According To Hoyt

If you read mad genius club, you know I’ve been under the weather. And though it shouldn’t have psychological effects, this did. For a while there I was unable to choose anything. Like …. do you want ice-cream or rat poison was an actual conundrum. (Not that anyone asked me that, but yes, that was the level of “I can’t even.” And if I could summon words at all they came out flat.

This broke yesterday but of course I’m profoundly behind. And now I’ve hit the stage where I can write, but it all feels like utter drek. This is absolutely bog standard for when I’m very sick. But of course I still worry about what if it sticks like that?

Oh, yeah, and it’s probably nothing to worry about. I’m furious at myself for how slowly I’m recovering — this thing did a u-turn at least once — but almost everyone I know has had it, and the thirty year olds have as much trouble kicking it as the sixty year olds. And this one was so nasty Dan caught it before me. (And is still working on kicking it off, though admittedly better than me.)

I’d like to promise you that next week I’ll be up to snuff, but of course I can’t. I’m going to try really hard though.

And no, this is not the whole point of the post. So ahem, the spiel:

And yes, if you have one of the first books to come out, it came with a foreword explaining this, but I’ve decided to remove it and let the book stand on its own. Also, there’s stuff to explain, some of which will be new to you even if you have read about it before, or you’ve read the book. (And yeah, I promise to write the stuff I mention. Soonish.) And yes, this is a weird place to do it, but this allows me to link the post places that haven’t heard of No Man’s Land. So, bear with me a little.

As some of you know, No Man’s Land is special to me. Look, just like a mother loves all her children, a writer loves all her books. It’s just that some are favorites.

Why is No Man’s Land a favorite? That’s easy. Because it was my first world and because I spent so much time in it as a kid. For various reasons it was a good place to hide, partly because it’s so different from the real world, particularly the world I lived in at the time.

But it’s also the world I thought I could never publish. Why? Well, partly because in Elly, the world in question, everyone is a functional hermaphrodite.

What is a nice writer like me doing with a book like that?

Well– First, I’m not precisely a nice writer. One of the things M. C. A. Hogarth has achieved — I’m not sure she was aiming for it — is convince me that I’m not just a craftswoman but an actual writer. She’s achieved it it by posting things like this, because I have to admit she’s right:

If you’re on twitter this is the link. And if you’re not, this is the link.

Because this absolutely my process. Why would any rational human being, much less a rational human being to the right of Lenin want to jump into sexual/gender weirdness while the left is using it as one of their vehicles to destroy society.

Well, maybe because it’s when it’s needed. You see, the people in Elly don’t choose their gender/sex anymore than we do. They are a bio-engineered race and their ability to each both sire and bear children is a blessing and a curse. For one, because of how they’re designed they have a very difficult time forming relationships, and the only reason they have a semi-organized society is because they were invaded a few times (and fought it out, and invaded again) by a totalitarian empire. They managed to adopt some structures, like marriage (of sorts. They have trouble with it) and monarchy (of sorts. It’s more like tribal power writ large) and commerce (of sorts.)

For another, as the series continues, they’ll have a real disadvantage in relation to normal humans. Also an inability to integrate with greater pan-galactic society. This is complicated, since the only reason they survived at all is that their designers — who were brilliant and insane, geniuses with a My Little Genetics kit and cracked wide personalities — gave them nanos that enable any number of them to have a wide range of psi-powers. And those psi-powers are important to humanity at large AND vanish if more than five generations from Ellyan ancestry. What do you do with that? Normally being a minority hampered in the reproductive department, they’d be genetically swamped and disappear. But the Star Empire that first makes contact with them needs their psi-powers and can’t let them disappear.

So, the situation is fascinating to me, because at what point do humans become zoo animals kept in artificial barbarism so as to preserve their “specialness?”. (They don’t, but the whole thing is very complicated to negotiate.)

BUT when this started out it wasn’t even that. It was that I’d read the Left Hand of Darkness and was OFFENDED to the chore of my proto-writer soul. Because the biology made no sense. The society made no sense for humans of any kind and also REEEE. being fourteen, at the time, I knew everything. So I decided there and then I was going to write better hermaphrodites. (Which I obviously couldn’t. No, seriously. My first attempt was forty pages handwritten.)

However, being — shakes fist at Maggie Hogarth — an artist (ptui. Did she have to make me admit that?) and cracked, I woke up that night with a not quite prince in my head running towards the chamber where his womb-parent the king has just died.

For those who’ve read No Man’s Land, no, weirdly it wasn’t Brundar. It was his ancestor, 500 years ago, at the start of the War of the Magicians. (Yirt the Justice Bringer. Though Brundar has another nickname for him.) And yes, those stories will happen, probably in a series of novellas and shorts.

I did write the novels. Eight times. They got rejected everywhere. The final rejection was a demand I change the pronouns to “she/her” instead of male pronouns. At the time I didn’t/couldn’t because well, visually they look more masculine (not that they look particularly either. Rendering them in midjourney for the sound track is a trip, because it either gives them beards or breasts randomly. And sometimes both.) As in, they don’t have breasts. And if I use “she” everyone sees breasts. However and more importantly, as time when on I realized that using “she” turned it into another big plea for female supremacy or exclusivity of some sort, and frankly I can’t even. (However in the second novel, a female-view-point character keeps thinking a lot of them are more like women or in one case “Psychotic little girl” — this is said admiringly. It’s that sort of situation.)

Anyway, into the drawer it went for a good long time, until two years ago I realized I was getting old, and might die with it unwritten. And at the same time had the brilliant idea (if I say so myself) of introducing a more normal human character (Not that Skip is precisely normal. And I mean that in the good and bad sense.) to be our “seeing eye dog” in the completely new world.

So the book starts with what appears to be a standard mil sf chapter with Future British in Space. And then the second chapter is the death of the hermaphrodite king and his child of the womb inheriting much too early. And because they are barbarians and call their psi-powers magic, you’ll think you were dropped into a high fantasy.

Anyway it ended up at 265 words, which means I had to publish it in three volumes on Amazon. (And the second book, Orphans of the Stars is going the same way, I’m afraid.)

I put the first volume on sale for 99c in the Based Book Sale. I will keep it at 99c till the morning of the eighteenth. Since I don’t intend to put it on sale again for at least a year, this is your chance to grab it if you either haven’t read it OR you intend to give it to a bunch of friends. (Hey, I can dream.)

But isn’t it weird to put it in the Based Book Sale which is supposed to support traditional values and all that?

Well, no.

Because the book actually is disturbingly wholesome. Y’all know that into all of my books a broad stripe of darkness must fall, but really, in the fundamentals, not this one. Oh Skip goes through a disgusting interlude, but he gets better, and fundamentally he’s a decent human being bound by honor and duty. And Elly is practically a screaming advert for marriage and having a lot of babies. (No, seriously.) And emphasizes them as life and civilization affirming. Also the characters are fighting bravely and for a large part of the book seemingly hopelessly against one of the worst villainous societies in science fiction. (Would you believe cannibal slavers? Sure, I knew you would.)

Anyway, that’s No Man’s Land, and it’s in the Based Book Sale. The first volume is only 99c, which is 3.99 off and makes the whole book much cheaper.

MEANWHILE I hate to bother you, but, Done With Mirrors is on pre-order. It’s a collection, but it’s the size of a novel and though the stories are previously published, the one from Black Tide Rising is double the size, because I misunderstood the specifications. Also, some of you might have missed some of the stories, since they were published in various anthos. Now, the collection comes out Valentine’s Day, and I would like to get to at least 200 pre-orders, and it’s lagging short of 150. No, you don’t have to buy it, duh. But if you’re inclined to, please do so.

Done With Mirrors: A Collection of Short Stories (Sarah A. Hoyt’s Short Story Collections)

DONE WITH MIRRORS

From Prometheus Award winner Sarah A. Hoyt comes a dazzling collection that showcases why her work has appeared in Analog, Asimov’s, and Weird Tales—and why readers can’t get enough.

Magic-soaked noir in 1920s Denver. Mirror-hopping time lords fleeing across infinite universes. Survival in John Ringo’s zombie apocalypse. Murder and mystery in the world of Darkships and Rhodes. Each story in this collection pulls you into a different world—and refuses to let go.

Previously published in acclaimed anthologies from Baen and Chris Kennedy Publishing, these nine tales span Hoyt’s most beloved universes alongside standalone adventures. Whether she’s writing in Ringo’s Black Tide Rising series, exploring her own Darkships and Rhodes worlds, or crafting speculative noir that defies categorization, Hoyt delivers the vivid storytelling and emotional resonance that has earned her a devoted following.

From rain-slicked streets where magic and murder collide to the far reaches of space-time itself, Done With Mirrors demonstrates the genre-hopping brilliance of one of speculative fiction’s most versatile voices.

Nine stories. Nine worlds. One unforgettable collection.

Contains the short stories: Honey Fall; Scrubbing Clean; Last Chance; Great Reckoning in a Small Room; Horse’s Heart; Do No Harm; Dead End Rhodes; Knights of Time; Done with Mirrors.

With an introduction by Holly Chism.

(If you want it printed, you have to wait till Sunday, because I got confused about when to upload it. Sorry.)

Okay — embarrassed — done with the sales spiel. You’ll be glad to know the songs have returned. I’ve done the next three on the sound track and will upload it when I have time. And there is one of the “Songs of Elly” cooking as well. I’d also like to do readings, but I need to stop coughing up a lung.

Honestly, I really am on the upswing. It just feels like I’m at the base of a very tall mountain! Hopefully next week I’ll be well.

You make your bet and you pay down the price….

Even if you don’t gamble, you do this every day.

People seem to be unaware of it, because when you make the wrong bet no one comes to pull the money out of your wallet. And heck, often you have no money. But you still pay for it.

Everything you do in life is a bet: your education, your job, what you choose to spend time on, what you choose to work at and make an effort at: all of those are bets. And whether they win or lose, you put down your bet first. As in, you put in your effort, the years of passion, the years of stress, the work, the time, and sometimes the (literal) money. Sometimes it pays off, sometimes it doesn’t. Life is too uncertain to pretend it’s not a roll of the dice. Most of the time you take some bad with the good, even if everything goes according to plan.

Take my writing. Okay, it was a crazy bet, particularly when you consider English is not my native language and I was writing for a culture I took some time to understand. And given the chances of even getting published back then — which of course I didn’t know when I started trying, of course, because those things were completely opaque — were slim as heck. And yet… well, here we are. So I did get published and I did make a living from it. I even beat the odds on staying published, since the average career when I came in was 3 books. And all it cost me was years of lost sleep, getting up at five thirty to get a couple of hours of writing in before being mommy. And then years — years — of writing like a fiend while they were at school, and doing all my work before and after. And making as much for all that effort as an underpaid secretary.

On the other hand, even then there were things that came with it I didn’t expect and which were a price. Like being known. This is even harder with the blog, which is not something I even set up to do, it just sort of happened. I’d much rather not have my real name attached to it, you know? There is a danger and not just of harassment.

Oh, yeah, and my family paid all the price too, though honestly I don’t know if I’d have been the world’s best mother if I hadn’t been a writer.

Anyway, this is not an extended whine. It’s saying: I wanted something and I paid the price. And I was lucky enough to get it warts and all.

Mostly what I saw, in writers’ groups and with acquaintances as I came up from nothing to fledgeling to fan writer to semi-pro, to professional, I saw that mostly people got what they were willing to “pay” for. If they wrote a few stories and expected instant success and didn’t get it, well, they stopped. And those who were published, but something happened and the publisher didn’t want them anymore, they gave up and whistled as they went because they were free. And then some of us stuck to it, half in love and half in hate, but mostly because we wouldn’t be failures, I think. Oh, and because baby needed shoes.

I was thinking about this the other day as a friend was talking about the left’s obsession with millionaires and billionaires. Because he said none of them would pay in time and effort, in work and in worry and in everything that comes with it.

And it doesn’t even take billionaire and millionaires, because I remember when Dan had a traveling job and made more money than ever before or since, we weren’t willing to pay in the time he was away from home, in his not seeing the kids as much as he wanted to. And so it was a price that was too much for us, and we stepped down to a lower income and lower lifestyle, just so we could have the other stuff with that, like time with the boys.

But there are people out there whose tolerance for stress, for uncertainty, for possibility of loss… all of it is massively larger than average, and they can do things like change the world. Like start companies that aim to take humanity to the stars.

My hat is off to them. I’d stop sleeping, I’d never have a minute of peace.

But fortunately my ambitions don’t run that way either. They run to writing my stories and making enough to live on. And if by a miracle I make enough to pay off the kids’ student loans I’ll be so happy, it will be like my crowning achievement. That’s it.

The flip side on that is that I don’t claim anyone’s reward for their own efforts. I mean, I’d hate for someone to come up and say “I’m supposed to get published, because I worked just as hard as she did and I–“

Oh, and I’ll absolutely admit that there’s luck involved. But luck is just how far you go. If you want the minimum you can have it, even if the price is being a total b*tch to yourself. I’m here to attest to that. I was willing to work enough for my modest needs.

But that, in the end is why the left’s envy is so destructive.

They don’t pay the price. And they want the big reward. The one that requires insane work and risk tolerance and all sorts of sleepless nights and sacrifices of a healthy family life and everything else. But they want the millions or billions, and they are offended it wasn’t just handed to them.

And, given a chance they will destroy those people who are willing to take the risk and make the effort. And they’ll destroy all opportunities for people to do so. They will take away every opportunity for the world to be the kind of world where people take risks and improve everyone’s life (even if they do it for their own comfort and profit, they usually improve the world for everyone) while demanding all the rewards of all that work and effort.

I think it would be easier if they understood that everything has a price. That everything has to have a price. And that without people willing to pay that price all of us would be poorer.

But I don’t think there’s any way of getting through to them.

And so we’ll have to endure it. You takes your bets, and you pay the price. And our price is to live with spoiled children who will scream and pout all the way, and think they’re entitled to spend the money of those who make the effort to create and make and do.

And not let them stop us. Ever.

(Note from Holly: Sarah is well, for a value of still getting over the never ending crud that’s going around. Alive, has eaten breakfast, has taken the editing pencil back from Indy cat who has decided to become an artist, we think . . . but it’s a bit of a time crunch on fiction and . . . dang it, Indy! Give that pencil back! Would y’all buy his artwork if we gave him colored pens and let him draw? Or books if he’s actually trying to write? I wouldn’t put writing past that cat.)

(originally posted here https://accordingtohoyt.com/2019/03/25/we-dont-make-ourselves/)

One of my grandmother’s favorite sayings, usually while excusing someone for something stupid or mean they’d done, or even more for continuous counter-productive behavior, was “we don’t make ourselves.”

True as far as that goes, and in the deep intersection between nature and nurture, it’s often very hard to tell who did what.

One of my kids tests off the scale for verbal reasoning/competency.  One of my kids tests off the scale for math.  Hint, they’re not the kid you’d expect, either for their professions/interests, or from interaction with them.

Partly, I think, because would-be verbal son is so introverted he’s not been around people enough to polish his verbal fluency.

Thing is, he could have, if it were a high value for him and he wanted to do it, get over his introversion and learn social graces and sociability.  I know. I acculturated pretty completely, (I’ll never acculturate as completely as if I’d grown up here, because a lot of the learning we do is before we can speak, but I’m say… 95% of the way there, and no worse than an American who spent his first year or two away from the US with foreign relatives, which you know very well happens) and culture is laid so deeply in that it’s not, but it acts like inborn characteristics.

Now breaking your habits of mind and behavior is hard. It feels like going insane. Our minds have all sorts of safeguards in place to prevent that happening, from distrust of what is strange, to the deep, abiding comfort of habit, which pulls you towards routine, which forms a great part of what you are.

You can’t do it without sufficient wish, sufficient will, sufficient motivation.

But it can be done.

We don’t make ourselves, but we sort of do.  Take the innate differences between male and female.  I realized how massive they were when younger son turned 14. I’ve always been an unusual strong female (perhaps not now. Years of illness have taken their toll.)  I don’t remember, anymore, how much I could lift at 30, but I remember the trainer telling me that it was more than the average male.  And I had greater endurance.  Which I already knew because through the many, many house moves of our thirties, Dan and I would consistently do most of the work, long outlasting any male friends who came to help (and in one notable occasion doing as much as an 8 person team of professionals, because yeah, we were paying but it had to be done sooner than they’d manage.)

HOWEVER that was in a time when I was in exceptionally good shape, and it’s not normal.  When younger son — who is a bit more inactive than the rest of this family and at the time had flab instead of muscles — turned out to be able to dead lift a 100 lb. cement sack when I couldn’t.  And I was in actual decent shape.  And he’d just started getting the call from Mr. Hormone, betrayed by a fall in voice register and a sudden and — to his mother startling — hairiness.

I.e. I know that males, including very young males get an advantage from testosterone that I simply don’t have.

If I wanted hard enough however, I probably could have maintained the strength of my younger years and be “stronger than the average male” (probably just stronger, not you know, overwhelmingy stronger.) which would still cause me to fold like wet kleenex when faced with a male with a modicum of training or in good shape (which I’m going to guess doesn’t describe the “average” male.)

I wasn’t willing to do that.  On this side of recovering from serious and prolongued illness, I’m doing my best to actually exercise. I don’t however have any interest in becoming exceptional at strength (if it’s possible, still, at my age, which I doubt.)  I just want to be in reasonable good shape, because I have better things to do with my time.

So, what is this in name of?

Oh. We don’t make ourselves.

There will be some time in your life when you’ll either come up against something you really, really want and aren’t good/strong/smart enough to get.  Or the thing you always wanted and were smart enough to get will disappoint you so greatly, break you so badly, that you won’t be sure you still want it, much less keep chasing it.  What was once interest and desire and the ability to work insanely will turn into “anything but that.”

I don’t know anyone my age who hasn’t experienced times like this at least once: either in career or in work, or with their children.

Sooner or later we all hit the wall and become profoundly broken and find it hard to take one more step, make one more attempt, reach for the brass ring once more.  My friend Dave Freer blogged about this.

You will experience this, even if you’re not a writer.  You will hit this wall. You will find yourself lost, with the beloved thing now an object of aversion, something you will give anything not to do/be/be around.

What then?

Obviously in the case of some marriages, some professions, even perhaps some living situations, for your sanity, for your peace of mind, for your survival you have to walk away.

But what if you don’t have anything to walk away to? What if you molded yourself into this thing you wanted to be for a lifetime, and you have no other goal, no other dream?

Well, then, again to quote grandma, you must forge your gut into a new heart. And you must march on.

Because you have nothing if you give it up. And you die. You either die physically or you kill a part of yourself. And you can’t go on.

No marriage, no career, no child rearing will be as it was in your dreams.  When you embarked on this, with flags flying and trumpets blowing, be fair, you had no clue what it was like.  You didn’t even know what it was truly like.

Just like no plan survives engagement with the enemy, no dream of “I want to be/do/create” ever lives up to the image in your mind.  And every career field, filled — alas — with humans is filled with suckitude and failure.  If you run from this, you’ll meet it again, sometimes over and over again. And you’ll die lost and embittered.

Forge your gut into a new heart and go on. Older, wiser, experienced, prepared.  And make the thing you love into as close as possible as what you imagined.  Ransom yourself from the depths of bitterness and horror and tiredness.

Be not afraid.

And I too will take my own medicine.

I have good news: We live in a time of great opportunity. I also have terrible news: we live in a time of great danger. The two inevitably run together, and the two will inevitably come to fulfillment in whatever measure. At most in our small way we can control the measure of it in our little portion of the world. We cannot and will never entirely banish risk. Because to banish risk is to banish opportunity.

Okay, first I probably should explain why I think we live in a time of great opportunity: Some of it is obvious. Take AI for instance. Yes, I know there is over and mal-investment, but let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. As soon as “managers” stop trying to push it into all sorts of things it can’t and will never do and let people who understand it use it, it will be a great boon to productivity and yes creativity, because it can do the donkey work and leave the actually creative humans to do the creative bits. Yes, it will UNDOUBTEDLY benefit the most accomplished and creative over the raw beginners (and ruin a lot of raw beginners too lazy to learn the donkey work so they can check it.) Tell me some new technology that didn’t in fact do that. For is it not written, to them who have more shall be given? Same as it ever was. And while laziness is not a capital crime (that’s stupidity) it always enacts a penalty.

But the thing is that as far as I can tell almost every field, not just AI is on the verge of just such a kind of breakthrough, marred only by the fact that for reasons known only to the psychiatrists we don’t have (no, really) our country (and countries around the world) decided it was a great idea to outsource science and research to the government, which as we all know destroys everything it touches. Only it seems to be losing its capacity to destroy and abolish and can — at best — delay things. And even that not indefinitely.

Then there’s politics. Look, yes, I go through times of fear and terror because we are on a knife edge, but listen you, we’ve been on a knife edge since our great republic was instituted. The sense we weren’t at some point is a great lie propagated by old people who remember the past fondly. What we have going for us right now is that Trump and Musk (and others, mind you) are aware what’s at stake is no less than their lives. If the left gets any power again, not only them but their entire families and loved ones will be dead one way or another. These powerful men don’t intend to be killed. So, possess your souls in patience and let them figure it out.

Of course the left is at a big disadvantage because they can ONLY keep their dominance when they control the entire flow of information, which is, at this point, impossible.

I’m not saying it’s all plain sailing. The enemy — and in this case they ARE enemies — gets a vote. BUT we have the advantage.

All of this combined are really great news and also terrible.

Why terrible? Because none of these things from information technology to AI to new automated manufacturing processes that render China’s slave labor obsolete say confined where they’re intended to stay.

What I mean is everything has third, fourth, fifth order effects. Remember the internet was supposed to facilitate military communication. Looks at blog. You can bet the left didn’t intend to lose their control on news and written media. And yet, here we are.

The loosening of new tech upon the world at a fast pace disrupts everything. The term is Catastrophic Innovation. Humans aren’t equipped to change their lives that fast.

On top of that, well, the attempts at retaining control like the entire idiocy of Covid and the theft of the elections (which was the reason for the covidiocy) rip the mask some more.

At this point very few people believe in our institutions and “the way to do things.” Which to be fair is deserved as all of that was the flimsy order imposed by FDR. Again, the only reason it took hold and stayed on was because control of the flow of information was part of the deal.

Now?

Now we’re in one of those rare times in history when anything is possible.

What do I mean? 1776 was one such, when we departed from the way things had always been done. And with great opportunity came great peril, too: Glares at the French Revolution.

The fun part is that our constitution, designed for a small government, is still the best for the new ways. While the modernizations (supposed) of the 20th century are old and busted, because they sought to impose the massive top-down control of mass manufacturing to people. Which doesn’t work.

So, will we get through this okay? Yeah, I think and hope so. At least in the US, because we do have the blueprint and the knack of spontaneous organization.

The rest of the world? Who knows? And even here we will go through some pretty terrible times/places, I guarantee it.

Thing is, you can’t break an order once it’s established. You need some great tech or location upheaval to even return to an earlier, better organization.

The communists weren’t wrong about that. The old order needs to shake apart and people need to reject it. It’s just that what they want to impose never worked and will never work. It leads to the tyranny of the darkest, most absolute monarchies. (North Korea, Cuba, too many examples to list them all.)

But the old order is shaking lose of itself, because it was never sustainable.

And we have a chance.

It is our very great privilege to be alive at this time. We must fight through the peril to the hope. In our hearts and minds, more than anything.

Be not afraid. This is no time to go wobbly.

If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months (unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, by clicking through and buying (anything, actually) through one of the links below, you will at no cost to you be giving a portion of your purchase to support ATH through our associates number. A COMMISSION IS EARNED FROM EACH PURCHASE.*Note that I haven’t read most of these books (my reading is eclectic and “craving led”,) and apply the usual cautions to buying. I reserve the right not to run any submission, if cover, blurb or anything else made me decide not to, at my sole discretion.– SAH

FROM SARAH A. HOYT, ON PRE-ORDER: Done With Mirrors.

DONE WITH MIRRORS

From Prometheus Award winner Sarah A. Hoyt comes a dazzling collection that showcases why her work has appeared in Analog, Asimov’s, and Weird Tales—and why readers can’t get enough.

Magic-soaked noir in 1920s Denver. Mirror-hopping time lords fleeing across infinite universes. Survival in John Ringo’s zombie apocalypse. Murder and mystery in the world of Darkships and Rhodes. Each story in this collection pulls you into a different world—and refuses to let go.

Previously published in acclaimed anthologies from Baen and Chris Kennedy Publishing, these nine tales span Hoyt’s most beloved universes alongside standalone adventures. Whether she’s writing in Ringo’s Black Tide Rising series, exploring her own Darkships and Rhodes worlds, or crafting speculative noir that defies categorization, Hoyt delivers the vivid storytelling and emotional resonance that has earned her a devoted following.

From rain-slicked streets where magic and murder collide to the far reaches of space-time itself, Done With Mirrors demonstrates the genre-hopping brilliance of one of speculative fiction’s most versatile voices.

Nine stories. Nine worlds. One unforgettable collection.

With an introduction by Holly Chism.

FROM NATHAN C. BRINDLE: I’m the Beautiful But Evil Space Princess Who Rules A Galactic Empire But Really Wants To Leave People Ruthlessly Alone: Volume 3 (I’m The Beautiful But … Wants To Leave People Ruthlessly Alone!)

Imperial Princess Regnant Alice and Crown Prince Daniel of Xeros are now engaged to be married, by the laws and customs of the Church of the Goddess on Xeros.

But if you’ve ever had a wedding, or anything like a wedding, you know you have to hope the guests will be well-behaved.

Enter the Goddess herself, and her “plus-one,” Michael of Terra, who have a bit of an emergency for which they need our plucky crew.

But don’t worry . . . it’s only the universe unraveling. It can wait till tomorrow.

The third volume of the BBESP light novel!

FROM TESSA KAINE: Try Me: Shaw Security, Book 1 (Billionaires of Aspen Ridge)

When Leah Mitchell’s coffee shop became the favorite morning stop for Pierce Construction’s new security consultant, she told herself to ignore the way his presence made her pulse race. After all, Grant Shaw was older, impossibly wealthy, and way too serious. Plus, he had a kid. The last thing she needed was complications—especially not tall, dark, and brooding ones.

He knew better than to get involved with a suspect’s sister. But something about the sunny coffee shop owner got under his skin, making him break all his own rules. When the threats against Pierce Construction escalate, he’ll do anything to keep her safe… even if it means losing her forever.

With her sister under suspicion and her hometown’s future hanging in the balance, Leah has to decide if she can trust the man who’s determined to protect her—even as he steals her heart.

Try Me is a dual-POV, age-gap billionaire romance featuring a single dad ex-military protector hero and strong heroine with a small-town heart that he can’t resist.

Authors note: Try Me is a steamy instalove novella that can be read in about two hours. If you love a quickie, this will hit the spot!

FROM PAM UPHOFF: A Political Marriage (Chronicles of the Fall Book 20).

Lord Kalev Meknikov a young noble in a high tech civilization . . . Lady Aurora Denhart a young lady with a father in politics . . . and you’d think in such a high tech society that political alliances wouldn’t require silly things like marriages between young members of the families . . .

But here they are . . .

A somewhat silly and sweet romance within a Science Fantasy Universe.

FROM SCOTT G. HUGGINS: Through a Spyglass Darkly (The Adventures of Jehanne Dark)

In a realm where stone gazes turn men to eternal statues and ancient magics bind the fate of kings, half-gorgon assassin Jehanne Dark hungers for escape from her blood-soaked life. When a ruthless usurper unleashes a deadly totem that petrifies armies and threatens the throne, Jehanne sees her chance: pledge her lethal talents to the besieged King Michael in exchange for a crown—and a pardon.

But as betrayal coils like serpents in the shadows, Jehanne must navigate treacherous alliances, forbidden sorcery, and her own monstrous heritage. With enemies closing in and the line between hero and villain blurring, can she claim victory without losing her humanity… or her heart?

Dive into this gripping dark fantasy of intrigue, vengeance, and unlikely romance, where every glance could kill—and every choice reshapes a kingdom.

BY GEORGE SURDEZ, REVIVED BY D. JASON FLEMING: Ladies of the Legion (Annotated): Two French Foreign Legion Pulp Adventures

A short novel and a short story exploring two very different effects of the feminine element on Legionnaires, told by the master of Foreign Legion adventure!

Lady of the Legion

She came in over the wall of a lonely French fort in the Sahara one night. And the commander decided to sacrifice himself and his men, rather than give her up to an Arab bridegroom.

Madame Takes Over

Rules Of Engagement don’t apply to the widow of a Legionnaire…

• This iktaPOP Media edition includes a new introduction giving the stories genre and historical context.

FROM HOLLY CHISM: Soul Inheritance

Fresh out of college, Evelyn Alexander’s first order of business was finding a place to live. One she could afford on her small inheritance before her job started. None of the local rental agencies had anything in her price range, but…she found a small Victorian house for sale, the only one mostly untouched in a decaying neighborhood of subdivided rental houses.

Complete with a ghost. A very attractive ghost. A very attractive ghost with a strong dislike of the idea of anyone changing his house. So, of course, she bought it. A cranky ghost for a roommate was still a better option than the tiny studio with criminal neighbors.

Between working to restore her new house, embezzlement at work and a murder next door, Evelyn has her hands full. As she works to get on her feet as a productive adult (and not fall in love with a ghost she can’t have), the problems start to snowball. And it’s only compounded by learning that her house has far more secrets than just a single, cranky (attractive) ghost…

FROM DAVID PERLMUTTER: “Honey and Salt”

Olivia Thrift, a.k.a. the superheroine Captain Fantastic, is excited to be meeting fellow Canadian superheroines for the first time. However, when their gathering is violently interrupted, it quickly becomes a savage fight against evil. And, when Olivia suddenly loses her powers, will she be able to set things right when her fellow heroines are immobilized?

FROM MARY CATELLI: A Diabolical Bargain

Growing up between the Wizards’ Wood and its marvels, and the finest university of wizardry in the world, Nick Briarwood always thought that he wanted to learn wizardry. When his father attempts to offer him to a demon in a deal, the deal rebounded on him, and Nick survives — but all the evidence points to his having made the deal. Now he really wants to learn wizardry. Even though the university, the best place to master it, is also the place where he is most likely to be discovered.

FROM JULIE LAURENT: Captured and Calibrated: The Erotic Adventures of Ellektra-7

One night on Copacabana, Ellektra danced under the stars. The next, she was stolen by the Virex Concord—aliens who turned her into their perfect erotic star.

Abducted during Carnaval and subjected to merciless enhancement, Ellektra’s body is rewritten: libido dialed to insatiable, every touch amplified, her pleasure shared through an unbreakable empathic link. She’s no longer just a woman—she’s a weapon of desire, designed for their interstellar pleasure arenas.

But Ellektra remembers Rio. She remembers freedom. And when the opportunity arises, she breaks free, stealing a sleek scout ship and vanishing into the galaxy.

Now, with the sarcastic AI Calyx as her only companion, Ellektra drifts from system to system—crashing on pleasure moons, bargaining with alien lords, seducing her way out of trouble. Every encounter tests her new limits, every orgasm reminds her what she’s become.

She’s free, but she’s not finished. Because somewhere in the stars, a promise still burns: she’ll come back for the woman she left behind.

A pulse-pounding, explicit sci-fi erotica adventure—full of alien lovers, multi-partner ecstasy, and a heroine who refuses to stay caged.

FROM COLE MARLOWE: Doors That Lock From The Inside: A Journey Through Spiritual Doors That Led To Locked Doors

Doors That Lock from the Inside

Love’s endurance amid spiritual doors that lock from within—a brilliant mind lost to unseen currents.
Day 1, Surfers Paradise: Cole Marlowe’s wife Sayuri—stylish Tokyo U. grad, Columbia MBA—collapses unresponsive. Follows 55 days of deterioration into strange disassociation and psychotic outbursts, City Hall battles, patient-rights standoffs, police/ambulance calls, refusals, vanishings, and muriyari psych ward commitment.

From Day 56 the layers are exposed: hidden vault reveals 4-year cosmic journey. 1,000+ Proton emails editing Beau Bauer’s The Dreaming Ring—outback starseed fasts, tree-trances, shadow walkers, Arcturus transmissions.

Fictionized for privacy (Japan’s MH laws), Marlowe’s Day-by-Day diary unravels it real-time. Flashbacks: Okinawa romance to Tokyo blind spots—“light worker” vigils, hoards, Beau’s deflections (“peaches,” temples). Vault playbook: deprivation → fixation → voices/“lights” → god-mission.

Sayuri rejects food/meds as poison, claims divinity. Wry expat voice skewers New Age solo quests sans guardrails: unchecked “awakenings” devour bright minds. Cultural anchors (tax-wife rituals) ground cult warnings.
No tidy end. Medicated glimpses amid locked doors. Marlowe reclaims vigilance: test novelties vs. ancients.
For genuine seekers, sincere spiritualists, cult survivors, expat spouses, skeptics—Brain on Fire x Educated in Tokyo twilight.

FROM JOHN BAILEY: The Longhorn Protocol (The Detective Stories)

A modern mystery in the tradition of Agatha Christie—where nothing is quite as harmless as it appears.

Fresh out of the University of Texas at Austin with a degree in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, Daniel “Danny” Reyes intends to enjoy a brief, well-funded pause before real adulthood begins. A modest trust fund gives him freedom, a private pilot’s license gives him perspective, and Austin’s booming tech scene offers temptation he mostly resists.

Then a weekend gathering at a Hill Country ranch ends in a quiet disaster—one that authorities are all too quick to explain away.

As Danny follows small inconsistencies that no one else seems interested in noticing, he finds himself brushing against venture capitalists, ethics boards, and international tech interests who insist they are doing nothing improper at all. In a city where artificial intelligence is big business, curiosity becomes dangerous, politeness becomes camouflage, and the most respectable figures may have the most to hide.

Lighthearted, intricate, and sharply observant, The Longhorn Protocol blends classic mystery misdirection with 21st-century espionage, proving that in modern Texas, the real secrets are rarely encrypted—and almost never loud.

THE BASED BOOK SALE STARTS ON THE 11TH. THE FIRST VOLUME OF NML WILL BE IN IT.

Signup for the 2026 Spring Based Book Sale Now!

BUSINESSES THAT AREN’T BOOKS BUT ARE FRIENDS (OR FAMILY) OF THE BLOG!

Shiny, Sharp, and Stylish…

Welcome! To Morrigan’s Mercantile!

MurphicIndustries

For your gaming figurines and other such needs.

AN MY ORDER FROM KING HARV’S COFFEE INCLUDED A FEW FREEBIES, ONE WAS THIS:

Attack of the 50 ft Tough Old Lady 1 lb NEW!

Which is very tasty.

For all your Imperial coffee needs, we recommend you fly King Harv’s Imperial Coffees.

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.

So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.

We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: THUNDER

So, there is a state of detante with the cats right now.

I think it’s because Dan and I have been sick for pretty much two and a half weeks, which means we have fed them late, slept late, not done things they expect on time.

This means that Indy is in desperate need of stimulus. No, I don’t know what’s with the ax. I left the ax on the table, as one does and found him just sitting there, looking like he would never plan anything. Which obviously he’s doing.

Anyway for the last several weeks we’ve been finding the door to the garage open. This is okay, because we have a pretty solid closing spring-activated glass door, but still we kept telling each other “We need to make sure we close the door when we leave.” Then last week Dan went to the doctor and left me sitting on the sofa, because I felt pretty sick. Minutes after Dan leaves, I hear noise from the door and go back to find that Indy has opened it. I told him off, and he was pretty upset at me, because OBVIOUSLY I was supposed to be GONE with daddy. So, he sat on the floor at my feet and glared at me for ten minutes solid.

What else has he been up to? Well, he can reliably open our bedroom gate (it’s a six foot gate we have to stop him bowling through the bedroom door.) This has become a game of wills between me and him. Most of the time he leaves the gate alone. Oh, yeah, he can only open it from the outside, not from the inside.

So, the other day when I came out of the shower, Muse was sitting on my bed, the gate was open and Circe was hesitating outside the gate. I picked Muse up and put her outside, but I knew that Indy was in there. The closet door was slightly open. It’s a sliding door, and he knows how to open it. However I was still feeling sick, and didn’t want to dive in the closet to find him. So, I went out instead, and pretended he didn’t know he was there.

I left him there for a couple of hours and fed the other cats while he was in there. When I went up, he was on top of my dressers, with his face pressed against the gate. He hasn’t broken in there again. :D

This morning he decided I was no longer allowed to leave dishes on the counter, and he batted all the silverware down. Thank heavens he didn’t do the glasses.

Other things he’s done: getting to any plastic bag with food I leave in his reach, including the FLOUR. Sigh.

Other than that? They’ve been super-needy. Today he insisted on sitting on my mouse hand, while his sister, Circe, crowded me from the other side.

Anyway, today I’m better, cold wise, just very tired, so I’m going to go to bed early with a book. Maybe that will fix it.

And because I can’t talk about cats without sharing pics, let’s have some pics. I promise more serious posts next week!

Part of the problem we’re having with our discussion of voting rights and the SAVE act is that I swear 90% of the people in the US have no idea what the difference between illegal “migrant”, legal immigrant, green card holder and CITIZEN.

Look, I’m going on my own experience going TO Green card holder, then being a green card holder, and then becoming a citizen.

I know it sounds completely insane to most people here. I tried to explain to my husband that there was this confusion out there, and he just stared at me going “What? What do you mean they don’t know?”

But his mom, the day after we got married — I hadn’t yet applied for a green card! — told me my name was pronounced differently because I was “An American Now.” And though in her last years my MIL became a View fan, I want to point out in no way was she a stupid woman, and she had a a bachelor of arts from Oberlin. (Yes, that probably explained the View habit. But again, she was not stupid.) At the time I hadn’t yet absolutely decided I was going to change citizenships even. (Mostly because I didn’t want to hurt my dad. It took me a few years to decide, but hey, when I did I went to it full tilt. It’s sort of how I do everything.) But I kept running into people who told me I was a citizen now, including notably a Yale graduate. They would ask me who I was voting for. They told me “You’re American now.”

Curiously, once I became a citizen, I started running into a different kind of crazy — still do — including the people who tell me that I must still have dual citizenship, because I wouldn’t want to give Portuguese citizenship up. And of course the jokers who tell me all the work I did to become an American citizen doesn’t count; being in the US for my entire adult life; living completely isolated from any Portuguese culture in the US; practically forgetting Portuguese (I no longer speak it as a native, really) none of that counts. I was BORN on the magical dirt, and that’s the only thing that counts.

And then there are the people who understand the LEGAL divisions, but not why it should matter. So you get the rank idiocy of foreigners wanting to vote in American elections, because what we do influences their countries.

And the rank — and self interested, because fraud — stupidity of democrats and extreme leftists (BIRM) claiming that everyone who is in the country should vote because “Why shouldn’t they have a say on what happens where they live???” This has given us crazy cakes stuff like ILLEGALS allowed to vote on local and state elections, because after all they live there, don’t they?

This makes as much sense as my having a say on how a hotel room is decorated because I stay there for a week. I can guarantee that the hotel would have something to say if I got in with cans of paint and painted the room bright yellow to cheer me up, got rid of their carpet for luxury vinyl and brought in all my cats to stay.

The reason they would have a problem with it is that I don’t own the hotel room, yes. But more importantly, it’s that I stay in the hotel for about a week. I’m a guest — supposing at least that I pay the rates. Otherwise I’m a squatter and have even fewer rights — and frankly whether the hotel room gets demolished, or every wall painted black the minute I leave couldn’t matter less to me. It’s there while I need it, and I pay the price to stay there legally (Again, if I don’t, they’re entitled to dump me and my stuff in the driveway, and call the police. At least they should be. Let’s not go into how crazy some local laws have gotten.) But it’s not MINE. I have nothing invested in it, and in the end I leave and go back home.

This is actually roughly equivalent to most illegal (and even a lot of legal) immigrants, yes, even to America. They come here because it’s convenient to them. They come here specifically to make money to send “home” and they fully intend to retire back “home”, if possible by building the most expensive house in wherever they came from and living from some kind of US pension.

Now compare that to people who are born in the US, whose entire LIFE, family, their entire experience of everything is in the US.

They are citizens and have invested in the future of the country, particularly those of us who have kids/grandkids/great grandkids. You live here, and try to steer the country to what you think will be a good future for your kids. Sure, you might admit the occasional foreigner, just like families adopt the occasional kid. But they should very much want to be Americans, fit in America and raise their kids to be Americans. They should, as much as possible, make themselves American and marry their future to America’s. Which justifies them being citizens.

Which is what I did. I suppose you can’t demand that every immigrant marry an American, but I will point out this is ideal. While I was born in a different culture and family, American culture and ideas had a very strong influence on me from just about when I started to read science fiction. (And mystery, but mostly science fiction.) I’m not using this to claim that people who read American fiction/watch American movies/etc. are American or should vote in our elections. Possess your soul in patience.

What I mean is that there were seedlings of American culture in my brain even back then. However they were partial and weird, because fiction — I know this is hard to understand, but trust me — isn’t reality. As is, my ideas were more accurate than if I’d watched Hollywood movies, but not by much. Fiction I read gave me a picture of the US somewhere between the 1920s and the 1970s, but not exactly any place on that time line, and it concentrated MOSTLY on the big cities, particularly NYC and Los Angeles. And the news were no help there.

In fact, the first three years, until I decided I’d become American (or bust) were spent mostly in correcting misapprehensions I had about the US. And this was AFTER I’d finished High School in the US.

It takes time. It takes time and living here, even if you’re fluent, isolated from people from your native country and really want to be American.

For instance, it took me five years to realize crime wasn’t out of control just because I heard sirens all the time: like American policemen turn on the sirens for traffic stops, or (as a cop acquaintance put it, yes, I know it’s a joke) the “fresh doughnuts” sign went on at Krispy Kreme. It didn’t mean it was like the movies, and people were being murdered left and right.

Or take the complete idiocy of our very first house purchase. If I’d been acculturated, I’d know that house would never sell at a higher price, and it was a stupid purchase. Or–

Anyway, the thing is, I came here. I came here as a full speaker of English. And once I’d decided (Might have been two years in. I’m old. The years bleed together) that I was going to become American…. I went all in.

Since I’ve moved to the US, my entire time in Portugal has been maybe a total of three months, cumulative, over FORTY years. My kids have spent maybe a total month there, in one week or less increments.

We got news of the family every week, via my mom. And my kids like the family there. BUT they are very much foreigners (They are to my kids, and my kids to them.) My kids grew up in the US. My kids grew up Colorado Kids. that’s a far greater identification to them than the fact they had a mother who was born abroad. One of the cutest things about my boys is that they don’t hear my accent, but they do identify the ten words or so I still pronounce the British way (because I first learned British English.)

I became a citizen before first son was born. And yes, the reason was pretty much because I was going to have AMERICAN kids and raise them to be American.

I remember one of the moments of frustration my mom had with older son, when she just yelled at him, “You’re so, so so so….” Hands up in the air “American!”

She did not expect the kid — he was fourteen — to give her a slow smile and say, “Why, thank you ma’am.” (One of the rare occasions of communications across languages.)

Anyway, this is the oath I took:

“I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I will bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform work of national importance under civilian direction when required by the law; and that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; so help me God.”

And I meant every single word of that. When I naturalized, I gave up all allegiance to the place I was born. I love my relatives, of course, but they are foreign. This is the country I married, as much as I married my husband. I built my home here, and I work to make this a country for my children and should I have them, my grandchildren world without end.

I’m not a guest. I’m not spending time here and intending to “return home.” THIS IS HOME. MY HOME. I have no other.

And that’s why I have the right to vote here. Because if this country gets demolished, or turned into a socialist shithole matters very much to me. And to my kids who, G-d willing, will live here after me.

And that’s why citizens are different. Now, can we police citizens to make sure they are wedded to this land of ours, and don’t intend to go back? No. BUT requiring citizenship is the very minimum you can do.

Citizenship and proof there of means there’s at least a chance they’re of us. Not just a hotel guest — or squatter — who wants to paint the walls black, or set explosive charges off in his room.

Lies, Truth and Rats a blast from the past from August 2014

This post is late because I have an outdoor not-my-cat who loves me. He brought me something that squeaked for breakfast. He brought it back very fresh. In fact, he brought it back for me to kill. Fortunately I was in the kitchen and he was in the outdoor mudroom thing we call the airlock. I stood in the kitchen, listening to the squeak-thump and wondering if I should intervene, but the chances it was a bunny are minor. Sounded like a rat. And the chances of a desperate rat in the kitchen were really high.

Eventually Greebo (He’s just a big softy) grew disgusted with me and carried of his victim breakfast to enjoy elsewhere.

All of which has absolutely nothing to do with the post this morning. I mean, I could twist myself into pretzels and come up with something, but I’m not going to and instead I’m going to plunge head first into the post.

Imagine everything you’ve ever been told is a lie.

No, seriously. Close your eyes and picture it.

This kind of ah epistemological upheaval is very difficult. I’m telling you this as someone who found out about half of what she knew was a lie. What? Oh, little things – the first flight across the Atlantic was NOT as I’d been taught Sacadura and Cabral. “I regret I have only one life to give for my country” was not said by one of the assassins of Dona Inez de Castro before his execution, no matter how much my history book said so. (It might have been said by him TOO, but I suspect someone just thought it sounded good and stole it.) If you take more than an aspirin at one time, you won’t die. (I remember standing frozen in the kitchen when I’d complained to my host mother of a headache and she said “Just take a couple of aspirin, honey.” I thought “She’s trying to kill me!”) Other things that aren’t true that I “knew” were true: if you take a bath before it’s an hour after you last ate, you won’t die. Oh, and if you wash your hair every day it won’t fall off. Also, the entire street won’t turn and laugh at you if you go out in last year’s fashions. In fact, fashions are different in different countries. (And in the US, different parts of the country.) Things I found about the US, like for instance, it’s not all paved and built over, and Americans don’t ALL live in skyscrapers, was a different thing. You expect to find new things about a country when you go to a new country. You don’t expect to find out new things about how the world works.

Even the aspirin thing? Blew my mind. “Why did my mother tell me I would die if I wouldn’t?”

Of course, the answer is because someone told it to her. (Also mom hates meds. ALL meds. She wouldn’t even take vitamins, because she was sure it would kill her.)

I understand it was much more difficult for people like the inhabitants of the former soviet block to come out and find out that everything was the other way around. In fact, anyone who comes from a repressive and self-aggrandizing society gets a shock when coming to the greater world. For instance I’ve heard of Arabs stunned to find out they DIDN’T win the six day war.

So, why am I talking about this? We are not in a repressive society, or not that kind of repressive society. News leak in around the edges.

Except we sort of are. Our press is not in collusion because they think that the dictator will punish them (unless you mean not inviting them to parties.) But they are in collusion in order to be thought of as “beautiful people” and “good people” and smart.

And it’s amazing how much of that crap you end up buying. I mean, everyone behind the curtain knew their news lied. It was just the AMOUNT of the lies that was unbelievably large. They thought some things would be true. Same with people coming from Arab countries. I bet you if we kidnapped someone from North Korea and exposed him/her to the real world, they’d be shocked at how little their great leader occupies our consciousness day to day. Because that’s probably the part they believe. That he looms large in enmity or alliance in the west. In fact, I’ve read stories of transplanted Arabs and the part they didn’t anticipate was how little people in the west think about Islam and Muslims day to day. How their neighbors were neither resenting them, impressed nor spying on them due to their origin/religion. (Most of the time the neighbors think they’re South American :-P)

I don’t know how much we’d get “The truth” when transplanted to another country, but I’ve noticed that British newspapers (even sometimes the Guardian) sound terribly “right wing” to me. I know they’re not. It’s just compared to our press.

But American media looms so large in the world we tend to drag the rest of it at least partially with us into madness.

Still, I wonder what when we emerge from this mess – we will, though it will take a while and feel like we’re swallowing live frogs. (I’m almost sure Greebo didn’t bring me a frog.) – will be completely upside down from what we imagine.

This is relevant for what we talked about yesterday. Because I read a lot I knew of the horrors uncovered in communist countries after the fall. It shocked me – still does – that people not only still go around, proudly proclaiming themselves communists, but also that the schools are still teaching communism as the better/more moral alternative and always coming up with false equivalence soviet-style “we have homeless too.”

But what you have to remember is that MOST people didn’t sign up for the epistemological upheaval. And most humans are REALLY bad at that sort of thing. REALLY REALLY REALLY bad. As in, most can’t, not after adolescence. And some not then.

Even when I was an exchange student – a self selected group – I was one of the very few ones who socialized/had my best friends outside my linguistic group (British and Japanese, actually.) Most people would go to their linguistic group or the next one. Portuguese would preferentially associate with other Portuguese, then Brazilians, then Spanish, then Spanish colonies, and so on.

I mean, even while they were in the US. This is because that spare-time association allowed them to reaffirm at least some of their world view and to say “Americans think this, but—”

I chose to go off without this protection because I wanted to know what was true/true and what was agreed-upon true.

BUT I’m abnormal. I run towards that which scares me. (Not a survival skill.) [Okay, unless what scares me is the possibility of allowing a rat in the kitchen. And that’s not so much scares me as “ewwwww”]

For most people maintaining the imagined integrity of their world is worth being wrong. Even being wrong in significant ways.

Because of Soviet Agit Prop, the “communist” view was “popular” and “cool” in the west since the seventies and counterculture, at least. (It was popular in intellectual circles before that.) It’s probably hard for you young kids to picture, but even stalwarts on the right assumed that communism was somehow more “moral” even when it failed. They disapproved of their curtailing of freedoms, etc, but it was ASSUMED it would have better results than capitalism, if allowed to continue long enough. The right merely objected to the cost in human capital.

If this was true on the right, imagine on the left. Do you wonder that the journalists didn’t report the true horrors or reported them with exculpation. “If it weren’t for embargos against Cuba, it would be a paradise” is still believed. And as for Russia… Well, truth be told if we hadn’t sent them wheat they would have starved, but instead you’ll hear about how our insane capitalist arms race kept THEM poor.

But more importantly, once the exculpation and the nine days wonder was over, and the snide laments about the good guys losing, it was back to acting as though communism had never fallen. In fact, over time, that has mutated to a denial that all the times communism has been tried, it was in fact communism, and an insistence it’s “never been tried.” This is combined with eructation about Marx still being “right” – mostly they insist he’s right about things like literary criticism (and no, even there Marxism isn’t of any use. It’s like trying to measure elephants in light waves. It’s just that most people don’t care enough about these niches to go and show them they’re wrong, so they can protect their epistemological certainty wrapped around themselves like a blanket.)

This is typical of people under stress and whose world view is under attack to such an extent they can’t cope. They erase whatever challenged it and place it outside the discussion, and go back to repeating the cherished platitudes.

You can see the embryonic effect of this in a kid who has done something disastrous that threatens his view of himself. “I didn’t break the dish. Aliens flew through the window and broke it.” Is the first defense. The next is to pretend it never happened.

You can also see it in the white house, as our red-diaper baby president stumbles around breaking things, but can’t process it, because it would mean upending everything he’s been taught and his vision of him as “smart” for believing these things. He’s a normal human or possibly a normal incurious human. He didn’t sign up for this kind of upheaval. So he keeps stumbling around, pretending he didn’t do things, pretending things are different. Hence the insistence that removal of troops from Iraq was the former administration’s fault despite recordings of him bragging about doing it.

The problem is this: due to effects of a super-abundant society where people are not close to the bone – in fact are so far from the bone they haven’t seen bone in years – and the dominance of the press and academia by the far left, people’s view of reality is at least as skewed as that of people behind the iron curtain in the bad old days.

This corrupts everything, even those of us who are awake. What sounds right and plausible is twisted 25 degrees from reality. Western society is a giant bubble and a loud enough bubble that even people outside the bubble believe it. And a lot of the things propagated by the bubble are antithetical to the west and fossilized old communist propaganda, because the denial-reaction of our “elites” has enshrined that as “smart” and “cool.”

Will it take a crash to correct?

I don’t know. I think a crash might be inevitable, but whether it would correct it or not, I don’t know. The magnitude of the crash that would correct it scares the heck out of me and might not be possible, due to see how far from the bone we are.

I think what will correct over time is that technology is changing too fast for centralized anything. They’re losing the plot in each field it hits. And because of their mismanagement (Centralized is always more inefficient) the fields it’s hitting first are the ones they most control: media, entertainment, education.

We can hear that epistemological “reset” in the voices of the publishing industry’s execs as they say over and over again that their houses are better for authors because covers and editing and publicity, as though saying it made it true.

It’s possible things will right themselves as the generation that is most heartily promoting its epistemological error passes from this world. (Not long before I do, so I can’t verify that.) Kind of like the generation of the desert had to pass before the promised land could be entered.

Or it’s possible it will happen faster, as technology will change very fast. At least it seems to be on a track of not so much rapid change but “rapid change that makes a difference to normal human beings in every day life.”

It’s unlikely to stop.

And they simply can’t adapt.

This is going to make the times ahead as interesting as those thumps and squeaks from the mud room. (See, I told you I could tie it back!)

But we are at least semi-awake. So, whether we’re flexible or not (and a lot of us are, being Odd) the shock will be lesser to us.

In the end, we win they lose.

For the last ten years I’ve been watching somewhere between alarm and disquiet, as conservatives went all in on: “No college! Trades!”

I’m not going to argue with you on college. I feel some great changes are coming that way, anyway, in the next ten years or so, though remember that for about ten years you’ll still need that piece of paper, though perhaps increasingly less. And ten years can mean 12 or 15 or 20. These things aren’t exact.

I think the loss of need for a college degree will only come when companies are allowed to test their own employees, and I don’t honestly know what is in the way of that, but I’d guess a forest of petty fogging rules and anti-discrimination lawsuits.

My guess is before college degrees are completely useless too, it will have to be understood that no, they don’t even guarantee the student can in fact read, much less learn.

But these things take time. Yes, at some point we’ll it “Then suddenly.” But on the way to “then suddenly” there will be a lot of “first slowly.”

And a lot of professions will always require college or its equivalent: medicine, engineering. Possibly law.

Here is the thing though, yes, the trades and manual work I impervious to challenges from AI. Yes, they really are needed. But if you push everyone into them, they’ll become as bloated as college once was. And also, some people simply aren’t designed for manual labor.

Look, I love the skilled trades in theory. But I don’t have the combination of hands and mind that would make me good at one of them. I like heavy labor, but more the kind like farming, which requires strength and endurance.

Oh, in another time when Journalism was a skilled trade you trained into out of high school, by being put on flower shows and obituaries, and the like, I’d probably have done okay at it.

Am I saying you shouldn’t put your kids into trade school? Well, no. Absolutely, if the kid has the type of talents and inclination for it, it is a way to make a living.

However, don’t go thinking it’s the One True Way. For most of them, in the end, it’s still working for someone else, and furthermore I expect in the great innovation wave (if we can avoid giving power to the leftists for ten or twenty years, at least) of the next century or so, most of those professions will be automated or otherwise rendered obsolete.

In fact that is the most important thing for your children — for everyone’s children — in the next few years: They must be prepared for a world in which innovation changes everyone’s lives and work at a rapid clip. Which means that they need to be fast and nimble on their feet.

It is the most important thing, not just for them, but for the nation.

Look, both tech and the current innovation climate means we need a lot of… small entrepeneurs. I’m going to lay down my dust right now that we’re going back or at least going towards — I don’t know how much of it was a pipe dream back then — that beloved standby of late 19th century and early 20th century science fiction: the genius in his garage, making something that turns the world on its head.

The combination of information on the internet — all of humanity’s knowledge at our fingertips — and increasingly affordable and accessible automation is making this possible as never before, or at least not in the last 100 years.

I know a lot of you are homeschooling kids and I approve of this. And if you’re doing that, you’re uniquely placed to give your kid the most important last finishing touch: Encourage them to start a business when they’re about sixteen.

What the business is doesn’t matter much. It should be something that interests the kid at that time, but it doesn’t mean it’s their lifetime vocation. Whether that’s 2-D printing, beading, computer repair, it really doesn’t matter at all. Whatever is within your means to stake out (I have a dream. We’ll see how this year goes. But I’d like to start $500 grants for kids to start businesses.)

It doesn’t matter if the business never makes more than allowance-money. And it doesn’t matter if it fails.

It matters that it be taken seriously, and the kid should be encouraged to do so, and to learn to establish his business as a legal entity, to keep accounts, to calculate prices, to figure out how to promote, to create business plans.

That and the experience of working steadily towards a goal is what the kid will take from having run a business. That and understanding that “the one thing” isn’t a thing. that you’re not FATED to do this or that. That the future is not written in stone. That you can fail and fail and fail and still come out ahead, as long as you get up once more than you were knocked down. Understanding themselves and the variety of their raw talents, and the limits of what one can do with sheer talent and work, the play of luck into even the most carefully planned business, etc. All of this will be invaluable to the kid so when they’re launched into the world they won’t be afraid to be entrepreneurs and innovators. If they end up getting a chance at that. And we need entrepreneurs and innovators by the score.

And what if they end up wanting to go to college? Well, let them, and help them in the measure of possible. Having learned how to run a business won’t hurt them in that.

However, don’t shy away from civics, history and politics. If the kids end up in college, they’re going to be submerged in a lot of crazy ideas. Make sure they know those are crazy, even if they have to parrot them for a while to get a grade.

Don’t send your kids down the “one true way.” I actually only know half a dozen people who are working in the field they studied for. And some of us you have to apply a lot of latitude. I’m sure my professors would be shocked if they knew what I’m doing now. (Given ages, most of them are dead. Which is probably for the best.)

Prepare them instead to pick paths, and to make the most of what they can do at any given time.

And for their sake, and the sake of this nation as we head to our third century? Teach them to be self-starting, self-bossing innovators, and unafraid.

It’s the best you can do.