I’m not going to make hard and fast promises. This should already be finished, but of course I am still unpacking and today my body decided it was a very good idea to wake up with a low fever. Probably auto-immune, but who knows?

I am still working on Strains of Earth, recast, as I realized I had the wrong voices, but a whole side line of “Elly sidequests” (It’s what the folder is called) suddenly appeared in my mind, mostly relating to Lendir Almar’s function as head of the fourth circle, which is the “justice” magicians, so mysteries. They will take place between the mainline books, and serve to explore some side-bits of Elly. Well, supposing the first one sells. It is profoundly weird and might ask too much of my readers to plunge into a mystery with strange artifacts set in a very weird culture.

I am hoping to finish this one sometime soon and publish it before I start working on the Christmas collection. It’s a normal novel, should hit somewhere between 70k and 85k words. The second Chronicles of Lost Elly book, which (sigh) is also beyond goat gagger in size will now be called Strains of Earth and probably come out Spring next year.

Trade Goods

Sarah A. Hoyt

Diplomatic message from Edmund Harrington Fairchild, Baron Thackray, to Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus Kayel Hayden, Viscount Webson

Public message:

Greetings,

I would like to consult on problems I’ve come across in my work as ambassador pro tem to the new protectorate of Elly. I feel your greater knowledge of the world and of the principal governors of its various portions will be of great help with some of my current issues.

Kalal Ad Leed, Countess of Allridge, has informed me that you’re awake and conscious. I realize your health might still be affected, but I am in great need of specialized information.

Edmund Fairchild, Baron Thackray

The message contains a series of dots, dashes, xs and other symbols, which seems to be a code used between the students of an exclusive military academy that both Thackray and Webson attended. Decoded, it reads:

Skip, please open the encoded message contained in this one. Use the name you give the King of Elly. Decoded, the enclosed message reads:

Skip, old bean,

I hear you’re in terrible shape, having almost killed yourself with power burn, which I understand is muy no bueno, as they say in Upper Hispania.

On the serious side, I realize there are reasons you left and didn’t immediately return. None of us are too sure of them, but the king turns to stone when asked when you’ll return, and I’m not stupid.

At any rate, I beg you to consider taking the post of ambassador as soon as possible, or at the very least to train someone more likely to do well at it. I’m serving because I was ordered to, and because after you – a long way down – I’m the person who understands Elly best.

But I don’t understand it. Not at an instinctive level. Despite being called male pronouns by the translator software, they seem to me to cycle between sexes very fast. I don’t understand them, and I never know if they’re merely going to disapprove of me, proposition me, or challenge me to a duel.

Again, I understand you might have personal reasons – moral ones – not to take the post, but I have to tell you that my being the only surviving agent of thirty sent to Draksah is a very bad reason to try to interpret Ellyans to Britannia and vice versa.

I have Britannian archeologists here, being nuisances. They couldn’t be kept off. They are important people and had her Majesty’s ear. I have Ellyans wanting to travel off world. The Draksalls are obtaining power weapons from somewhere and I can’t find out where, and I’m about at my rope’s end.

For charity’s sake, at least speak to me and give me some clues.

Your friend (I hope),

Edmund

Pro Tem

Edmund Harrington Fairchild, Baron Thackray, son of Gideon Fairchild, Earl of Darrow, pro tem ambassador to the protectorate of Elly:

Sometimes Edmund had trouble understanding how it had come to this. He sat in his perfectly comfortable office, in the royal palace of Eles, in the world of Elly. And all the words in that, after “office,” were a problem.

Oh, the comfortable office was a problem too, in the way all of Elly was a problem. It looked perfectly normal, a place of work. There were his bookcases, in a line behind his desk, filled with real paper books on the duties of ambassadors to new protectorates and the law on how to resolve various disputes.

They were in paper – expensive and cumbersome – because Elly, a barbarian world, could not be trusted not to alter sophisticated electronic records in a language they technically shouldn’t understand. It was the same reason Edmund and his secretary worked on paper, with ink – though the Ellyans were fascinated that he wrote with a pen and not a brush – because electronics could be, and often even inadvertently were, tampered with.

And Edmund had a desk and a proper office chair – his price for remaining and serving, such as it was – but the properness ended there. Across from his desk were not chairs, but what looked like formless beanbags of colorful fabric overlaid in fur blankets. He’d tried to explain that his guests and the people working with him would want chairs, but he’d got back owlish stares and blinking. They were willing to consider Edmund’s chair a sort of throne, since he represented the Queen of Britannia, but the seating for guests would be movable and practical, and therefore these gigantic pillows, filled with wool. Which were… movable and practical, for Elly.

But that was minor. What bothered Edmund most about Elly went beyond cultural misunderstandings and the stubbornness of barbarians who knew one way to do things, and therefore it must be the proper way. The only way. That was to be expected in any newly discovered society.

The bigger issue was found only in Elly, and was exemplified right then as Edmund’s secretary slipped in, carrying a teapot and a cup on a tray with a sugar bowl and a small milk jug.

His secretary, Seren Hassamar, was probably just a little younger than Edmund himself. Edmund had a vague memory he’d been told Hassamar was twenty. Hassamar, because to call him Seren would court a duel even from Seren Hassamar. Seren Hassamar, who was tall, very slim, pale blond, distractingly beautiful and sweet to a fault.

Which was its own kind of problem.

Ellyans were hermaphrodites. Fully functional hermaphrodites.

How they’d come to be so had to be prefaced with a disquisition on the twenty-first century and its pathologies. In the late twenty-first century, when the process of translating a whole ship from the orbit of one world to the orbit of another was in its infancy, its designers had ignored the temporal variable. Which meant that ships could also get flung through time, to the past or the future. With no control. By the time they’d controlled for the time variable and started traveling space reliably, humans had found lost colonies, some of them with civilizations older than Earth’s, though their colonizing groups had all left Earth in the twenty-first century.

Elly’s human occupation was probably around ten thousand years old, the ship having been flung back in time and crashed. And the expedition that seeded it had left in the early part of the process, when more than half the ships disappeared. Which meant the people who’d founded Elly were fanatics on a mission. They believed they were fixing the “flaw” at the heart of humanity. What flaw? Having two sexes. Edmund still couldn’t understand the reasoning, but there were recordings and documents. The people who’d designed their descendants as functional hermaphrodites had done so in the conviction this would make them cooperative and non-aggressive and enlightened.

Edmund wished he could show them their descendants ten thousand years later. He wasn’t a cruel man, but Elly brought out a sadistic streak in him. The founding idiots deserved to see the scrappy, insane, fighting mess they’d created. Though they’d probably say it was the Ellyans’ harsh history – their war with Draksah, which had often invaded and enslaved them – that had distorted them. People were good at excusing their own failures. And at any rate, the founders of Elly were long dead and couldn’t answer to Edmund’s anger, the cowards. Though maybe they hadn’t died just to escape him.

Ellyans didn’t look hermaphrodite, though, not exactly. What they looked like was very flat women. At least that was what most of them looked like to Edmund. The translator nanos in his head rendered their single pronoun, applied to all humans, as “he,” but that helped nothing.

There was a range, of course. Lendir Almar, captain of the royal guard, was taller than Edmund by almost a head and built like… well, built like something designed for strength and endurance. Perhaps a long-distance spaceship. When he flexed his muscles, other muscles had to get out of the way. This was very comforting, because despite his soft, beautiful features, Almar didn’t disturb Edmund in the least. He pinged “pretty-faced bodybuilder,” and Edmund would be fine going out for a pint with Almar. Not that he did, because he didn’t drink if he could avoid it. At least while on Elly. He had a feeling that if he started drinking, he’d spend the rest of his ambassadorship blotto.

Because—well, many reasons, but take Seren Hassamar. Please. Someone do, because Edmund certainly wasn’t about to.

Hassamar was pretty. As in, he’d have made a very pretty female. And he was delicate, and he was graceful. And right then he was wearing an ankle-length tunic, cinched at the waist with a braided silver belt. A blue velvet tunic, embroidered with silver flowers, which matched his silver slippers embroidered with blue flowers. And Edmund wouldn’t lay a bet against Hassamar having embroidered both.

Hassamar set the tray down and – handling the china as if it were precious, which it was, since it had come from Britannia – poured Edmund’s tea, put in exactly as much milk as Edmund liked and two teaspoons of sugar, and set it, reverently, in front of Edmund. Then he looked up, and his blue eyes widened. “Lord? What have I done wrong?”

Edmund realized he was glaring at Hassamar and hurried to say, “Nothing. I was thinking of the archeologists.” Which was a good excuse, because he always glared when thinking of the archeologists.

“Oh,” Hassamar said. Then, brightly, “Do you wish me to take down a letter for them, milord?”

“No, no. Not yet. I’ll have my tea and think. You may go. I’ll call you back when I need you.”

Hassamar smiled and bowed slightly, then left, the skirt of his tunic swaying with his walk.

Ellyans didn’t walk like women. Or men. In fact, the design of their hips gave them a distinctive gait that allowed the trained eye to pick out interlopers in Elly. But as in everything else, there was a continuum. And Hassamar swayed his hips rhythmically as he walked. He probably wasn’t doing it on purpose.

No, make that he couldn’t be doing it on purpose, because the last thing he’d do would be to imitate a woman, since the chances of his ever having glimpsed one were vanishingly small.

Edmund sighed and took a sip of his tea, which was perfect, and which annoyed him for reasons he’d never be able to articulate.

The problem wasn’t that he was a man attracted to women, stuck alone on a planet of people who weren’t women. They weren’t men either, and the difficulty hadn’t seemed to present itself at all to Scipio Hayden, who was attracted to men. In fact, Skip had hurried off the world, leaving the ambassadorship in Edmund’s hands, presumably to escape an affair with Elly’s king.

No, that was probably wronging Skip. He’d probably left under the belief he was being noble, leaving the king free to pick a more suitable sworn lover, the Ellyan equivalent of a spouse. Except the king hadn’t picked anyone else. The king wasn’t picking anyone else. The king was looking like a shade of himself. And Skip wasn’t answering letters.

Edmund found he was drumming on the desk and made himself stop. Skip seemed to have assumed – without even thinking about it – that everyone here was close enough to male, and since Skip was attracted to males, his problem was of a different kind than Edmund’s.

Edmund’s was mostly loneliness. Few Ellyans pinged male enough to be just friends, the kind you just talk to, unguardedly, and the only two he knew were very busy: one was head of the royal guard, and the other, Glar Sirihar, was governor of a division called Lirridar.

Every other Ellyan, including the young king and his sire the Archmagician, called from him responses somewhere between the abashed appeasing of a matriarch and the protective, vaguely flirtatious – or at least aware of la difference — manner one used with a young and attractive female. Neither of which was remotely appropriate to the proud and prickly Ellyans.

Edmund felt he had to keep himself in check every waking minute of every day. Oh, and the sleeping ones too. He’d started setting up sensors and alarms around his bed that woke him up, wide awake, if anyone stepped past them. He might be paranoid, but he’d heard the king had insinuated himself into Skip’s bed at the start of their relationship, and if someone misread Edmund and got into his bed under the amiable belief he could be seduced, the resulting shock, horror and dismay would probably end in a duel.

It was enough to give him a nervous breakdown. And that was without considering the other side of Elly’s inherent differences from the rest of humanity. The one, in fact, responsible for giving Elly a high functionary known as the Archmagician.

The colony ship had crashed into the frozen portion of the world, known as Erradi, and lost ninety percent of the adults on board. And the same people who’d decided humanity’s great flaw was having two sexes had decided that the way to ensure their descendants survived was to create highly specialized nanites which, given energy, could manipulate matter interdimensionally. Apparently they’d thought these nanites, interacting with brain structures they’d designed into the embryos of their descendants, would give them the normal range of psi abilities.

They had done that, in fact. There was some measure of telepathic communication, teleportation and telekinesis. But there was also healing, the creation of portals that allowed travel between places on the world and to other worlds, and shields, and flares of power. In fact, the entire system had come to be called “magic,” or at least that was how the translator nanos rendered it. And how even Britannians had started calling it magic. Except the scientists, who called it something mind-breaking and tongue-twisting. But no one cared about that.

The Archmagician, Eerlen Troz, who had started life as an Erradian nomad wandering the frozen wastelands of the world, was a very powerful mage and the leader of the group known as the Brotherhood of Magicians, which sat in a spiral but called each of its winding curves a “circle.” And each circle had a specialty. First circles were just hell-of-scary people who could do anything “magic” could do. Second circles were experts in war and the lethal uses of power. Thirds were healers. Miraculous healers. They could cause their patients to regrow body parts in some circumstances, even. They could do anything except cure infection. Fourths were… well, justice. They served as an informal police force, or at least the closest Elly had to one. Fourths could investigate a crime scene, call back what had happened with varying degrees of clarity, and generally determine the guilty party in serious crimes. Since most serious crimes in Elly – being a barbarian world – were punished by death, once the culprit was determined it was the duty of the head of fourth circle – Lendir Almar, also known as Lord of Justice – to take the head of the guilty in clean, immediate punishment.

Then there was the fifth, whose head was known as the Master of Distance. Fifth circles were portaleers, which was strange, as a single one of them couldn’t even open a personal portal. But ten of them working in concert over a month or so could open a portal and set it, so that it became permanent, and so that people born without the structures to harbor the nanites that created magic could still use it. Then the sixth were masters of creatures, doing for animals what the third did for humans, but also having some control over the animals’ behavior. Sevenths were masters of time. They mostly created stasis. Stasis containers were used all over Elly to preserve food, and they could be permanent or temporary. Temporary stasis containers were cheap, but the permanent ones, huge boxes that people used as sort of refrigerators but not cold, were very expensive.  Edmund had a feeling the Seventh Circle power might have other sides. He’d just never asked, because the whole magic thing gave him hives.

And that was before dealing with eighths. The head of the eighth circle – whom Edmund privately thought of as the king’s baby mama, since he had given birth to the king’s sireling, for now the heir presumptive to the throne – Selbur Deharn, was… slippery was one way to put it. Edmund got the feeling he thought too much and said too little. And his circle was known for illusions, able to fool people into thinking their surroundings were quite different from what they were. Which could be the most deadly ability of all. The fact that Edmund was naturally immune to it didn’t help. It only made it more obvious he was an outsider.

And Elly wasn’t actually alone among the lost colonies in having this magic. Not anymore. Not for the last several millenia. Through interbreeding, they had given the ability to the Draksalls, their mortal enemies. Since its discovery, Draksah was also a rogue world, outside the bounds of civilization and allied with forces fighting the free world: the Earth Federation and Britannia on High’s star empire. Which meant that the enemy of free humans had magic.

For the ambassador of Britannia, Draksalls – infiltrators, subverters, spies – were another facet of the headache. Though at least Draksalls had women, his mind said, and Edmund shushed it loudly. It helped nothing. They had men too. A corrupt culture was a corrupt culture, even if they were a dual-sexed human race, like most of humanity.

And he realized his loud shushing had interrupted Hassamar, who stood in the doorway, having come in – knocking was a skill Edmund despaired of teaching Ellyans – and was saying, “Milord?” in an alarmed tone.

Edmund sighed. “Yes, Hassamar?”

Hassamar fidgeted, shifting his weight from foot to foot, causing the hem of his tunic to sway over his slippers. “It’s the archeologists, Lord.”

Of course it was. The archeologists were Britannian, but they were not the sort of people Edmund would have wanted to have a pint with. In fact, Edmund was starting to entertain serious doubts they were people at all. Robots with a single-minded program would be more accurate.

Except that… no, they were human, and high-status Britannians, obsessed with archeology and the history of the various newly discovered colonie. As soon as Elly had been discovered, they’d started lobbying to dig in Elly. And because they were high born, the Queen had allowed it. Six of them, with special permissions and guarded by Ellyans. And they were to minimize interactions with Ellyans not their guards. Well, their guards too, outside formal interactions.

Had they done that? Ooh, boy. Apparently archeologizing – he stood by the neologism – came with going to fairs, sampling food, asking people rude questions, and interrupting Edmund five times a week with some fabricated emergency. At least he hadn’t heard of any of them bedding an Ellyan. Edmund only hoped that meant they hadn’t. They were all middle-aged married males, by the Queen’s requirement for entry to Elly, but the same spirit that had them trying fruits they’d never seen before might extend to other experiments. Edmund said a silent prayer that they’d keep it silent, if so. Silent and not fruitful, please. “What do the archeologists want now?”

Hassamar swayed his tunic’s hem in a dance of hesitation. “It’s not them, Lord. I mean, it is them, but… You see, Lord Sirihar would like to talk to you about what they’ve been up to.” He did a little dip, as though his knees had gone weak at the thought of Sirihar in a mood, which frankly Edmund wouldn’t even blame him for.

“Oh, no,” Edmund said, or to be fair, moaned in extreme dismay.

“Yes, Lord. He’s here, and would like a word with you.”

Edmund drank the rest of his tea. It had gone cold in the cup, and it didn’t matter. He spilled half of it onto his shirt. “Send him in, please.”

He stood to greet the Ellyan, who came storming into the office, glaring. Not that standing did much, since Glar Sirihar was taller than Edmund by more than a head, taller even than Lendir Almar. And he had much the same build as Lendir Almar, meaning his muscles had muscles, and those muscles were thinking of acquiring more muscles. Seeing him stomp into the office made Edmund think he definitely should ask Britannia to send him a set of weights to train with. And platform shoes.

He bowed to Sirihar. “Milord. I’m sorry if the Britannian archeologists—” he felt the nanos translate that as “diggers of history” “—have been causing you problems.”

Sirihar, who was still soft-featured enough to be considered a very pretty male, was pale skinned, with dark hair down to the middle of his back. In fact, all Ellyans of any consequence wore their hair long, short hair translating to “manual laborer or ruffian.” All except Lendir Almar, at least. He apparently relished the idea of looking threatening.

Sirihar’s clothes were blessedly free of embroidery. He wore suede pants and what looked like a rough-spun linen tunic to his waist. As he strode in, his expression of anger resolved into one of pained confusion. “They are problems,” he said. He had a comfortably mid-range voice, not the high, musical voice of most Ellyans. “But I don’t suppose that’s your fault. The king says we have to endure them, and I suspect your king also told you to.” The nanos didn’t understand any other gender in the Ellyan language.

“Yes, milord.”

“Yes. Well, the problem is they’re digging in my home farm.”

Edmund blinked. Sirihar was the Lord of Lirridar. Elly had a single supercontinent, but its divisions were inaccessible to each other by land without portals, mostly because the center of the continent lay over the arctic and very high, a frozen high desert whose weight would eventually unbalance the world, or cause the breakup of the continent, or whatever it was geologists said was likely. Edmund knew less about geology than he knew about archeology. And at least no geologists had insisted on coming to Elly, which was a point in their favor.

But when it came to archeologists, Edmund was sure the king of Elly and the Queen of Britannia had agreed they’d be let into Erradi, with limited access to the Cave of the Ancients and the surrounding regions, because that was where the colony’s spaceship had initially crashed.

“How did they get to Lirridar?”

Sirihar’s lips twitched. “I assume the normal way: via portal, Lord.”

“No, that’s not—why?”

Sirihar flung himself onto one of the gigantic pillows, allowing Edmund to sit down, and made a sound at the back of his throat. “Apparently they are very interested in dating how long the Draksall occupation of Elly lasted, before Amissar liberated us, and they say the remnants of what was their headquarters are near my palace, in my home farm. To be precise, between my apple orchard and my barn.”

“How would they know that about the Draksall occupation?”

“Ah.” Sirihar made a face. “I presume they talked to someone. Likely at the Feast of Gold.”

“The—”

“Feast of Gold. The harvest festival in Lartoar. There are butter and cheese competitions, and a cattle market.”

Of course there were. Lirridar was known for high, grassy plains full of cattlemen. To be fair, Edmund mostly knew this because of all the jokes about Lirridarians, “beautiful enough to make you weep,” sleeping with their cows and goats and sheep. Which he didn’t think was true, but it was one of the clues to what the division did.

“And the archeologists attended the festival.”

“Are attending the festival,” Sirihar said. “It’s still going on, for another two weeks at least.”

“And want to dig in your home farm?”

“They might be drunk,” Sirihar said. Then he sighed. “They’re scaring the cows.”

“Oh.” Edmund ran through his limited range of options for dealing with archeological intruders in a home farm, scaring the cows. “I could send a dispatch to the Queen.”

“Yes,” Sirihar said. “You certainly can. But before that, you can come with me and talk to the mad people digging up my apple trees.”

“They won’t listen to me any more than to you.”

Sirihar shrugged. “No, but you can try. And then I can go to the king and tell him I’m going to spear the intruders’ gizzards if he doesn’t intervene.”

“Right, right,” Edmund said. He was fairly sure Sirihar knew archeologists didn’t have gizzards. Probably. “Let me dictate a letter to Hassamar, to send to the Queen.”

“Oh, you can come tomorrow. They’re very drunk. It would do them good to sleep it off. I’m going to put guards around them so they don’t go and get more alcohol. I just wanted you to see the problem we’re facing.”

“I see the problem,” Edmund said, standing and bowing as Sirihar left.

Edmund called Hassamar. The young Ellyan had willingly taken the nanites so he could type in passable Britannian, and he could even use a computer – kept in his own cubicle, where no one else entered – since he was blessedly free of magical power.

He looked apprehensive and a little worried, though that was his natural state. His parent, Mardir Hassen, one of the royal guardsmen, had recommended him to Edmund. Mostly because Hassamar had been small, slight and sickly as a child, and was still too slender for his family’s hereditary work. So his parent – which in Elly meant parent of the womb, the other parent being called a sire – had wanted him in quiet work, in the dry. And the young person was indeed competent and careful, and willing to learn. But did he have to ping girl-in-distress?

Edmund held himself in check and didn’t smile reassuringly, or try to imply he’d protect Hassamar from the archeologists. For one thing, he’d like to be protected from the archeologists himself.

“You need to take down a communication to send to Her Majesty, Queen Eleanor, about the archeologists.”

“What… what are they doing?” Hassamar asked. “If I may ask.”

“Apparently digging in Sirihar’s orchard and scaring his cows.”

Hassamar looked shocked. “That’s very bad.”

“Indeed it is. Take this down: To Her Majesty—”

When he was done dictating, he asked, “I don’t suppose you know if our previous message to Lord Webson was read?”

Hassamar shook his head. “It either wasn’t, or was read under privacy.”

Lovely. Scipio Hayden, Viscount Webson, was either ignoring Edmund or pretending to ignore him.

“Could you possibly bring me more tea, when you have time?”

“Certainly, Lord.”

Edmund sank into his chair, wishing he could have a bourbon. But the last thing he wanted was to be in a state where he couldn’t fully control himself.

Tea would have to do.

Justice Wakes

Lendir Almar, Commander of the Royal Guard, First Magician of the Fourth Circle of the Ellyan Brotherhood of Magicians, Lord Justice:

Lendir Almar woke up.

His mind resounded with the echo of a brotherhood alarm. Unfortunately, it was a sound he knew. Specifically, it was the sound of one of his underlings in the fourth circle of the Brotherhood of Magicians calling him in the line of duty. As head of fourth, Lord of Justice, it was Lendir’s duty to respond.

Still sleep-fogged, he blinked. For a moment his bedroom looked unfamiliar, partly because it was. After he swore to Eerlen Troz, Archmagician of Elly and sire of the king, they’d been assigned larger quarters on the fourth floor of the palace, just below the fifth, where the king lodged. These new quarters were more spacious than Lendir’s old ones, with three bedrooms, not counting the adjoining nursery and the lodging for nursemaids. And the main bedroom, where he lay in bed next to a gently snoring Eerlen, could have fit the bedroom, kitchen and sitting room of his previous lodging. It also had two large, shuttered windows and a door to the balcony, which Eerlen insisted on leaving open, because the mild fall of the temperate climate was, according to Lendir’s sworn, “sweltering.”

The grey light of very early morning came through that door and the shutters over the windows, painting stripes over Eerlen, who slept naked and uncovered. He was turned on his side, and his long blond hair had come loose from its braid and half hid his face.

Orienting himself took Lendir a few seconds, and the sound that wasn’t a sound still echoed in his head, urgent and unstoppable. He blinked again and sighed, because he had to obey the call of duty, however little he might wish to. Eerlen would be the first to tell him that. He concentrated, and thought very hard in the direction of the call, Yes?

Lord Almar? The mental voice felt very young, hesitant, tentative.

Yes. Who is this?

I’m Terem Karrovan, Lord Almar.

Terem Karrovan…

Clan Rovan, Lord.

Lendir ran through the list of his subordinates in the fourth circle and came up empty, which shouldn’t happen, because he knew each and every one of them. Rovan. Was that a Lirridarian line? Not that he knew all the lines – that was Eerlen’s domain, at least for lines with magic – but he had a foggy memory of seeing the name painted over a cheese and butter stall at a gathering. And most cheese and butter, though not all, came from Lirridar. Also, Terem, “golden butter,” was a quintessential Lirridarian name. Lirridarians often gave their children butter and cheese names and were baffled that the rest of the world thought them funny. I’m sorry, Karrovan. I don’t—

No, Lord. Lendir got the impression that if mental voices could shake, this one would. I am a fourth circle apprentice, Lord Almar. Clan Rovan.

An apprentice? Lendir sat up. Part of him wanted to yell and close the mental connection. The normal protocol was for an apprentice to reach the Fourth Circle’s Gate, the last in the circle, who was informally in charge of the herd of semi-trained adolescent apprentices.

But the transgression itself was so strange that he had to verify it was just a panicking half-grown child and not something worse. So instead, disciplining his mind to calm, he sent, What caused you to break formal protocol? Why come directly to me?

Now the emotion that came through with the voice was terror, confusion and embarrassment all together. Lord. I had to. It’s my clan. It’s my older sibling!

So a crime had been committed – presumably, otherwise why invoke the fourth circle? – and this child was overwrought. But no. He had been trained, after all. Lendir made sure apprentices were trained. He wasn’t just overwrought. Something was off. Had to be.

Take a deep breath and tell me what happened, he mind-sent, and found he had already gotten up and pulled off his night tunic. By the scant light, squinting, he cast about for the tunic, pants and boots he’d taken off the night before. He found his battle leathers first and shoved them aside. Eerlen had helped him untie those as he’d dragged in from battle shift. He remembered that, but didn’t even remember falling into bed.

He should bathe before going out. He’d been at the front, on duty, last night. No breakthrough, Maker be thanked, which meant no holding shields or— But you still sweated like crazy under battle leathers, even in the ice and snow of Erradi.

My sibling, the apprentice replied. Myret Rovan.

Myret? Oath of Giving. Odd. A child born shortly after a swearing, he presumed.

Yes, they say… that is, I found him hanging in the winter barn. Grief joined the rest of the feelings in the mind voice. I went in to see to the feeding and—

Dead? Lendir located his pants and pulled them on. Brown suede, and showing creases and—no. Eerlen would kill him if he went out in dirty clothes. Honor of the brotherhood, and besides he was sworn to the archmage, half crossibling of the king. Honor of the king, too.

Lendir dropped the pants and rushed to the bath next to the bedroom. It had a bathing pool, and the water was warm, so he could wash in minutes. He undressed and dove under the running water. It ran continuously, as all water in the palace did, pulled and warmed by some form of magic they no longer understood. Something from the ancients.

Yes. Oh, yes. His eyes were all—and his tongue—

You were the one who found him?

Yes. I cut him down. But I couldn’t make him breathe. I called a third—

Bad, but expected. Families would do it, even if it made reading the traces far harder. I understand it’s your sibling, but why call me?

Myret. Myret is dead and we don’t know—

Why the head of circle? He was already running through his list of underlings at the back of his mind, choosing whom to send to the case. Probably suicide. Maybe.

Lord of Justice, I think he killed himself, but there are traces of coercion, and my parent says he didn’t, and he wants to—he wants to duel Kyral Artel, and I can’t stop him.

Kyr what? Who is Kyral Artel?

My sibling’s sworn. They swore last month. And my parent says Artel drove Myret to kill himself and it’s as good as killing him, and Lord Almar, please. It will start a clan war. Ours against the Artels. Their lands are next to ours and—

Drying himself, Lendir thought very hard – though not in the child’s direction – that he’d like to say a long string of profanities. Clan honor and suicide and a parent who’d lost his line child were not things he wanted to wake up to. But the worst part was that the child was probably right.

Lendir pulled on clean pants and a knee-length tunic, shook his hair, congratulating himself on having cut it short despite all the social disapproval, and slammed his feet into boots.

He got the coordinates from the apprentice’s mind and sent a vaguely reassuring thought that he was on his way. Crossing the bedroom, he stopped at Eerlen’s soft voice. “Lendir, love?”

Eerlen was awake, sitting up. Lendir dropped to one knee to kiss him. “Suicide, maybe murder, in Lirridar. Parent taking it badly. Clan war threatened against the dead one’s sworn. I’ll go, I’ll cast to see what happened, I’ll be back.”

“Not alone,” Eerlen said, starting to rise.

“I’m head of fourth. How would it look, taking the archmage to protect me? Go back to sleep. I’ll be back soon.”

“Clan war is a bad bridge to stand in the middle of, Dir. Take backup. Guards.”

“No. Fourths. I’ll take my next two.” Meaning the two fourth circles next to him in power.

Eerlen paused, then nodded, giving in to the logic. At any rate, while fourth circles weren’t precisely inner circle, neither were they powerless. It would take a very unusual clan to subdue three of them together without their at least being able to call for help. And no clan was foolish enough to want to go to war with the brotherhood.

“I’ll be back in an hour,” Lendir said. “Two at most.” Mentally, he called Ridar Vessan and Korlen Ossari. The Karrashan wool weaver and the Brinarian fisher were next to him in power, and so evenly matched that he didn’t envy Eerlen the choice of the next head of fourth, should something happen to Lendir. They were also, Lendir suspected, a couple. The fact that he sensed them in the same bed at the other end of his mind call wasn’t a surprise. But they hadn’t informed him; they hadn’t made it official by swearing, and it was none of his business. He gave them the details of the call and the coordinates.

Before he stepped out of the bedroom door, he felt his blue magician’s cloak drop onto his shoulders. Eerlen reached around to fasten it in front, then kissed Lendir’s cheek. “Don’t refrain from calling for help if you need it, Lord of Justice.”

“I won’t,” Lendir said, fairly sure he was lying.

He closed the front door of their quarters, shook his head at the sudden straightening and startled bow of the guard in the hallway, and ran down four flights of public stairs, ignoring the occasional servant going about some early business, and two of his own subordinate guards, off duty, coming back from outside, obviously the worse for drink and leaning on each other.

In the front courtyard, the guards by the public portal were fully alert, ready to keep track of any arrivals who might be a threat. That one of them was weaving, a long strip on a drop loom fixed to his belt and weighted with pebbles, was no detriment to that. Guards often used the downtime to weave. Lendir had been known to do it.

They looked curious but didn’t ask as he walked past them and into the public portal, the coordinates for his destination firmly in mind.

He walked out on the other side, at a dedicated portal in the middle of a plaza. It was a vast plaza, and around its edges converged the entrance gates of five farms. Doubtless each farm had arranged for a protrusion of land just wide enough for walls and a gate. Their lands would sprawl behind in quite different directions, but this allowed them easy access to a portal: a necessity for dairy families with no power. Or no high-circle power.

Lendir had instructions. He knew which farm gate to head for.

But he didn’t need them. In the sharp, chill wind of early fall in Lirridar, a wailing carried. A parent mourning his line child.

I’ve been having a heck of a time getting down to work. Okay, there are many reasons: tiredness being the foremost, and also how much of the place still looks like a moving truck vomited all over it.

I had thought, originally, that this would be ready for a house warming party about now, but the truth is we’re barely at the “functional” stage and don’t yet have a dining room (which is important since the kitchen eating area is only big enough for two.) A lot of it was because stuff like putting new flooring down took double the time we expected, and was on top of painting taking double the time. (Painting was probably frivolous, but due to both cats and my breathing, the carpet had to go. And you don’t want me to live in dark green and dark grey. What is with younger millennials and their hatred of color?)

So there is the hangover from moving, the “where the heck is “x” where x is a normal object of every day life that you swear you packed in a properly marked box, but which has done a vanishing act without your permission. Yesterday I cleaned and set up the entire master bathroom because I was tired of brushing my teeth with one of those cheap toothbrushes hotels give you when you forgot your own. We’ve been at the house for a month now, and I wanted my re-fargin toothbrush. That meant unpacking and setting up the closet because the boxes for the closet were piled in the bathroom. Because the boxes for the linen closet were in the master closet. Because the boxes in the linen closet…. you get the point. Those are now in the future piano room, and therefore we have a linen closet, a bedroom closet and a bathroom. The toothbrush was in the box before last. In my defense, it was marked “Open immediately.” Eh.

Also I found I have opinions on drawer pulls — disco ball like things should not be bathroom drawer pulls! — and glass shades on ceiling fan lights (they shouldn’t be frilly white flower like things in the office. No.) Finding out I have strong opinions on such subjects after a near sixty four years (turns out I’m turning sixty four, the Mathematician assures me. Eh) of an unexceptionable life, is a bit of a shock to the system.

Also being extremely ADD I have trouble working in environments that make no sense. Which is why I have to finish unpacking the office, probably tomorrow, but–

There is more to it than that, particularly since the next book of Elly has retitled — Now Strains of Earth because I kept typing Orphans of the Sky instead of Orphans of the Stars, and I’m not crazy enough to steal Heinlein’s title, no — and clarified, and is all but erupting from my forehead, and a short (eh 80k words) Elly mystery (Trade Goods) wants to be written this week pretty please. And I’m having trouble sitting butt in chair more than five minutes and alternate between optimism and despair and wanting to chew on my nails, except if I start it will go all the way to the elbow.

The elections? Undoubtedly that’s in there, somewhere, but … it’s more than that. It’s this feeling of wrongness, of being twisted into an uncomfortable position and not being able to get right. Like… you know your left shoe is half a size too small, but you can’t verify it. Like… you woke up one morning in your beautiful bright green room, but you’re sure it was yellow last night, and you’d like to know how it changed. And is it going to change back?

This is not a new feeling and it accounts a lot for how distracted and strange I’ve been even on this blog. It’s been going on for six years… give or take.

Things like 10/7 didn’t help it at all. It is, with the lock downs, a moment when the world fractured.

It wasn’t even the atrocities, though those should be unthinkable for anyone not living in the Neolithic, but the reactions. As with 2020 the way people acted, the people who–

Look, I was talking in my friends’ group online tonight, and other people pinned it down. It was 2020. It was 10/7. It was a dozen other small events along the way where the same thing happened.

What happened was this: The masks were pulled off.

Some of us who are by nature paranoid and who furthermore worked in fields where the left lunatics were thick on the ground; those of us who stayed quiet through lunchroom discussions but heard a lot; those of us who can read social context, knew we were surrounded by leftists, and that a lot of these people were, by all the norms of civilized people, functionally insane.

But we didn’t expect the soft pudding heads to be raving lunatics, too. And we didn’t expect people nominally on our side, some of whom we thought well of until the crisis hit, to also have massive holes where their logic apparatus should be.

2020 scared the heck out of me. Seeing who went Nazi, so to put it, but more importantly, who said, “No, no, stop talking, not so loudly. Pretend to be a Nazi” scared the piss out of me at a very deep, fundamental level I’m still not fully recovered from. I’d always thought I was cynical and pessimistic about human rationality. Oh, brother!

And 10/7? Just as bad. The idiots, the pudding heads, the weak sisters “You must admit that Israel–” I admit nothing. Israel is a civilized nation beset by barbarians, and far too good for this world. Because if they weren’t on 10/8 they would have taken to killing everyone in Gaza in batch lots. Women and children? Sure. We saw how they cheered! They indulged in behavior that from the dawn of time has seen tribes eradicated root and branch. And they have the nerve to scream “genocide” even while their numbers increase. And the pudding heads, the sob sisters, the envious, the evil, are willing to go along with it and pile on. Because, you know, feeding someone’s face to the crocodile keeps your own face safe. Or because they want to feel special. I don’t know.

And then… all the little breaks along the way. All the psy-ops that some people in our side insist on falling for.

It’s like…. Indulge me in a metaphor: An hostile alien invasion happened, decades ago. The aliens are very good at pretending to be human. Some percentage of them live among us. You probably have one or two in your groups. Maybe one or two in your family. We suspected it, at least those of us with more sensitivity than an anvil.

Then, something happened, and they removed the mask, showed us what they were, demanded we allow ourselves to be herded into quarantine camps, take a shot of their weird mixture, whatever. They ran around forming ministries of truth, cancelling people, and showing that really they would prefer we were all dead.

And the horrible thing: they weren’t just who we suspected. They were the babysitter, grandma, the lady around the corner who brings us a slice of cake when she bakes. All suddenly revealed fangs and red eyes, and screamed they want us dead.

Then they put the mask back on and went back to being themselves. More or less. Until 10/7 when again, they revealed their fanged and horrible countenance and their hatred of Western civilization and longing for barbarism. And it wasn’t even the same set of people. Oh, it was mostly overlapping, but that second uncovered other stragglers that we never suspected.

And then they go back to pretending to be normal….

I don’t know how many of you read Robert A. Heinlein’s Puppet Masters. If you haven’t, it’s the story of an alien invasion in which the aliens are “half a pound of tapioca” in appearance, but they can completely control any human whose nervous system they can attach to. Initially, they ride between the shoulders and you might only see a slight founding of the back. Your only clue.

Until the main characters make it impossible to doubt they’re there, there is a period where they control substantially entire cities, but keep up the pretense of normal human life. This time is called “the masquerade”

There are tells. Closed swimming pools at the height of summer. Men wearing coats. But they’re not massive tells. Our hero, who already knows what is happening visits a city in the masquerade, trying to figure out who is hagridden and who isn’t.

You can read the book yourself. It’s one of my favorites.

BUT that’s what it feels like. Particularly since 2024. It feels like I’m living in the masquerade. People act normal, but there are tells. And I can’t be sure, but all of this daily life and peace feels like an act.

Is it trauma from the years before? Oh, likely. But the question is: is it also true?

I think this is part of what’s feeding the doomerism about the midterms. I think it’s also part of how many of us creatives seem to be glitching. And it’s part of why I’m having trouble settling down and writing.

Nerves.

It’s probably just nerves. But nerves don’t explain 2020 or what followed.

I want it to be just nerves.

(A Blast from the Past: https://accordingtohoyt.com/2022/10/31/i-dont-believe-in-aliens/)

I don’t believe in aliens but I profoundly dislike Woo Woo. And Aliens at least aren’t woo woo. Or they weren’t. It could be argued that when everyone on the left started running around talking about UFOs being some kind of psychic phenomenon, (circa early seventies) it was a sign of true cultural rot or perhaps a sign that my (tongue in cheek, I think. I THINK) theory below is true, of course.

I don’t know how many of you remember this, but UFOs and aliens didn’t use to be in the same category of belief as elves, fairies, ghosts, weird spirit messages and the thing called “Earth changes” that has sneaked back in under the scientifist guise of “Global Warming” on the left.

UFOs were a sign of something physical out there. Of possibly more scientifically advanced but not supernatural aliens. Maybe very bad aliens. (Looks at Puppet Masters.)

And then it changed and became part of the new age circus. Which is when I gave up on it, though I always had trouble believing in aliens, which is why they don’t exist in my fiction, even when they seem to. (More on that later.)

Yesterday in a group, a friend said what is obvious about the left is that they seriously oppose human reproduction and longevity. Ultimately human life, I guess.

Here’s the list as to why:

NOT AN EXHAUSTIVE LIST:

1) Pushing to maximize abortion

2) Pushing to maximize homosexuality

3) Multiple different initiatives to make child rearing more difficult and expensive including a) Ramping up the intensity of social services scrutiny, effectively necessitating high intensity “helicopter parenting” b) Turning schools into indoctrination factories that don’t prepare children to function independently but do prepare them to have constant fights with their parents over their indoctrination c) Making healthcare more expensive through constantly ramping regulation, making the actual having of children more difficult and prohibitively expensive d) Pushing to nationalize healthcare, granting them further power over who lives or dies– allowing limitation of IVF, and also e) legitimizing legal euthanasia while also pushing to make healthcare decisions for the public (see Canada right now)

4) Pushing from other regulatory angles to make the de-facto standard a two-income family, ensuring children are raised in daycares and further pushing family budgets to the brink

5) Using the student loan system to turn the bulk of reproductive age, upwardly mobile people into collateral in a deal that passes billions of dollars directly from the US government to the same system that then indoctrinates those kids to the point of full societal dysfunction; encouraging, as much as possible, the use of sex as entertainment ONLY

6) Turning sterilizing yourself into the hot new fad for kids

7) Turning the simple identification of gender into a minefield so that even sex between people who aren’t mutilating themselves is suddenly difficult to even consider

8)Willfully manipulating nursing homes into putting elderly people in a position where they are MOST LIKELY to die during COVID

9) Adopting COVID policies which foreseeably shut down cancer diagnostics and treatment for almost two years, which is the most likely cause of the 10 fold increase in the rate of cancers since the COVID lockdowns (although I can’t entirely discount that the vaccines themselves are partially responsible because, sing it with me now, you can’t ensure the long term safety of something that hasn’t been around long enough to have long term safety data, which is why we do clinical trials and not mass experiments on the general public. I note in passing that the drug companies are so trustworthy they demanded legal indemnity as a condition of participating, while swearing blind that the product was safe and effective even though it was physically fucking impossible for them to have data to back that up due to minor problems like the requisite quantity of time not passing.)

And then this:

Whether they intend this to be a coordinated effort or passively want us gone, at some point you realize

The Democratic party? They’re the aliens in Independence Day.

Because I don’t like Woo Woo, I jumped off from this to aliens:

If the hypothesis that appeared in a lot of pulp age SF that humans were “the old ones” of the Galaxy (or the universe) who lost a war, and whose remnants were sent to Earth in exile, and whose “leaders” are being manipulated by “aliens” to keep them from achieving high tech, specifically space travel again, what would be different?

Space travel?

Well….

1- Shortly after the moon landing, there was a concerted effort by the left to confuse, thwart and obfuscate all attempts at space travel.

2- the talk of UFOs and possible space travel was corrupted by an entire slew of “sightings” and ideas that made UFOs and aliens into a supernatural, woo woo phenomenology fit only for New Age circles.

3- NASA might have gone the way of all government agencies, so natural, but–

4- Every democrat president is intent on crippling our ability to travel in space further, and discredit the very idea we SHOULD aim for it or attempt it.

5- Even space opera with or without minimally believable science, which — if nothing else — kept the idea we can eventually travel to and colonize the stars was shut down hard, in favor of fantasy and HARD science fiction. (I have nothing, absolutely nothing about hard science fiction, but with very few exceptions, it is only exciting to people who know enough science to understand what’s being done. It’s not how you popularize the idea of space colonization.) And the old masters who were pro-space were discredited and attacked. Even Baen who kept space travel fic alive, kind of, ended up in the narrow mil-sf sub-field most of the time. The rest became one of those self-fulfilling prophecies of trad pub: Space opera doesn’t sell, so we won’t publish any, and what we publish we won’t promote, so it doesn’t sell, so space opera doesn’t sell, so we– last verse, same as the first.
Note trad pub did this even though space opera movies continued to do exceedingly well, even arrantly stupid ones.

6- our capacity to generate enough energy to allow for even thinking of space travel is under systematic attack, which

a) feeds into depopulation, or will this winter, but also

b) inexplicably nuclear is included in this and attacked twice as hard, which of course is at war with us going to space, interstellar travel and eventually FTL (yes, it’s “impossible.” Our species has an history of doing the impossible on the regular. It’s just incremental steps, which are being thwarted by cutting us off at the ankles.)

That second list is also not exhaustive and I’m sure other people can contribute more instances of “this just doesn’t make sense, unless….”

Now I said I don’t believe in aliens and I don’t. I mean, base level fundamental, either aliens are utterly incomprehensible to us, or we wouldn’t realize they’re sentient. I THINK. But at the same time, if our species is much, much older, the aliens could be us.

Maybe there’s a universe of space commies, and we’re the space Americans who’ve lost the battle but not the (final war.)

Look, no, I don’t believe in any of this. This is the process I go through to create universes. I go through the evidence, see if it’s coherent, etc.

But if this were true what would be different?

And mostly I say “aliens” because I don’t like woo woo.

On the other hand, if it’s aliens I can’t do anything about it. If however it’s activity by a well-dressed gentleman of wealth and taste whose expensive perfume can never fully disguise an underlying whiff of brimstone.

…. Well, I can pray.

Even if it’s the equivalent of looking for the car keys under the street light and doesn’t make much sense.

Anyway — I don’t believe in any of this. I think. But it was worth laying out to think on.

Cui bono in all these things? Cui bono?

My husband has acquired a new and strange habit of listening to podcasts while working. I completely understand this, as his work is mostly numbers and patterns and words don’t intrude. Yes, it plays havoc with my writing, which is why I have headphones and Sabaton.

Sometimes, occasionally, when I’m doing visual or animation work, though, I will listen to what he’s listening to. Not because of interest but by sheer inertial. If it’s not bothering me, I passively-listen, the same way I passively watch TV by catching bits of whatever he’s watching in between work and such.

One of the podcasts I thus consume was an interview with a figure on the right who is a Trump supporter, but almost exactly in the opposite way of how I look at Trump and his administration. This person is enthusiastic about everything the administration does, but horrified, appalled and even shocked at Trump’s “uncouth behavior.” Meanwhile, I look at a lot of things the administration does with a weather eye even when I agree with the objectives, because I can see doors being opened that terrify me. (And yet, I also don’t see a way around it.) On the other hand Trump’s oh, so rude, terrifyingly crass behavior? Meh. I think he’s a little salty and a tad-bit mouthy at times. So what?

Perhaps this comes from having grown up in a Latin culture, where you can call your best friend a mother lover at the top of your voice, and accuse him of having raped and murdered his own grandmother, and it’s all taken to mean “I’m really mad at you” and no more. By evening, you’ll be having dinner together in the best of moods.

Or perhaps it’s because I understand the dynamic between “Trump Mouth Eruptions” and sympathize.

Look, yes, a lot of what he says that sounds absolutely crazy is intentional. And a lot of it is clear to anyone who read The Art of the Deal. And a lot of the times when he’s rude it’s also intentional, to distract you — or at least the main stream media — from something he’s doing or working on.

BUT–

There’s more going on there, because some of his outbursts don’t help him, and in fact might hurt him. Or at least horrify a number of the more delicate flowers on the right.

Which brings us to why they happen, and how I understand him.

To begin with I’m going to quote Mike Resnick of blessed memory, at the beginning of the indie possibilities. Mike Resnick, a gentleman in every sense of the word, said, “If this works out, I’m going to be very rude to a lot of people.” Why would a gentleman say that?

To understand it, you have to understand the regimen of frogs that traditionally published writers lived under.

Traditionally publishing houses were — literally — the only game in town, if you wanted to bring your book in front of enough readers to make even “underpaid secretary” money. The. Only. Game. In. Town.

Staying employed over the long run, meant swallowing a lot of frogs even if you weren’t from a “cancelled” political persuasion, like me, which had other difficulties, like keeping your mouth shut while the editor you worked for kindly informed you that libertarians wanted to abolish the internal combustion engine. (No, of course not Baen. DUH.)

You had to, for instance, shut up when they told you the book hadn’t sold, which was of course your fault, or at best “genre isn’t selling” even though you knew they’d done the florid stupid with cover or release date or whatever. You had to stay quiet while you watched them do the florid stupid. After six or seven of these, you had to accept their verdict that you just didn’t have potential and were stuck as a low level scribbler. Etc. etc. etc. You had to see them ignore contacts from movie producers who contacted you first, and shut up because it wouldn’t get you the movie deal (the house controlled the right to negotiate that) but it would destroy your ability to publish anything ever again and not just with that house, because it’s a small incestuous field. You had to accept being sent to a conference for middle school teachers to promote your book that wasn’t remotely suitable for middle school. And accept being sent over your 40th birthday. And keep your mouth shut and not blow up when you came home to a notice that this book was being taken out of circulation, a decision made before the print. And through all this, you had to meet these people at cons, and act like they were your best friends. Because as a friend whom I won’t out, though he too is beyond their reach told me, “They see your expressions. They watch how you react and what you laugh at. And what you DON’T laugh at.”

I refer to it as a regime of eating live frogs. You swallowed a frog a day as a minimum condition of being employed, of practicing the craft you wanted to work at since you were cognizant it existed.

And before you say “Sarah, everyone has to do that.” Sure. Sure. BUT there are degrees. Of course the overworked retail worker doesn’t tell his boss to shove it. BUT if he/she did, all it would take at worst is a move to another town to find work again. While if you ran your mouth in trad pub, you were done. Because it was a small field and they all talked to each other. And you couldn’t go down the street and find a similar job. You were done-done. (In fact a lot of us tended to assume some favorite writer had died, when he/she had been cancelled for a minor offense, not even saying what they thought.)

But it was more than that. Recently someone commented that No Man’s Land has more “life” than all my other work, and why didn’t I do stuff like that while I was publishing with trad pub?

Well, because trad pub is the art of the possible. And No Man’s Land and the world it explores is weird. So weird that the only hope for it would be Baen AND EVEN THEN they wouldn’t have much clue what to do with it. Because they would have to sell it to distributors and stores and…. there was a good chance their own reps would think it was weird. (This is what pushed the conformity trend in SF/F, where changes and originality had to be in tiny dosages.)

So your very mind got invaded. Not just explicitly by the publisher saying “No. Ew. We won’t publish that.” But by your perception of what they would or would not take and were or were not interested in/hot for. All while keeping your mouth shut on the bad things.

It was tough. I mean, really tough. And you really had to act as though agents, editors, etc. were your besties. (I did like one of my editors/publishers. Well, and a couple of people in the house. Yes, you guys know which house. BUT I had to act like it for ALL houses, even the ones that I was actively becoming blocked on projects because the people were so hard to deal with.) How much did we have to “act” — well, recently while at dinner with younger son, he asked if he could taste my dessert. And I said “Why not. EVERY ONE of my agents and editors reached over and took food from my plate without asking, at a work dinner.” That much.

Am I salty about this? Weirdly, not that much. I have the temperament that blows up on very little, but then forgives and forgets. I mean, I’m describing how bad it was, so you understand what it might do to other people.

I don’t know if other people who ran to indie are ‘being very rude.’ I don’t have much interest in most of the field at this point, except “books I enjoy reading.” To me writing has become an intensely personal/freeing thing, where I work at what I’m passionate about, promote it as best I can, and that’s it. (Weirdly, for the first time in my life that’s pay. Still slightly underpaid secretary, but will improve once the move is done and I work more.)

The thing I want to show is: you eat a lot of frogs, the frogs eventually come up. You become …. very rude. Because you can be.

Trump’s working life, most of it, required being self-abashingly-subservient to a lot of leftists in the one-party rule of NYC. Worse, over his lifetime he probably saw the left become more narrow, more totalitarian, more incapable of leaving anyone alone, even in the privacy of their own thoughts/words. And he had to act like he was their besty.

Which explains why he hit the political stage saying the things that most of the public was afraid of saying.

And btw, the public being afraid to say things? That’s a sign everyone is eating at least one small tadpole every morning. And the pressure builds.

And then he endured four years, after what was obviously to anyone with the mathematical intuition of a tadpole (which is about my level) a stolen election, of being persecuted for whatever crime the left establishment could dream up, some of them improbable enough to give this fiction writer pause. Granted, he wasn’t as much swallowing the live frog as having it force fed at that point since they slapped various gag orders on him that would ruin him if he spoke.

So — Trump is rude. And sometimes thoughtlessly says things that sound weird or hurt people who don’t deserve to be hurt.

That’s fine. I don’t care. The frogs come up. The more you force people to swallow, the more they come up.

There are things to worry about with the administration, like the offer of 5k (just let us keep the 5k dudes!) and other weirdness.

BUT the “rudeness”? Stop clutching your fricking pearls. If you force people to swallow live frogs, sooner or later they have a belly full and the frogs come up.

Ribbit!

Whew, this morning has been exciting. No, that’s not a picture of the crimes that happened at our house. it’s a friend’s shared meme of HER cat.

Our crimes were different. because Indy can taste — and smell — sugar, we keep cookies inside ziplocs (the entire package is inside a ziploc) and atop the baking cabinet, six feet up. The criminal managed to jump up there and bat down cookies and crackers for his sisters. I was alerted by rustling and rescued Dan’s oreo ziploc with only one small hole. However I somehow missed that my gluten-free matzos (look, you have your food preferences, and I don’t judge them. I like jam on matzos. Deal. The gluten-free ones are Amazon only, though, and cost the earth) which I found the cats devouring, because they are utter weirdos.

This was annoying, but not surprising. These are our fourth set of cats. We’ve seen everything. Mind you, the Misoites (the present batch of Indy, Muse and Circe) are possibly the weirdest, with Muse’s obsession with peaches and potatoes and Indy’s love of all things sweet, including plain sugar, and Circe loving all bread… But we’ve had cats with weird food preferences before. And nothing, absolutely nothing can explain Havelock’s love of screws and thumb tacks or the fact that I found them in his poo and he never had to go to the vet for emergency surgery. (Guts of steel, brain of cotton wool.)

When we take the cats to the vet and report a weirdness, the vet will say “Oh, that’s not rare, the–” And we go “we know, we know” because there are thirteen urns on our mantel, and two more cats who disappeared and we don’t have the urns for.

I guess I must be old, because I’ve hit this with politics. And when you crazy kids complain about having to vote for the slightly less evil one, because it’s not voting for cake over death, just the common cold over pneumonia, or if you prefer Chlamydia over Syphilis.

And I, who started my voting career during the cold war is looking at you in “You think that makes you special? That you’re voting to stop the red-green alliance, even though the person you’re pulling the lever for is a disgusting RINO?”

Look, we voted for people who were objectively leftists, but who were LESS — not not, just less — likely to sell the free world to the Soviet Union, just to stay free a few more years. In Portugal I once voted for a socialist — yes, with the understanding that socialism is the path to communism — because the alternatives were open Leninist and Maoist.

(I didn’t like it, and I was young, which is why after that election, in Portugal, I voted monarchist. It was a protest vote, like voting for a small, local party in the US, because honestly, monarchists get 0.2% of the vote or thereabout. In the village it was me and the 90 year old. And when I moved and stopped voting there, he came to ask my parents if I was okay.)

Now do I like it? Are you kidding? The red-green alliance is holding a gun to my head by forcing me to vote against them so hard that I vote for other people who hate me, just who hate me less.

And it’s bad for the country, because it allows the shitheads on the right to get away with things that they’d otherwise be punished for. But we can’t punish them because that would mean voting for people who want me shot on the back of the head. (And you too. I’m not implying you guys are voting to save my life, though if you are thank you.)

It’s what created both the myth that only RINOS like Romney or for that matter Nixon were “electable”. Because the decent people still voted for them, or rather against the commies, while the “we only Vote Republican because the Left is declasse” “right” only voted for the “moderates” (“surrender to the USSR, but slower!”) It took Reagan’s name recognition and amazing common touch to break that. And then we went right back to it, until Trump. Who had immense name recognition and derived immense power from the return of the repressed: I.e. from saying aloud what people had been thinking and scared of saying for years.

And of course, there is the psy-ops, the endlessly cycling psy-ops (psy-opsi? psy opsis? psy-oh-heck-not-again) from the left, the foreign enemies and–

The polls. The polls which are more unreliable each cycle, and who have never once predicted a right-wing victory. (Not initially at least.) And the others, designed to have the idiots on the right (We have as many idiots as the left, we just embrace them less) shun some group of a vast and unsteady coalition.) And the psy-ops that the economy is terrible, the most terrible ever. Guys, I was alive and awake in 1990. If you weren’t, find someone who wasn’t and isn’t stupid and ask them how Clinton got elected. (And even that took Perot. But the psy-ops that the economy was the worst since the Great Depression was part of it. Incidentally Ray Bradbury put himself beyond the politically correct pall by correctly saying it was a funny depression that went away when you turned off the TV and stopped listening to the sob stories.)

There are things that give me hope. The last two big run-by-the-lefty-media outrage psy ops were designed to make WOMEN afraid of voting GOP. This tells me that the left isn’t sure of WOMEN who frankly have been their most reliable voting block, both because they tend to be conformists to what they perceive as the most widespread side (something the media can make appear so) and because most women want to be “nice.” And the left has always painted itself as “nice.” (Which isn’t the same as good.) If they’re not sure of the women, the face of the upcoming election is different.

The other thing that gives me hope is that we’ve had no riots at all this summer. It’s not like they wouldn’t have done it, if they could. Oh, yeah, and that the demonstrations/riots/circus of anti-immigration-enforcement was so limited and fizzled. I’m not joking, the “big” demonstration against deportations in my town was the usual half dozen people and two who might have been walking past. (Per picture in the paper. Why it even made the paper is something else.) And they only found two idiots willing to get themselves killed, and neither was ethnic or a pregnant woman. That tells its own tale, because from the time I’ve followed leftists’ “martyrs” they’ve been able to get at least one pregnant woman. (Yes, yes, Kent State. You thought it wasn’t a setup? You’re funny.) I suspect in many cases shot down by their own side, if all else failed, and blamed on the other side.

Is this because Trump pulled the plug on USAid? Might be. Note the turn for the right in central and South America from that moment.

Mind you, they still have a lot of money sloshing around, but that seems to have been a knife in their primary funding.

So maybe we have a chance. Maybe. How much of the machinery of fraud is paid? I don’t know. And neither do you. But I’d guess at the very least half.

Turns out electing a president who fights with money might have been a brilliant idea.

However, nothing is certain, and I’m not sleeping well.

We’re not voting between cake and death, but we’re voting between being whipped and death. There’s only a chance some will think death is more merciful. And all I can do is pray.

Mind your six and keep your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark.

IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT: Over the last month a number of you sent me books for the promo which did NOT get included in the promo. And then sent me increasingly frantic/angry emails. Sorry, I was moving and the email was misbehaving. If I overlooked your book, please send again next week. Thank you- SAH.

Book Promo

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, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. By clicking through and buying (anything book-related, 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. Remember though all of these submissions are from people willing to be associated with this blog. So if you’re trying to buy from people who don’t hate you, this is a good place to start.– SAH

FROM KAL SPRIGGS: Courting Power: A Regency of Aeliana Romantic Fantasy Novel

Book one of a five part fantasy regency romance series.

Five daughters, one season, and fortunes, magic, and love at stake.

The five Priddington daughters have arrived for their Presentation, to win love and husbands in the Empire’s Capitol. Descended from a powerful bloodline, each of them presents a prize, where a perfect marriage will increase the power of the happy couple… and one misstep within Society can mean ruin.

Miss Patricia Priddington would not be surprised if one of her sisters were so fortunate. Only a rakish Prince seems to keep catching her when she falls. As love blooms, however, the Queen seems to oppose their budding romance, another would-be suitor is found dead, and it seems that the Prince is the prime suspect.

What is a proper noblewoman to do except get to the bottom of things, hopefully without bringing down scandal upon her and her sisters? Because while she is looking for a perfect match, others suspect that she is only courting power.

FROM PAM UPHOFF: Max Berezin Collection (Chronicles of the Fall Book 26)

Snapshots a character’s life.

One previously published short story, plus nine new stories that give brief glimpses of a budding Mentalist Lord as he survives ambitious relatives, brief romances, interesting assignments, and vacations . . . Balancing family duties and work while doing what’s right . . . even if it might not actually be legal . . .

FROM ALMA T. C. BOYKIN: Books, Barns, and Songs: Familiar Generations Book Twelve

Words have power. Books change lives, and songs bring healing. But words can also wound.

Return to River and Devon counties, and places farther afield, with characters both new and Familiar.

Claire Tainuit discovers that excitement doesn’t always stay in stories, or in the spell circle.
Simeon and Vladimir take on trouble … and memories.
A young Hunter and sorcerer labors to fit into two worlds.
Arthur Saldovado sorts books and wonders if the plots can get any worse. He shouldn’t tempt fate …

In a Familiar world, barn art carries power, books inspire magic, and some novels really are that bad.

Six short stories.

FROM DALE COZORT: Exchange: Book One of the Exchange Universe

It’s called Bear Country, an untamed alternate reality where humans never evolved, but saber-tooth tigers and suspiciously intelligent little green monkeys did. Random chunks of Bear Country are temporarily swapped—exchanged—with Earth, bringing a risk-averse, bubble-wrapped society unimagined threats, from giant bears to the hazards of unknown bacteria. They also bring opportunity for anyone brave enough—or crazy enough—to settle there.

Computer guru Sharon Mack prepares to evacuate when she finds out her town is about to be Exchanged . But when her crazed ex-husband kidnaps their autistic daughter, dragging her into Bear Country, Sharon has no choice but to go after them, find her daughter, and escape before the Exchange reverses, cutting her off from her own reality forever.
Flash floods and giant bears aren’t the most dangerous thing in this wild frontier. Bands of escaped convicts, with nothing left to lose, roam freely in a land with no laws but survival of the strongest. Then there’s enigmatic Leo West and the secretive Sister West cult, determined to claim Bear Country for their own. And there are those willing to kill to hide the true secrets of the Exchange.

Exchange is the first book in the Exchange universe. The second is Devouring Wind, available now.

FROM LEE ECKHARDT: GLADIATOR’S LUCK: A Science Fiction Novel

Sixteen-year-old Komani is a gladiator, genetically engineered to be the perfect fighting machine, fast, tough, and strong. Gladatorial combat is illegal on most worlds, so Komani and his manager Jonan travel from solar system to another,, eking out a living and trying to stay one step head of the law. The future seems bleak until a master criminal hires them to help rob the treasure-planet Hylaea. Komani, eager to participate in the robbery, is completely unaware of what lies in store for him in the depths of Hylaea’s rainforest, where he will face hostile elements, a criminal double-cross, and the truth and his relationship with Jonan… Note: Barriel Takatura previously appeared in ‘Underworld’.

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: Gnawing the Bones of the City

Tikhon Grigoriev has a problem.

He’s a member of the civil police, but has come to the attention of the political police. In Stalin’s Soviet Union, that is a very dangerous situation. He’s hanging on by his fingernails in besieged Leningrad, and he has a family to think of.

Worse, he has reason to believe that something uncanny stalks the frozen ruin that is a besieged city in subarctic winter. But as a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, he is not supposed to believe in the supernatural.

How can he keep his head in this impossible situation?

A short story.

Note: includes intense scenes that may be disturbing to some audiences. Reader discretion is advised.

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 5

Imperial Princess Regnant Alice has lately discovered herself to be with child.

This doesn’t stop her usual grind of duties, of which she has also discovered quite the backlog since returning from her honeymoon with Prince Daniel. With the help of both Daniel and her private secretary Lady Candace, and of course that of her loyal maids, the Princess Regnant powers through audiences and public appearances and even the unending round of lavish soirées thrown by the rich and noble of Capital.

As always, though, her life is bound to have problems tossed into it…much like grenades. An ancient frigate appears in Capital space, from a sector a hundred thousand light years away, normally a 12-year one way trip. Of course they bring news of a problem. But their means of arrival may also spark the biggest war seen in the Galaxy since the Wars of the Dispersal…

The fifth volume of the BBESP light novel!

FROM BECKY JONES: Chaos and Disarray: A Collection of Short Stories

When you mix animals, magic, friends, and school… it can be quite chaotic at times.
A boy finds a hellcat on his back patio. An entire middle school is transported into that weird place between worlds. A wandering cowboy encounters more than he bargained for in the wilderness. A young man must prove to his djinn father that he is worthy of respect. Ten stories of friendship, growing up, and family make up this collection of unpublished and previously published stories.

FROM SUMMER GRAYLING: True Colours

Jan Van Der Vaart is a legend. The focus of his magical Talent is pain, and he’s spent years in the military, then as a mercenary, making terrorists, cartels, and governments fear him. Finally, he carved out a safe haven for other Talents, and tried to retire… until one last job, cracking a black lab snatching Talents off the streets, went sideways. He’s left staggering down a rainy coastal highway, thumb out and hoping he’ll catch a lift before the kill team realizes they missed…

Aurelia Brinati is on the run. Having escaped five years of hell as an unwilling lab rat, she has a stolen car and a plan to hide from pursuers by taking passage on a cargo ship headed anywhere else in the world. When she picks up a stray sailor headed the same way, she rapidly discovers she’s out of her depths… and safe in the heart of the storm.

The entire world fears him… except her. Powers are gathering to recapture Aurelia, but they’d best beware. Jan and his friends will do whatever it takes to keep her safe… whether it’s murder, mayhem, or last-minute shopping runs to find something called cream of tartar for her snickerdoodle cookies.

Protective Hero ✓ Hidden Magic ✓ He Falls First ✓ Found Family ✓ Runaway Heroine ✓ Psychic Powers ✓ Hurt/Comfort ✓ Damaged Heroine ✓ Touch-starved Hero ✓https://link.amazon/B0bfvFueo

FROM MICHAEL NICHOLS: Fatal Abstraction: Revolutionizing Strategy and Innovation for the Age of AI

In an era where AI is accelerating disruption and uncertainty, traditional business strategy is dangerously outdated. While innovation professionals adapt rapidly, many established organisations remain stuck in slow, mechanistic planning cycles. Fatal Abstraction argues that to survive, leaders must learn to govern at the level of uncertainty they face―rethinking how strategy is conceived, executed, and evolved.

Drawing on philosophy, mental models, and first hand experience with hundreds of ventures, author Michael Nichols offers a bold framework for mastering disruption. This timely work equips entrepreneurs, executives, and investors with the tools to navigate AI-driven change, build resilient ventures, and revolutionise strategic thinking in the modern age.

FROM JOHN BAILEY: The Day My Phone Got Hacked (Living as an Adult in the 21st Century Book 6)

At the International Cyber Defense Expo, thousands of hackers, defenders, security researchers, and technology companies gather for the annual competition known as the Gauntlet.

Daniel Mercer has been doing infrastructure engineering for thirty-five years.

He has watched punch cards give way to mainframes, mainframes give way to client-server systems, servers become virtual machines, and entire data centers migrate into the cloud. Now, surrounded by young hackers, AI security startups, zero-day hunters, and cryptocurrency enthusiasts, Mercer arrives with something that looks hopelessly out of place:

An old Android phone.
A battered wooden case.
A few blinking LEDs.
And a honeypot.

The younger hackers laugh. They think they know exactly what they are looking at.
They are wrong.

FROM ELISE HYATT: A Fatal Stain (Daring Finds)

TABLE FOR HOMICIDE Some antiques have history. This one has a body count.

When furniture refinisher Dyce Dare picks up a bargain table at a garage sale, she expects the usual suspects: water rings, cheap veneer, and questionable taste in stain colors. What she doesn’t expect? Human blood hiding beneath layers of amateur polyurethane.

Now Dyce has questions. Inconvenient, potentially life-threatening questions. Whose blood decorated this dining set? Is the previous owner currently occupying a grave or just really bad at DIY first aid? And most pressingly—does the person responsible know she’s discovered their crimson calling card?

With her wedding to Cas Wolfe on the horizon, her son E insisting his imaginary llama named Ccelly can solve the case, and her friend Ben offering “help” that mostly involves creating more problems, Dyce’s plate is already full. But when strange incidents suggest someone is watching her workshop, she realizes she needs to find both victim and killer before she becomes the next stain on someone’s furniture.

A Fatal Stain – Sometimes what’s under the surface is murder.

(Note: No actual llamas were consulted during this investigation. Ccelly tried, but let’s be honest—imaginary camelids make terrible detectives.)

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 to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: Muddle

By Holly the Assistant

A couple-three days ago someone at a major media outlet noticed this: https://www.ed.gov/about/news/press-release/us-department-of-education-issues-final-rule-hold-all-colleges-and-universities-accountable-low-earning-programs which you’ll note is dated June 29, proving that the MSM is a tad slow on the uptake. Three months is not hardly news speed.

And of course the realization that the fine arts programs by and large do not graduate into paying fields hit the internet like a freight train.

First of all, we’ve got to exclude the B.Ed. degrees in the arts. Lots of arts majors are smart enough and capable of putting up with public schools enough to get the B.Ed. Those programs will be unaffected: they make as much as any other ed degree holder. The jobs are scrambly and often require midday commutes from one school to the next to the next, but they are education jobs. They pay well, like every other public education job, with good benefits.

No, the degrees affected will be the degrees like mine, a Bachelor of Arts in Music. This degree qualifies me to do exactly one thing, which is, go apply for a Master of Arts program. Had I done so, that would have qualified me to apply for a Doctoral program, the graduates of which are then eligible to compete for the very few professor of music jobs.

As it happens, I have a now-local friend who is, oh, about four or five years older than me, who did exactly that. She has a pile of student loans, and is paying them back on a professor salary, which is not nearly as well compensated as it used to be. Still not bad, but not what we’d call high paying.

I do not and am not. I was an academic full ride student, and could study anything I wanted as long as I kept my grades up. And I have spent the last decades working as a freelance musician, a little of this, a little of that, some weddings, some funerals, lots of teaching, some decidedly non-music-related gigs (points at Sarah), and that is very typical of my classmates, including those who did go on to get more degrees, including those who borrowed money. Dr. Professor Friend is, in fact, up for tenure this year, which is to say, she has just barely been a professor long enough to be eligible to apply. She will probably have her student loans paid off before she retires: she’s very frugal. Her first decade or so out of school she took whatever part time gigs she could get. It is a bad field to go into.

These degrees are demanded by the institutions for a look-in at the professor jobs, and there are more of us who would like to work professionally in the field than there are jobs available. Many more.

The Arts, with this rule, will become the property of rich kids and full ride scholarship kids, and the closure or reduction of most college arts programs, which means there will be no choir or theater for students in other majors to participate in. I do not like this. I think it will be bad for Art, and make the fields even more self-referential and nonsense-prone. I think the entire point of college was to expose students to a broad variety of information, and closing the arts departments will remove a large amount of human endeavor from the curriculum. (Especially since it looks like History is also in the same position of non-paying degrees.)

But I very much more dislike seeing my friends, my colleagues, kept in poverty, scrambling to pick up odd gigs, trying to make ends meet, when they would have done better to not have that mountain of debt, and would still be working at the coffee shop, the hardware store, the grocery, and performing and teaching on the side.

I think we have need of a great deal more educational reform, and that probably eliminating all federally backed student loans would be a good start, but as a prologue, this will do. It will slow the bleeding. It will help stop the old lie that if you study what you love the money will follow. Maybe it will help us get some reform into the high schools. That’s probably too much to hope for, for something that will affect only four or five percent of college students, but it might start the process.

Take what you will from this, and use it for your arguments with well-intentioned and naive folks, who haven’t and don’t work in the Arts, or who worked in the Arts two generations ago when it was a different career. Please.

When we first moved to Denver, East Colfax Avenue was a little unsavory. Nothing too crazy, but you know, we tried not to go to Pete’s Kitchen when we had a bunch of suitcases visible in the back of the car say. And if Dan went in to pick up take out, I locked the doors in the car, and grew eyes in the back of my head. There were just enough “shady” characters around to be wary.

I mean Pete’s Kitchen itself was perfectly safe, by the simple expedient of giving free meals to policemen, so there was always at least one large table occupied by Denver police, at all times. (Considering that in the seventies Denver Police ran a burglary ring, this might not always make things safer, but in the early nineties it did. Enough that we felt okay going there with a toddler by the hand and an infant in the sleeping basket/car seat.) We just weren’t stupid about it, and minded our six.

By the 10s the vigilance wasn’t needed and by 2015 you could see women alone walking their small dog at 10pm, which is my gold standard for “this is a safe neighborhood.) When I mentioned it to a friend who’d lived in Denver in the seventies, he said “you’re kidding” because apparently in the seventies and eighties, it was… not safe for anything not large and male, and even then… I caught echoes of this, before we discovered Pete’s Kitchen (remember, we lived in the Springs, and when the kids were little our trips to Denver were usually day trips to hit the mystery bookstore (Murder by the Book) and maybe go to the natural history museum. It was only when the kids were older, like elementary/middle school age that we started spending weekends and actually exploring.) which we did when oldest was three or four. I read a series of articles in the paper about large men who could hold their own forming “Angels on Colfax.” Trying to extricate victims and people in trouble. I have absolutely no idea how that worked, btw, just the vague memory of articles several decades ago.

Anyway, the gentrification I’d seen seemed to me — I’m simple that way — a good thing. I liked all the little shops and eating places that sprang up once the place was mostly safe. Later the places became pricey, but I enjoyed being able to walk along, hit the Tattered Bookcover, meet friends from out of town at Pete’s without giving them full instruction on how to protect themselves, etc.

So imagine my surprise when late night browsing brought up a video on how the gentrification of East Colfax was the worst thing ever, because it pushed “low income people” out.

First I was shocked. Then I was incoherently angry.

I’m seeing parts of the city I live in now making the same trajectory, and also some of the smaller/cheaper/ethnic neighborhoods starting to attract outsiders and become “kitchy and interesting.” … Honestly, the later since ICE started shipping bad hombres out and curtailing cartel activity. And I haven’t looked but I’m sure there is the same sort of lamenting documentary out there about this.

There are posters anti-gentrification, for sure, and I catch conversations of people throwing fits over it, and–

And it makes me see red. As red as if someone waved the hammer and sickle in front of my eyes, which is never a good idea.

Why angry, you’ll say? Because the people who want to keep areas “authentic” and “affordable” for poor people seem to think that poor people want to/need to/are happy in high crime environments. It’s like “be raped and murdered, you dumb proles! It’s what you deserve!” You can add a soupcon of racism, since in most cities the “proles” being pushed into those areas are also ethnic.

Okay, you’ll say, but Sarah, if people can’t afford to live in a place that’s not crime ridden, they are homeless.

Meh. Only because when a place first becomes gentrified there’s a inrush. And because there is a premium on safe places. Trust me, I know. Part of the dance of the houses we engaged in was to ensure parts of our family were not in a rapidly-becoming-unsafe area. There were other reasons, too, but that was one of them. I’ve felt the safety tax directly in my pocket this year.

But if most places are decently safe, then some will of necessity be cheaper. It’s not like we’re making more well off people in a factory to take over the gentrified places. Places that are less fashionable, or less convenient to fashionable/convenient spots will naturally be cheaper. Smaller places, too. Little working-man cottage type neighborhoods aren’t bad places, if you don’t have to worry about the meth house next door, and you’re not afraid a cartel will shiv your kids.

Look, I know this. I grew up in a place of no great comfort which was not fashionable at all (It no longer exists, having disappeared under countless cement stack a prole apartments and an influx of outsiders. Also a few turnpikes.) The old village, as was, and its surrounding areas had an accent so interesting — interesting — that the first time I opened my mouth in college, in a linguistics class, the prof made a face like he’d sucked on a pickle, and said “Ah… Aguas Santas.” For the rest of my time in that class I was known as “the young lady from Aguas Santas.” It wasn’t a compliment. But by and large it was safe. Your clothes might get stolen from the line. (And occasionally your chickens or rabbits from the backyard pen.) But there was very little interpersonal violence. People could walk around late at night alone. Heck, mom would send me to the store on the corner, with a handful of coins to buy a pound of peanuts in shell, on those long Summer evenings, so the family could sit around snacking, having lemonade and talking. From the time I was five or so, it was perfectly safe to send me, alone. The only drawback was that I might get lost (yes, it was a straight shot, but trust me.) NOT that I’d get hurt. Also trust me on this, the housing wasn’t expensive. I suspect some of the smaller, older houses, rented for “I let you live here, and you do daily cleaning woman stuff for me.”

It’s false logic to say “if we make a place safe, it will become expensive.” That only happens because we let places be ridiculously unsafe and hell on Earth.

Look, I understand there is a balance between justice and mercy. It’s impossible to make the world a perfectly safe place. It’s impossible to make a city perfectly safe. Even a 99.9% safety is impossible without taking enforcement measures that are unpalatable to a free citizenry. I know that. Again remember I come from a country where, once upon a time, the police could arrest you for swearing in public (note I only know this from mom reenacting of scenes she’d seen. She was very funny and she did voices. By the time I was old enough to swear, that law was a thing of the past. or I’d have lived in jail.) Or for going barefoot. (The later was actually important and it was to curb the spread of TB in a country in which it was endemic and people spit on the ground a lot. But still. Police. Looking at your feet. Arresting you if you’re barefoot. Again, not by the time I was an adult, and occasionally went barefoot (usually because I’d broken a shoe heel or because I had a blister, but still.)) I don’t think Americans would put up with that. Even with good reason. Also for people like me it would have an immediate effect of making us want to speak only in four letter words and walk around barefoot with our toenails painted stop sign red. And that would be weird, particularly for the straight males among us.

But not policing people’s language is not the same as letting people shoot up on the corner, follow or menace strangers, camp on the sidewalk, defecate on the sidewalk, or the never end of unsavory shit (literally) that we’ve seen in the last ten years.

There used to be a concept of “basic law and order.” And while the lawless elements will always live among us, and some people will be violent, it doesn’t mean giving the violent the right to do as they will at the expense of others is the right choice.

I’ve lived in a lot of places where the basic right to be secure in your person while going about your lawful activities was degrading, and the pattern is almost always the same. Some politician, some mayor, some police chief, decide to be “compassionate and understanding” to the insane, encroaching and violent. They’ll call standing on the corner, weedling on yourself and shouting profanity like some sort of tourettes machine “a victimless crime.” And are “understanding” with the perpetrator who is, nine times out of ten, drugged out of his mind, and the tenth time floridly insane.

But to say it’s victimless is to ignore the business that people are no longer patronizing, as they take a WIDE path to avoid the crazy and who knows, potentially violent person.

In the Springs when things started to get out of control downtown it went from there being virtually no crime downtown and a ton of little mom and pop shops to places closing because the free-floating “homeless” would go into the little delis and threaten customers, go into the used bookstore and piss on the books, rob high school kids at knife point, etc. etc. etc. rinse and repeat. These places then got replaced by bigger/better financed places who could afford to guard the entrances and keep scary people out. A lot of them expensive bars and restaurants, mind. I think that trajectory has reversed now, but I haven’t lived there in ten years so I can’t swear to it.

The problem of “unsafe neighborhoods” is that they don’t have to be. The decay in basic order; the toleration of the violent (often connected with revolving door arrest and release), the toleration of property destruction: all of it has been proven to be a choice. Giulliani cleaned NYC by going after basic disruptions in law and order pattern.

So why are we tolerating it? Other than the fact that politicians imagine this makes them look good? Or that they’re being compassionate? Or that it creates places that “people can afford?”

WHY should poor people be forced to live in unsafe and violent neighborhoods? Who profits by it except idiots consumed with nostalgie de la boue?

We’ve tried this “Let a million crimes flourish and it will get better.” It doesn’t work. Abolishing the police and “social working” and understanding the bad elements just makes things worse.

No, I’m not making a plea for a policeman in every corner making sure you don’t swear and are wearing both shoes.

But people who are dangerous, people who commit crimes, should be arrested, and arrangements should be in place whereby they can be kept away from law-abiding humanity who just wants to walk to the corner store at 9 pm, unshivved, you know?

Yes, I know that shades into a lot of things, particularly mental health. So?

It’s high time we rolled up our sleeves and made a concerted effort to make our cities safe again. Safe for the well off, sure, but also safe for the people who just want to rent a cheap apartment and save to maybe one day rent a slightly bigger cheap apartment.

We’ve tried being only compassionate. Kindness to the cruel is cruelty to the kind. It’s time to bring out the cudgel, too.

Because if this goes on much longer, what comes after is everyone open carrying and shooting anyone who steps out of line. And frankly after the last ten years, it’s starting to sound really good. Even though I know it wouldn’t be.

So, let’s roll up our sleeves and start by shoving the politicians “compassionate measures” up their noses.
Maybe it will reach their vestigial brains.

Sorry to be absent yesterday and to do this late, but yesterday was the last of the wholly dedicated days of helping family move, which is the other half of our move, and it’s been a lot over the last three months, and I kind of folded.

Then I spent three hours in the night wide-awake, which is what tells me I’m actually worried about the midterms. Yes, I know. On X, Cynical Publius, whom a friend calls “The only decent one of the Roman Statue guys” says that the whole idea the democrats will sweep the midterms is a psy-ops.

Look, he might very well be right. After all, when is the last time you heard of the GOP being “well ahead” before an election (except maybe locally.) And perhaps it is just my impression, but I think the “The GOP is losing badly” polls get more certain and exaggerated every election cycle. I mean they learned from 16 — ish. They’re no longer saying absolutely no chance but that the left takes all. But they still are, just more low key and sounding more intellectual.

So, it’s entirely possible the left is dead in the water, knows it, and is doing the “We’re totes going to win” out of reflexive attempts to demoralize the right.

The thing is, for my money, it was never an attempt to demoralize us. Look, which of you won’t vote because the left tells you all is lost? You vote harder and with an FU, right?

I think the polls and the triumphalism was ALWAYS to hide the fraud. Because if the polls were accurate and the left didn’t convince us all it was going to win anyway, people would look more carefully at the fraud.

“But Sarah, the fraud can’t be that gynormous”. If it weren’t they wouldn’t have fought so hard against the SAVE act. They wouldn’t have been so crazy as to push every state they can towards vote by mail. And coming from one of those states, let me tell the fraud was already massive before that. Now, of course, Colorado is in the grip of Sauron till the abomination of fraud by mail is defeated.

So, how reliable are the polls? Even internal ones?

I don’t know. Therefore I don’t know how much gravity to lend the story that the GOP is now running adds in locales that should be safe. I honestly have no clue.

We have things going for us, including la grande salida (this time for real) which is where people leave rather than worry about ICE. Or leave because it’s harder for them to suck the benefits teat. (It’s really not possible for them to live here, at the wages paid to illegals, without also massively imposing on the social safety net.) But that doesn’t matter much. Why not? Because the registrations of those that registered will be there, and someone will vote in their name, particularly in “loose” and vote by mail systems.

Then there is … the machine. Just the machine of fraud and deception built since Clinton passed the Motor Voter act.

How efficient is it? How much of its founding has failed? And how much will the people involved in it pay heed to all the hunting down and persecuting of those involved that has taken place more every year? I don’t know. And neither do you.

I do know that the steady drum beat of “The economy is the worst it’s ever been” is affecting the young, who at any rate for a variety of reasons, most of which are “progressive” dominance, from anti “child” labor laws to failing schools to the massive not-dischargeable-in-bankruptcy loans, are finding life very difficult to get foothold on.

Is the economy bad? I don’t know. In our region, the gas is not as bad as it was under Biden, and we can afford eggs, which were once upon a time unobtanium, and which we were called “treatlers” for complaining about. (Only the democrats could make eggs too expensive to afford. Apparently the repeat of a trick first performed by FDR, at that.) Looking around I won’t say things are hopping. I don’t see the big take off we saw under Reagan. But then again, even under Reagan the take off was not instant, and I beg to note that Carter didn’t as comprehensively destroy the economy as the auto pen did. Partly because he started with a relatively stronger one.

I know that despite our town being very friendly to homeless (Grrrr) the infestation seems to be receding apace. (I wonder how many of those were illegal, or how many of the addicted-and-crazy were being ignored due to all the support going to illegals. It’s probably a “yes”.)

I also know that in this safe seat, the only ads I see are crazy — and I mean crazy — attack ads against the GOP. There are no “this is our program and it’s so much better.” There are also no GOP ads. So– Does it mean anything? I don’t know.

And what the heck is with the caravan of “migrants” (Yes, invaders) from Honduras winding towards our border? What do they thing they’re going to accomplish, when the border has been sealed since Trump took over?

Achtually I have a theory. I think the left thinks it can’t lose on that one.

First you have to remember that they drink their own ink and they’ve been going on and on about how people are very, very upset at Trump for all the deportations and sealing the border. They’re right actually. The people are very upset about the deportations being so slow. But the logistics of it always dictated they would be. Though that’s not why the left thinks we’re upset. They have seen all the movies. They’ve made all the movies. You know, about how the innocent illegals are being shot down on the street. They’ve written and read all the articles about how even citizens are being shot and deported.

They’re spitting mad and appalled. And they lack a theory of other minds, so they figure EVERYONE is mad and appalled.

So they figure they send a massive caravan at the border. If the border patrol resists the invasion, people will get shot — the left will make SURE a pregnant woman or more get shot. It’s the playbook! — and people will be furious at this administration and sweep the left into power in a wave of righteous indignation.

Or… the caravan is just turned away, they mine the sad stories, and the people are heartbroken and sweep the left into power in a wave of righteous indignation.

I’m not worried about that. In either case. It’s the left thinking in movie plots, in which “All the people” rise up in response to whatever the crazy thing is that they’ve dreamed up to be mad about.

OTOH we also think in movie plots. The post Holly shared yesterday I was surprised that I expected greater fighting and leftist violence if Trump won, despite the fraud. (And I didn’t expect him to win because of the fraud, which is why I went to bed at 3 am election night. I don’t expect the election night this year to be better.)

Now, Trump’s going after their funding sources stopped some of that. Definitely. This is why we haven’t had another Summer of Burning Love. (Though I wouldn’t put it past them to be saving for 2028.)

OTOH I was scared and I guess I too tend to think cinematically. I am, after all a story teller, and “They they gradually adapted to this as the culture slowly changed, until opposition…” is not a great plot to fit into a novel. Not even a massive novel, like No Man’s Land.

I take my fear as a picture of just how fraught things felt back then.

Which is why I would much rather not go back to it. By the time a piddly league pundit like me is worried about debanking and conceiving stratagems to get around it? Things are very fraught indeed.

Did we do enough to obviate the fraud? Who knows? Crystal ball cloudy. Ask another day. Mid November, for choice.

It’s not very cinematic, but we’re just going to have to vote against the commies (even if there’s no one to vote for in our area) and keep on keeping on.

Sursum corda. Keep your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark.

In the end we win they lose. It might just take a while.