According To Hoyt

For two weeks now I’ve been driving my family and my close in fan group insane with “They’re going to steal the election. I can see all the battle space preparation signs.” And them telling me I was insane.

After last night, I don’t think a lot of them speak to me.

And yet–

“But Sarah, the right lost fair and square!” “The people want Islamic socialism!”

Maybe they do. Maybe they do indeed. Except there is no sign of it at all, except what came out of the machines last night.

Look, the numbers are — on the face of them — bloody unbelievable. The democrats had presidential-turn-out-or-better, suddenly, in a mid-term. Which, given how many of the voters were deported– Never mind. Not enough, probably, to make a big difference.

But what we saw at the polls heralds the type of sea change that goes “everyone hates the president”. And… I’m not seeing it?

Sure maybe in some super-blue enclaves this is obvious and in your face, but… even so. Opposition that strong shows. Where is their viral “Let’s go Brandon!” moment? Where is their run away success fictional series where the good guys win? Where are their massive demonstrations saying “the king is a fink?” The No Kings movement had to use photos from a year ago or two years ago. Because they couldn’t even commandeer their usual 12 people on respirators in a corner.

You know what else a big sea change movement of this kind doesn’t do? Steal signs. Across the country there was an epidemic of leftists stealing signs. Not one or two, not their petty, usual vandalism, but “I can’t keep a sign for my guy up, because it gets stolen.” That’s… battle space preparation. Not for a fair vote, but for fraud.

You know what else is funny? Well. A lot of things. But one of them that is clearly, blatantly, obviously funny is that the Democrats outperformed the polls.

“But Sarah, Republicans outperform the polls all the time.” Yes, but that’s like me saying “There is a flock of turkeys flying north” and you saying “So, geese do that all the time.”

The culture we live in, Democrats announce their preference loudly. Hell, they’ll run you down on the street to tell you what they think. They will not be phone shy. Ever. And all the polls are skewed left anyway, if you look at the internals.

Another weird thing: This time the cities reported first. Normally they report last to account for how many votes they needed. Not last night, no siree bob! They reported first. Must be because there’s no fraud in the cities any longer. Stop laughing.

“But Sarah, where’s the proof?”

And there you have me. DataRepublican exposed their talk of color revolution. Of what they’d do to secure the gains if the President tried to call them out on it. How they’d expose him as a tyrant.

What does that hinge on? No PROOF of the steal. Or no easily provable proof. Because if we can point at it and say “but they obviously stole it, this way” then the color revolution fails.

I don’t know how you voted. I mean, the mechanics of it. I voted in paper. I was such a small minority that the only wait in our polling place was for the machines. No wait at all for paper. And until five minutes ago (It’s five am, btw) I was patting myself on the back over it.

I filled a ballot, then I approached a machine. A nice poll worker helped me put it in the machine, the ballot was pulled in, and the screen lit up “Your vote has been counted!”

Very nice. Who was my vote counted for, precisely? It can’t tell me, of course, the nice poll worker would see it! And besides the ballot is right there! They can count it again. (I presume.) Sure. BUT I’m NOT THERE TO WATCH IT COUNTED. … and most people voted by machine.

You know the rule, don’t you “Don’t trust your vote to anything you wouldn’t trust your cash?”

Let me know when you’d be happy and excited if your bank account had no way to audit your deposits and withdrawals. I know I’d practically pee myself with happiness! Who wouldn’t? I put a thousand dollar check, the ATM flashes “Your deposit has been accepted” and then…

Look, I’m increasingly looking askance at AMAZON because I hadn’t looked closely at what one of my releases was doing in years, but when I looked at No Man’s Land — I also had never had an indie release that sold numbers worth watching like a hawk, to be honest — anyway, I saw it do impossible things. Like my sales numbers went backward without returns. That was… special. More than once. And I’m looking askance at it, because “what’s my control?” and “What’s my recourse?” And in both cases the answer is “none.”

Now look at your voting apparatus which just did a … if not impossible truly bloody unlikely thing. What is your control? And what is your recourse?

Yeah, yeah, enclaves of foreign workers in Texas and Islamics in Michigan and…. Are you for real? In two years? It changed that much in two years?

No bloody way. What we just saw was expert fraud preparation and then the pay off.

There AREN’T any organic, on the ground signs for this shift. And suddenly dems are poll shy? People. These critters haven’t been shy about their idiotic opinions since they emerged screaming “Marx” from their birthing person’s wombs.

Yes, yes, a lot of their candidates were smooth articles, who practically claimed to be GOP. BUT Talarico? The homunculus? Like Beto but gayer? Was that really what Texas was waiting for? And across the board, too? Not just the big profile campaign?

One thing I’ll tell you is that locally, they stopped handing out the little slip of paper that you had to hand back to show how many people voted. You see, it had been badly wrong in 20, so… People, ah ah, just forgot to hand it in. But it worked in 24. And now it was gone, without a blink.

It stinks. To high heavens it stinks. Before you start ripping into your fellow citizens, look around. The reason you’re not sleeping (Ah!) or beating your head against the wall is that none of it makes sense. A friend last night said “AI could make the hack into the voting machines smooth, without sudden hockey sticks.” But of course, that’s nonsense. These systems that are all connected to the internet are as secure as big, commercial refrigeration systems, after all. A hack would be preventable, obvious. And it’s not like, oh, open AI or Anthropic have a vested interest in getting someone in who will destroy grok! Or in getting idiots in who will “regulate AI.” Not a chance.

It’s a black box. Your vote goes in. Trust me, bro! comes out. And you trust it. Of course.

Oh, you don’t? Well, what are you going to do about it? In 2020 with the fraud blatant, in front of our eyes and in front of G-d and everybody, we couldn’t convince the vast majority that we’d been color-revolutioned. Now? Now with this smooth operation? Are you kidding me? A quarter of you are in a full out tantrum and saying I’m making up shit.

I’m not making up shit. Our election systems have gone from wobbly to fully mythomaniacal. And you know what is a bad sign? A bad sign is DataRepublican talking about ways to power around the vote system and the elected rep system. And one of the reasons it’s a ridiculously bad sign is that those don’t work. Not really.

Oh, yes, you should be fully ungovernable and make it as hard as possible for them to do onto you. No one is asking you to be good Germans.

BUT– Look, it’s obvious the left got an infusion of cash and expertise. Looks at Europe. Looks at Brazil. Hell, maybe even Israel, though every politician there is so bad one can come up with excuses. But then one can come up with excuses everywhere.

For something like sixteen years this depressive has been telling you to have hope; this hothead has been saying “don’t go hot.”

Now the ballot box has failed us. Conclusively.

Yes, I just heard, across the internet, as a hundred thousand of you dragged the ammo box across the floor.

For years now, I’ve told you “When it’s time, I’ll tell you.”

Is it time?

Not yet. Don’t stomp your foot. It’s unbecoming for a fully grown ungovernable American. I didn’t tell you never. And no, I won’t keep saying “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.”

I’m not even saying “trust the plan.” If you remember in 2020 I was the one who never trusted the plan. I was beating myself like a fly in a tarbox because I didn’t trust the plan.

I’m saying take a deep breath. Go back to bed. Sleep. Eat. Bide your time. They’re expecting resistance right now. They’re prepared right now.

What’s more, maybe some portion of the DOJ isn’t entirely taken over by the deep state. (I know. I’m so funny!) And they were supposedly ready for this, right?

Give it a month. Give it at least a month See what happens. A month isn’t so much, is it? Put that ammo box back under the sofa. And the bed. And in the closet. And — (Look, guys, someone brought her dowry in ammo in my family, and I don’t think the rest of you are so different.) — don’t forget where it is.

The program is subject to change depending on what happens. Keep your eyes peeled. (The man with an overcoat is an enemy.) And I’m praying really hard that a miracle occurs and we don’t have to shoot ourselves out of this. Right now, the most dangerous move is the premature one. Make sure you’re not getting in the way of something that obviates your need to move. The next most dangerous move is trusting the guy who’ll drive you to the criming. And the person saying you need to go hot right this minute, and they have everything to help you do so. Don’t do any of that.

I’m begging you with tears in my eyes, don’t do the dangerous. In fact, don’t do anything right now. Isn’t there a rifle — or a dozen of them — you want to clean? And you know that the price of ammo is going to go up. And wasn’t there some ruling recently making body armor legal for civilians? Go shopping this week. Figure out the money.

Do all of that. I half joke about “sell your cloak and buy a helicopter” but metaphorically speaking consider it.

Also check your canned. Check your water storage. Make sure you have the right meds stocked up. Take your pets to get their vaccines you’ve been putting off. That surgery? If you can have it done asap and be okay in a month, now is a good time. Take out cash. Better yet, buy silver, both coin and jewelry. (Gold is for the big things. How many houses do you plan on buying? Cars?) Make sure you have clothing for winter, and back up means of heating. And a good first aid kit. And make sure your family has a rendez vous in case the house is not there. Or not reachable. A bolthole might also be a good idea, if achievable. (These days, it might be hard.)

Don’t go off half cocked. And give it time. Who knows? Maybe the pig will sing. I’ll grant you it’s unlikely, but G-d looks after fools, drunkards and the United States of America. Looks up at ceiling fan: Now would be good, Lord.

You feel you just were massively cheated because — signs are — you probably were. Almost certainly. All I’m seeing is perception management and a number that defies even the perceptions.

Take a deep breath. This is not your sign. But it’s closer to your sign than it’s been in almost two decades.

G-d have mercy on us all. But in the end, we win they lose. There is no other option. Because ours is the only hope for mankind.

Be not afraid. Deep breaths. Plan, plan, plan. No, plan more than that. And give it time for a miracle first.

Stay frosty. Stay ungovernable. Stay American. Don’t give them an excuse to enact the second half of the coup.

Go count the canned again. Contemplate what we’ll lose forever if we have to act. (All I wanted to do was to write my little stories in peace and make enough to live on. And to have children and grandchildren, fat babies to hold and sing to. That’s all I ever wanted.)

Take a deep breath. Go to sleep. Give it at least a month.

I actually doubt it will hold that long. Gut feeling is it won’t. Not every one reads ATH. Not every one will go count the canned and go back to sleep. Not everyone will give it a month. And some will go off half cocked. I suspect some are being wound up to do so even as we speak. And we can’t control them.

So be prepared for that too. For when the sea tosses you and it’s all you can do to keep your head above water. That’s where your preparation comes in.

G-d have mercy on us all.

Your lives, your fortune, your sacred honor. Did you think it would be easy? Did you think it was a game?

First of all go vote. We’re going as soon as we get up and I drink enough coffee to be functional, because we’re getting reports of lines. Maybe tomorrow will be the exception to that, but hopefully it won’t.

Vote to give us a chance to get better representatives. Vote to give us a chance to escape what’s happening in Europe.

I do believe we’ll survive, anyway, but on the way to survival there is a never end of pain we’ll be inviting if we let the bastards have even one house. Go vote. Vote against socialism. Vote against subjection. Vote so blogs like this can continue to exist.

And speaking of what’s happening in Europe, yesterday in my close-in group (The Chinchilla of Hope gang) someone asked why the store shelves are bare of essentials like toilet paper. We quickly determined this is country wide, so it’s not a fear of storms.

Apparently a bunch of countries around the world are telling their citizens to have 3 days of supplies on hand, and, not being stupid, people know that fuckery is planned and fuckery is afoot.

I don’t think it will move this fast here. For one the votes won’t be tallied by tomorrow night.

BUT Bill Reader in a rare phone call a couple of days ago told me that he expected things to go hot almost immediately. That win or lose (please let them lose) the left is going to go hot ASAP. … well, even if they win (particularly if they win) it wouldn’t be the first time that they took this as the go signal. It wouldn’t be the first country either. And if they go hot here it’s probably the sign for the world to go hot-ter which would explain the “warnings”.

So– On your way back from voting, go see if you can get whatever you need to round up your supplies. And yes, I am very much including ammo. And axes. you can never have too many axes. (Okay, fine, I can never have too many axes.)

Go forth. May the Lord bless you and keep you, may he may His face to shine upon you and give you peace. (And strength.)

And as always, keep your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark.

I have bad news: This is not going to talk about the Heinlein novel. Yes, I will resume my reviews, soon-ish. Right now the ETA for this place unpacked is “before New Years” mostly because novel keeps pulling me away from the packing (Weird that.) So the reviews might not resume before that, but they will review. Besides, me, reviewing Heinlein amounts to “Squee, squee, squee!” and you’d all be reaching for your adjustment knob and this blog ain’t got one.

The further bad news is that I’m going to inflict Slopcore on you, which is apparently the term for generated music with this kind of “catchy” non demanding tune and this figure. Before I do, it’s okay if you don’t watch it. The story is ten bad ideas, five really inadvisable decisions, and a strong burning core of hope all rolled into one. From further videos, I suspect the people producing this channel are Libertarian Socialists, which are weirder than anything the founders of Elly (in No Man’s Land) cobbled together. Fortunately it’s an ideological chimera, not a biological one. Unfortunately, it can only live in a world where the laws of economics have stopped applying. And since the laws of economics are tied to basic humanity, getting there — as for all socialism — would imply exterminating humanity. (And if you just said “Oh, that’s why!” Yep. That’s why the green everything, the purposeful immiseration, the loathing of mere humanity. For Socialism to live, humanity must die.)

Anyway all the same, the slopcore is catchy and there’s something there, which I will explain. (Beyond and beside the stupidity.)

The stupidity is obvious. It starts with “voted to share what the robots made” — economy doesn’t work like that. Life doesn’t work like that — UBI is second only in stupidity to the idea you can take billionaires’ wealth and make everyone rich forever. If you have UBI in some amount, then every price immediately goes up by the measure of the UBI. Also, for the love of screaming Bob, robots will belong to real, live people ( probably a lot of them retirees counting on their funds to live.) They will need maintenance and replacement. Nationalizing robots is the stupidest thing imaginable. Supporting people without work is the stupidest thing imaginable. There’s a reason the scions of very wealthy families become Hunter Biden. Man — and woman, and those who looked in their pants before going on — was made to strive. Remove the striving, and it all collapses, everything that makes us human. Which is one of the fundamental mistakes of socialism. Giving people things doesn’t make them happy with those things as it does earning them. And the ultimate penalty of socialism is the loss of the will to live. It manifests first with stopping births. Then killing the elderly in the name of compassion. Well before people are being supported in absolute comfort.

It seemed to me we didn’t need the socialist experiment, frankly. We already knew what happened to retirees who had nothing to do, no drive. And we knew what happened to very rich kids. But did anyone ask me? No. Partly because I hadn’t been born yet, which seems to me like a poor excuse.

Anyway, I did not miss that this is two generations of single mothers. Look, I’m also not kicking too hard at that, because there is such a thing as clean storytelling, but it wouldn’t hurt to have a guy there for the birth scene and mention dad lost his job too. Hey, maybe mom and dad have different jobs.

The core of hope that makes this story cheery despite the galoomphing stupid: The abundance it promises is real. Radical, soaked through, endless abundance. And that’s… well. That’s a tide that lifts all boats.

It won’t stop human civilization, though some people WILL fall by the wayside — look, it’s as easy to kill with joy as with grief, and who told you human evolution was done — but as with AI used properly, it will free those with the drive and the will to push on to do the things that matter.

Like this: Yes, a lot of jobs are going away with AI — and even more with robots, though if you tell me you don’t have a dream of a housekeeping robot (I’m going to name mine Jenkins, and if you get it, you get it. AND if I can make things work out as I want, this January you’ll understand why this is funny enough to laugh shooting coffee out of your nose. You’ll see.) you’re a rank liar. Science fiction people, I’ve found, writers and readers alike are lousy housekeepers. We spend too much time in our heads to do otherwise. I try to be the exception, but I’m losing that battle as I get older.

BUT as the Little Pickle said last night “Heaven’s sakes! There will be other jobs that appear. Jobs don’t go away without new ones being created.” Which means that if I die before there are grandkids old enough for me to yell economics at, they’ll still be fine.

Because she’s exactly right. If every job currently being done went away tomorrow morning, humanity would find new needs. If every dirty, dangerous outdoor job is done, men don’t become obsolete. They will find their danger and dirt exploring far flung worlds, designing and testing the machines to get us there… all of it.

And if every indoor, boring, repetitive job went away tomorrow, it doesn’t make women obsolete. They’ll find they can plan their household better, and have the androids execute it. People who had servants didn’t stop working at the household. (Well, some did… but… See evolutionary pressure below.)

To an extent we’re already there, already past that inflection point. No? Compared to even the nineteenth century we’re unimaginably rich. As a culture, sure, but even as a species. Do you know how our ancestors would have felt about “The only time there’s a famine is when we let ourselves be oppressed by horrible rulers?” Famine was the rule of human existence since an ape stood up, thought of the past and dreamed of the future. This is literally unimaginable for the generations of our forefathers who sleep in the dirt.

This shows in the small things too, everyday life. Cleaning, cooking, the most basic tasks of housekeeping for anyone not wishing to live in rank filth, are so ridiculously easy now. (And we still fall down, and yes, there are novels to write, and I’m going to blame those, okay?) And it keeps improving.

And yet, we’re busy. Busier than ever, at least some of us.

This is what I was saying, about evolutionary pressures. There already is an evolutionary pressure in place. Right now it’s a little mixed if I’m honest. Those who are given everything, have no ambition and are basically non-functional SEEM to have an evolutionary advantage. I maintain that’s illusory. Yes, they reproduce more, but the children live ephemeral lives and a lot of them die without reproducing. On the other hand, those with drive and purpose, who design and plan and build are suffering a different pressure: by the time we’re done training and establishing ourselves — unless you’re as crazy as Dan and I were and take the plunge early. Our infertility was the fault of my auto-immune, not of our waiting too long — we don’t have the ability to produce children. Which brings the spiraling population numbers into focus, of course.

Fortunately not every one of the purposeless produces children that likewise lack drive. And the ones who have drive are the most likely to survive.

Also, fortunately, this dream future of robots that seems actually within our reach, is going to lift the onerous cost of training and establishing oneself. Or it should. It should be easier than ever to plunge from late adolescence into comfortable, if now ridiculously prosperous (though maybe by OUR standards) adulthood, and children without a problem. (Either that or figure out how to extend fertility which, instinctively, seems to me will be the harder puzzle to crack. But maybe no. I’d like to say I’m here for it, but even in pie-in-the-sky scenario chances are low. I have, on the outside, if everything aligns, maybe 30 years, after all.)

What I think this … let’s call it radical abundance, will do is that we will have those who don’t want to do anything, if it’s not needed for them to survive. They will… wither away like retirees without a mission. Which means the children of those with drive and purpose will inherit the Earth. Yes, some of those, maybe most of those, will be purposeless and will also just wither. Look, the majority of humanity is designed to be lazy. That was the evolutionary pressure in pre-history. Man who hunted mammoth while mammoth was rotting at the camp, just starved and his whole tribe with him. Which means the “selection for drive” will refine over the next, oh, few thousand years. But that’s not our problem. It is simply what it is.

The point though is that this future gives humanity a chance at the stars, a chance at lives that transcend the everyday chores, the boring, all physical stuff, the fear of hunger, the fear of disease, and maybe if we’re very lucky the humiliating descent into senescence at the end of life. (I don’t expect, or want, to live forever, but the decline and loss of ability should be manageable, if we’re going to live lives even as long as we have now. It’s a pity to waste 1/3 of your life to diminishing ability.)

It will bring with a lot of new and fresh problems, yes, like: Yes, what about people who just want to sit and eat cake (or do drugs, or whatever) till they die? And what does marriage become in an age where you live a long time, vigorously? How many marriages survive? And what becomes of families when the longest time you’ll have with your children is with them as adults? (This we’re already facing.) And what about people too dumb for the new economy? (Ah! Caught you. That one is Bullshit. There will always be things people can do, at whatever level. No? look at history.) And what do we do when obviously stupid ideas seem to suddenly make sense? (Like this video. Chill, they still don’t.) And what do we do when we go beyond the need to write words? And– And we’ll burn those bridges when we reach them. But I’d rather be fighting in such a state of abundance that Humanity can’t starve if it tries than otherwise, okay.

This future of radical abundance hinges, to a great extent on how these elections go.

If you just snort giggled, don’t. I mean, I’m not stupid, and I think this future, this radical abundance, is inevitable. The question is… How far in the distant reaches of future time? Because it could be very far indeed.

Or it could be in the next 20 years, within our children’s lives. It is honestly, right now, so close we can touch it with our fingertips.

And yes, sure, your GOP congressman is a fiend, or if you live in Alaska, an idiot. And some of them are demonstrably in the pay of China.

But there are more people in the pay of China on the left. More importantly the left, elected mostly by fraud (trust me on this) doesn’t give a good damn for what you want. You have no pressure you can bring to bear on it. Look at NYC or Denver. Seriously. They don’t depend on voters, and can shit right on your wants and needs. And call you names on top of it.

However, if the left — let alone the red-green alliance — takes over, we’re done. The only question is for how long a count. AI will be regulated to a fare-thee-well, which means the current, impossible to monetize models will be the only ones, and it will quickly become a rich man’s toy. (I’d hate that, because it has become one of the best series-Bible keepers I’ve ever met. And instead of spending three days leafing through three ring binders to find a reference (I always sucked at wiki format) I can simply ask and be told. And verifying that is way easier than coming up with it fresh. Also, honestly, that frees more time to write. I need to experiment with publicity via AI too, because I sure can’t do it on my own.) Humanoid robots will come, but it will be to literally take your job. However, don’t worry little buddy, the government will create a job corps, digging and filling in ditches. (They never understood why this was idiotic. So they’ll do it again.)

These regimes collapse in about 70 years, but they either mutate into hardcore fascist (hi, China!) which is not an improvement or they leave an awful hangover for a long time.

That future we can ALMOST touch? Could be gone within a year, if we hand our legislature to people who are even more ignorant of economics than you average politician. (And that’s a lot.) It could stay gone until no one on Earth remembers our names, not even as a line in some record.

Arguably worse if the green part of that alliance takes hold. I am all for freedom of religion, but without a radical reformation to make it safe for the world, Islam will stop all progress cold. HARD. Because it’s a religion with a political component that is rigid and rigidly enforced, and which is attuned to the desert of Arabia circa the seventh century, countries that fall to it stop progressing in knowledge and civilization and often regress HARD.

Oh, the future will still come, the super-abundance that’s baked in in our tinkering genes. But that would be…. How does thousands of years sound to you? Because a lot of it will need to be re-invented. From first principles.

Yeah, I know. One of the lines the slopcore hit right was “the year when everyone was afraid of the future” and a lot of people are. It’s running too fast. It’s making the world too unstable. Hit a pause button!

As with puberty (sorry) there is no pause button. There is only something that will hurts seriously and has a small, outside chance of killing us prematurely.

I’m begging you with tears in my eyes. Do not try to hit the pause button. The future will hurt. But not as much as trying to stop it.

Go out and vote for your GOP crook as opposed to your DEM madman. It’s important. They’re all stupid and venal, but the GOP is slightly less so, because it still depends on getting out the vote and also because at its core it doesn’t hate America. Or humanity.

Vote for the crook. It’s important.

And maybe there will be time for the stars in the near future. And, yes, even time for love.

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 CHRISTOPHER R. DINOTE: Endless Battle Wyrd Warfare (Raconteur Press Anthologies)

The hour is late. The bottle is low. The lightweights have gone home. What’s left is the stuff that burns going down & the stories nobody tells until everybody sober has left the room .

Eleven stories. Eleven wars. One question nobody wants answered.

A survey scout stranded on an ocean world follows something enormous through the water, and finds out whose nightmares he’s been having. Two British privates break through the wall of a trench in 1916 and find what’s been taking the bodies out of no man’s land. A Union major and his Confederate cousin stand back-to-back in New Mexico because the dead Comanche in the valley below don’t care which uniform you wore. A frozen squad at the Chosin Reservoir learns that the thing killing them can be hurt–by noise. A Navy senior chief sits in a courtroom that’s just been cleared of its jury, and finally tells someone what came out of the fog at 25 degrees north.

From the Western Front to Korea, from Katanga to the Bermuda Triangle, from a deployment gate cut into the earth at Oak Ridge to a Warsaw schoolhouse full of things that shouldn’t have a body, these are soldiers doing the job in front of them while the rules quietly stop applying.

Some of them come home.

FROM PATRICK MCHARGUE: The Patient Dark (Expansion Book 2)

Thirty years gone. He wasn’t supposed to come back. The mission wasn’t supposed to change.

A signal comes out of the Belt, and the first person to recognize it hasn’t been seen for thirty years.

Jack Merrill and Francene Tailer get the call on a Saturday — Dr. Lisa Chen wants to talk about that vacation they keep putting off. What she actually wants is to send them out as supernumeraries aboard the Kuiper Belt Explorer, approved, built, and crewed for a different mission entirely. Chen scraps that mission and re-targets the ship at the signal’s coordinates instead.

The crew gains one more member: a man Jack and Francene haven’t seen in thirty years. He’s been places, done things, kept up with things — and answered exactly none of the questions that mattered. Chen doesn’t know and doesn’t ask — she trusts.

Six weeks each way. Seven people aboard a ring ship, headed toward something that found them as much as they found it. Whatever is waiting at the end of the transit has had a long time to decide what it wants to say — and even longer to decide who it wants to say it to.

The dark has been patient. It can afford to be.

FROM ROBERT MILLER: The Rabbit Hole Weirdness Itself

So what is weirdness? In Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland the March Hare’s tinkering with a pocket watch using butter and a butter-knife definitely qualifies. But so does tinkering with people, or being tinkered with by outside forces. Weirdness is the sense of just such tinkering, evil or benign, with the living, the dead, nature, time, or reality itself. And just as the March Hare’s results can be horrible (for the watch), or humorous (for us); so too can tinkering with any aspect of reality result in horror, humour, or, in the end, be just weirdness itself.

The following writers look beyond the normal, offering thirty-six stories of strange tinkerings with people and reality, all of which represent new trips down The Rabbit Hole: Wastella Amanda Parker, H. Donovan Lyón, James Rumpel, Kath Kilburn, Helen Speirs, Sarah Oechsle, Robert E. Stahl, Taylor Hagood, Nicholas Samuel Stember, Philip S. Bloch, Z. M. Renick, Selah Tay-Song, GD Deckard, Murray Eiland, Dana Hammer, E.J. LeRoy, James Carraghan, Gary Battershell, Daniel Mahoney, Phil Baringer, Iain McGrath, Alistair Blackledge, Kathy Liddle, Mark Keane, Sarah Busching, Bonnie Stanard, Molly Schulz Kelash, Gio Clairval, Kate LaDew, Robert Miller, Peter Mangiaracina, Adam Stone, Colleen Morrison, and Tom Wolosz

FROM ETHAN MOORE: Scorched Earth Volume I

In 2024, civilization was consumed in the Rebirthing fires. Ninety years later, Gerti Alvarez just wanted to survive the impossible task she had been assigned. Instead, she finds a scarred girl, a repair team trying to hold their town together, and a mayor hiding more than political ambition.

Scorched Earth: Volume 1 is a gripping apocalyptic adventure about loyalty, survival, and the cost of doing what’s right

FROM DAVID BADURINA: Hold My Beer Heroes: Ten Comic Tales of Magnificent Overconfidence (Raconteur Press Anthologies Book 82)

Every hero in this book is absolutely sure he’s got this.

He doesn’t. That’s the fun part.

Hold My Beer Heroes gathers ten comic stories about the overconfident, the underprepared, and the magnificently wrong, and the glorious moment each of them finds out. Curated by David Badurina, this anthology celebrates the oldest joke there is: the guy who says “watch this” right before everything catches fire. And then, somehow, wins anyway.

Inside you’ll find:

A would-be insurance fraudster whose PowerPoint has no slide for “we grabbed the wrong guy.”

A London art-crime inspector who calls himself The Fox and investigates like a wrecking ball in a borrowed tuxedo.

A park ranger who knows every inch of the backcountry and nothing whatsoever about crime scenes.

A farmer at war with a chicken-thieving fox and a plastic owl that refuses to stay where he puts it.

A weekend sword fighter who has never failed to call a clean hit, until he meets people who aren’t playing.

A washed-up musician in a zombie-overrun Bronx with four hours to throw his son the birthday party of the century.

A barbarian and a sorcerer banished to the worst hell imaginable: an outdoor jam-band festival that never ends.

A ship’s janitor, a sarcastic AI, and a mop he swears is a prophet, stranded on a planet built from the galaxy’s garbage.

A cocky boxer who takes an easy-money fight and finds out exactly who bought tickets.

An Australian monster hunter with twelve laminated documents and one very large problem in the lake.

Crime capers, monster hunts, space comedy, sword and sorcery, and a zombie apocalypse with a surprisingly good pizza place. No lectures. No hand-wringing. Just ten heroes who fail upward with enormous confidence, and the deep satisfaction of watching them get exactly what’s coming to them.

Grab a cold one. Somebody’s about to say “watch this.”

FROM KURT KELLEN: VIGILANTE: NEW YORK HELLSCAPE: AN AMERICAN VIGILANTE NOVEL

As Paris Burns and Europe Crumbles, A Warning to the United States…

New York is broken. Rats own the streets. Cops are just another licensed gang and the socialist mayor treats the city like occupied territory. A man can’t walk from the subway to his own deli without becoming a victim.

Thomas Goodman has had enough. When a knife-wielding thug comes into the shop, Goodman kills him in self-defense. It should have ended there. Instead activists, the media and the mayor’s machine decide a white deli owner who fights back is more useful as a racist murderer. The DA starts building a case. Goodman opens his mouth once on camera and tells the truth: what’s happening is not migration. It is a takeover. Islam is eating the city like a cancer.

Then they rape his woman and burn her face with sulfuric acid before they kill her. The mayor’s office wants to pin it on Goodman and ride the story to election day.

The mayor, activists, the media … they made one tragic miscalculation: Goodman is an ex-mobster who just wanted to be left alone. Instead of creating a patsy, they created a monster. A monster with a thirst for revenge.

New York Hellscape is a riveting new thriller by Kurt Kellen, and a horrifying look at America’s future.

FROM G.K. MASTERSON: Blood of the Fae (Cycle of the Eternals Book 1)

He came south for justice. He found his blood instead.

Assistant District Attorney Raúl Rodriguez left Queens with a broken heart, a sharp legal mind, and zero patience for small-town Southern hospitality. All he wants in Vicksburg, Mississippi, is a quiet drink and a case worth winning.

What he gets is Thea Collins.

Blunt, brilliant, and allergic to small talk, Thea is a local private investigator who does astrophysics in a bar, insults people in a dozen languages, and keeps a crossbow handy for anyone who annoys her. She and her cousin Jimmy are also persons of interest in the disappearance of a mysterious doctor, a case that just landed on Raúl’s desk.

One night of conversation changes everything. Raúl starts seeing things: strange lights, shifting faces, crowns that shouldn’t be there. When he tries to break his oath to the court, his own throat closes and nearly kills him. Then Thea drags him home to meet the family, and he learns the truth no one ever told him.

He is Fae.

Not glitter and wishes, but the old blood of Arcadia, inherited from a grandmother who gave up eternity for love. Now Raúl is sworn to an ancient Earl and bound by oaths that can choke him and debts that must be repaid within a year and a day. He has to learn glamour, combat, and the laws of a hidden world from the two people who drive him craziest. The training is brutal. The nightmares are worse. And in one of them, he sees his own grave, dated just six weeks away.

Then Thea is found beaten and poisoned with cold iron, the one thing that can destroy a Fae’s very soul. Raúl and Jimmy are arrested for the attack. With Thea trapped in a coma and sending him cryptic visions, Raúl has to clear his name, outmaneuver a deputy with a grudge, bargain with a Fae secret-keeper whose price is steep, and accept help from the last allies anyone expected: a motorcycle club of werewolves.

The clock is ticking toward the date on that headstone. And the person who wants Thea dead has Raúl in their sights next.

Full of Southern heat and sharp humor, with a slow-burn romance and a fresh take on the Fae, **Blood of the Fae** is the first book in the Cycle of the Eternals, a sweeping urban fantasy saga that begins on the banks of the Mississippi and reaches all the way to the stars.

FROM HOLLY CHISM: Fixing Up Love (Building a Life Book 1)

Amaryllis left school with a worthless degree and a fiance who wasn’t that into her. She refused to go back home to wallow in her family’s judgment of her choices, so she took refuge with her best friend instead. Her very handy best friend, who was fixing up a foreclosed house he’d bought. It was a really big job, and he could definitely use her help. His handiness kind of made her want to get handsy, but would fixing up the house together fix up their relationship as well?

FROM HYEOK LIM: The Last Colony Builder

Rook Nine is being written off. To keep the Mars outpost breathing, a maintenance worker must turn damaged power lines, shrinking reserves, and a twenty-one-sol proof window into a case no corporate office can ignore. The Last Colony Builder is a tense, blue-collar science-fiction novel about survival, repair, and the people who decide a colony is more than an entry on a balance sheet.

FROM LEE ECKHARDT: THEY

Who are They? They are shadows flitting across the desert in the moonlight. They are things you see only from the corner of your eye. They have haunted the Earth for thousands of years, inspiring endless tales of terror; They are the reason human beings have always feared the night. Until now They have made only brief forays into our world, but They have changed their plans; They now want the Earth for themselves. Young Aleksei Arbatov has discovered Their existence; he knows Their plans. He, alone, must face Them, with only a single ally – an ally that might, in the end, actually prove to be one of Them…

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: The War That Came to Houston

In the midst of preparations for a critical mission, Leland Andersen can’t afford the return of a childhood nightmare. Yet night after night the vision torments him, of an astronaut dying in flames.

Nora McKinzie is a Houston police officer — and a member of an ancient order founded to fight eldritch entities wherever they might flee. When she receives a warning that a sworn enemy is on the move again, her obligations come into conflict with each other.

Both of them are present when Johnson Space Center comes under attack by terrorists. And they both know that the official explanations don’t hold together.

Two people, one deadly secret — and an enemy from beyond time and space.

A novel of the Grissom timeline.

Previously serialized under the title A Separate War.

FROM LILANIA BEGLEY: Cataclysm: A Space Patrol Romance

A quiet maintenance man with dangerous reflexes. A brilliant botanist on the run. And a dead asteroid that is slowly waking up.

She knows him only as Lael and thinks him to be a grim, silent mechanic who pulled her out of a dying space station before it went dark. He claims he’s just trying to survive. But a simple maintenance worker doesn’t move like a shadow, track like a predator, or carry a sealed data drive taped to his soul.

The only name she’s willing to admit is Sanda, and she isn’t a helpless passenger. Fleeing across the sector, their only refuge is a massive, abandoned asteroid mine swallowed by cataclysm of unknown origins. Trapped together in the depths of space, Sanda begins to strip away his guarded walls, finding a man who would burn the galaxy to keep her safe.

FROM NATHAN C. BRINDLE: Found On Road Alive (Timelines Universe Book 12)

It’s Always About A Dame

Five years after he defeated a tong queen, and found a bride, and went back to chasing down cheating husbands and wives, New York City blue blood and private detective Clark Griswold is back on a case.

This time, the Russian Mafia is involved. And a general in the Russian Army, stationed in faraway Xinjiang Province in what used to be part of China. And a South Chinese army wanting to take that part back. With Americans sitting in between them, trying to broker peace.

And a dame. Because it’s always about a dame. And this time, Griswold and his wife Becca have no idea what they’re getting into when the particular dame in question is

Found On Road Alive

FROM NICK NETHERY: Arcane Intelligence: Ten Stories of Spycraft and Sorcery

Every service runs assets. Some of them are not human.

A forger raises a dead agent out of a pair of gloves and gives him four days. A vampire on the CIA

payroll takes the midnight train to East Berlin. A shapeshifter walks into the world’s largest collector

of magical artifacts wearing a stolen face. A ghost feeds MI5 perfect intelligence for thirty years, and

nobody thinks to ask what he wants.

Ten stories of tradecraft and sorcery, from Vienna in the ruins to a spin studio in suburban Virginia.

Forged papers. Blown covers. Debts that come due in something other than money.

No chosen ones. No prophecies. Just professionals, doing impossible work.

FROM ROB HOWELL: Giant Killer Kaiju: Ten Tales of Monsters and the People Who Face Them (Raconteur Press Anthologies Book 83)

The monster is the easy part. Ask the guy who has to move it.

Giant Killer Kaiju collects ten brand-new stories about the biggest things that ever walked, swam, burrowed, or flew, and the people who end up underneath them. Not generals. Not superheroes. A circus roustabout. A dam engineer on the night shift. A salvage crane operator with a lapsed software subscription. A sanitation director handed an 80,000-ton corpse and told to make it look orderly before the evening news.

Inside:

• A Depression-era circus where the star lizard has hit breeding age and the ringmaster won’t let him go.

• A Gulf Coast salvage lottery where the crew draws the worthless tail and finds something still alive inside.

• A Bolivian salt flat where one tourist’s souvenir turns a sightseeing bus into bait.

• A Roman fort on the northern frontier , sealed shut against something with wings wide as the sky.

• A Colorado railroad tunnel, 1880 , where the drill crew keeps calling something out of the canyon.

• A city clearing a dead kaiju off the courthouse steps , while cultists chant, funeral lobbyists circle, and the corpse keeps roaring.

Plus a monster’s-eye view of waking up in a world that got very small while it slept, a steampunk sea serpent that is not what it seems, a dam built over something that remembers, and a detective on a far colony world tracking a sea beast with a very specific craving.

Ten authors take you from Roman Britain to the 1880 American West, from steam-age France to the Antarctic ice, from a Texas refinery to a colony world with three moons. Some stories will make you laugh out loud. A couple will make you wince. One ends with a sanitation director quitting mid-disaster and getting hired back at triple rate before sunrise.

Some of these monsters get killed. Some get outsmarted. Some just want to go home.

Big monsters. Real people–Ten stories that earn their roar!

FROM SHANE GRIES: The Dead Badge of Courage: The Line Book IV

WINTER HAS FORCED THE RETREATING ARMY TO STOP. WHAT’S HUNTING THEM HASN’T.

The march west was supposed to end at the Cascadia Redoubt. Instead, the passes through the Rockies are buried under snow, and Mark Foley and the soldiers of Bravo Company are ordered south, to wait out the winter in the one place still holding out: Colorado Springs.

They arrive expecting reinforcement. They find a city bleeding out.

The 1st Infantry Division links up with the scattered remnants of III Corps, only to learn how bad things really are. Ammunition is running low. Food is running lower. The perimeter is held by exhausted survivors patched together from a dozen broken commands. And past the wire, in the snow and the dark, something is moving that none of them have ever seen, undead who seem to know exactly how thin their lines have become. Facing starvation, plummeting temperatures, and a threat built to destroy them, the soldiers of the 1st Infantry Division dig in for a fight they didn’t choose and can’t afford to lose.

Book 4 of The Line is the next brutal chapter in a war fought as much against the cold and the clock as against the thing in the dark.

FROM THOMAS WOLOSZ: The Rabbit Hole Weirdness Itself

So what is weirdness? In Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland the March Hare’s tinkering with a pocket watch using butter and a butter-knife definitely qualifies. But so does tinkering with people, or being tinkered with by outside forces. Weirdness is the sense of just such tinkering, evil or benign, with the living, the dead, nature, time, or reality itself. And just as the March Hare’s results can be horrible (for the watch), or humorous (for us); so too can tinkering with any aspect of reality result in horror, humour, or, in the end, be just weirdness itself.

The following writers look beyond the normal, offering thirty-six stories of strange tinkerings with people and reality, all of which represent new trips down The Rabbit Hole: Wastella Amanda Parker, H. Donovan Lyón, James Rumpel, Kath Kilburn, Helen Speirs, Sarah Oechsle, Robert E. Stahl, Taylor Hagood, Nicholas Samuel Stember, Philip S. Bloch, Z. M. Renick, Selah Tay-Song, GD Deckard, Murray Eiland, Dana Hammer, E.J. LeRoy, James Carraghan, Gary Battershell, Daniel Mahoney, Phil Baringer, Iain McGrath, Alistair Blackledge, Kathy Liddle, Mark Keane, Sarah Busching, Bonnie Stanard, Molly Schulz Kelash, Gio Clairval, Kate LaDew, Robert Miller, Peter Mangiaracina, Adam Stone, Colleen Morrison, and Tom Wolosz

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: CLUMSY.

By Holly the Assistant

One of the young men in the family (pursuing hard science degree on the cheap, living at home) had the experience for the first time in his life of calling for a tow. I’m kind of amazed, given what he drives, that he hasn’t had to previously: mostly probably based on being cheap and sharing rides, someone else called the last several times. (The old beater decided that oil was better on the outside of the engine than inside. This is widely acknowledged as contrary to continued operation.)

Things you don’t know how to do til you do it.

We raised our kids pretty country. They all learned to shoot a gun, butcher small livestock and/or game, fish, cook, clean, garden . . . it’s how both of us grew up, on opposite sides of the world. A lot of people haven’t had the opportunity to have those experiences, to learn those skills, even poorly.

We could have a long discussion about what people should know how to do: Robert A. Heinlein put in Lazarus Long’s mouth the words “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.” I suspect most of us are missing at least one off that list due to old injuries if nothing else.

But the bigger thing is that people don’t have a chance to try, and we live in a society that says “leave it to the experts” for most of those things, and makes it cheaper to have it done by someone else than to do it yourself. And for children, well, if you’re in class for seven to eight hours a day, followed by extracurriculars, no matter how good those extracurriculars are, you’re not going to have time to learn to do very many things. Especially if they are things that have a long lead time–you probably aren’t going to go down to the market and buy a live cockerel and take it home to butcher, at least, not in most of the USA today. You’ve got to buy a chick at the feed store and raise it for several months first. Which you do learn a good deal more from doing, but you’ve got to have the several months. Also most urban areas, I hear, frown on slaughtering in your front yard.

This is why we keep getting young folks who very much know things that just ain’t so. They know what they know from what they saw or heard, not from what they did, and they never were exposed to the actual things they’re hearing about or seeing at a nice, sterile, electronics mediated remove.

For us adults, there’s also not enough time in the day to do all the things. We might take a first aid class now and then, but we don’t practice the skills regularly. We might in theory know how to change oil but not have done it in the last four decades. It’s been a hot minute since I last messed with a spark plug, and I’d really rather pay someone to do that than try to figure out how the heck to get at them (I learned on a ’69 Chevy SUV, ok? It had a lot less stuff in the engine compartment).

The sum total of human knowledge is too great for one person to be able to even do it all as an amateur. If you tried, you’d never specialize enough in anything to make a living at it.

Let me encourage you to dust off an old skill or acquire a new one, though. It’s good for the brain, really, ask the neuroscientists, they get all enthusiastic. Several of my cello students took up music for exactly that reason. Maybe I’ll break out my spindle: I put it away when the first little someone figured out how to crawl and get into the wool, quite a while ago. It’s a nice, warm, indoors wintry sort of skill, and once upon a time I could even make even yarn. At this late date I’ll be starting over from vague memories and books. (Yes, I know there are you-tubes, no, my brain doesn’t work that way.)

What will you do?

Maybe don’t make it running a beater with the oil outside the engine, though? This one might get a touch pricey: we’ll find out next week if he pulled over fast enough or if we’re up for the learning experience of putting some other old beater’s engine into this old beater. It has been done before.

Lately there’s been a lot of talk about how we’re all “so divided” and we need to be in the center, and how America’s true political orientation is independent and how– BROTHER!

This was brought home — this was brought OFFICE — to me while I was at work two days ago, and Dan was listening to Joe Rogan. He often listens to podcasts while he’s working, because his work is numbers, so hearing words doesn’t disturb him. My work, unless I’m working on covers, well…. So normally I slap noise cancelling headphones on.

The headphones were out of charge, so covers it was, but after a while he told me he couldn’t listen because I kept arguing.

Look, Joe Rogan, normally, doesn’t disturb me that much. I’ll snort giggle at some of his stuff, but it rolls over me, and doesn’t take a bite…

But this… He was with Joe Manchin at some “independent” conference, and just about everything he said was distilled stupid. And everything Manchin said was self-serving pretending-to-be-stupid. And I was fit to be tied.

Now, I don’t do media critique, and Rogan is Rogan, or as someone put it a barbarian who evolved yesterday and came in search of fire and legends of other people. (Honestly, that’s half of his schtick.)

BUT this slotted into all the talk about how “we’re so divided” and “The biggest political affiliation is independent.”

Let’s dispose of that last one first: bullshit. People register as independent because the left are foaming-at-the-mouth rabid weasels who will cancel anyone they even SUSPECT of being on the other side. I was registered independent all the years that I was working for trad pub, because being found to be “one of those evil people on the right” would end my career, and baby needed shoes (and eventually college textbooks.) There are other reasons, but usually the strongest is “I’m on the right and I don’t want to be cancelled.” Very few independents are actually independent. Right now my husband is independent because he didn’t want to say GOP to the blue haired young lady registering him. (I OTOH did, and she said, “Oh, thank heavens. I wasn’t sure, coming from Colorado.” Which goes to show you.)

At any rate, is that everyone? Doubt it. You can be very embarrassed of associating with either party, without being a centrist or independent. Sometimes it’s all about which party you hate more when you vote, but you don’t want to say “I’m with them” because they’re a bunch of bozos, and you know it.

Second, even if “independent” were the biggest self-identification group, it doesn’t mean there’s a great hunger for the center or for reconciliation. Perhaps all the independents are people who want something else. Say, a true constitutionalist government, which, alas, isn’t on offer. It’s as likely as that they’re all “centrist” or that these “centrists” all agree on the same thing.

What made the program infuriating and brought out my political tourettes is that all the solutions they “offered” were bullshit that has been tried, a lot of which is responsible for turning California into a one-party rule, such as open primaries and first-past-the-post elections. Seriously. I could dissect the mechanism by which this “delivers us bound to our foes” but I don’t need to. Look over at California. Do you want that? No? Your ideas will get that. To pretend that this has never been tried is either dumb or malicious.

On the dumb side, Rogan was doing his caveman impression “Tell me about these things I never heard of!” But Manchin? Manchin is malicious. Why do I say that? Well, he pretended not to know why we stopped using coal for electricity generation. It’s apparently a deep mystery and not the green obsession of presidents he supported, like Obama. Bah. Yeah, he kind of distanced himself from the Democrats in the later Biden years, but not wanting to trans kids doesn’t make you a centrist. It makes you a moderately sane, non kinky human being, for crying in bed.

Then there is “term limits”. Term limits, in the year of our Lord 2026 when we know how deep and how evil the evil deep state is! For the love of little children and the apples they steal! No, seriously. Sure, let’s have an ever-rotating wheel of incumbents who don’t know what they’re doing so the deep state can march on unimpeded. Heck, the only reason we have presidential term limits is that evil bastard FDR whom Joe Manchin still adores.

And then came the, of course, Joe Manchin would like to be president. When Rogan asked about that, I could taste the hunger for power in the creature’s voice. (Waves arms.) GAH. I guess I hadn’t got that out of my system yet.

Do I like the two party system? Well. I’m not in love with it. On the other hand I experienced the “as many parties as want to be” system in Portugal and this is the problem: Honest human beings will divide into parties on the slightest excuse:

“I am from the party of free economy, marry whoever you want provided he/she is an adult, but no welfare.”

“I am from the party of free economy, marry whoever you want provided he/she/them are adults, but no welfare.”

“I am from the party of free economy, marry whoever you want provided he/she/them are adults, welfare for widows and orphans.”

“I am from the party of free economy, marry whoever you want provided he/she/them are adults, welfare for widows and orphans provided they’re legal residents.”

Etc. etc. You end up with fifty parties where the disagreement between them is very small. But you know who doesn’t divide that way? Socialists. Communists. I mean usually they divide from each other, though honestly, as with penguins, only they know the difference. (And no, it’s not the same as the theoretical difference. Crying out loud, I studied this in school. I know the text book definitions. BUT in practicality the only difference is the socialists going “I want that too, but slower so we don’t scare the rubes.” No? Well, ask yourself what the USSR stood for tovarish.) So in the end, the left wins. Because they’re not as worried about carefully defining anything, and they LIKE to march lockstep. (Also in their minds, when they win, it’s the other guys in the mass graves. Spoiler: it’s always them in the mass graves.)

Meanwhile the two party system has the drawback that any change — real change — is slow. Very slow. Because you have to take over one of the existing parties from within. This can be bad — we’re taking forever — but also, what? You want the DSA to take over the dems FASTER?

So do I like the two party system? As opposed to what? If the choice is cake or death, I’ll take cake, thank you, with chocolate sprinkles. But the choice is never between cake and death. It is at best between syphilis and gonorrhea, and you pick the one for which you have antibiotics handy.

And this is ultimately the issue. “Independent” isn’t a political movement because people who are “independent” are not a group. they don’t all agree on what they believe. They mostly aren’t sure which side will make them hold their nose LESS or, hear me out, they are on the right and afraid to declare it. And don’t underestimate the second group. For years, it’s been known if a public personality doesn’t ever mention politics? They’re on the right. Because only one side actually tries to punish your dissent. (Now this is known, so not speaking brings about retaliation, too. We’re almost a publish and be damned o’clock. I’m just glad I’m out of it.)

Second, “We’re all so divided.”

Yes. As opposed to? No seriously, think about it. We’ve always been divided. It’s just that while we were bound by mass media, which the left utterly controlled, people didn’t know that there were more dissidents from what appeared to be the only widespread opinion.

Even my priest at mass was lamenting, you can’t be in a hobby group without the hobby being political. Oh, yeah? And who made it so? I don’t mean the poor man, who is very young and seems to be unexamined college-left. I mean, the left has insisted that everything be political since I joined adult society, lo, over 40 years ago. THE ONLY DIFFERENCE NOW IS THAT WE’RE FIGHTING BACK.

I want to do this skit where people are having dinner while using other people as furniture, and it’s this idealized family dinner, and quiet and everyone is smiling. And then someone frees the “furniture” and a brawl breaks out and the former diners are going “Stop, stop. everything was so peaceful! How did this happen?”

It’s like “economic” (or any other kind) inequality. It’s not actually evil, unless it persists for centuries WITH THE SAME PEOPLE AT THE TOP AND BOTTOM. In which case the society is in deep trouble, as it is in much of Latin America. BUT not in as much trouble as societies in which almost everyone is equal, because the only way to do that is totalitarian, rigid control over people and the economy.

“Politics are so divisive” is nonsense. People don’t form political parties or join the political process to work on the things we all agree on. “We should wear hats on our heads, not on our left foot” is not a political position because most people agree with that, and the ones that don’t are locked up for their own good. (They keep slipping on that hat.)

Politics are supposed to be divisive. And a good brawl is how you know you’re still free. And I’m tired of the soft heads that pretend otherwise.

Let’s hope we can continue to fight back and stay free.

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

(A Blast from the Past: https://accordingtohoyt.com/2024/11/15/uncharted-wilderness/

Note from Holly: this post is just shy of two years old now. I was looking for old posts on Art, in keeping with the theme of the week as it’s turned out so far, and the search popped this up, and well . . . it seems like a good reminder? Not sure what it has to do with Art, but search serendipity shouldn’t be ignored.)

Most of the time we look at a landscape, particularly if we live in it, and we know exactly where the road or the walking path is. We know that if we set off from here, we’ll walk that way, and…

And then there’s snow storms in Colorado, where I lived most of my adult life.

Colorado is not, as most people who know it only from TV think, a place where it snows early in Fall, and it stays covered up till next Spring. That’s more a thing of Ohio or Pennsylvania. I mean, there are places in Colorado — the high ranges — where it’s definitely like that, but that’s not most of it. Most of it, you have sun and snow, and days that are completely dry, and then days you are buried. There is no guarantee what type of day you’ll have. Some days you’ll wake up to a beautiful sunny day, then find yourself buried in snow by nightfall. Once in Manitou Springs, it was sunny in front of our house, and snowing in the back.

And then there were the sudden snowstorms that covered everything. Once or twice they caught us on the road, and even WHERE the road was became a matter of opinion. Obvious (and dangerous) if one side goes down a deep ravine, but the other side? Yeah, you’re on your own. It’s uncharted flat white.

We find ourselves kind of like that in our current political landscape.

You see, there has been a storm, a bad one, and it flattened everything. But in its wake, we are left in a changed landscape, where the usual sign posts don’t apply — except for the ravines, of course. Those are still there and hellofdangerous.

I probably don’t need to elaborate for this audience, but the storm was the stolen election, and its threat that we’d never again be free to choose our path, that — from now on — we were in the hands of the international oligarchs, and that at most we could carve our tiny little paces of semi-freedom, but we’d never be a free PEOPLE — or by extension, a free species (most of the species is. The West even is iffy. The US remains the last, best hope of mankind) — again.

Yes, I know, I expected differently. Because like with the Diamond Princess and the Covidiocy, I did the math. They can’t win. it’s impossible.

But even I expected a long period of darkness, or a blood bath in the way to our being free again. I prayed otherwise, but….

Well, on election day we got our miracle, a culmination of at least two previous miracles. And here we are.

And everything has changed. The problem is that the if you really look at it, the storm has been a succession of storms, starting about 100 years ago. And throughout it, it looked like there would be only one road, and only one way to move, and it would all end up in a prolonged darkness, which the sun of freedom might never penetrate.

But these things are never as they look, and beneath the snow cover, things were moving and the landscape was changing.

To be precise, the industry was changing, from one where large and central had all the benefits of being more economic and more profitable, to one where — not fully yet, but we can see it from here — distributed everything, and largely automated factories with minimal human labor are the future. And what a future it is. The same tech allows distributed communication, and it allows information to travel from those who have it to those who need it in almost no time. (Seriously. I once fixed my vaccum in no time by looking at a few you tube videos. You can also learn just about anything from those. From practical skills to languages, to history, to–). Even though there’s some resistance (including from Musk, sigh. It’s his reflexive liberal. It’s not fair to work from home, since not everyone can. Poppycock.) obviously distributed, from home, from your small town, a bit from everywhere working (and living) is the future. And it is a future that also allows women to work/pursue an avocation while looking after their own kids. This is leading to revolutions in teaching and in… well, just about everything else.

The world simply isn’t the same as when civilization started getting frosted over, and we assumed the future was the world of 1984 or Brave New World, and the most we could do was delay it a bit.

Paradoxically while that world seemed to be driving to a super state across the world (which FYI is inevitable tyranny) the fact we can communicate effortlessly across borders and across the world, perhaps by making us aware of cultural differences is fueling a drive towards nationalism. Which, contrary to what you’ve been taught in school is not fueling a drive for war, or Hitler like racial purges or whatever the crazy. WWI was caused by INTERNATIONALISM, i.e. by the royal families of Europe getting ambitious and trying to establish multi-continental empires. Being governed small and closer to home is always better for freedom. If those in power know you can come to their house and isekai protest them (like truck con protest them) they tend to behave a bit better. (Or, put up barricades if they’re Jarred Polis, whose conscience must be the deepest dark dingiest hell on Earth.)

Anyway, in this new world, a few things become not clear. Like, sure, RFK is still a commie (well, his dad was one TBF) but is he a bad person to be in charge of the FDA? Consider what the FDA is and what it’s been up to. What we know for absolute sure it has done is bad enough. I’m sure there’s stuff we don’t even know about. As long as he doesn’t try to fill it up with stranger and more strict requirements for… everything, why should we mind?

Tulsi Gabbard is still at the very least commie-adjacent, but she was victimized by the security apparatus by being put on a no fly list. Sure she might just reverse the polarity of the abuses. But she might also have seen the elephant and, in the light of the new day, seek to put the brakes on the overstepping. It’s worth a try.

Things like tariffs…. well, I ain’t no fan of them, but you know? The president has to at least be able to threaten them convincingly, so I’m willing to leave his elbow free. And I don’t know. I don’t like tariffs, but I hate taxes, particularly since they eat months of my husband’s time in calculating what all my strange little businesses owe. Maybe, just maybe we can swap them for tariffs, or come up with a yet more creative solution to finance the essential functions of government.

I’m open to what might come. I mean, today DOGE announced it’s hiring, but the job won’t be paid. Using American culture of voluntarism to cut the wasteful state? It’s amazing. It’s the most American thing ever. And think of all our retirees who just found a fun project for their golden years. (If I didn’t have books to write, I’d be volunteering myself. And if we had more money, my husband (and younger kid) would already be applying. Since they’re math geniuses, they probably could help.)

Meanwhile, yes, of course, the ravine stays. I will be watching very carefully and squawk at everything and anything that trespasses on the essential rules: The state should be small (we can start with smaller) and afraid of its people, not the people afraid of their state. And DON’T HURT PEOPLE AND DON’T TAKE THEIR STUFF.

Those are ravines indeed, and we’ve been driving with a wheel over that abyss for far too long. We might not know where the road is, but let’s get the heck out of the dangerous spot.

The rest? The rest is wide open.

Where a dark and dreary road the entire world was pushed into used to be, there is now a trackless wilderness. Into which we can cut paths, alleys, roads, delightful little gardens, and probably fly over it, or tunnel under too.

What is dawning is a day of great experimentation free of the “certainties” of the 20th century which, if we’re all lucky, is now dead and will soon be buried.

Let’s try to make stuff better. Some of it will even succeed. And let’s stop doing the stuff we already know doesn’t work. No, it won’t be different this time. Let 100 million eggs with no omelets be waste enough. Don’t add to it.

Go and create and figure out ways to do things: cheaper, better, with less hurting people and taking their stuff.

And take a deep breath of the crisp, cool air of the new world.

What a time to be alive.

Recently I learned something I could have gone my whole life without knowing: the war on fun is a bipartisan affair.

What do I mean by that? Oh, this week on Twitter, several Voices of the Right TM came out breathing heavy about how not just the Malfoid fan fic trend, (which honestly is THE MOST WHOLESOME trend we’ve seen in fanfic ever) but in fact all of fiction, including people like Larry Correia and John Ringo are a sign that everything is corrupted, and evil, and we’re putting bad things in children’s heads and the left is winning.

Look, guys, I got my antique partner’s desk refinished and up in the new office. I don’t want more dents on it, again.

That the left are ridiculous scolds who had their sense of fun ablated at birth, we knew. As we can tell from the game, movie, book companies they control, they think everything should serve the Marxist agenda or be worthless. Which is why every game, movie, book company is in the crapper. BUT apparently the right looked at that and went “That’s why they’re winning!” and they want to do that too. I’ve actually come across an article complaining about the Hardy Boys. Which I grant you have gotten rewritten, but the solution is not to eliminate it, but to find the old ones used. (I never saw the attraction of that or Nancy Drew, because I preferred Enid Blyton, but I knew most American raised readers grew up on those forever.)

Here’s the thing: The left isn’t winning the culture war. It looks like it, because it’s all you can find in the grocery book shelf (WHY are you buying books in the grocery store?) or even at most bookstores, but that’s because yes, the left owns the cultural pathways, and that’s what they’re pushing.

However, from the inside, each year the print runs are smaller and sell less. You know what’s winning? Indie authors. Okay, most of us ain’t making a ton (most tradpub authors didn’t either) but in aggregate, we’re making a huge dent. And a lot of us are doing pretty well. BECAUSE WE WRITE FUN STUFF. Or at least fun for us, and apparently some people agree.

This got into the whole ridiculous debate of art. “But just because you enjoy it, it’s just cheap thrills, it’s not art.” Well, let me tell you, just because you suffer to consume it, it ain’t art, either. It’s JUST suffering.

So, let’s talk about it: When I was tutoring, I got girls in who were failing at everything. Inevitably, I found their parents allowed them to read two things: The lives of saints and the Bible.

Now, it is possible to write the lives of saints in a riveting manner (Because my brain is broken I’m writing the story of the first Ellyan saint, which is mental as I have…10? books in the world to publish first.) However, most of it isn’t written in a riveting manner, and also, frankly, after a while you kind of know the pattern.

Do I read lives of saints? Sure, but not as my whole reading diet, because that would be boring.

What I inevitably found is that if I convinced their parents to let them read other stuff, their reading AND EVERYTHING ELSE went up grade wise.

Now, I’m not a utilitarian when it comes to reading. I don’t think you should be a good reader because it’s good for you. But there is no denying that being a good reader gives you a massive advantage in life, but no one — NO ONE — has ever become a great reader by reading only the required stuff for school and maybe 2 very holy books. No, not even in the middle ages. Did you know that until the eighteenth century, people moved their lips when reading? Because there wasn’t enough reading material for most people to get past that point.

But besides all that, and because this is not just about reading: Who died and told you that humans should never have fun?

In the dystopian hellscape the left is trying to herd us toward, there is enough worry. In our economy cacked by multiple government interventions, there is enough struggle to stay afloat. And even for those of us who see opportunity everywhere? We’re working harder than we ever did. You want us to never let up? That’s not how humans live.

Look, I can understand disapproving of some people’s way of decompressing: those that are bad for themselves and others: alcohol, drugs, gambling, unbridled sex. (Yes, sex is better with bridles. Seriously? Can you be serious for ten seconds?)

BUT movies, games, books? Because they’re fiction and don’t have a “deeper message” (to your mind.) That’s crazy cakes.

First, if you want to sell your message, it best be wrapped up in a sh*tload of fun. When the left was actually winning the culture war, 40 or 50 years ago they knew how to do that. People will swallow poison if it’s wrapped in fun.

And now you’re saying that fun is evil. No. Fun is fun. The message you load it with might be evil, but then again it might be good, too. Removing the fun is not the way to improve things. The way to improve things is to make it GOOD.

Second- BUT! FUN ISN’T ART! Well, guess what? Peanut butter isn’t chocolate! Music isn’t painting! Shoes aren’t boats! Purple isn’t yellow! And other news of the obvious.

Sure, fun books/movies/games MIGHT NOT be art. And? Is only “art” allowed? WHY? Because we’re only allowed to create and consume “worthy” things? Worthy according to who? Exactly?

Because personally I don’t care. Yes, I’ve read “real literature” and even enjoy some of it, mostly Shakespeare and Austen, to be fair. BUT I also read fanfic. And everything in between. I read what interests me at the time, and I don’t care if it has the stamp of “art” or not.

Which brings us to “What is art?” And that got outright silly. I pointed out for most things the only real evaluation of “art’ is “that which has survived the test of time.” THAT’s IT.

And to survive the test of time, it needs to be FUN first. So it’s loved by a lot of people.

And then we got people arguing that’s not the only test, because you can look at something and know it’s art. (People, the Elgin Marbles, before being taken to England, were being used by the locals to make lime wash for their houses. No, seriously. And yeah, to me I look at them and they’re art. BUT obviously Greek villagers disagreed.) You can take reality apart and not find a single atom of “art” because that’s inside the human brain. And the “art” proclaimed by the elites is mostly stupid message bamf. And even the ‘test of time” thing, we won’t know until the decks are cleared, because in the age of mass media, it was easy to fake “popularity” and a lot of what’s now considered 20th century “art” your grandchildren are going to laugh themselves sick over.

So, the only test is “Has it survived the test of time” which means, to begin with, it was fun or enjoyable enough to a large enough group of people that it SURVIVED.

Oh, yeah, and let’s slap our foreheads for the people explaining to me that making a good screw is art (No, apparently phrasing is a dead art) and that making steel is an art and that… I had to point out that’s the OTHER meaning of art. Not worthy object/admirable product, but “art” as craft, as knowledge, and semantic confusing helps no one.

Though I suppose that person would love to go through a museum of art, admiring screws. (Start with la maja desnuda and… never mind.)

All of it to obfuscate that, as a wise rabbi once said “Not of bread alone lives man.” And btw, he spoke and taught in little fictional stories. Because it makes the “word of G-d” go down easier.

But fine, fine. If both sides of our utterly effed up political spectrum wants to make war on fun, let them come, they and their armies.

I’ll be standing here, holding stunt middle fingers aloft. Why stunt? Because otherwise it’s pretty hard to type and produce decent fiction that some people will find fun.

Probably not enough for me to ever be considered art. Which is fine. I don’t care. I’m having fun writing this stuff, and I hope my fans are having fun reading it.

In the end, that’s all that matters.

It is perhaps inevitable that we’re now being besieged by arguments on what art is, and what counts as art. AI has done a number on us. And before the shrieking starts, note that I’m not one of the AI haters or even one of the AI skeptics. (I’m a skeptic as to how wisely humans will use AI, but that actually makes me a human wisdom skeptic, and guys, what else is new?)

But AI has done exactly the same number on us that cameras did once upon a time. People used to paint to be as realistic as possible, so you could look at their picture and it would be like the picture their eye saw. And then– Cameras.

Decades of learning, people who had devoted their entire lives to pursuing this art, who were d*mn good at it, and who might be in their near-old-age and there, cameras nuked their lives. Okay, it was somewhat mitigated by the pictures being in black and white, but that wasn’t forever either. And what were they supposed to do now?

Well, obviously — though I don’t know enough of art history to give you names — some arts laid down and died, probably portraitists most of all. But I’ll be honest with you, out there, staring at the screen, it’s not actually that difficult to make an artist lay down and die. It’s difficult — perhaps impossible — to make them produce art, but that’s… something quite different from actually standing up the great wide world and staying “You, out there, buy my mad, beautiful thing” (I swear, if M. C. A. Hogarth doesn’t make t-shirts and stickers and bumper stickers with “Do your mad, beautiful thing anyway”, with a drawing of the tesla, I’m going to do it!) Because all of us have rats in our heads. To produce art you must simultaneously believe your mad, beautiful thing, is the best thing ever and also the biggest piece of crap ever produced. So, you see, putting it up to the judgement of an (at best) indifferent world is a bit difficult. (Not lying. To this day I ask my fans to read reviews before I even look at them. Yesterday it was a review for the anthology Chaos and Consequences, edited by Jason Cordova, and incidentally that story is Brund and Skip and a different perspective on the future book The Worlds of Men.)

But we do know that not all artists laid down and died. A lot of them painted better, more expressive portraits than the camera back then could capture, on top of which, of course, a photograph was black and white to begin with. And by the time cameras were color, there were other ways of painting that looked utterly different from a photograph. And then this weird trick happened, and photography became art too. No, seriously, it really is. The funny thing is that I can draw (and could have been a contenda! if the fire in my belly went that way. It doesn’t.) but give me a camera, or you know, a phone, and I become a monkey with ten thumbs. Cedar Sanderson has a cat that looks almost like mine (They’re sisters, two consecutive litters, her Toast and my Muse) but she takes pictures of Toast and makes her look alive, and expressive, all personality coming through. Me? I take a picture of Muse and she’s a pretty flame point. You can even sort of see that, but definitely not her feisty, commanding personality. (She’s Greebo’s heir and was just herding me to my desk to write, because she knows which side of her tuna is buttered.) I’m also in awe of her insect/nature pictures. I don’t even try, even though I life in a woodland area, where … so many interesting spiders. My younger son, when he visited, captured an image of a spider eating a colorful insect, and it was like a painting. If I’d done it it would have been “Oh, it’s a spider. Ick.”

So there’s something that goes into photography that I don’t have.

And all the flopping around about AI “stealing” art… mostly by artists who are so by virtue of being called so by elites — what I call “unremarkable image or object, but really call description” “artists” — is nonsense. By that reckoning “first learned from what came before, copying the bits that we like” every artist is a plagiarist, all the way back to Lascaux (And only because we don’t have much from before.)

But is AI art disquieting? Threatening to those of us who spent a lifetime learning the best techniques and becoming damn good at the craft part of what we do? Hell yeah.

Interestingly, the artists I know who are compulsive — they HAVE to do art — and dedicated — practice, practice, practice — might be slightly discomfited and a little afraid — we’re all cracked like an unsound cup, okay? Again, it doesn’t take much — but they’re not lying down and dying. And they’re not stomping around throwing hissy fits that “If that’s AI, you might as well not bother.”

I don’t even know how much of the anti-AI mob sentiment is real, and how much is being stoked by global enemies terrified of America plus AI. I know a lot of it is just those enemies. And I wonder if it started that way and hit the soft heads of the wanna be artists and those who consider art a sort of grift.

I’m not a visual artist — again, I think I could have been, and the last art class I took — fourth year? — the teacher agreed and tried to convince me to pursue it professionally. Dad offered to pay for a third degree in art (He did NOT pay for the first two. One was paid for by my having very good grades, and one I paid for.) Because it was his first degree, and he always dreamed of one of his descendants picking it up. (Squints at the future. The Little Pickle does these amazing little symbolic paintings. Also not her main avocation, but you know? Maybe there will be kids who have dad’s ability and fire.) I still love to do portraiture, by hand, and am currently trying to figure out if there are life drawing/painting classes nearby. My favorite is doing those in conde crayons, all earth tones. BUT it’s not my professional thing. Not even close.

And yet, I dropped into AI art with both feet, because it served my actual need for my real professional artist avocation: writing. I needed covers. And before you flop again (what are you a fish?) and whine about taking money from an artist’s mouth, I WASN’T using professional artists before. The only one I’d have considered is Cedar Sanderson, and I suspect we’d have butted horns so hard — because we have different concepts of what makes a great cover and also because I knew enough to be dangerous — that it would have forever ruined our friendship. I like her, so I’m not going to do that. Oh, yeah, I also used Jack Wilder (See the amazing Dyce Dare covers) but guys…. getting Jack to do covers when I need them (I’m not good at planning. It’s always an emergency) was like nailing jello to the wall. He’s got to be one of the busiest men in sf/f.

So what was I using. Oooh, boy. I have some covers to redo. I started by trying to hire an artist for my first indie novel. It… didn’t work out, and I didn’t like the product. Which is not a big deal, because well, I couldn’t pay much (I still can’t, because I never know how a book is going to DO) though what I lost in that was more than I could afford at the time. (Remember, I had NO indie business, yet.)

So I started hunting down for stock images and altering them, and trying to make them fit. Honestly, sometimes I suspect I went beyond the license, and the covers still looked… well, like bad 70s covers when book publishers had first discovered cameras. (Not MOSTLY SF/F where seventies covers are sometimes great, but main stream or mystery 70s covers, at least in Europe. They were… odd. My favorite mystery series had silver covers with an inset of a picture of the human body. No, not A human body, which might have worked. Just a random portion of the human body, scaled up so far you couldn’t tell what it was, but it looked vaguely disquieting. (Have you ever looked at your nostrils? I mean, really looked?)

From that, after I spent weeks crying in front of the computer, and refusing to cook dinner because I couldn’t even, my husband dropped DAZ 3-D in front of me. Oh, I continued crying and screaming for six months (Most of this is not literal) while I rendered naked people with no hair. And then something clicked.

Were those covers good. Eh. Some were USABLE after extensive processing, but honestly it’s hard to get rid of a certain uncanny valley feel for those and anyway, I was still working through filters and lighting and… when AI hit. And the game changed.

Even in its early incarnation, where I sometimes used pieces of 10 AI paintings for a cover, it blew DAZ 3-D out of the water (Though I’ve found I can get Daz 3-D to do the base picture, then take it to AI and alter it, on rare circumstances when I’m asking for something AI simply doesn’t do well or at all. Would you believe classic pulp robots is one of those? Sure. I knew you would.)

So I jumped in, both feet, because mama has books and needs covers. And redid them when AI got better, and I have probably 10 covers crying out to be redone now, when I have (AH!) time. Which brings us to…

I know the artists who use AI for covers. I use AI myself. The amazing thing is how different our covers are, and how you CAN too tell style. Maybe it is our favorite AIs. Maybe it’s the fact that we’ve TRAINED them. At one time, before we were even doing covers, our friend group all put the same prompt in, and even then, at the dawn of AI, what we got was completely different, because even then we’d trained AI to our vision.

So, is it art. I don’t know because I don’t know what art is — which is what is emerging from the big argument on X. That there are as many opinions as there are people. And we’ll go into that tomorrow under “the war on fun.” — and no one seems to know, though each person has mad-serious opinions.

BUT I know that even with AI use, the product is highly individual and tracks to the human doing it. More, honestly, than to the AI used (I have friends who’ve changed AI engine, for price or ease of use.)

Ah, but AI art lacks the divine spark.

Maybe it does. AI writing tends to lack bodies. (I’ve spent a lot of time reading AI novels, in Jane Austen Fanfic, and it only hit me why they’re so tiresome after about 100 of them. There is no stage business. No one fiddles with their bracelets, or adjusts her shoe, or even plays with a stray lock of hair. Or sips too-hot tea. Only bits of stage business are in STRICT service of the narration. “She looked at him when he spoke.” Not “While he spoke, she played with her embroidery thread.”) Now, once you figure that out — and btw, most writers also forget bodies. At least at first. And in my case when I’m exhausted. Which is why I have that — it’s probably easy to incorporate that into your prompts.

And I’m sure that a lot of AI art lacks something, even if it’s gotten better at hands.

BUT obviously not all, since I can tell whose AI art I’m looking at, and when a house changes cover artists even though both use AI. There is definitely a spark between artist and art. Which will probably get better now that we’re past the phase of screaming at the AI “I said a woman in a dress and a bird. Not a feathered woman and a bird in a dress.” (Don’t ask. Trust me. Once seen it can’t be unseen.)

I think yes, it’s uncomfortable and it’s going to demand that we change, and it’s sparked a scream and shout on X. Which is why we’re going to cover that tomorrow. Yes, I know there’s a war on people having fun. BUT must it be bipartisan?

But is it any more of a disruptive technology for artists than the camera?

I’m not convinced. I think it’s exactly the same. And artists who are compelled, are going to learn to use AI and to make their art better. And others won’t use AI but will learn to make their stuff so distinctive and amazing that AI can’t take their mojo.

And yes, in this case “artists” include writers, who are going a little crazier than even visual artists, partly because this technology has come for us too. (Note we had a minor disruption for wordprocessing and for dictation, but not as hard and fast as the camera for visual artists.)

I can’t tell you what other writers are doing. I can tell you what I’m doing: NOT laying down and dying. My stuff tends to be weird enough it’s hard to imitate, anyway. (Except to younger son, who can do a dead-imitation, the little SOB.)

And other writers are using AI agents for publicity, to remind themselves of various tasks (I need to figure out my substack. No really.) To convert books to epub format. Etc. etc. etc. Things that cut down on the other tasks and allow them to write more.

Me? I found it’s dangerous to talk about my universe to an AI, because I’m tired and slightly depressed. Because it gives me IDEAS. But then again, everything gives me ideas. I do have an idea for a youtube feature, though. Will I ever do it? I don’t know. But I’m holding onto the idea until I am done unpacking. Probably new years. If this works it might sell me a lot of books. Even more than the music did. (And I need to resume that with other series.) Now this type of brainstorming used to work great when Dan and I were both young and childless and used to drive nowhere in particular at night. Same effect. (Of course, mathematicians and AIs…. what am I saying?) BUT then the kids came and we got very busy, so I hadn’t had a rubber ducky with no time limits and very busy for a long time. Which, I’ll be honest, was kind of nice.

So, AI art is still human. But is it art? I don’t know. The divine spark or lack thereof is literally above my pay grade.

BUT I’m an artist, or at least a sad compulsive who expresses herself in stories. In my (it’s getting to be longish, no?) life, I’ve tended to grind everything in my writing mill and use every technology, every even, every friendship (people, we’re despicable, we writers!) as fodder to the thing I couldn’t stop doing.

AI is just more grist to the mill. It will get used in the service of creation. And what come out the other side will stand or fall on how well it’s used.