According To Hoyt

I never expected to be a mother.

I won’t say I never wanted to be a mother, because that isn’t true – precisely.  I wasn’t opposed to motherhood and at various times in my life had sort of distant dreams of having kids one day.  But here’s the thing, mostly I saw myself adopting kids.

You see, I never expected to get married.  Okay, so it went well beyond logic, but I thought of myself as the world’s most unattractive woman.  In retrospect, I wasn’t – not physically, not by a long shot – but I was “awkwardly in the world.”

One of the ways in which I am stupid is this tendency to forget I have a body.  What I mean by that is rather literal.  I’ll get involved with pursuing some line of research, or get thoroughly ensconced in some imaginary world I just created and other than the obvious necessities and routines – which I do more or less by rote, from eating to showering – I forget I’m present physically (or I used to, before I was responsible for other people’s physical existence.  More on that later.)

Anyway, it might not be obvious, but this lack of attention to physicality can present issues when one hits what we’ll delicately call a romantic age.  As in, if you don’t much pay attention to how you dress, and periodically remember to style your hair but most of the time don’t (Recently – two years ago – I had hair I could sit on.  Not on purpose.  I forgot to make an appointment to cut it.  For five years) guys aren’t likely to notice you’re there.

Add to that that most young men (and many older ones) bored me out of my gourd, and you’ll understand why I never expected to be a mother in the natural way.  Besides, the whole thing seemed very awkwardly put together, as a physical process.  I mean, kissing was bad enough with one never knowing what to do with one’s nose, but that?  You’d got to be kidding.

Then interest in boys – real interest, not the pretend-romantic one that inspired hundreds of sonnets to a young man who never knew I existed – hit suddenly and devastatingly at eighteen.  And I realized my inadequacies.  I’m a quick study.  I observed other young women and what they did to attract men.  It worked.  I started to have a dating life.

None of which made me think of motherhood in more than a theoretical way.

You see, I didn’t want to get married.  Most men still bored me – particularly long term – and good gravy marriage was SO final.  Between 18 and 22 I rejected six marriage proposals that I remember/got I was being asked (I suspect there were others, because I had a tendency not to get “subtle.”  My idea of subtle is a two by four to the skull.)

Then Dan asked me.  Let me right now assure you I intended to say “no.”  Yeah, I loved him.  Yeah, I wanted to live in the US.  BUT my degree was not valid here (being a teaching degree.)  And besides, one travels lighter.  And besides…

I can’t really explain it.  This has happened a dozen times in my life, at crucial points.  I just couldn’t say no.  The option didn’t exist.

So I got married.  And suddenly, like the boy thing had hit, the motherhood-thing hit.  I wanted children.

In retrospect this is vaguely puzzling.  Look, guys, I was always awkward around babies, vaguely puzzled by toddlers and often outright scared of school age mons– er… children.  So why the heck did I want kids?  Who knows?  Perhaps biological imperative.  Perhaps insanity.  I wanted eleven children.

We waited a year then started trying and…  Nothing happened for almost six years.  Of course, infertility made me more determined than ever to have children.  I don’t like failing at things.

What I never paused to think about is why I’d want to have a child, or what in heaven’s name I intended to do to him/her.

So, when I had Robert – actually had him – it shocked me out of my gourd.

To begin with, pregnancy shocked me.  Why?  Well…  I don’t know how I imagined it before.  Like Alien, I think.  BUT … well…  Would you believe me if I told you I knew I was pregnant two hours after Robert was conceived?  And I knew he was a boy?  And I could SENSE him, clearly?

It is very WEIRD.  The idea that there’s a human inside you is one of the weirdest things you can experience, I think.

It gets weirder when they’re born.  There’s not only a sense of crushing responsibility – you brought him into the world.  What are you going to do about it? – but a sense of being “divided.”  Your soul – for lack of a better word – is riding along in two bodies…  Three, when Marshall came along.  (And, for sheer confusion, with Marshall I not only didn’t sense him from the beginning.  I couldn’t sense him even after I’d SEEN him on ultrasound.  I thought to the end something horrible would happen and he’d die before being born.  Turns out, no, he’s just very reserved.  That sense you have of someone else there when someone is in the room with you?  Yeah, he turns that off often enough, seemingly on purpose.)

I don’t know how to explain this without sounding new agey, though I think it’s more a matter of “attuning” your senses to the kids, but the “link,” the sense of being a soul in several bodies, grows fainter as they grow up, but I don’t think it ever goes away completely.  Right now, a part of me is listening for their movements, in their rooms, the sound of typing.  It’s not that I want to pry on them – it’s just a vestigial mother-thing.  Even when they’re out of town and too far away for me to hear/feel/sense, my mind tries to follow them.

I used to think, as a kid, that mothers had this special power.  I wanted to impress my mother.  I wanted her to be in awe of my achievements.  (Yes, there is a story there, but mom is mom and she did the best she could, and I love her.) To me, she was a figure of power, the center of the family.

Being a mother, it feels completely different.  I feel small and humble, dwarfed by the task and always aware I’ll never be good enough for it.  No matter what I do, I’ll always do/have done something spectacularly wrong.

And yet… and yet…

Despite my claims – loud and frequent – that I should have stuck to raising cats, things are not that simple.   They never are.  The truth is now that they are young adults we are ALMOST equals (no, not quite equals.  I’ll claim the rights of experience and knowledge.  And yes, I AM one of those sticks in the mud that insists in a difference in how they treat me, and how they treat their friends.) And I find I enjoy their company.  I enjoy their minds.  I enjoy going for walks with them, and woodworking, and those late night discussions where we unhook the universe and spin it around just for fun.

And in retrospect, I enjoyed the process, too.  They never scared me – except with the fear that I was raising them wrong – they never had a “feral” phase.  And even as toddlers, they interested me – perhaps instinct over brain.

I miss the sticky kisses, the odd collections of pebbles, the children’s books, the stories.  I enjoy the rational discussions, the stories about college, the sharing of esoteric scientific knowledge.

And I look forward to the future – scared and confused, happy and terrified, confident and humble – glad I got to be a mom, even if I was the least likely person to be so.

To my mom, whom at various times growing up I judged far too harshly but who did an amazing job, given that she never wanted to be a mother and that she had no happy childhood on which to model mine, I wish a happy mother’s day and I hope we still share many years among the living and have time, now and then, over those years, to share the joys and fears of motherhood.

To my (paternal) grandmother who was very much my secondary mother, and whom I lost nineteen years ago, wherever she is (keep your opinions to yourself, okay?  I might or might not have an afterlife, but I’m sure grandma did/does) I hope she’s not shaking her head too much at my efforts at being a mother.  In many ways, now as when I was a little toddler, following around in her wake, reaching up my hand for hers, I’m still following in her footsteps – and I’ll never be big enough to fill her shadow.

And to all the mothers, fathers and children out there: Happy Mother’s Day.

UPDATE: the free short story is up.

Yesterday night I didn’t know what to blog about.  The problem looked even more complex when Amanda Green dropped Mad Genius Club rotating Saturday blogship on my lap late last night.

Fortunately the gods of fate are kind to me.  And fortunately the publishing industry will never, ever, ever run out of teh stoopid for me to marvel at.  So just as I was about to go to bed, a friend of mine gave me a link to The Passive Voice which made my blood boil and my mind become awed at the sheer amount of stupid in this field.  The particular link was this.

 The background for this is the DOJ case against the big six publishers who are accused of collusion in pricing in the so called “agency pricing” that was imposed on ebook retailers.  Amanda has covered this very ably here (as here, here, here here and here)  I don’t have time to go into it, but fell free to check it up.

Every time Amanda talked about it, someone came up with the talking point that “it didn’t matter” and “it didn’t hurt anyone.”  This puzzled us because on the face of it, agency pricing hurt quite a lot.  It hurt readers, who had to pay more for a book they wanted than they would have, had the free market been allowed to operate.  It hurt publishers, who sold fewer books because some people simply refuse to pay that much for what is essentially a license to carry the book on one, or a limited number of e-readers.  It hurt authors (at least it would, if publishers in most cases didn’t calculate ebook royalty by guess and by golly) because they made less money.  (This is not in dispute.  Publishers say everywhere the agency model means they’ve made less money.)

More importantly, Amanda said the law – unjust or not – is the law and price fixing is against the law, period.

 BUT the talking point still puzzled us.  How they’d even come up with that gem made no sense to us (or probably ninety percent of human beings.)  And then, as I said, a friend sent me that link.  The link was about a letter Simon Lipskar, agent and board member of the Association of Authors’ Representatives, sent to the Department of Justice regarding the antitrust suit filed by the DOJ against Apple and five large publishers alleging the group colluded to fix prices on ebooks.

 Joe Konrath, long may his beard grow, fisked the letter here.  Also linked was another column by Konrath – a letter by a publishing insider.  And that is what caused this blog post, because it FINALLY explained what they meant by “but it doesn’t hurt anyone.” 

This is the money shot: 2.  One Book Is Pretty Much The Same As Any Other.  Lipskar acknowledges, as he must, that the prices of New York Times bestselling books went up following the simultaneous industry-wide imposition of agency pricing (“prices for a limited number of titles published by these publishers increased, i.e. those ebooks that were digital editions of newly released bestselling hardcover titles.  Amazon had quite explicitly promised its consumers that these titles would be available at $9.99, and with the switch to agency pricing, these titles did indeed increase in price, mostly to $12.99”).  But, he claims, these higher prices couldn’t hurt anyone because the prices of other books decreased (“No Price Increase for Non-Bestselling Titles”).

Okay, got that?  (Beyond the fact that yes, they increased the price of non-bestselling books or else some of my books are REALLY selling beyond statements, but we’ll leave it at that.)  ONE BOOK IS JUST LIKE ANOTHER.

 Look, guys, I’ve been in this field forever, and I have the bruises to prove it, but the thing about shocks me to my core.

We’ve long known that publishing execs weren’t readers.  But NOW, now, we have proof they’re not only not readers, they’re insane, or possibly an alien life form.

 What they’re saying above is that if you’re a fan, say, of Nora Roberts, you’ll be just as happy with a book by Terry Pratchett.  If you’re a fan of Jonah Goldberg, you’ll be equally pleased with a book by Michael Moore.  If you’re a fan of Robert A. Heinlein, you’ll simply adore a random book with “SF” on the cover.

 Got that?  Books are fungible, which means they are interchangeable.  You want to read Shadow Warriors by Tom Clancy and we don’t have it?  No problem, we have If you Give A Mouse A Cookie.  It’s a book and it should make you just as happy.

 “Of course they don’t mean it to that extent,” you say.  “Are you out of your ever-loving mind, Sarah?”

 Okay, so they don’t mean that to THAT extent, to what extent do they meant it?  I can tell you to what extent they mean it.  They mean if you’re into a certain sub-genre of science fiction or fantasy or Romance or anything, you’ll be just as happy with a book which is more or less along the same lines.  Say, you’re a fan of Nora Roberts and her book is too expensive.  Well, you can buy this nice book by Julia Quinn (or, since JQ is also a bestseller, let’s use a made up name, like Mary Smith).  See, you have a book.  It has words and everything.  So, you – being an idiot child who is easily distracted – will be perfectly happy.

 “But Sarah,” you say, “they didn’t call us idiots who are easily distracted.”  No?  Really?  But they’ve been TREATING you and me and every other reader as idiots who are easily distracted.  This is the only way they can treat books as fungible and think a book is just as good as the other.  (And I’ll have something to say on this before I close this article, btw.)

 This particular sentence though, this concept of any book being just as good as any other suddenly made sense of a bunch of industry practices which – otherwise – make no sense whatsover.  (It also made a mockery of a bunch of other industry practices, which is why I’ll have more to say on this.)

 For instance, how many of you, as readers, are aware that publishers think books are bananas?  Okay, maybe not bananas, but some other, fragile, quickly-expiring, short-sell-by-date produce?  Probably not many of you.  Heck, I didn’t when I was just a reader.  (Though it was a little different then, too, because the particular inventory tax laws that killed back list hadn’t come into existence yet.)  Most books these days have a an expiration date of just a few weeks.  When you have a traditionally published book, you have to start promoting MONTHS before it is even available because that influences how much it will be available, which influences how many will be bought in the first weeks they are on the shelf.  After that, they are removed from the shelves (if they ever got on the shelves at all) and replaced with other books.  This never made sense to me, but now it does.

 If books are fungible, why would you want to read a book that’s older than a few weeks?  If any book is much like another, all that counts is that the book is new and shiny and on the shelf, right?

 Or consider what publishers do, by buying books for the AUTHOR’S life story or the author’s cute face, or the author’s nice bit of leg in lace stocking.  It makes no sense to readers who – silly us – read for the story and the words and couldn’t care less if the creature who wrote them is secretly a cockroach.  BUT if one book is exactly like another, then the only way to sell them is the “image” and the “narrative” – therefore buying writers for things other than their writing?  Genius!

 Or consider “stocking to the net.”  Since all books are alike, readers – those idiots – must be attaching to the writers’ name in order to buy books (who knows why.  Maybe it’s like imprinting.)  So they will buy every book with the same author name in the same amounts, even if they are in totally different fields.  Romance by Georgette Heyer?  TOTALLY the same thing as mystery by Georgette Heyer.  And if a writers’ name isn’t selling, the best thing possible is to change the name, since that’s all the reader imprints on.

 Or consider that the publishers thought it was a PERFECTLY VALID and, in fact, marvelous state of affairs to be able to control which books even got seen, much less bought.  They would buy a hundred books and plan on 80 of them failing and, in fact, make it impossible for those books to succeed.  (The reason for the inventory being so large is related to all sorts of other stuff, including “holding space” and the fact that even a book which “doesn’t sell” will sell a few hundred copies, which with the new print on demand tech was enough for them to make money.)  How could they think this made sense?  How could they think they could PICK the books the public would want to read, across the country with that much exactness?  How could they think they could say “this book will sell 100,000 copies and this one will sell 500?”  Let alone why would they buy the book which would sell 500, let’s concentrate on their belief that it was a good thing to decide how much the book would sell before exposing it to the reading public (this from an industry that does no consumer surveys and in which twenty one houses turned down Harry Potter.)

 HOW could any sane industry think it was a good thing to be able to say “Well, I don’t care if the customers want more Pratchett.  We shall give them more Laurell Hamilton.  They’re both fantasy.  The readers will buy more of what is in a bigger display, and that’s the end of it?”  (Of course, both Mr. Pratchett and Ms. Hamilton sell.  However, Pratchett didn’t for almost a decade in the US while selling in the UK.  Why?  Because NYC had decided he wouldn’t sell.  So he got print runs of five thousand books and was about as well known here as I am.  The moment at the first Discworld con when Pratchett said “What changed between then and now?  Different agent, different publisher.  I write the same,” was a moment of intense relief for me, because if they can hold Pratchett at that level, they can hold anyone.  It’s their decision, not the writer.  More on that later.)

Well, the publishing execs think one book is much like the other.  So, it’s perfectly fine to push the books they want to push, with the opinions and attitudes they want to promote.  The reader, is after all an idiot, and they can just buy whatever is available.

 But Sarah, you say, printruns have been falling since this became policy.  Well, yes, I know that, but editors and publishers say it’s video games and TV and movies.  That’s their problem, not mine.  (And also, readership has increased with the e-book revolution.  I wonder why.)

 Other things that are their problem – if every book is fungible and every reader will be just as happy with one book as another:

 How come you stop buying an author when he/she doesn’t magically become a bestseller, when you haven’t slated him/her for it?  Because, look, if the reader will be just as happy with Harry Potter, A Farewell to Arms or If you Give A Mouse A Cookie, HOW can it be the writer’s fault?

 How come you give different advance levels to different writers?  Exclude the celebrities, since you think that sells a book.  How come you give some writers millions and some a thousand?  If a book is the same as the other, then all writers should be paid the same, right?  Maybe a certain amount per word?

 And if every book is the same as another book, why would anyone buy books from a certain publisher?  (Baen fans, SIT DOWN.  I’m not saying every book is the same.  Big Publishing is.  Baen is NOT part of teh stupid in this, and Baen is not guilty of this nonsense.)  Why not buy indie instead?

 By their very logic this brings us to the conclusion that the big six might or might not be alien life forms or mentally damaged, but they ARE in fact fungible.

 Don’t give big publishing a cookie.  BUY INDIE (Small press, micro press or self published and, of course, Baen who is in many ways indie).

 *My title btw, is taken from Shakespeare, whose works still sell, and therefore – by not being bananas – puncture all of big publishing’s argument.

*This is the Fantasy novel I’m posting here for free, one chapter every Friday.   If your conscience troubles you getting something for free, do hit the donate button on the right side.  Anyone donating more than $6 will get a non-drm electronic copy of Witchfinder in its final version, when it’s published.
There is a compilation of previous chapters here  all in one big lump, which makes it easier to read and I will compile each new chapter there, a week after I post.  When the novel is completed and about to be edited the compilation page will probably be deleted.

Oh, this is in pre-arc format, meaning you’ll find the occasional spelling mistake and sentence that makes no sense.  It’s not exactly first draft, but it’s not at the level I’d send to a publisher, yet. *

For previous chapters, look here:  http://accordingtohoyt.com/witchfinder/

Prisoner and Guards

Caroline couldn’t think and couldn’t focus.  Not that she wanted to focus.  As the ground seemed to speed beneath her, and she saw the clods and small stones struck up by the hooves just an armspan away from her, she was all too aware only the centaur’s strong arm, its tight pressure beneath her breasts, kept her from falling down and being trampled.

She closed her eyes, but it was impossible to ignore her situation.  She smelled horse and human sweat commingled, she felt the jarring pound of the centaur’s hooves beneath.  After a while she heard yelling, and then the hooves stopped and the movement, and the human arm let go.

Caroline opened her eyes in time to stumble a little, then recover her ballance.  She stood on a clearing, filled with dozens of centaurs, clustering round her on all sides.

The centaur who had brought her pushed her forward, a hand on her shoulder, and said, “I have brought her, you see.  At the council’s command.”

Around her there were many centaurs.  All of their human bodies were swarthy, heavily muscled, and her first impression of them was of a menacing group, particularly as they moved restlessly, their hooves stomping the ground, and calling out words she only partly understood.

“In the sacred ground of our ancestors–”

“The announced one–”

“In this dire hour.”

They spoke now one and now the other, their voices louder and more resonant than normal men’s voices, their heads tossing – just like horse’s heads, she thought, in shock, even if they were atop men’s trunks and necks – their long dark hair sweeping and becoming even more disarrayed.  They had overgrown stubble or outright dark beads.  Some wore necklaces of what appeared to be human teeth.

Caroline wanted to run, but she could imagine this troop of centaurs following her – hunting her down.  She swallowed hard and felt sweat prickle at her eyes.  Her throat was so parched she feared she might not be able to speak, but she had to speak.  If she couldn’t run, she had to do something to prevent these creatures–

To prevent the creatures what?  She could remember, vaguely, from her classical mythology and history that drunken centaurs could get thoroughly unpleasant, in the way of unpleasantness that mama would say Caroline shouldn’t know about until her wedding night – and perhaps not even then.  But Caroline had heard the women of the nearby village talk, and some of the maids too.  And besides, the home farm had livestock.  And Caroline was no slower of mind than she should be.  So she had a pretty clear idea of how unpleasant and in exactly what way centaurs could get.

Though she wondered if it was exact enough to fend it off.  She should have asked Gabriel.  Of all of the adults in the house, he was the only one not likely to tell her she was being unladylike or to turn her mind to more appropriate thoughts.  Michael wouldn’t have told her that either, but he knew no more than she did, and besides, frankly, Michael was not very interested in what went on between centaurs or women.  Or men and women for that matter.  If it didn’t have gears, he was simply not much interested in it.

Which brought her to here and now, and whatever the centaurs meant to do, and the fact she was quite – quite – powerless to defend herself.  Except by trying to do what mama called showing herself a lady and therefore beyond their touch.  She looked at those large hands, at the end of bulging muscular arms, and realized not a few held knives or lances.  She swallowed again, then planted her feet and spoke loudly, “I am Caroline Ainsling, the sister of the Duke of Darkwater, and I want to know what you want with me?”

They moved.  At first she wasn’t sure how.  There was just more stomping of feet, and more galloping, and sounds like a stable.  Smells like a stable too, which made her wonder how human centaurs were, and how animal.  Around the edge of the clearing where the centaurs were assembled, two of them galloped in circles.

“Quiet!”  It was a clarion call of a voice, a voice such as, unleashed in a square in London could have called the whole city to attention.  Caroline trembled, thinking the yell directed at her, but then the voice said, “We are being rude to the maiden, and fools to seek her help but not tell her what we wish.  Agapios, Thanos, cease your mad galloping.  If you insist on behaving like colts, you shall be excluded from the councils of men.”

To Caroline’s surprise, the two madly galloping centaurs stopped, and one of them lowered his head like a schoolboy caught at fault.  It occurred to her that despite their golden skins, the long, dark hair, they were very young.  If they’d been horses, their horse-body would look like a colt’s not fully grown into its height, and if they’d been humans, the human body would have looked too gangly, too thin, not muscular enough.  The sweaty faces were devoid of stubble, and one of them wore his hair pulled back from the forehead with a bit of ribbon, an affection that, for some reason, made him look younger.  She almost smiled at him, then remembered the situation, and that she definitely shouldn’t encourage centaurs with untoward friendliness, and tried to make her face impassive.

“Caroline, Daughter of the Duke, Maiden,” the man who had first spoken, spoke again, and then, to Caroline’s eternal shock, fell on his front knees in front of her, and looked up at her with anguished eyes that didn’t look any less scared for regarding her from under beetling brows.  “We need your help.  My son has fallen in a snare, and you’re the only one who can save him.”

Caroline looked again at the powerful bodies around her.  “I’m the… only one?  But you…”

The centaur shook his head.  “No.  It is not a human snare, nor one such that can be defeated by the hand of a centaur, or the force of our arms.  It is a snare of the mind, a snare of the soul, and we are powerless against it.  We felt your nearness, and we went to get you.  We don’t know if your potency will hold against the local magic, but we hope so.”

Her … potency?  Had they lost their ever lasting mind?  And where were the centaur women?  Unpleasant ideas formed in Caroline’s mind, and she drew herself up very tall – or as tall as her five feet would allow – and spoke in a way that, she hoped, would do the Duchess credit.  “I do not have the pleasure of understanding your meaning.”

“It is my son, Akakios,” the centaur said. “He has been captured.”

“Captured by whom?  Where?”

There was movement again, this time towards her.  No.  The circle that had been all around moved, so in front of her there were only trees and no centaurs.  The centaur who’d knelt before her – the same one who’d brought her here? – now stood beside her, his hand on her shoulder.  Impossible not to follow as he walked forward, though he neither pushed nor pulled her.

He said only “Caroline, maiden!” and at that moment, they reached the edge and she could see through the trees.  She’d thought they were in a large clearing, but the clearing ahead was twice as large.  From the center of it, suspended on what seemed to be a silver chain, that attached soemwhere in the distance, was what looked like a crystal bird cage.  For a very large bird.  A very, very large bird.  Only there was no bird in it, but a young centaur.

His hair was in more disarray than that of his congeners.  His hands were clasped on the translucent bars of his cage.  And his human chest and horse body were crisscrossed with bloody slashes.

He raised his head, as if sensing her scrutiny and looked at her with eyes that were as green as leaves in spring, and that looked like he’d been crying.

Then she saw them: Around the clearing, as though on guard, galloped many unicorns.

They were large, white, glimmering, beautiful.  It took her a moment to realize that the tips of their horns were stained with blood.  

By which I don’t mean this is a blog devoted to Kate Paulk’s book.  Sorry, guys.  When it’s cued to come out, I shall let her excerpt, okay?  Good, now moving on.

One of the things that my blog yesterday touched on was the concept of “Consensus reality.”  You guys seemed to know exactly what I was talking about, which is good, because…  Well, mostly it is a concept I’ve discussed with my kids, but not with anyone else much.  However, I don’t know if you understand the breadth and depth of consensus reality, or what it means, how it is established, its fatal flaws and how insane things can get when the consensus reality is significantly different from the kind of reality that can bite you in the er… nethers.

Creating or changing the consensus reality has been a project of revolutionaries and/or invaders and/or reformers since… the world has been a world.  Probably.  You can find it in changed inscriptions on the stone monuments of ancient empires.  You can find it in defaced monuments, for that matter, in which someone’s face was carefully chiseled out of a statue, which was left standing.  You can find it in historical descriptions of battles, invasions and other such “first sources.”

When studying history, it is a bright idea to remember the supposed credo of journalists “if your mother tells you she loves you, verify it.”  In this case, if your great grand mother tells you she gave birth to your grandmother, verify it.

How can you verify it, if every source is biased?  Well, you read as much information as you can, in as wide a pattern as you can.  After a while the way in which things contradict each other, and some of the absolutely known, rock-bottom facts about the era (like “half of Europe died in wars,” for example.  Or “At the end of this era the country was markedly poorer,”) will give you a fairly accurate view of reality.

Note what I say about multiple sources.  When studying history, multiple sources are the cure to consensus reality.

Now let’s say you have an ideology – because the ideology has changed what it actually believed in through the time, except for a few certainties – we’ll call it Hopeful Stupidity which believed that it needed to change what people thought reality was in order to get a foothold in a country that they could FINALLY transform into paradise on Earth.

BTW the idea that HS in its beginning format, [and including the idea that people like onto angels (by which – bizarrely – they meant intellectuals, philosophers and theorists!) could impose a better way of living from the top down and drag us from the grubby present into a perfect, peaceful and prosperous future] was a propaganda coup of the old USSR is not in dispute.  The beginning of it as a project in the US started before that (the ideas are to an extent to be expected of the then-normal beliefs about technology and the future) because no idea is stupid enough not to have occurred multiple times.  But the level to which it has become a consensus reality – in fact, the project to make it a consensus reality, was part of the agitprop of the old Sov Union.  Keep that in mind, because it is relevant.

Again, the idea of creating a consensus reality of – in fact – lying to the mass of people about their past and their future was not a new development in politics or government.  What was new was its intersection with technology.

To the extent that such things can be simplified (And they have to be, because I’m writing a blog, not a 100 page treatise) the twentieth century depended on technologies that worked best in mass form and were directed/controlled from the center.  (And our political theories have a tendency to follow our tech.  It’s stupid, but there it is.  See Glorianna in the middle of her clockwork empire.)

But what that meant is that those technologies were – by nature – designed to create a “consensus reality” such as the world had never seen.  (And the world has seen some great attempts at this before.  For instance, I BET some of you believe that Marie Antoinette said “Let them eat cake.”)

In most countries, creating a consensus reality took the form of top down authoritarianism, though.  The Sov Union, itself, resembled more than anything 1984 with lower tech.  And such work has holes.  Mostly it has the problem that people are really good at developing double-think.  That is where they will say something with the lips and confess another faith in their heart.  By the time the project really got going in the US, there were already indications that this was so.  And it disturbed those involved in the project.  (Was it a coordinated and rational project?  To believe Heinlein’s bio, as well as the documents in the USSR archives, yes, at its center.  It was in fact a conspiracy.  However, at its outlying edges it wasn’t really enforced.  People did things to advance it, more or less without thinking.  The “coolness” factor was a great part of it.  The early-planted idea that the future lay that way.  And the fact that it was bought into by probably the most massive generational bump to hit the US.  There are other factors, like the feelings of veterans of WWII, and the advent of television and… again… I don’t have 100 pages.)

In the States, the form it took was that “the good people” – people with a certain view of how the future should go.  Yes, yes, mostly (once more) philosophers and intellectuals, though a few were ruthlessly practical and power hungry men.  It happens.  And this particular project afforded a lot of power – took positions of power.  In a way it was a very easy project, because Americans are a very weird breed.  We like to do things, and we like to mind our own business.  That means NO ONE is minding the philosophical shop most of the time, and as far as liberal arts in college go, well, we want our young people to be able to show them Europeans a thing or two and read the same works and all but Good G-d, we don’t expect them to take all that mumbo jumbo seriously, right?  So, just go on to school, Johnny, and spew back what your teachers tell you, but we’ll forget all that when you come home and take over dad’s business.

And for a while it worked like that.  AND because NO ONE was minding the ideological store, it was very easy for little Johnny who had a more… HS bend than the others to finish his degree with flying colors, and to take a job where he could come to the top and control who got hired to teach the kids.  And what they were allowed to teach.  Or to take a job where he could control what books got published.  Or to take a job where he could pick what TV programs got aired.  After a while, with people possessed of Hopeful Stupidity in mid-positions, or in enough low positions, it was enough for little Johnny to be dim but really good at regurgitating back the Hopeful Stupidity credo.  And, to paraphrase Heinlein, if he was too lazy to work, too stupid to create anything new, and too cowardly to run his own con, little Johnny fell in place like a cog in a machine.

In the fullness of time, the people at the top died and little Johnny took over.

I think – if there are future generations who are literate enough for this – our descendants will laugh themselves sick at the idea that just as these people slotted into key positions, the Sov Union was falling apart, and the idea of top down economic and cultural control was withering.

Part of the issue, of course, is that in the US this wasn’t so much a conspiracy as we think of it, with cloak and dagger, but a slow and steady application of the idea of what is “cool” and the “future” to the culture, by all means available, and a slow but steady promotion of like minds, at all levels of entertainment, news, academia.  That type of thing takes a LONG time.

(And before you accuse me of paranoia, go and take a poll of academia, of publishing (fiction and non-fiction), of journalism.  If there were no ideological filter in hiring and promotion for those, in a deeply divided country like ours, the politics would break 50/50, right?  Or thereabouts?  But they don’t.  If the country mirrored those professions, we’d all be Red Pioneers.)

The other part of the issue is that this type of system promotes DUMB.  By which I mean, rock bottom stupid.  No, I don’t mean that individuals are stupid in the sense of not being able to memorize and spew back what they heard.  Some of them are brilliant that way.  But when it comes to innovation and intelligence, they are DUMB.  It is part of the Hopeful Stupidity credo that we’ve already reached a stable point in tech, and that’s why the government can now direct resources and thoughts and beliefs towards a better society.  If you let people going around creating random crap, that would upset the whole apple cart.  You can’t have that.  That creates “instability” and breaks apart the “national consensus.”

What this means is that the USSR promoted the same type of people.  Intellectuals, with a hunger for power.  Too lazy to work, too dumb to create, too cowardly to run their own con.  The first generation had to be hungry and sneaky.  The second needed to be less so, and were at least somewhat aware of not being the sharpest tool in the shed…  Which meant they hired the same type as themselves, but dumber.  Dumb enough not to challenge them.  Which is part of the reason that the Sov Union collapsed when it did.  Past the third generation, you’re in the same point that took the royal families of Europe centuries to achieve through mere inbreeding, where a king could put the crown on the right end of his bride two times out of four or so, and could be taught not to drool in public.

However, collapsing when it did, it also acted as a clarion call to the people who’d been involved in the project of Hopeful Stupidity in the US.  Up till then, at least in my profession, they let the occasional dissenter through.  And though you’d not get the bestest goodies, you could make a comfortable living, if you just kept quiet about how STUPID Hopeful Stupidity was.

Then the people, by then comfortably in control almost everywhere, realized that – uh – people COULD doublethink.  (Be kind to them.  Most have trouble single thinking.)  And that meant they needed to keep a sharp eye for heretics.  Certain profiles stood out.  Say you were OBVIOUSLY not stupid, but didn’t rock the boat.  “Um… better safe than sorry.  Keep so and so in menial no-decision positions.”)

In an ironic twist the Heigelian philosophy I was taught was right in this.  A system always seems strongest before it crashes.  By the nineties Hopeful Stupidity, by then flying the banner of “everyone has the right to never be offended” was publishing manuals on what language you were allowed to use, what words you were allowed to think, what word use was the moral equivalent of eating babies on screen.  And they were kicking out anyone from the industries they controlled, who might have a spark of original thought.  (Some escaped by having got established before that.)  This, btw, among other things, explains the state of the movie industry.

But here’s the thing – while it worked, it established Consensus Reality.  By which I mean, people got the same view of the world EVERYWHERE.  From school to your shootem movie, you heard the same things, over and over and over again.  In retrospect, this should have been a warning, but it wasn’t.  Of course it wasn’t.  Humans are social animals.  If our monkey band all thinks they can levitate the Denver Mint, if our education tells us that belief controls the world, if there are philosophical treatises on how belief is everything, if in movies and novels people can levitate the Denver Mint and end the war…  Well!  It must be true.  Otherwise someone would say something different, right?  (And btw, post-modernism is a way of closing that thought-escape-hatch.  It’s incoherent, of course, but it can work for a time.  If you really want it to.)  And when it doesn’t work, there are always reasons.

I was telling my son that the first time I thought FDRs policies had been RESPONSIBLE for the Great Depression, I thought I was going nuts.  All the “experts” knew he’d saved the nation.  It said so in my history book.  Casual reference was made to that in movies.  Fergodsakes, I was just a chick who read economics.  How could I question this?  (For the record now even Krugman admits it.  Only he thinks it can work, provided we get a WWII.)

But the Hopeful Stupidity NEVER understands innovation.  They don’t get that other people will do things other than climb to the top of the ladder by regurgitating the credo.  And they particularly failed to get that 20th century tech was a transitional state.  (Forgive them.  Part of it is that they just want power – not knowledge or wisdom.  Also, they don’t usually study tech.  There’s all that math, see?)  

And so… first the VCR, then cable.  In science fiction they could never QUITE get rid of Jim Baen (Wherever you are, Jim, I’m glad I got to “meet” you, if only over the phone.)  And then… and then there was the internet.  And all hell broke lose.  

The internet was supposed to be for scientific exchange or SOMETHING.  It was supposed to be for important people to tell each other important things.  They would tolerate porn, of course, but…  Political blogs?  Who were those people in their infernal pajamas?

And then it got worse.  What do you mean people can write and publish books without our approval?  But we worked years to be gatekeepers.  We licked all the right… er… boots.

Worse, just when the books that would show these people the past was different from what the gatekeeper’s said were FINALLY aging out of readibility… they could be brought back?  In a way that doesn’t age except when language ages?  (I would say the “lead” regulations that got half of my kids’ school library destroyed slotted into that, only I don’t think they’re smart enough to have thought of it.)

In case you wonder this is where SOPA came from.  It’s also where the shrieks of the industry come from.  And why they seem caught in molasses and unable to adapt.

We’re uncoordinated, insane, often very very angry (who, me?) and we just “put it all up” and “throw it all out.”  BUT that, it turns out, is the big hammer that shatters the delicately built, painstakingly constructed crystal of consensus reality.  The ONLY thing that could work.

Things are going to get much worse before they get better.  No establishment EVER goes down easy.  But in the end, hammer will always shatter glass.  (And isn’t it ironical that the originators of Hopeful Stupidity thought the hammer was theirs?)  Particularly when it’s a million pen hammers, wielded with gusto.

Carry on my friends.  Aim for the shiny bits.

I often talk about how I was influenced by Heinlein.  What I don’t mention is that the only books of his that could even vaguely be considered juveniles which I could find translated into Portuguese in the early seventies (which doesn’t mean that the others weren’t translated, only that I could no longer find them.  Portuguese book business has always worked on no-back-list, so barring finding the book used you were simply out of luck) were The Door Into Summer and Have Spacesuit Will Travel.  (This last one, of course, hit straight home because in many ways my family resembled Kip’s.  In many ways, too, I WAS Peewee.)

I read the juveniles after I got married.  My husband had about half of them, and I tracked the others down, used, one at a time, till my mid thirties.  (The days before Amazon were dark, oh, children of mine.)

But the thing is that before Heinlein I had another very strong influence on my formation and character.  Those of you who are from Europe, nod as you go along – Enid Blyton.

Yes, I know what is said of Ms. Blyton.  I don’t know if they call her sexist, but I’ve heard her accused of being racist and/or hating gypsies.  (Did she?  Well, I didn’t see it that way.  In Circus of adventure the gypsy girl is a central and sympathetic character.  BUT even if she had a condescending attitude to gypsies, it’s not race prejudice as such.  Part of it has a reason, at least if you go back far enough in Britain.  When sheep-culture [I can’t remember the Latin term.  Oviculture?] began in England, the enclosing and merging of lands led to a lot of marginal tenant families being dispossessed of the land they had farmed for generations.  Any number of them became “counterfeit gypsies.”  It was a way of avoiding the work house.  They dressed colorfully, moved from place to place, engaged in minor acts of pilfering.  “Gipsy” became the British word for “Homeless” or “Transient.”  The encampment of gypsies in Jane Austen’s Emma was almost certainly of this nature.  In that sense, it had nothing to do with race, and it was more akin to a young woman being afraid to cross a homeless camp – for that matter, probably not entirely unfounded.  Just because someone is discriminated against, it doesn’t make them angels.  My guess is that is the background of Blyton’s recoil from gypsies, if any.)

She’s also been accused of class prejudice.  Look, I wouldn’t know.  I did not grow up in a classless society, so at the ages I read her – four to ten or so – I would have been blind to it, at any rate.  It was just part of instruction on “How to behave properly.”

And right there, I must point out these things might be far more evident in the early childhood books.  I’ve heard of Noddy.  A friend of mine had one book.  But I never actually read any of those books.  The ones that helped form me were Famous Five and the Adventure books.  (I discovered the boarding school ones much later and read them, but by that time I was beyond “forming” at that level.)

What do I mean formed me?

Well, Enid Blyton who might or might not have hated Heinlein on sight, shared with him one important characteristic.  It is something that goes well beyond being a good writer, something almost of an alchemic nature, which is difficult to pin down.

They create in you a sense of morals – their morals – and a desire to follow them so that the author’s characters [or more often, bluntly, the author] would approve of you.

Admired, loved, important writers completely lack this.  (I could be wrong on this, being, again, well past the age of being formed, but from what I saw of how these influenced my younger son, J. K. Rowling completely lacks this, but Terry Pratchett’s Tiffany Aching series has it in spades.)

From Ms. Blyton I got un-Portuguese and frankly un-feminine senses of fair play and nobless oblige.  (Now, not totally un-Portuguese because the Northern region I come from was heavily influenced by England.  However, certain things that Blyton managed to instill with me, such as not taking advantage of personal connections and trying to get ahead purely on merit, or keeping a stiff upper lip and not displaying emotions, are outright counterproductive in Portuguese society.)

I’m not going to speculate on what creates that effect.  That’s a subject for another column.  I suspect it’s some combination of a strong personality, a strong voice, attractive stories AND the courage to give your opinion loud and clear.  (Agatha Christie seems to have this effect on some people, but not most, possibly due to her rather more quiet personality.)

I can tell you Enid Blyton had that effect, though, because hers were the first books I evangelized, and I saw her attitudes push into everyone to whom I gave the books.

Yes, I know what I said above about the attitudes being counterproductive in Portugal – but all the same they gave me a way to arrange my inner universe.  And they dovetailed rather well with the attitudes I picked up from Heinlein, btw.  So, of course, when I had children, I wanted to influence them to be more like me, so I could understand them (And verse the vice of course )

Heinlein books were easy to come by, and by then I had hold of the juveniles.  Enid Blyton, on the other hand…  The year before we had Robert, with the vague idea that a miracle might happen and we might eventually reproduce (well, we’d been trying for five years, in our twenties) I stopped by a bookstore in England to look for the books.  And recoiled.

There were books with those titles, right enough.  But they were not the books I’d read.  There were televisions, and computer games.  But what was more, the kids did not sound RIGHT.  It was a short excursion and I didn’t have the time to really read them, but I walked away shaking my head.  The books had been re-written, which I thought I understood.  But I had no intention of exposing my kids to this.  I didn’t know if whatever they’d done left the alchemy intact.

Fortuitously, years later, when Robert turned three, a friend of mine – hi Charles! – worked at a used bookstore.  When someone came in wishing to trade a large box of Enid Blyton, the books didn’t even go on the shelf.  I got a phone call, and rushed down.

These were the real deal, the books from my childhood.  I passed them on to the child, and again, the alchemy worked.

Now, you’re saying “But Sarah, they had to modernize the books.  How could kids read them otherwise?  Children are not sophisticated.  They have to read about kids like them, in environments like theirs.”

Really?  REALLY?  You’re REALLY REALLY REALLY going to tell me that?  And you expect me to believe it?  (Presses fingers on either side of the bridge of her nose, closes eyes and shakes her head.)  What kind of children do you people have?  More importantly, what kind of namby pamby expectations do you have of your children?

Throughout history children were raised on stories of lands long before their own and far more alien to them than England between the wars would be for children today.  Even fairytales should be incomprehensible to American children a hundred years ago.  Were they?  No.  Children will accept the parameters of a story, and then build from that.  Doing that is no different than learning the rules of Harry Potter and enjoying the books.  I mean, kids, you do know that your children aren’t learning broom flight and magic, right?

Is the setting of Enid Blyton’s adventure tales odd to modern children?  I should hope so.  It was outright alien to me.  No one in Portugal (different culture, remember?) would dream of letting their kids go and camp anywhere before their eighteenth or twentieth birthday.  And even then, they would not let girls do so.  There were also all sorts of idiosyncracies.  They had no TV for instance. …  But kids are adaptable.  I knew I was reading about a different land, a different time, and I went along with it, captured by the characters and accepting the premisses of the world.

People who insist that Blyton or Heinlein or for that matter Agatha Christie must be modernized for “the younger generation” have been sold a bill of goods.  Young people who won’t read Heinlein because “I grew up with computers, and his characters don’t have them, so they’re irrelevant” of course also can’t handle mythological tales, or stories of the middle ages.  Or perhaps they’ve just been sold a bill of goods by the adults in their lives.  Or perhaps… and this is the scary part, they’re so convinced of the rightness of the consensus reality these days, so absolutely sure that our prejudices, our beliefs, our thoughts about things are the right ones, that they don’t want to think society might have been organized differently once upon a time.

This is different – if you ask – from the type of strong moral (or immoral) code that can influence other people.  For one, it’s more fragile.  I can’t imagine anyone like Heinlein or Blyton refusing to read about other lands/people because “they aren’t like me.”  They would probably judge the inhabitants of those worlds, fictional or not, according to their own lights (multiculturalism being a weak poison at the time) but they wouldn’t put their hands over their ears and refuse to hear about it.  In fact, this attitude of “modernizing” books betrays a LACK of cultural confidence, and a lack of belief that this is what we should pass on to our children.  It’s as though we’re (and here I’m talking society as a whole.  Just like I am at home in the lowest greasy spoon and the highest gourmet restaurant, I can encompass literature from all eras, and my kids can as well) afraid our kids will find out things were organized differently once upon a time, will investigate why and will come to believe (oh, horrors!) those old norms.

In fact, the “updating” of books is another way of enforcing that consensus reality that the gatekeepers have been working so hard at.  It’s a way of making sure that you hear nothing that makes you question “how things are done.”

It is in a way the same impulse that led to the endless revisions of history in 1984.  “We have always been at war with Eurasia” means you shouldn’t consider that perhaps there is a specific reason for that war, and that maybe that war is wrong.  “We have always had computers” and “it’s always been wrong to look down on gypsies” and “Women and men have always been equal” means you don’t think too hard about the way we live, and don’t consider HOW you could live.

You see what I mean about how that betrays a lack of cultural confidence?  How what it shows is that people are afraid their kids will meet unexpurgated books that push thoughts that are no part of our “politically correct” reality?  (Did you know that term comes from Maoism?  It was supposed to denote something that was obviously wrong, but was “politically correct” – i.e. true to the ideology of Maoism.)

“Oh, come, Sarah,” you said.  “Aren’t you getting al bent out of shape because some idiots gave The Famous Five computers?  I mean, it’s not like they’re defacing Caesar’s Campaigns in Gaul!  Perhaps kids like reading about other kids with computer games.”

Ah.  But see, when you go in to “modernize” something it’s very easy to change the other stuff too – on purpose or not.  Look, I’ve tried to revise a mystery that I wrote in the early eighties, and had it fall apart in my hand.  It was impossible for that book to happen in a world in which you could google things.  Modernizing something from the early twentieth century?  You’re going to have to change essential parts.  You’re just going to have to. And, of course, while you’re modernizing, you’re going to “correct” the attitudes of the characters.

No?

Okay, let me tell you a story.  My older son, during one of our walks, brought up a book I couldn’t remember.  He said something about a tree and “it was one of the books I read when I was little.”  Well, he read EVERYTHING when he was little – kind of like a pulping machine will swallow everything – so I forgot about it.

Only he didn’t.  Turns out that box of books had a few Enid Blytons I’d never read.  Robert, in attempting to prove to me he’d not gone nuts and that there was a story out there that sounded like what he’d told me, went looking through the internet.

He found it.  It’s The Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton.  And then he found the paragraph on Wikipedia, talking about the “modernized” versions.

In modern reprints, the names of some of the characters have been changed. Jo has been changed to Joe, the more common spelling for males, and Bessie is now Beth, the former name having fallen out of usage as a nickname for Elizabeth. Fanny and Dick, whose names now carry unfortunate connotations, have been renamed Frannie and Rick. The character of Dame Slap has become Dame Snap, and no longer practises corporal punishment but instead reprimands her students by shouting at them.

I’ve never seen my son so shocked.  Not the names, though changing the names is a goodly piece of nonsense.  Again, children are not completely stupid, and it doesn’t hurt them to know that the slang terms weren’t always the same as they are now.  On the contrary it gives them an idea of change and of time altering things.  (Which of course will make them question the justness of our own versions of things.)  But note that the character who practiced corporal punishment has been changed too, because G-d forbid our precious little sprouts would guess that once upon a time, and still throughout most of the world, corporal punishment is the norm in child rearing, and that generation upon generation have been raised that way without turning out any more dysfunctional than our own children?

If the precious moralists and revisionists HAD to do that and felt their own inherent superiority enough to do that – what else did they DO?  What else is changed in those books?

I bet you EVERYTHING.  Every attitude, every way of looking at the world.  EVERYTHING that made those books powerful moral influences.  If anything of that feeling remains, it is now in the service of the currently fashionable ideas – ideas like the ridiculous animism/new-primitive worship of the Earth (quite distinct from trying to keep a functional ecology), ideas like “we can’t hurt anyone’s feelings, even if they’re bad” ideas like “political correctness.”

My son said “WHY do that?  Why keep the book, the shell of the book and change everything?  That’s horrifying.  Wouldn’t it be more honest to burn them and ban them?  How dare they take the words of someone who is dead and can’t defend him/herself and make them into something OTHER?”

I agree with him.  If you’re that diffident about your current ideas and attitudes that you don’t want children exposed to older ones, be honest about your insecurity and bigotry.  Burn the books.  Ban them.  Yes, it will make you feel like a thug, a bully and a coward, but that just means you’re seeing yourself clearly.  If that’s what you want to be, BE that.

But don’t hollow out a person’s ideas and thoughts and attitudes, fill them with your own consensus reality, and then sell it under that person’s name.

That’s repulsive.  Grave robbers have better morals.

One of you – RES? – asked me to write about how different people view the book.  The book, if you will, from the perspective of the writer, the publisher, the reader.

Meanwhile between blog comments and talking to a friend yesterday I became aware of the zany ideas ya’ll have about the writing life, starting with how much we work and ending with how much control we have over what you get on the shelves.

For extra points and double daring somersault I’m going to combine both into one post AND add in how this is changing with indie publishing (because my posts are normally so short, yeah.)  Watch me fall on my face.

So, let’s start it double reverse and from the back.

You, the reader, what do you know/see about a book?

I can answer this, because I’m a reader.  I was a reader long before I was a writer.  I was a reader – more importantly – before I knew Jack about publishing, because I had no hope of ever being a writer.  As a reader, like the man who doesn’t know what is art, but knows what he wants to hang over the sofa, I knew what I liked.

Mind you, what I liked varied.  Sometimes I was in the mood for science fiction, sometimes for mystery, more rarely for fantasy, occasionally for historical.  And within each of those I had my subsets and the writers I liked.  (I still have those.  I adore Pratchett, Freer and F. Paul Wilson, and half a dozen others but not back to back and rarely on the same day.)

As a reader, I watched for the writers I loved, bought their books, dragged them home in victory.  I can’t remember anything quite so cozy and rewarding as walking home on a rainy afternoon knowing that when I get in I’ll put on my robe and read that book I just bought and am carrying.

What did I know of the writers’ life?  Well, I knew what I’d read in books and seen in movies.  Writers wrote when inspiration struck, for instance.  Also, they were either bottom feeders (and even then they could get their agents to do things like pick up groceries for them) and cranked out book after book, or artistes, and too fine for common life.  Publishers could ALWAYS tell the difference between the two.  If you were an artiste, you would go through a starving period at the beginning, but once you sold your first book you became rich beyond the dreams of Croesus.

Publishers…  I still don’t know much about how publishers work, except for knowing most of them are parts of giant media conglomerates and that the important thing about your book is their putting forth a PROJECTION of what they think the book will sell.  Say, editor b reads book x and likes it well enough to buy.  Before editor b takes it to meeting, she has to decide how much they’re going to “invest” in pushing the book, which means they have to decide how much the book will sell.  When they come back and say “It will sell five thousand dollars” that book is going to be slapped out there, often – no, I know of at least a couple cases – without even an assistant editor at mega publisher inc READING it.  (If it was bought on proposal.)  I also know that it’s best for the individual editor if a book sells as little as she predicted than if it breaks her predictions and goes huge.  Why?  Because what she’s selling isn’t books.  What she’s selling is her judgement in picking them.

Once you’ve figured that out, stuff that made no sense suddenly comes into focus.  Like the midlister whose book goes out of print a week after coming out, because it has sold out of the printrun, and the editor in charge chooses to bury it, rather than risking its going blockbuster.  Like the distribution that doesn’t happen for “bottom” books.  Like…  Like books being taken out of print when they’re about to earn out of advance.  Like…  The bizarre editorial behavior in thinking they should control distribution and ultimate sales, instead of allowing readers to read what they wish.  Because for each individual editor, that’s enlightened self interest, right there.  For them the best possible outcome is not each book they publish is a bestseller, but each book they publish sells exactly as predicted.

And then you have the writer.  Here I’m going to give you a highly skewed view, and I want you to remember I came into the field at what can only be called the twilight of the gods.  That is, I came in when the publishers had achieved what they thought they wanted – complete control (via shelf space and exposure) of what readers go to see.  This meant if they slated you as a best seller you’d be that.  If they slated you to fail, you’d fail.

Let’s say given my tendency to stick pins in the “accepted” attitudes – often because I’m a contrary dog’s daughter – I would never be slated as a best seller.  And I wasn’t.  But they also never QUITE managed to kill me.  Oh, they killed SOME names.  For a time.  And they could force me to change genres.  But they could not make me go away.

The reason they couldn’t make me go away is twofold.  One is because I can’t stop writing.  The other is because I don’t like authorities telling me what to do or forcing me to do something.

Kit Marlowe once said “Hell is empty, and all the demons are here.”  Well… that could describe my career for the last ten years.  I got caught between the “but I have to write” the “I’ll be damned if they make me give up and go away” the “writing for any reason other than money is futile and stupid.  If people aren’t paying for it, or reading it, why bother?” and the “but I have to write.”  What it did – and I have yet to figure out if this is good or bad.  When the flames are hot enough they refine, after all – is that it took the “but I got to write” and taught me to harness it.  

They wanted historical mystery?  Sure.  I could do that.  Literary fantasy?  Oh, it depresses me, but I can do it by the numbers and blindfolded.  Historical biography-novel?  Sure.  Modern mystery?  Of course.

Why was this hell?  Well, remember where I said above that as a reader I read practically EVERYTHING but not at the same time, not back to back, and – sometimes – not on the same day?  It’s the same as a writer.  Sometimes what takes possession of my mind is a space adventure, sometimes it’s a funny mystery with cats.  And sometimes it’s a dark, laugh in the teeth of hell, vampire book.
The problem is this – in traditional publishing, to sell these, I had to write an outline and send it out.

When the idea first comes over me, it’s the most important thing in the world.  It possesses me.  It makes me do it THEN.  Most of my ideas were like that (save when I was TOLD to send in a proposal on this or that.)  So, I write the proposal in a white-heat.  I send it out.  Three years later, I get the contract.  (Or eight years later, in one case.)  By then, my head is in a completely different space.  I learned to force it.  (You can learn anything.)  This didn’t make me happy, though.  It might also not have made for the BEST product (good, sure, but not the best.)

Not that it mattered, since I was firmly slated “midlist” and nine times out of ten no one in the publishing house bothered to read the book.

However what it meant for me was sort of forcing little plant after little plant to come to maturation, then throwing them into the fire.

Because – listen to this – movies, and even books lie.  Unless you’re a mega bestsller – and sometimes not even then – your publisher and agent will not bend backward to do stuff for you.  For most of the mega corps you’re exactly that “slot” they’ve put you into.  Hell, even if you’re doing your own publicity, they won’t help, if they’ve slated you to sell “Minimum and no more.”  I had a publicity person at one of the houses become smitten with one of my books and work with me on some very creative campaigns.  She was fired.  Mind you, she did make THAT book a success.  Which probably made life very difficult for the editor, who fortunately managed to sink the next one to the appropriate level.  (Yes, it might be stupidity, not malice but…  How do you know?)

Because – listen to this – it’s not that I’m an artiste and too impractical for the grubby business of selling my book – see above, where I had to let go of the artiste and crank out books on demand, to kep publishing.  It’s that once I give a book in to a traditional house, I have ZERO control over that book.  There are certain things they technically can’t do (not that they haven’t all done it at one time and another) like, rewrite an entire chapter and not tell me, however, they have control over ALMOST everything else.  How the book is packaged.  What the cover looks like.  Whether it’s called fantasy or science fiction or main stream or biography or…  What the title is.  Whether it’s marketed YA or adult (and some of the decisions make one face-palm) and, more importantly how much push it will be given to be on shelves (or not.)

But Sarah – the reader says – how can you not have control?  It’s your book.  What I see, what I remember is your story AND the name on the cover.

Yes, of course.  Which is why for years now, publishing houses have gotten away with “every failure” (or unexciting performance) “is solely the author’s fault.”  And yet, the author had no control.  No control over when things came out, how they were presented, or even if more of a series came out.  More importantly, the writer dared say NOTHING.  Why?  Because to say anything meant you had a good chance of never working in publishing again.  And because all of us – writers – knew the system forced us to write things we didn’t want to write by the time they sold (no matter how much we wanted to write them when we first submitted) we also always felt a little guilty and like we were not doing our best, which fed into the whole thing.

This meant that we were shoved into a field where we had no control over our careers, but had to stay in it because most of us are compulsive, and where those who should be our greatest defenders – readers – held us responsible for the boneheaded moves of others.  (If I had a dime for each fan who has sent me a letter saying “Why didn’t you write more Shakespeare?  I liked those books.”  Or “Why didn’t you write that third refinishing mystery earlier, so that I didn’t have to wait two years for it?”  Or…   Well, I wouldn’t need to write for money.  We’ll just say that.)  And we had to be nice to the people putting us in this impossible position.  Oh, yeah, and there was no way to advance beyond what they slotted for us, but you could always FALL.  Which in my case meant falling right off publication.

And then they said we were neurotic because we were artistes.  Yeah.  Let me tell you, what’s amazing is that none of us ever went postal.

So.  How has it all changed with Indie?  Well, you guys still attach the book mostly to the writer.  That’s fine.  No, you won’t like everything even your favorites ever wrote.  BUT you’ll get to see it.

For writers?  Well, the possibility is there to write everything on spec (which I’m retooling towards as soon as possible.)  Which means, you write it while you’re white-hot and the book just wants to be written.  Does that produce the best work?  For me it does, usually.  I won’t answer for others.

For publishers?  Well… the good ones will find they have a better relationship with us.  The one publisher I’ve chosen to keep might or might not be shcoked because I speak frankly now.  (I don’t know.)  But I know it makes me easier to work with, because I’m no longer as full of doubt, guilt and aggression as a chicken with three heads.  The bad ones are finding that no one ever attached THEM to the books.  They attached the writer’s name, instead.  To them this is almost unfathomable.  They’re also finding that – because bookstores don’t want to die – they are ordering from what they see the book doing on Amazon more than on the word of the distributor.  (Right now it’s mixed, but you’re starting to see books slated for success fall flat, and vice versa.)  All of a sudden there’s nothing to be gained by making the book fail just as you predicted.  Whether that will change corporate culture or not, I neither know nor care.  I think the mega-corps are beyond redemption, and I’m not going to cry as they fall, though I might be happy if they retool in a more functional manner.  Because as a reader, a system that gets more and better books to me is always welcome.

Meanwhile, unless we screw up the transition, we seem to be going towards a system in which the hand that rocks the keyboard rules the reading world.

And I feel fine.

If you’re really good?  Like knowing if he really loves you… it’s not immediately obvious.

This grizzly (what, you think I’m not?  Just mess with my kids.  Okay.  I’m more of a dragon) Old Writer wishes for this one dramatic scene, she could come down from the mountain, carrying tablets, but she can’t afford an ipad, so you’ll have to make do.

Look…  I’ll tell you a story – like I ever do anything else? – I grew up thinking of myself as not particularly attractive.  I knew for a fact most guys of my acquaintance had rather chew off their ankle than spend an afternoon talking to me.

It never occurred to me this had nothing to do with my looks, but to conversational gambits that started with, “So, what do you think the chances are that the Napoleonic invasions and the bureaucratic state they ushered in across Europe are the proximate cause of WWI carnage?”

And then I (finally) got pregnant and had the world’s second worst pregnancy (I don’t know everyone’s pregnancy stories.  One might be worse) still resulting in a live child.  Part of this involved being bed ridden for six months.  It not only made me gain sixty pounds, but the hormonal and other effects destroyed my metabolism.

The first time I went out in public felt weird.  Not because I felt self-conscious, but because something was different.  It took me about an hour to realize strange men were no longer turning around to stare at me.  Yes, they’d done that before.  They’d done it while I thought I was an ugly duckling.

What does that mean?  You can’t tell from inside.  You can’t tell how you look, you can’t tell how you feel, and you most certainly can’t tell how you write.

Look, if you have a few spare kroner, buy For Us The Living, by Robert A. Heinlein.  Then read Patterson’s biography of Heinlein.  Not only didn’t Robert realize that novel was a dud, but he kept trying to publish it for the next ten years or so, even while he was writing the juveniles, which means he HAD figured out what a novel was.

Another story – my first created world, in which I wrote EIGHT novels, I couldn’t give away for love or money.  I was then – my children (G) – as you are now, or rather more naive, if you consider I started writing this at 14 and submitting at 22.

When it got rejected (Mostly with standard rejections, though an editor I would later go on to work for told me she hated the characters, the setting and the writing style – which… never mind.) I assumed it was because my technique wasn’t up to snuff, and I went and worked at it some more.  I read how to books.  I read other books and analyzed them.  I took the Writers’ magazine course and half of the Writers Digest (I got published halfway through that.)  I tried first person.  I tried third person.  I tried a cast of thousands, I…

I never considered the books weren’t selling because they were WEIRD.

See, at fourteen, I created this world as an answer to The Left Hand Of Darkness.  I’m sorry, that book has world building issues.  (It’s a good book, nonetheless – magnanimous of me, isn’t it? – even if its narrative style is very much a prisoner of the seventies.)  From MY perspective (what other perspective would I work with, honeys?) she got humans wrong.  Yes, even hermaphrodite humans.  From what I read humans settled, formed clans and families because females needed protection when pregnant.  If everyone could get pregnant…  Well…  It’s hard to tell, since the only hermaphrodite species we know are lower orders.  However I think there is at least as much likelihood that it would become a fiercely independent every-individual’s hand against everyone else’s as a mother-loving, clannish society where children were communally raised and therefore no one was tied down to child rearing.  (What is it with “feminism” and not wanting to be “tied down” to child rearing, anyway?  Shouldn’t that be “masculinism”?  Love them and leave them?)

Anyway…  I created my world as a response.  Yeah, it’s a world of fierce individualists.  It also has an ick factor a mile wide (well, unless you make up a pronoun, and I’m not that crazy, you end up using “he” – at least you do if you’re not writing the clannish, feminist thingy.)  AND it has a counter-politically-correct factor wider than that (look, I THOUGHT SF was about open minds.  I hadn’t realized a lot of the efforts of NYC publishing were towards creating consensus reality, including consensus imagined reality.  I WAS YOUNG.)  AND to top it all off and put a cherry on it, it went the way my stories do.  Busy creating the world, I forgot WHY I was doing it, and got into all the fun details, including geneological tables going back 3k years, and dynastic wars and… yeah.  (Scratches nose.)  If I were smart, I wouldn’t (apparently) have pushed that baby carriage.  Twice.

Eventually it dawned on me that it MIGHT be the world.  (What, it had only been sixteen years since I created the world!) I wrote the Pseudo-Cretan fantasy, which did have internal issues (including my being stuck in cast of thousands) and though I didn’t sell it, I got tons of interest from agents, AND it won a contest.  And then I wrote the first version of Darkship Thieves.  And then things got weird.

Anyway, the point is, the first one of those first books WAS PUBLISHABLE as far as quality goes.  It was however sort of like a dead albatross, from the marketable point of view.  I thought my problem was technique, when in fact my problem was (as usual) having fallen under my own influence and thinking more kinds of forbidden thoughts than I can mention.  (I mean, the books didn’t even have sex in them, which would be the only excuse that NYC would GET for writing them.)

So, you kids (get off my lawn!) today, breaking in with your newfangled indie publishing can stop feeling like ya’ll are the lone ranger because you don’t know if what you’re writing is good.  No one EVER knows if what they write is good.  You write what you want to write and what fits your internal biases of how a story should go.  And you’ll be stubbornly blind to your peculiar biases.  (Like, not figuring out that in books about an hermaphrodite species people expect sex.  Or that New York editors would balk at a fiercely individualistic and independent society in which every individual had a womb.)
There are – of course – writers’ groups.  There’s only one problem with writers’ groups.  Most of them aren’t writers’ groups.  Most of them are … critiquers’ groups.  What I mean by this is that 90% of the writers’ workshops out there have devolved from groups of writers banding together to improve their writing to groups of people who have learned “rules” with which they can beat hopefuls away from even trying to write and incidentally make themselves feel better.  For instance, the ban on adjectives and adverbs?  (Gleefully broken by Rowling and others.)  It’s a feature of minimalism.  If you aspire to write in a minimalist style, heed the ban.  If not…  Well… write what works.

And what works?  How the heck do I know?  I could have told you, once upon a time, what would have worked for the traditional market.  I could tell you because there were well-known editorial biases.  Now…

Even Kris Rusch and Dean Smith are no longer teaching the Oregon Professional Writers Workshop.  (And they did it for years and were good at it.)  Why?  Because no one knows where to aim to hit the jackpot.  No, not even old pros.

But how do you know you’re not going to embarrass yourself?  You don’t.  It’s a risk you’ll have to take.  The disadvantage of the collapse of consensus taste – among many advantages, like not having stuff forced down your throat – is that there is no consensus taste.  What is too unreasonable for me, too new agey, too seventies, to mother-hugging-Earthy is someone else’s “just right” and “Plausible.”  And there are enough readers out there for those.

I don’t like For Us The Living, and I find Pratchett’s Rincewind books well-nigh-unreadable.  There are people who love both.

Put it out.  Put it all out.  Then, if you choose, take conclusions from what sells best.  Grammar and punctuation and formatting should be obeyed – or at least given broad nods to.  (Formatting can get odd across multiple platforms.)  So copyediting should be attended to.  Copyediting isn’t – or shouldn’t be – very expensive.  Get that done.

The rest…  If you aspire to be a bestseller, read the things that are selling well.  Study how they do it.  If you aspire to be literary, study how your idols do it.  

To your own self, be true.  And stop trying to judge your writing.  You can’t.  Amanda Hocking hoped to make a couple hundred dollars to go see the Muppets, live.  Instead, her books made her money hand over fist.  My older son has a story out – Bite One Get One Free – which he’d shelved after its being rejected for a vampire antho (possibly because it’s science fiction.)  It has now sold over 1500 copies.  A short story.  With no publicity.

You can’t tell.  Write it the best you know and put it all out.  Let the readers sort them out.

A year and a half ago I blogged about Lloyd Biggle Jr.’s novel, The Still Small Voice of Trumpets.

I’ll confess I was not perfectly straight forward with you, when I did that.  If I remember, I wrote from the perspective of a reader, and how happy I would be to see the writers who had vanished, how happy to rediscover them.  But I couldn’t close that circuit and make that connection.

I couldn’t do that because at the time I was still agented.  I was still not writing for indie.  I did not know if I could be or would be at any time.  And this imposed certain controls on my tongue.

For those of you who have never read Biggle’s The Still, Small Voice of Trumpets, some spoilers follow.  I’ll just say that despite the spoilers, despite knowing how it will turn out, you should still read it.  It’s one of the classic space operas that is near and dear to my heart.

First, to give you space if you wish to read no further because of spoilers, let me tell you that the proximate cause for this post is a comment by Robin Munn about how, due to the horrible contracts houses are now forcing many writers to sign, until publishing collapses and something else rises phoenix-like from the ashes, many writers are going to disappear for ten years or so.  (It’s in reply to this post.)

My answer said something like “yes, but writers have been disappearing randomly, strangely, for fifteen or more years now.”

I’ve talked about this elsewhere, and I won’t go into the mechanisms.  If you wish to read my old post He Beats Me But He’s My Publisher, go for it.  If you don’t – and I’m not the first person to describe this mechanism.  Dean Wesley Smith and Kris Rusch have described at least parts of it – I’ll give you a quick summary.  At the end of the eighties, sometime, while I was laboring largely in vain to break in, the publishing landscape underwent a marked transformation.

It was mostly a revolution in retail.  I remembered reading at the time about the bright future ahead, now chains were displacing indie bookstores, and how there would be more books and cheaper for the public.

This was true to an extent.  I was very happy when a Borders opened here in town, because it had a much bigger selection than anyone else, and I could go out and buy anything, even late at night…

Except–

Except the book trade is a specialized trade.  If the people who were running, managing, distributing, etc, had been readers, true book people and/or if the publishing industry hadn’t itself gone through a convulsion of mergers and buy outs that left management quite removed from the day to day business of publishing… or had most publishers the most rudimentary understanding of economics, the chain bookstores would have been a very good thing.
If ifs an’ ans were posts and pans no one would ever be hungry.

However, the conjunction of book retail being treated as just any other retail “by the numbers” and of the publishing houses having clue zero why it would be a bad idea to control the numbers from the inside out… was a very bad thing.

Sorry, I’m so used to the situation that I just realized I might need to unpack it further, for you.  See, to some extent, publishers always had some control over how much “push” a book got.  To an extent.  The book reps – the people who went door to door, bookstore to bookstore, drugstore to drugstore, everywhere that stocked books saying “hey, you want to stock this because” – tended to be (I think, this was before I was in the industry) readers.  But they also got marching orders – of course – from the publisher.  If told “We’re pushing this book to be big” they’d go out and lean on the stores to stock a lot.  Did it work?  Eh.  Sometimes.  And sometimes, no matter how much they pushed, the retail managers, who back then were by and large readers, would read the book and go “Joe, this is a stinker.  It won’t move.”  And sometimes the reverse happened to.  You had “surprise bestsellers.”  A book that was slated to go down into obscurity would catch the fancy of retailers, and they would hand sell it.  It would reprint, and reprint, and reprint.

That was before retail became consolidated into three big chains and before Borders brought its innovation of “computer numbers” and “ordering to the net” to the business.  Ordering to the net is ordering to the last “net sold” number of books by that author…  No matter the genre, the subgenre or the author’s growth.  (And let me tell you right away that there is no writer – not even Heinlein or Pratchett (genuflect) who never wrote a stinker.  And there are few writers so bad – one or two – who never wrote a book I like.)  Or… what was on the cover.  Or…

What the “computer numbers” system was supposed to do was streamline ordering and give the retailer a real basis for re-ordering.  What it did was provide cover and allow both retailer and publisher to play the numbers.  Let me put it this way – if you had only two books on the shelves per store your chances of selling more than half were almost none.  Your chances of reprint were less than that.  And your writing name would have to be changed within three books.  The alternative was you gave up writing and retired in disgust.

BUT the publisher didn’t have to think about “did we use the right cover?” or “If we bought it, how come it didn’t sell at all” or even “Should we have pushed more.”  No.  They could say “the numbers were bad” and cut the author off.  It was ALWAYS the author’s fault.  Even when the book didn’t even make it to the shelves.

This is what made me think of The Still Small Voice Of Trumpets.  In the book – spoiler warning! – our hero finds himself in a world of people with a mad appreciation for the beautiful.  The most valued art form is music and the type of music is the harp.  The world is ruled by a mad king who periodically – for no reason anyone can divine – has an harpist mutilated by having an arm cut off.

This makes it impossible for the harpist to play again and though the harpist might have been very popular, it effectively erases them from public view and public consciousness.  They disappear into the villages of the one-armed men, where they are in fact untouchable and “dead” to their fans.

In the interest of fomenting revolution, our hero invents a trumpet that can be played with only one hand and teaches the one-armed men to play.  In one of the most moving scenes of the book, the one-armed men march into the capital, playing their music and all their former fans, suddenly, remember them and realize how unjust their condemnation was.  Which starts the revolution.

When I wrote that first post, a year and a half ago, I was thinking how much traditional publishing was like that mad king.  I know of an author who sold very well and had the door slammed on her face because… she dumped her agent – one of the big names in NYC.  I know of authors who gave up in despair after two or three series died without their being able to do anything.  I know of authors who never got started, because they saw how their “older” (in the field) friends and mentors were treated.  And I know of authors who suddenly wouldn’t be bought and never found out why.  The wrong word at a party; the wrong blog post; the wrong expression when a political joke was told…  And it all came tumbling down, and you were banished from publication and from the shelves.  And your fans forgot you.

(In here, because the commenters asked before, I should say that it’s an open secret in the business that if you’re writing for Baen “you’ll be okay” – partly because Baen is in many ways a family enterprise, and not run strictly by bean counters.  OTOH when, like me, you like to write many different genres, it’s rather a lot to ask Baen to start a mystery line just to keep you happy.  So at least one of my pen names – Sarah D’Almeida – was sent off to the village of one armed men.)

If you’re like I used to be, before entering the business, you just went “Well, I guess so and so lost interest in the series; stopped writing; retired.”  If we were still writing – in other genres/under other names – we HAD to abet the deception.  In the interest of continuing to be published – not angering the mad king – we lied to you.  We said “Oh, I hated that series.  I’m much happier with this one.”  We said “Oh, that just never went anywhere.  I didn’t know what the next book would be.”  We said “We always just wanted to be myster/fantasy/romance writers, so we crossed over.”  And what the heck could you do but believe us?

But now we have our trumpets.  Indie publishing allows us to bring back dead pen names; to start writing again; to start writing at last.  We’re no longer dead and gone, banished to the unseen villages of one-armed men.

We are, more and more, marching into the capital, playing our trumpets.  Our fans are remembering us.

In the revolution that follows, a lot of mad kings will be deposed.  I agree with Robin that what emerges will be completely different.  I’d like to believe that as at the end of a fairytale the good are rewarded and the bad punished.
It’s more likely to be like the ending of Romeo and Juliet: “All are punished.”

Rough waters are ahead.  Revolutions are always hard.  But I think in the end, the system will be a little less closed, a little less insane, and a lot fairer.

Listen.  Can you hear it?  The sound of indie publishing is the Still Small Voice of Trumpets.  And they’re ringing freedom.

*This is the Fantasy novel I’m posting here for free, one chapter every Friday.   If your conscience troubles you getting something for free, do hit the donate button on the right side.  Anyone donating more than $6 will get a non-drm electronic copy of Witchfinder in its final version, when it’s published.
There is a compilation of previous chapters here  all in one big lump, which makes it easier to read and I will compile each new chapter there, a week after I post.  When the novel is completed and about to be edited the compilation page will probably be deleted.

Oh, this is in pre-arc format, meaning you’ll find the occasional spelling mistake and sentence that makes no sense.  It’s not exactly first draft, but it’s not at the level I’d send to a publisher, yet. *

For previous chapters, look here:  http://accordingtohoyt.com/witchfinder/

*Author’s note — I promised I wouldn’t let readers comments influence me when writing this.  But of course, some level of influence is impossible to avoid.  And “You deflowered the family goat” — courtesy of Pam Uphoff  Beth (who freely admits to it!) — just proved impossible not to steal.  My apologies.*

For My Lady Fair

The Duke took off running towards the field, and there was very little that Nell could do but follow him.  She had, of course, understood that Gabriel Pen had just ported in from whatever trouble the cards might have indicated – and she could not even imagine what represented him – and that he had someone else with him.  A necromancer.

The idea made her flesh crawl – an expression she’d heard before but never actually experienced.  Only now she had something to associate with necromancy: Antoine’s dead corpse walking.  She remembered the blank look in his eyes, the feel that whatever and whoever Antoine had been was no longer there.  Now, there was just a thing: an empty shell.

That in itself had always made her feel odd, the few times she had witnessed death – mostly of animals – but the idea that the dead meat should walk, move as if of its own volition was obscene.

Even now, the memory made her feel like her throat closed in disgust, and her flesh tried to crawl away beneath her skin.  She took deep breaths of the cool morning air, scented with the familiar smells of the farm, and ran as fast as she could.  If there were a necromancer come to the farm, she must defend the farm – and grandma – from him.  More important, if there were a necromancer come to the farm was it the one who had been responsible for re-animating Antoine?

If so, she would have something to say to him.  She was beginning to think, in light of what her true origins were likely to be, that she’d fallen in a neatly set trap, and that Antoine was part of it, but one way or another, and whatever he might have been, he didn’t deserve what had been done to him.  No one did.

She arrived in the field behind Seraphim.  Impossible not to.  His legs were much longer than hers and besides, she’d been accustomed for her time in Avalon, to be restricted in her ability to run anywhere.

When she approached the group, Seraphim Ainsling was yelling something.  The shock when she understood his words, and also what he was doing, was almost too great to permit her to react rationally.

Seraphim Ainsling, the proper Duke of Darkwater, of whom much was said, but not that he had fishmonger or carter ancestry, was screaming at the top of his lungs at the two men – one of whom was not only completely oblivious to him, but seemed to be attempting to dig to China with his bare hands, and burrow face-first into the hole.

Worse, the one standing was the Duke’s valet, and, Nell presumed, the Duke’s brother and – from what she’d seen of them – one of his closest friends, but the Duke was holding him roughly by the arm and shaking him.

What came at her, shouted at the top of the Duke’s voice, was almost impossible to understand so loud and rapid it was, “– I should wash my hands of you.  Are you out of your senses to be approaching this creature and to fall into his clutches once more?”

“Now, Duke,” Gabriel Penn said, very mildly, but in a tone of worried distraction.  He made as though to take a step sideways to pull his companion out of the dirt, or perhaps to succor him, but Seraphim held him fast.

“No, don’t you go trying to cajole me.  You know what coils this creature embroiled you into and you know he can only bring you dishonor and grief.   Even if he captured you, by dishonorable means, you should know–”

Gabriel Penn’s eyes flashed with a look not unlike Seraphim’s own when animated with near-uncontrollable fury, and for a moment he showed his teeth, pressed close together.  Nell thought he was about to slug the Duke, and for just a second, without thinking, moved to step between them.  Then she checked.  Even on Earth, stepping between two men about to engage in a slugging match was perfectly stupid.  But, stepping between two men from Avalon about to engage in a slugging match might be crazier.  Not only would they slug it out around or over her, but they would also hold each other responsible for causing her to step in.  Their rules of chivalry were complicated, but that one was obvious.

As she checked, Gabriel reached out and got hold of both of the duke’s arms above the elbow, “Your Grace, you bonehead, listen to me: Marlon Elfborn did not capture me.  I went to him to ask for help when I had nowhere else to go.”

“Well,” Seraphim said, struggling to pull his arms away from his brother’s gripping fingers.  “that only proves you’re not competent to run your own affairs.  Further more–”

“Yes, I know, further more he interrupted my education, raised the dead and deflowered the family goat.  Give over Seraphim, you fool, do.  Stop your vendetta and listen to me.”

“He deflowered what?” Seraphim said, stopping mid shout and frowning.

A dark red blush climbed Gabriel’s cheeks.  His eyes darted at Nell, and he actually attempted to bow, which went to show that the training of Avalon men was quite past rationality or sanity even.  “I beg your pardon Miss Felix, I–”

“Not Miss Felix,” Seraphim bellowed.  “Not Miss Felix.  She is the princess royale.”

“Oh, dear,” Gabriel said, and his face looked as though someone had lit a candle inside his skull, and he looked like he would presently join his friend in digging in the dirt.

Which finally triggered Nell’s reaction.  She couldn’t do anything about the Darkwater brothers.  She had a strong feeling whatever had been happening here had been going on for a long while – possibly since their births – and would go on yet longer.  But right now, at this moment, there was a creature who was suffering from either insanity or some compulsion, and she must help him.

She looked at the digging man with her mage vision, and saw…  Oh, dear.  Earth was near-lethal for a creature like Seraphim, even, full of magical power and not hardened from birth to the proximity of what they called cold iron, and which was in fact more what Earth would call technology. But this creature, the red-headed man scrabbling at the dirt, was at least three quarts magical, probably with fairyland blood – no, had to be.  Gabriel had called him Elfborn – but with some other magical blood mixed in as well.

And while, unlike Seraphim when he’d been transported here, he was not ill, and while he should be able to defend himself from the hostile surroundings, he seemed to have been caught by surprise.

He hadn’t intended to teleport here, Nell guessed, and therefore hadn’t shielded himself from the surrounding influence in time.  She would guess Gabriel Penn had had a second longer to shield, and that made all the difference.

Elfborn’s unshielded magic was under attack on all sides, much like a glob of flesh thrown into strong acid.

Acting instinctively, she threw a protection veil over him.  Not a spell.  A spell wouldn’t work for something like this, because it was not alive and would just get corroded along with everything else.  The only protection to extend in this case was a veil of magic, an extension of Nell’s own magic, fortunately hardened the conditions of Earth.

It worked, to an extent.  It stopped the creature’s magic dissolving and disintegrating.  It wouldn’t allow it to regenerate, because she couldn’t build a thick enough wall between it and Earth.  Particularly not since – as the effect hit a second later – to be so linked with him meant that she could feel his pain too.  It was somewhere between a migraine and a whole-body toothache.  She gritted her teeth against it, and turned to the two men, who had stopped arguing and were looking at her, as though she’d just grown a second head.

Gabriel recovered first.  “Thank you,” he said.  He let go of Darkwater’s arms, and like a total idiot, attempted to throw a veil of his own over hers.

“No,” she told him, using whatever concentration she could spare away from her task to magically block his attempt.  “You’re half-elf yourself and you’re not used to Earth.  If you try that, we’ll have you both in the same condition.”

“Well, if you think–” Seraphim Ainsling said, to Gabriel.  She could spare them no look, but something must have passed between them, some wordless argument, because she heard the duke draw a deep breath, and then she felt his power, like barrier, interpose itself not just between hers and the influence of Earth’s anti-magic, but between Elfborn’s and her own.

The pain lessened, receding a pace, and Elfborn’s magic pulsed, once, and reorganized into a coherent, if still fainter than it should be.  He stopped digging and fell back on his haunches, looking dazed.  Which, apparently, gave the other two men an opportunity to start screaming at each other again.

“What in he– Hades do you mean the family goat?” Seraphim started, at the same time that Gabriel said, at the top his voice, “You said she is the princess royale?”

“Please, don’t start screaming,” Nell said, thinking that hot tempers must run in the family.  which made perfect sense, as both the men seemed over-controlled, which they would be, if they knew they were likely to lose control completely, once they unbent.  “The Duke of Darkwater does believe that I am the princess royale of Avalon, Mr. Penn.  I’m not quite sure why myself, except a medallion and some… some other indications, but he says I look like the Queen.  And, your Grace, I presume Mr. Penn said what he did in an effort to derail you so that we could attend to Mr. Elfborn.  Is that so?”

Gabriel Penn opened his mouth as though to say something.  He reddened dark again, and shot his brother a glowering look.  “Yes.  Pardon me, Seraphim, but you– Oh, never mind.  We must get Marlon’s magic stable so he can survive here.  Miss– Er…  Your highness, do you chance to know where there are any standing stones hereabouts.”

“In the United States?”  She saw his blank look too late.  “The equivalent of your American colonies, sir.  We have no standing stones.”

“Oh.  But we–”

“It’s a different world,” Seraphim said, testily, and she thought that his tone was as much the result of whatever animosity he had towards Elfborne, and the not-quite-pain-and-worse-than-any-headache behind the eyes that protecting the man’s magic caused.  “They don’t have openings to fairyland here.  Which, I suspect, is what makes this a safe world for all of us right now, because I suspect, pardon me, Gabriel, that your magical kin’s stinking court politics are at the center of this mess.

“Yes, I suspect so too,” Gabriel Penn said, and turned to Nell.  “And this is why I wondered if you had something like standing stones.  They would have provided a shield for him, even if they’re not connected to fairyland.  They are places of refuge for magical creatures caught in this land, and they would allow him to recover.  He was trying to dig in the dirt, because that would be protection of a kind.”

Nell sighed.  “So, an underground room would help?”

“Somewhat,” Gabriel said.

“Very well.  The house was built in the time of coal heating.  There is a basement with an outside entrance.  There is nothing in it now, but I used to play in it as a girl.  If you’ll follow me,”

She led them around the house to the entrance.  This part of the basement, which had once contained a coal furnace, now dismantled, had been cleaned out and outfitted as her own private refuge when she was a little girl.  She’d always liked it, and liked hiding there to read.  Now she wondered if it was because it had afforded her own magic a respite from hostile forces.

Whatever had driven her to it, her grandmother had aided and abetted it. The little refuge had not only bookcases, a small table and a microwave, but also a loveseat draped over with a colorful shawl that hid the tears in the upholstery.  It also had a tiny powder room attached.  It had been installed late enough – after Nell had claimed it – that Nell knew it had plastic piping.  Just as well.  Sometimes too much metal was a problem for magic in the literal sense.

As soon as she closed the door to the outside, she felt the pressure against her shield over Elfborn abate.  It was like coming in from a raging storm to a place of calm.  Seraphim must have felt it too, because she saw his features sag in relief.

Gabriel Penn had helped Elfborne to the loveseat and dropped him into it, and the man’s eyes were returning to some semblance of understanding.  He looked at Seraphim, and his eyes widened.  Then he looked at Nell and they widened further.

“I beg your pardon,” he said, his voice creaking.  “I understand one or the other of you will wish to kill me.  Might I–” he looked at his dirt-covered hands.  “Be allowed to rinse the dirt from my hands and face, first.”

“Oh, Marlon,” Gabriel said.  “Stop the cheap tragedy.  Seraphim isn’t going to kill you and I can’t imagine why Miss– why her– why the lady would.”

“Will they not?” Elfborne said, something like the light of battle and a rueful look in his eyes.  “You only think that because you don’t know the half of it.”

Kris Rusch is having issues with malware attacks on her sites, and I find her post important enough to echo it here and over at Mad Genius Club.

The Business Rusch: Royalty Statement Update 2012
Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Over a year ago, I wrote a blog post about the fact that my e-book royalties from a couple of my traditional publishers looked wrong. Significantly wrong. After I posted that blog, dozens of writers contacted me with similar information. More disturbingly, some of these writers had evidence that their paper book royalties were also significantly wrong.

Writers contacted their writers’ organizations. Agents got the news. Everyone in the industry, it seemed, read those blogs, and many of the writers/agents/organizations vowed to do something. And some of them did.

I hoped to do an update within a few weeks after the initial post. I thought my update would come no later than summer of 2011.

I had no idea the update would take a year, and what I can tell you is—

Bupkis. Nada. Nothing. Zip. Zilch.

That doesn’t mean that nothing happened. I personally spoke to the heads of two different writers’ organizations who promised to look into this. I spoke to half a dozen attorneys active in the publishing field who were, as I mentioned in those posts, unsurprised. I spoke to a lot of agents, via e-mail and in person, and I spoke to even more writers.

The writers have kept me informed.  It seems, from the information I’m still getting, that nothing has changed. The publishers that last year used a formula to calculate e-book royalties (rather than report actual sales) still use the formula to calculate e-book royalties this year.

I just got one such royalty statement in April from one of those companies and my e-book sales from them for six months were a laughable ten per novel. My worst selling e-books, with awful covers, have sold more than that. Significantly more.

To this day, writers continue to notify their writers’ organizations, and if those organizations are doing anything, no one has bothered to tell me. Not that they have to. I’m only a member of one writers’ organizations, and I know for fact that one is doing nothing.

But the heads of the organizations I spoke to haven’t kept me apprised. I see nothing in the industry news about writers’ organizations approaching/auditing/dealing with the problems with royalty statements.  Sometimes these things take place behind the scenes, and I understand that. So, if your organization is taking action, please do let me know so that I can update the folks here.

The attorneys I spoke to are handling cases, but most of those cases are individual cases. An attorney represents a single writer with a complaint about royalties. Several of those cases got settled out of court. Others are still pending or are “in review.” I keep hearing noises about class actions, but so far, I haven’t seen any of them, nor has anyone notified me.

The agents disappointed me the most. Dean personally called an agent friend of ours whose agency handles two of the biggest stars in the writing firmament. That agent (having previously read my blog) promised the agency was aware of the problem and  was “handling it.”

Two weeks later, I got an e-mail from a writer with that agency asking me if I knew about the new e-book addendum to all of her contracts that the agency had sent out. The agency had sent the addendum with a “sign immediately” letter. I hadn’t heard any of this. I asked to see the letter and the addendum.

This writer was disturbed that the addendum was generic. It had arrived on her desk—get this—without her name or the name of the book typed in. She was supposed to fill out the contract number, the book’s title, her name, and all that pertinent information.

I had her send me her original contracts, which she did. The addendum destroyed her excellent e-book rights in that contract, substituting better terms for the publisher.  Said publisher handled both of that agency’s bright writing stars.

So I contacted other friends with that agency. They had all received the addendum. Most had just signed the addendum without comparing it to the original contract, trusting their agent who was (after all) supposed to protect them.

Wrong-o. The agency, it turned out, had made a deal with the publisher. The publisher would correct the royalties for the big names if agency sent out the addendum to every contract it had negotiated with that contract. The publisher and the agency both knew that not all writers would sign the addendum, but the publisher (and probably the agency) also knew that a good percentage of the writers would sign without reading it.

In other words, the publisher took the money it was originally paying to small fish and paid it to the big fish—with the small fish’s permission.

Yes, I’m furious about this, but not at the publisher. I’m mad at the authors who signed, but mostly, I’m mad at the agency that made this deal. This agency had a chance to make a good decision for all of its clients. Instead, it opted to make a good deal for only its big names.

Do I know for a fact that this is what happened? Yeah, I do. Can I prove it? No. Which is why I won’t tell you the name of the agency, nor the name of the bestsellers involved. (Who, I’m sure, have no idea what was done in their names.)

On a business level what the agency did makes sense. The agency pocketed millions in future commissions without costing itself a dime on the other side, since most of the writers who signed the addendum probably hadn’t earned out their advances, and probably never would.

On an ethical level it pisses me off. You’ll note that my language about agents has gotten harsher over the past year, and this single incident had something to do with it. Other incidents later added fuel to the fire, but they’re not relevant here. I’ll deal with them in a future post.

Yes, there are good agents in the world. Some work for unethical agencies. Some work for themselves. I still work with an agent who is also a lawyer, and is probably more ethical than I am.

But there are yahoos in the agenting business who make the slimy used car salesmen from 1970s films look like action heroes. But, as I said, that’s a future post.

I have a lot of information from writers, most of which is in private correspondence, none of which I can share, that leads me to believe that this particular agency isn’t the only one that used my blog on royalty statements to benefit their bestsellers and hurt their midlist writers. But again, I can’t prove it.

So I’m sad to report that nothing has changed from last  year on the royalty statement front.

Except…

The reason I was so excited about the Department of Justice lawsuit against the five publishers wasn’t because of the anti-trust issues (which do exist on a variety of levels in publishing, in my opinion), but because the DOJ accountants will dig, and dig, and dig into the records of these traditional publishers, particularly one company named in the suit that’s got truly egregious business practices.

Those practices will change, if only because the DOJ’s forensic accountants will request information that the current accounting systems in most publishing houses do not track. The accounting system in all five of these houses will get overhauled, and brought into the 21st century, and that will benefit writers. It will be an accidental benefit, but it will occur.

The audits alone will unearth a lot of problems. I know that some writers were skeptical that the auditors would look for problems in the royalty statements, but all that shows is a  lack of understanding of how forensic accounting works. In the weeks since the DOJ suit, I’ve contacted several accountants, including two forensic accountants, and they all agree that every pebble, every grain of sand, will be inspected because the best way to hide funds in an accounting audit is to move them to a part of the accounting system not being audited.

So when an organization like the DOJ audits, they get a blanket warrant to look at all of the accounting, not just the files in question. Yes, that’s a massive task. Yes, it will take years. But the change is gonna come.

From the outside.

Those of you in Europe might be seeing some of that change as well, since similar lawsuits are going on in Europe.

I do know that several writers from European countries, New Zealand, and Australia have written to me about similar problems in their royalty statements. The unifying factor in those statements is the companies involved.  Again, you’d recognize the names because they’ve been in the news lately…dealing with lawsuits.

Ironically for me, those two blog posts benefitted me greatly. I had been struggling to get my rights back from one publisher (who is the biggest problem publisher), and the week I posted the blog, I got contacted by my former editor there, who told me that my rights would come back to me ASAP. Because, the former editor told me (as a friend), things had changed since Thursday (the day I post my blog), and I would get everything I needed.

In other words, let’s get the troublemaker out of the house now. Fine with me.

Later, I discovered some problems with a former agency. I pointed out the problems in a letter, and those problems got solved immediately. I have several friends who’ve been dealing with similar things from that agency, and they can’t even get a return e-mail. I know that the quick response I got is because of this blog.

I also know that many writers used the blog posts from last year to negotiate more accountability from their publishers for future royalties. That’s a real plus. Whether or not it happens is another matter because I noted something else in this round of royalty statements.

Actually, that’s not fair. My agent caught it first. I need to give credit where credit is due, and since so many folks believe I bash agents, let me say again that my current agent is quite good, quite sharp, and quite ethical.

My agent noticed that the royalty statements from one of my publishers were basket accounted on the statement itself. Which is odd, considering there is no clause in any of the contracts I have with that company that allows for basket accounting.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with basket accounting, this is what it means:

A writer signs a contract with Publisher A for three books. The contract is a three-book contract. One contract, three books. Got that?

Okay, a contract with a basket-accounting clause allows the publisher to put all three books in the same accounting “basket” as if the books are one entity. So let’s say that book one does poorly, book two does better, and book three blows out of the water.

If book three earns royalties, those royalties go toward paying off the advances on books one and two.

Like this:

Advance for book one: $10,000

Advance for book two: $10,000

Advance for book three: $10,000

Book one only earned back $5,000 toward its advance. Book two only earned $6,000 toward its advance.

Book three earned $12,000—paying off its advance, with a $2,000 profit.

In a standard contract without basket accounting, the writer would have received the $2,000 as a royalty payment.

But with basket accounting, the writer receives nothing. That accounting looks like this:

Advance on contract 1: $30,000

Earnings on contract 1: $23,000

Amount still owed before the advance earns out: $7,000

Instead of getting $2,000, the writer looks at the contract and realizes she still has $7,000 before earning out.

Without basket accounting, she would have to earn $5,000 to earn out Book 1, and $4,000 to earn out Book 2, but Book 3 would be paying her cold hard cash.

Got the difference?

Now, let’s go back to my royalty statement. It covered three books. All three books had three different one-book contracts, signed years apart. You can’t have basket accounting without a basket (or more than one book), but I checked to see if sneaky lawyers had inserted a clause that I missed which allowed the publisher to basket account any books with that publisher that the publisher chose.

Nope.

I got a royalty statement with all of my advances basket accounted because…well, because. The royalty statement doesn’t follow the contract(s) at all.

Accounting error? No. These books had be added separately. Accounting program error (meaning once my name was added, did the program automatically basket account)? Maybe.

But I’ve suspected for nearly three years now that this company (not one of the big traditional publishers, but a smaller [still large] company) has been having serious financial problems. The company has played all kinds of games with my checks, with payments, with fulfilling promises that cost money.

This is just another one of those problems.

My agent caught it because he reads royalty statements. He mentioned it when he forwarded the statements. I would have caught it as well because I read royalty statements. Every single one. And I compare them to the previous statement. And often, I compare them to the contract.

Is this “error” a function of the modern publishing environment? No, not like e-book royalties, which we’ll get back to in a moment. I’m sure publishers have played this kind of trick since time immemorial. Royalty statements are fascinating for what they don’t say rather than for what they say.

For example, on this particular (messed up) royalty statement, e-books are listed as one item, without any identification. The e-books should be listed separately (according to ISBN) because Amazon has its own edition, as does Apple, as does B&N. Just like publishers must track the hardcover, trade paper, and mass market editions under different ISBNs, they should track e-books the same way.

The publisher that made the “error” with my books had no identifying number, and only one line for e-books. Does that mean that this figure included all e-books, from the Amazon edition to the B&N edition to the Apple edition? Or is this publisher, which has trouble getting its books on various sites (go figure), is only tracking Amazon? From the numbers, it would seem so. Because the numbers are somewhat lower than books in the same series that I have on Amazon, but nowhere near the numbers of the books in the same series if you add in Apple and B&N.

I can’t track this because the royalty statement has given me no way to track it. I would have to run an audit on the company. I’m not sure I want to do that because it would take my time, and I’m moving forward.

That’s the dilemma for writers. Do we take on our publishers individually? Because—for the most part—our agents aren’t doing it. The big agencies, the ones who actually have the clout and the numbers to defend their clients, are doing what they can for their big clients and leaving the rest in the dust.

Writers’ organizations seem to be silent on this. And honestly, it’s tough for an organization to take on a massive audit. It’s tough financially and it’s tough politically. I know one writer who headed a writer’s organization a few decades ago. She spearheaded an audit of major publishers, and it cost her her writing career. Not many heads of organizations have the stomach for that.

As for intellectual property attorneys (or any attorney for that matter), very few handle class actions. Most handle cases individually for individual clients. I know of several writers who’ve gone to attorneys and have gotten settlements from publishers. The problem here is that these settlements only benefit one writer, who often must sign a confidentiality agreement so he can’t even talk about what benefit he got from that agreement.

One company that I know of has revamped its royalty statements. They appear to be clearer. The original novel that I have with that company isn’t selling real well as an e-book, and that makes complete sense since the e-book costs damn near $20. (Ridiculous.) The other books that I have with that company, collaborations and tie-ins, seem to be accurately reported, although I have no way to know. I do appreciate that this company has now separated out every single e-book venue into its own category (B&N, Amazon, Apple) via ISBN, and I can actually see the sales breakdown.

So that’s a positive (I think). Some of the smaller companies have accurate statements as well—or at least, statements that match or improve upon the sales figures I’m seeing on indie projects.

This is all a long answer to a very simple question: What’s happened on the royalty statement front in the past year?

A lot less than I had hoped.

So here’s what you traditionally published writers can do. Track your royalty statements. Compare them to your contracts. Make sure the companies are reporting what they should be reporting.

If you’re combining indie and traditional, like I am, make sure the numbers are in the same ballpark. Make sure your traditional Amazon numbers are around the same numbers you get for your indie titles. If they aren’t, look at one thing first: Price. I expect sales to be much lower on that ridiculous $20 e-book. If your e-books through your traditional publisher are $15 or more, then sales will be down. If the e-books from your traditional publisher are priced around $10 or less, then they should be somewhat close in sales to your indie titles. (Or, if traditional publishers are doing the promotion they claim to do, the sales should be better.)

What to do if they’re not close at all? I have no idea. I still think there’s a benefit to contacting your writers’ organizations. Maybe if the organization keeps getting reports of badly done royalty statements, someone will take action.

If you want to hire an attorney or an auditor, remember doing that will cost both time and money. If you’re a bestseller, you might want to consider it. If you’re a midlist writer, it’s probably not worth the time and effort you’ll put in.

But do yourself a favor. Read those royalty statements. If you think they’re bad, then don’t sign a new contract with that publisher. Go somewhere else with your next book.

I wish I could give you better advice. I wish the big agencies actually tried to use their clout for good instead of their own personal profits. I wish the writers’ organizations had done something.

As usual, it’s up to individual writers.

Don’t let anyone screw you. You might not be able to fight the bad accounting on past books, but make sure you don’t allow it to happen on future books.

That means that you negotiate good contracts, you make sure your royalty statements match those contracts, and you don’t sign with a company that puts out royalty statements that don’t reflect your book deal.

I’m quite happy that I walked away from the publisher I mentioned above years ago. I did so because I didn’t like the treatment I got from the financial and production side. The editor was—as editors often are—great. Everything else at the company sucked.

The royalty statement was just confirmation of a good decision for me.

I hope you make good decisions going forward.

Remember: read your royalty statements.

Good luck.

I need to thank everyone who commented, e-mailed, donated, and called because of last week’s post. When I wrote it, all I meant to do was discuss how we all go through tough times and how we, as writers, need to recognize when we’ve hit a wall. It seems I hit a nerve. I forget sometimes that most writers work in a complete vacuum, with no writer friends, no one except family, who much as they care, don’t always understand.

So if you haven’t read last week’s post, take a peek. More importantly, look at the comments for great advice and some wonderful sharing. I appreciate them—and how much they expanded, added, and improved what I had to say. Thanks for that, everyone.

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“The Business Rusch: “Royalty Statement Update 2012,” copyright © 2012 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

*Sarah Editorial Note: Right now I can’t get to any of her sites, to pick up the paypal link, but she does have one, and if you consistently read her, you should tip.  You also can’t read last week’s post, but once the hacking gets solved you should.  It meant a lot to me.