don’t expect.

At any rate, a lot of us are having 70s flashbacks, and in my case they are worse than most.  (I appreciate that a lot of Russian immigrants agree with me, but to them I want to say “you have it easy.  You didn’t see the fall and if you had it wouldn’t be in a modern society.  In my case… PTSD might better describe what’s happening.”)  But they’re also reassuring in a way, because we didn’t end up in the soup then and maybe we’ll escape now.

Don’t yell at me.  I’m aware – very aware – we are all of us in much worse shape than in the seventies, for several reasons, among them a slow bleed away of competency due to our execrable school system.  But – this is important – while our kids are uneducated it doesn’t mean they’re stupid, and nothing wakes you like a bucket of unemployment in the face.

Also, the feeling I have about the American economy is that of a barely restrained horse, wanting to be racing.  Many things could loosen it and two of the simplest would be the end of regulatory insecurity and permitting us to exploit our vast mineral wealth, to wit oil.

Never happen?  Don’t bet on it.  Now the things after that, including a simplification and defanging of the tax code… that I can’t promise you.  But I think we have a fair shot at the first two.

And if we don’t?  If it all goes pear shaped?

Well… Portugal – and other countries – have lived through bankruptcy.  There was civilized life of a sort still going on in Lebanon in the middle of the civil war.  Things just become very weird, and ways of doing things become odd, and supplies can become irregular (which is why it’s a good idea to have some stop gaps laid by.)  Yeah, you might have to be more careful when going out.  Yeah, you might have to fence your yard.  No, you won’t like it.  But in the end all of that are minor adjustments.  Yes, even the bars on the windows and tall walls around the houses are minor adjustments.  You aren’t catapulted suddenly back to the 10th century with no reprieve.

Remember the difference between a dystopia and a dystopia with a Heinlein character in it.  Be a Heinlein character.

In other words, to paraphrase the man, if faced with the choice between being a live lamb or a dead lion, be a live lion.  As he noted, it’s often easier.

Don’t give up.  Don’t accept decay as an inevitable fate.  Fight.  Improve.  Think up new ways to do things, and new ways to get around problems.

We’ll do.  We’re humans and humans survive.

(Human Wave.)