Month: February 2011

Does anyone else out there sometimes have trouble remembering they live in a body? No? Only me?

Well, I do have that problem. Sometimes it’s really big and in your face as problems go. Like the first time an agent wanted to see all of my manuscript and I decided I had to fix it from the inside out. At the same time, my son, Marsh, was in charge of feeding pre-school fish. We were supposed to go up every day and feed the fish. Let’s just say that his whining, pleading and begging didn’t get through to me until the work was done. And then I REMEMBERED. Let’s just say those fish were called “Schrodinger” fish for the longest time. While running to the school, kid by the hand, I wondered if the fish were waves or particles… er… I mean, dead or alive. They turned out to be alive, but, you know, I didn’t know fish could look so HAPPY to see you. No, seriously.

There have also been times when I’m on the home stretch of a novel and everything finally looks right, and I’m coasting on it, and I finish it and realize I’ve been working for twenty four hours, and can’t remember if I’ve eaten.

What is this a propos de? Well… this book that was due in October has been delayed mostly because of the stupid body. Sometime at World Fantasy I caught what I thought was “perfectly normal” con crud. Only once I kicked it (about a week) I got to work for about a week, and then it came back. I’d think it was something permanent and specific to me, only I know a bunch of people who have been doing the same, including my family.

The problem is this. If you work in an office, yeah, you drag yourself in, you work. In those one or two days a month you can’t do it, you stay home in bed and watch soaps.

This is fine. I know that Victorian ladies of my age spent most of their time being invalids, and I know the reason – I think. On the shady side of forty is when we first realize we are no longer the energizer bunny.

I do try to force myself to work. I even manage to, sometimes, but here is the problem. I’ve now finished this book – A Fatal Stain – twice. Only the first was wrong, and the second was profoundly wrong.

Why you ask? Well, because it’s a funny light book. Now, when I’m feeling like this – and this illness isn’t bad, and it’s more attenuated every time it visits. It’s mostly tiredness. GREAT tiredness, stomach upset, mild upper respiratory – it’s easy to push through on tragic work, or even serious one. But light hearted and funny? No. That takes being “in the voice.”

I wasn’t those first two times. Worse, every time I get sick for however many days, when I come back I need to work up to the voice again. Which when you feel tired and still out of sorts is kind of hard to do. Then I hit the voice, get into it, fix/work/write a good chunk… and the next day I wake up half dead. And if I force it then, the plot twists under my fingers. Let’s just say neither child kidnaping nor people burning alive are funny, okay, and be done with it.

So that brings us to today. I’m this (holds up fingers) close and thought I’d have finished it this week, only Tuesday I was feeling so so, so I went for a walk to wake up and er… Yesterday I did nothing but sleep.

Today I feel like I could go for a walk. Yeah, I hear you yell “Don’t do it Sarah!” I won’t. I’m going to have some more coffee, then sit down and try to finish this. I THINK I can do it by close of business tomorrow. I hope so, as I’d like to go up to Denver on Saturday and hit the museums and stuff.

So, what I want you to do is to keep good thoughts coming in my direction, so that I don’t have to struggle with the stupid body and can actually get done this time.

Think, think, think. :)

Lately, partly because I’ve been trying to kick off whatever bug has got me since November – it keeps coming back – and because when I’m tired or sick I can’t read fiction, I’ve been reading books on the proto- Indo-European culture.

Now, you go back long enough and it’s like reading tea leaves. Oh, okay, not tea leaves. Horse’s teeth and grave sculptures. However, through all this, it is possible to get a picture – vague and confusing though it is – of our most distant ancestors.

I’m not going to play psychologist, but themes emerge from what we can salvage of the very oldest tales: sacrifice and loss, love – often not eros, but agape or family love – blood and death.

Pratchett in a lot of his books says if you go back far enough you find that almost all the old stories are about the blood. I’ll add to that. The oldest stories are about blood, death and rebirth.

I think this is part of the reason that vampires are so popular, but that’s a side line I cannot pursue right now.

One of the things that surprised me is how the themes that echoed through the oldest fragments of legends we can find are the same themes we find again and again in science fiction and fantasy: twins; quests; bringing something magical/healing back; finding who you are.

Part of this, I think, is that humans are not like other animals creatures that live in a certain way because of instinct. Humans are domesticated creatures, as much as our dogs or our cats, but we domesticate ourselves. We are at the same time Fluffy who wants to pee on the sofa and the human who stands over her and tells her no. Only the human is often embodied in a myth.

Of course a lot of us believers get a lot of our morality from religion. But that’s an overt morality. It declares itself. It says “this you shall do” and “this you shall not do” and “here you shall go” and “here you shall not.”

Useful, of course, but it’s rather like the choke chain or the owner literally standing over you to prevent you from going on the sofa. The other part is more important – you don’t go on the sofa because you know you shouldn’t. You know you shouldn’t, because you’ve internalized the experience.

I was thinking about this and it all got tied up with different generations of science fiction and fantasy. Our myths are very much part of what we think the world should be. And what we think the world should be is both fed by and feeds the myth in our head that keeps us acting the way we think humans should act.

As I said, you find a lot of the themes of our oldest myths in fantastic literature… Until, that is fantastic literature decided its more important part was not dreaming of the future – or fantastic lands – but the last part of its name “literature”. It decided its most important function was to astonish the world. In doing so, it lost track of that “what humanity should be” and of reaching back into the sense of what humanity – or our branch of it – was and has been since we’ve had words and long before we had writing.

And so the self sacrifice was lost, and the discovery, and the sense of wonder. Instead we got either purposeless rambles, or people telling us life was brutish and nasty and then you die.

This is I think, an attempt to “count coup”, i.e. to claim to be superior to the vast uncounted multitude of our ancestors who first clawed their way to civilization and to an idea that there might be something better hereafter. And I think in that attempt we – as writers and as a civilization – only make ourselves mental and moral midgets.

Do you ever get to the end of a short story – or worse, a novel – and go “and your point was?” Worse, do you ever get to the end of a short story – or worse a novel – and go “Uh… I followed these characters around for this long for you to either twist them beyond recognition and/or kill them? Do you ever get the impression the author veered away from the ending that could and should have been to go in search of a glitter in the weeds of disappointment and bitterness?
No, I’m not saying that happy endings or happy-go-lucky stories are the only ones worth telling. Why in heck would I? If you’ve read me, you know well that’s not my attitude. But even in the nastiest of settings it is possible to be caring, to be a hero, to fight on. Even in difficult – particularly in difficult situations – it is important to remind others of what it means to be human.
Why would a bad ending be considered more mature or deeper than a happy one, or one where the character acted honorably?

Still battling mystery, partly due to serious case of crud. I can’t think of anything non-fictiony to write, sorry, so here is a bit from A Fatal Stain:

Mind you, I didn’t leave the door unlocked on purpose – not as such. But it wasn’t a big deal, because this wasn’t a bad area of Goldport. Oh, okay, so my friend Ben thought that downtown Goldport near the college was a slum and that gangs fought in the street in front of my house every day. But Goldport was never a big town, though it had achieved a somewhat large and definitely rowdy population during the gold boom. That had left its echo in places named Goldpan Alley and Three shots street, and the Leather and Lace hotel up the street which was a bed and breakfast on the site of a famous brothel.

The gold bust had left the town deserted, its fine Victorian buildings falling to pieces, until UC Goldport had moved to town, and brought with it a boom in tech and other white collar jobs.

Goldport was so white bread it was a wonder no one had ever tried to spread butter an inch thick all over it. Even downtown Goldport was as safe as suburbs in larger cities. If gangs fought on the street in front of my house it would be The Paperclips versus The Calculators. They’d be hauling some serious numbers and glaring daggers at each other. They could do serious damage with the edges of their sharpened, gold mastercards.

But of course Cas thought otherwise and there was no point arguing. After all he saw whatever crime there was in town – and for him even a single crime would be too much. If murders didn’t happen, he’d upgrade graffitti to serious crime status.

“I’m sorry.” I gave him something approaching a contrite smile – at least if my acting abilities were up to snuff – while I looked at the table.

It started innocently. At the time we were living in the small mountain town of Manitou Springs. There were the two of us, (of course) our two sons and four cats. So the logical thing for my younger son to ask for, for his fourth birthday, was… two hamsters.

In a sign our lunacy was too far gone, we then named them Butterscotch and Fudge. And then – such our folly – we put them in an aquarium on the back porch. An aquarium covered only by fine mesh net.

Oh, yeah, one more thing – these hamsters were both female.

The cats left the hamsters curiously unmolested, but the hamsters clearly felt that they lived under hostile conditions.

In the dark of night, they would screech in their little aquarium like tribbles in heat. And in the summer – such our folly – we left the back-porch windows open. So their call went out to the world at large and – I only surmise this, but it’s almost certain – all over the rodent world little signs sprang up written in whatever it is rodents write in saying “Free the Aquarium Two.” And “No Mercy For the Captors.” Rodent students organized protests and there would have been rodent demonstrations at our door step save for the fact that at least one of our cats was the great calico huntress.

Squashed, ignored, desperate, digested the surviving neighboring rodents resorted to extreme measures.

His name was Jean Pierre and he was born in the yard of a neighborhood French family, from which he learned protest songs, a disdain for the establishment, and a tendency to smoke really stinky cigarettes.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

It started as so many things did with Pete, our oldest cat. You name a cat Petronius the Arbiter, you get what’s coming to you. In this case, it probably wasn’t so much his fault. Pete was getting old. He was fifteen or so, and he caught a cold. As those of you in multiple cat households know, you really can’t have them all together when they are sick. So we locked Pete in the powder room in the attic where we tempted his fading appetite with truly stinky tuna.

Now, to get the action in this story, a little description of the locale must intrude. Manitou Springs looks like a village in an early twentieth century comic, with buildings perched at erratic intervals on the mountain side. Our house was near the top of one of the hills. Our garden was seventeen steps up from the street. The house itself was three floors high and my office was on the third floor. The only doors into the house were on the bottom floor, and we only used the front one, because the back porch one stuck. One of my boys had a door to a second floor porch, but to get to his room you had to walk through his brother’s room AND a bathroom.

The third floor itself, up a narrow staircase, consisted of small powder room, on the left (with a door.) Dan’s office, on the right, without a door (just a railing dividing it from the top of the stairs. And then my office, through the door straight ahead and taking up the entire front of the house. (Not as luxurious as that sounds, since most of it had sloping ceilings. It might explain something about my early writing, that I continuously walked into the side of the ceiling. HARD. To the point of giving myself near-concussion.

On that day, I was running up into my office, to get mail to take out, when I heard the oddest of sounds coming from behind the door of the powder room. It sounded like… an animal choking. I panicked. Pete was getting to be middle aged and a little odd, and I thought he was choking. I screamed for my husband, whose cat Pete was, because if Pete was having seizures, he was more likely to be calm with dan dealing with him.

As Dan came running up the stairs, I threw the door open and…

There was a small, mad-looking squirrel cornered by Pete and making the tcha-tcha-tcha sounds which I believe are French squirrel for “you’ll never take me alive, nom d’un nom.”

So… Dan and I stood stunned in the doorway (not the least of which because a rodent had survived for minutes in a room with Pete.) We stared a moment too long. The squirrel ran between our legs and … into my office, where he holed up behind the printer, singing the Marseillese in squirrel. “Allons squirrels de la patrie” – or, in other words,(Squirrel languages being less diferentiated) tcha, tcha, tcha, tcha.

After running in circles a while, we closed the door on Pete, got the phone, leafed madly through the yellow pages (yes, it was that long ago) and called Animal Control.

Most of them just hung up on us. They knew Manitou had a problem with rodents. Though they seemed to think the problem was endemic plague. And then a bright boy told us “Just leave the front door open and a path to the front door, and he’ll go straight out of it.” Now, this would make perfect sense if the path to the front door weren’t: Down the stairs (ignoring Dan’s office, which we couldn’t block) down a zigzagging corridor. Down another set of stairs (with railings we couldn’t block) past the entrance to the library (no door) and THEN out the door. But we were desperate. And Dan had a window in his office. We thought… Block the stairs. Open the window in Dan’s office. Take screen out. Get out of the way.

So… We didn’t of course realize that this was a special squirrel.

At first it seemed like everything would work. Spying his way clear, the squirrel bolted out of my office and to… Dan’s desk. Where he took advantage of a tiny hole in the back and holed up in a drawer saying tcha tcha tcha * (*translation “I am your worst nightmare, you oppressors of innocent rodents.”)

We called animal control again. One of them took pity on us and told us he wouldn’t handle it, but since the squirrel had probably got in through a hole in the roof, anyway, how about we call his friend who replaces missing roof tiles and has been known to capture the occasional wild animal. At that point, frankly, we’d have called Bezelbub and Sons, Animal Control and Soul Collection. There was something about a possibly rabid squirrel in a house with kids and cats that made our blood run cold. That the squirrel seem to be singing protest songs from inside our desk file drawer just made it even scarier. For all we knew he was collecting our account numbers to pass to the squirrel resistence.

So we called the roof repairman, who was an almost peternaturaly laid back man. We tell him that the squirrel is holed up in the file drawer, that he’s been singing protest songs and that we’re fairly sure we caught a faint wiff of galoises. He didn’t even look like we should be committed. He didn’t even ask us if the squirrel was wearing a beret. Instead, he said, “We’ll get him out,” in the tone of a man who has encountered the Rodent Liberation Front.

For his first attempt, he opened the drawer a little, holding a trap at the ready. He said this often worked. But Jean-Pierre wasn’t JUST any squirrel. Instead of falling for the trap of the oppressor, he holed up further in the drawer, a little mad eye (not that squirrel have any other kind of eye) peeking over “accounts receivable” and his defiant tcha tcha tcha echoing throughout the house.

The unflappable rodent-controller sighed and said “Well, this is more risky, but I have some sleeping gas. I’ll just pump it into the drawer. He’ll be out like a light in no time.”

So he started pumping gas into the drawer. But Jean-Pierre had clearly trained for this eventuality by snorting a little bit of sleeping gas every day.

Once the normal dosage. Tcha, tcha, tcha!

Twice the normal dosage. Tcha, Tcha, tcha!

Three times the normal dosage. I laugh in the face of your puny sleeping gas.

At that point the would-be captor opened the drawer just a little. Taking advantage of this, Jean-Pierre ran out through the opening and into the tinier opening of the drawer above it. Where he holed up saying “Never go up against a squirrel when desks are on the line!”

By now the unflappable man was thoroughly flapped. “I’ve never seen a squirrel do this before,” he said. “It’s like he’s a commando squirrel or something.”

To which Jean-Pierre replied Tcha Tcha Tcha (squirrel for “make my day.”)_

“I’m going to try something I’ve never tried before. I’m afraid of hurting him, but if I give him more gas, I’ll kill him.”

We said okay and fine. Without saying a word – because by then he knew Jean-Pierre understood human English – the man made a little lasso. Then he quickly opened the drawer with one hand, while lassoing Jean-Pierre with the other.

To everyone’s surprise – but PARTICULARLY Jean-Pierre’s – it worked. And, faster than Jean Pierre could formulate curses profane enough, the rodent-catcher threw him a little carrier and shut the door on him.

Our kids, of course, being ours and therefore of dubious sanity, wanted to see the squirrel before the man repatriated him in another neighborhood.

I’ll never forget the squirrel standing inside the cage, looking at us in unquenchable fury. I swear he was holding up his little squirrel fist and singing We shall overcome. Za, Rodentia! (Tcha, tcha, tcha.)

The punch line to this is that a couple of years later, we moved to the neighborhood to which Jean-Pierre, or, as the kids call him, super squirrel, had been relocated.

The very first night, I hear our less-than-bright cat, Euclid, make the sort of meowing sounds that mean that he’s scared of something. I run downstairs. Euclid is staring out the dining room window. And there – in the dark of night (since when are squirrels nocturn?) is a clearly elderly and bedraggled squirrel, dancing along the fence, taunting our cat, singing tcha, tcha, tcha.*

*Allons Squirrels de la patrie……

*A Guest Post by the indomitable Kate Paulk*

I’ve already devoted a fair amount of pixels to my rather less than orthodox view of Vlad III Tepes, also known as Vlad the Impaler, or Vlad Dracula (his choice of name, based on his letters). In The Allure of Evil (http://madgeniusclub.blogspot.com/2011/02/allure-of-evil.html) posted to the Mad Genius Club I talked about the phenomenon of the person who serves good but does evil and how that concept applies to Vlad. The Kindness of Cruelty (http://nakedreaderpress.wordpress.com/2011/02/04/the-kindness-of-cruelty/) posted to Naked Reader Press, is about Vlad’s world and the way that impacted his decisions. Over at Kate’s Corner (my blog), The Man Behind The Monster (http://www.katepaulk.com/writing/the-man-behind-the-monster/) covers how I portrayed Vlad the man and some of the decisions that I needed to make while I was writing Impaler.

That makes it sound easy, doesn’t it? Of course, the fact that I could ramble for days over various aspects of Vlad’s life, times, and likely beliefs and actions doesn’t help matters. Researching someone that deeply tends to bring them to life, and make them part of you in that odd writer-specific way that lets a writer channel someone’s personality enough to depict them in words.

One aspect of Impaler that’s going to get interest is that most people immediately associate Vlad with the Bram Stoker creation – and of course, vampirism (please don’t go giving me counter-examples from Romania or from non-Western cultures. I know I’m speaking within a particular cultural framework. It just happens to be the one where Impaler stands a chance of selling a few copies (and yes, I’d love it to sell way more than a few copies)).

The identification of Vlad with Stoker’s Dracula (please ignore the movie for the moment – I’m talking about the book) is so strong it’s next to impossible to write a Vlad story without invoking the vampire mythos in some form even though if he’d ever run into any vampires he would have staked them through the heart – eventually. It takes a while for a stake to get that far in an impalement.

Possibly the biggest conceit in Impaler is the way I’ve handled the Vlad-as-vampire mythos: what modern readers would identify as vampirism – the need to drink fresh blood, preferably human blood – is something Vlad sees as a curse imposed on him by Mehmed II (also known as Mehmed the Conquerer, although Vlad is never that polite: Vlad usually refers to Mehmed as “Mehmed, may he rot in Hell”). The backstory for this is hinted at when Vlad’s oldest son Mihnea asks if the curse can be passed on to his children, a prospect that horrifies Vlad. There are other hints: mention of relatives who died young because of a mysterious wasting disease.

My theory here – which may or may not hold as medical science advances – is the existence of an inheritable auto-immune disorder with results that resemble anemia on steroids, combined with Vlad’s unpredictable and often berserker temper. Of course, I’ve boosted the effects of fresh blood – which could be a psycho-somatic response, too. For the purposes of the novel, it works. Vlad sees himself as cursed, and believes he may be permitted to atone for the sins the curse drives him to commit if he uses the curse in God’s service.

Traditionally, of course, the vampire is an inherently profane creature, unable to abide sacred ground or the sight of a holy symbol (this would make it horribly uncomfortable for Islamic vampires when the moon is a crescent, but the question of which holy symbol will chase off which vampire is its own post – to quote from a movie I never saw but has at least one memorable line which I read in the Neil Gaiman and Kim Newman compilation Ghastly Beyond Belief (http://www.amazon.com/Ghastly-Beyond-Belief-Neil-Gaiman/dp/0099368307/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1297301881&sr=1-1), with a Jewish vampire saying to a cross-waving peasant girl, “Oy, yoy, have you got the wrong vampire!” Anyway…).

Vlad is deeply religious, although I’ve taken a few liberties with just how he deals with religion. In his first reign, he clearly favored his native Orthodox faith, and scared the crap out of visiting Roman clerics – to whom he was somewhat hostile, as he presumably saw them as imposing foreign mores on his people. During his time in Hungary, he was offered freedom and a wife if he converted to Roman Christianity. It’s not unreasonable to assume that Matthias’s offer came with the unspoken “or spend the rest of your life in my prisons” – he’d already betrayed Vlad once, and had no reason to assume he’d be safe if Vlad wasn’t securely attached to him by something stronger than a sworn oath (which, incidentally, I haven’t found any evidence of Vlad breaking. His contemporaries treated sworn and signed oaths as inconveniences, but he seemed to attach a good deal of importance to keeping his promises – perhaps because he was betrayed so often by so many people he should have been able to trust). At any rate, when Vlad left Hungary to try to recapture Wallachia, he had a Hungarian wife who was also Matthias’s cousin.

I took the view that in that position, having converted for political reasons, he’d maintain the appearance of Roman practice (it wasn’t commonly known as Catholicism at this time), and probably support both branches of Christianity. Also, being familiar with both branches, I considered it likely that he’d recognize them as fundamentally similar, and that they needed to come to some kind of accommodation if the much greater threat of the Mohammedan Ottoman Empire was to be defeated. Vlad – correctly – recognized that if Europe’s Christian powers didn’t unite to stop the Ottoman advance, there would be no part of Europe safe from them. The fact that his country was one of the most likely Ottoman targets no doubt sharpened his perception of the risk, as did the well-known tendency of the Ottoman Sultans to foment wars of succession and other instability in realms they’d targeted.

The accuracy of his concern is proved by two pieces of history: within 100 years of Vlad’s death the Ottoman Empire had conquered Hungary; and less than 50 years after his death the Pope fled Rome ahead of an Ottoman invasion that was stopped only because of Mehmed II’s death and the battle for succession between his surviving heirs. By that time, Wallachia was a vassal-state of the Ottoman Empire, and remained one until the 1800s.

One of the other substantial twists on the vampire mythos in Impaler is that there are no fangs. Vlad might need blood, but he doesn’t gnaw on people’s necks to get it. Actually, he prefers to get it in the middle of a battle, but since he can’t really be slicing and dicing his many enemies every few days, he has to use other methods – principally volunteers: something that makes him intensely uncomfortable.

I find it difficult to imagine most vampires of fiction having any difficulty with someone offering them blood (this has changed somewhat in the last few decades as vampires have morphed from the always evil undead predator to sparkly sex symbols – a change I devoutly hope will not be permanent), much less preferring not to know who donated it.

Ultimately, while he’s technically a vampire (he needs to drink human blood if he wants to survive), Vlad is without doubt not your mother’s vampire. And, no, I don’t want or need to know why your mother keeps a vampire.

As never fails when I make a push to finish a novel, my younger son brought something weird home. (And recovered from it in 12 hours, the little so and so.) The something weird is making my mouth taste like I swallowed a dragon and it’s burping somewhere at the back of my throat. My head hurts and I just want to sleep.

So, even though I tried to get some work done, the progress yesterday and today wasn’t exactly marked. I took a nap, shoveled the walk (I had to get out of the house or go nuts) and spent a considerable amount of time reading The Horse, The Wheel, and Language. No, I don’t know why. I have a strong feeling it relates, somehow, to this long-shelved project called Mirrorplay.

Also – and this has a tendency to happen whenever I run a mild fever – I found myself in the middle of a weird search. In this case it was for pictures/google Earth, etc. of my place of birth.

First of all, and weirdly, apparently I’m the most famous person to come out of the region in the 21st century. (Poor region.) I.e. if you google the village/ubervillage/city you get… me. This alone almost spooked me into giving the whole thing up.

But of course, I had a fever, so I didn’t. I went on to find a map of the place with pictures people have taken integrated in it. There’s pictures from the place I grew up in and the parish church, and the cemetery which is all white marble, by regulation, and so vast it takes up several blocks on the map. Which was kind of interesting, if a little scary.

And then I got completely lost. I mean, I know the way from the cemetery to my parent’s house on foot. Or I used to. I walked it fairly often. (No, not morbid. The town hall is across from the cemetery.)

So I tried following the roads I would follow and got turned around and completely confused. This in itself is not that strange. I mean, seriously – do you know the name of your childhood streets? Well, maybe you do. And nowadays in Portugal they’re very well marked, but when I was little, I knew streets in other ways “Go by the alley where She of The Little Doggies lives. Turn at the Lighted (private part) ’s house. Then go up to where that pig escaped last year.”

On top of that, in the twenty five years since I’ve been gone, they’ve built countless stack a prole apartment buildings and tore open a lot of new streets. This contributes to my having no clue where I am at any given moment. On top of that, manipulating google-maps with my mouse was… uh… curious. So suddenly I would spin out in an unexpected direction and find myself some place only dimly remembered from adults’ conversations in youth: Paranhos; Sao Mamede Infesta (which I remember because my mom would pronounce it sambamed and my dad would add infesta like it was a joke, which I suppose it can be, because it can mean ‘infestates’);Alfena (from which, for some reason, my younger self was convinced mad people came. No, I have no idea why.)

And in the middle of all this, it hit me. The entire map of my childhood, including the places that sounded distant and far away and that built my concept of “foreign” – as in, they do things differently there – is probably no more than fifty square miles, if that. Put it another way, the place names I associated with wonder and distance; the “foreign parts” I dreamed of seeing (not that type of part. Stop it. Those were lighted.); the things I associate with vaguely strange customs and mysterious ways… that entire area would fit in the space between my home and downtown Denver. Possibly with room to spare.

Oh, and the place I always thought of as a “region” – not the village, which was much smaller, but the bigger entity, with the townhall and the church and the cemetery – is described as a village, relegating my childhood world to a hamlet, I suppose.

Weirder, though, was seeing the woods — called “Lightening Rays”, though, from reading the book I’ve been reading, it could also be a cognate of the word for “things that turn” in proto-Latin. Who knows? — and how small they are in reality. Now, mind you, I’d guess they’ve been halved since I was born, but to me those woods are THE WOODS. I like to think of them as a remnant of some old and primeval forest, but they can’t be because when we trekked in them, dad and I would find ruined homesteads and bits of Roman inscriptions. Still, it backed up almost to my grandmother’s backyard. Okay, there was the backyard wall, about maybe five feet, stone. On the other side was the neighbor’s field, stretching to the line of trees. I know sometimes we went around to the gate up the road and took that route, but most of the time, on Saturday afternoon, when dad needed to get me out of mom’s hair, so she could clean the house without me underfoot, (how’s that for mixed metaphors?) dad and I would just jump the backyard wall, walk across the fields and to the forest.

In the forest there were rabbits and birds, and lizards. And there was some pond where reeds grew. Dad used to make me flutes from them, with his pocket knife. And there were massive dragon flies. And ants. For some reason I was deeply into ants. Down the street to the train stop (it’s now almost a station with coverings, but before it was just a stop. Some trains stopped, some didn’t — and it didn’t always mean they weren’t supposed to) there were three or four anthills (that street was dirty.) We used to take them bread crumbs on Saturday and sit around watching them carry it in…

But now looking at it on the map… I think some of my friends have bigger backyards. My entire world of adventure and wonder, where every day something new happened or something unexpected revealed itself – my world of surprises and enchantment turns out to be just a little corner all too easy to fly over on Google maps.

And yet I’d trade dominium over continents and power over countries for the joy I found in my grandmother’s backyard and for the dreams with which my imagination peopled the narrow band of trees beyond it.

I figure I’ve lived a blameless life these last few weeks. The death threats and exclamations about my moral depravity and lack of social caring (read ability to toe the line) have slowed down to an almost imperceptible trickle. In other words – I iz doing it wrong.

The start of this post was something Dave put up. It’s not that far away, it’s not that inconceivable, and it’s not at all unlikely one way or another that at some point humans will find a way to do the reproduction thing without one of the genders. I grant you this is more likely to occur with women first since babies need a leasehold in a human body while growing. However, that too might not be insurmountable with a bit more biological research. Bio-wombs of some sort might do the trick.

So, we come to… Planets where the entire population is one gender. Yes, Bujold did it, and she did it, arguably, in the difficult way. But she was published by Baen.

Unless I missed something, the flood of these stories is mostly one way – mostly we’re in some idyllic future where men have been disposed of. All is peace, love and harmony. And that figure retching while reading is me.

Why? Because it’s stupid. And while a lot of science fiction is stupid – really? In the world of Star Trek no one gets paid? People just work because they want to? Behold homus novis! – this particular trope is something that drives me up the wall until I cling to the ceiling by my frayed nails.

So, why does it have this effect on me? Two reasons.

One is that it’s the suck-up’s route. (I don’t like suck ups. I used to wait for them behind the metaphorical bike sheds and beat seven kinds of… never mind. Like Pratchett’s character, I only ever managed to get six anyway.) These stories are easy to publish, they make you feel good and “progressive” with an added side of “speaking truth to power” WHILE at the same time the power – which for these purposes is the person publishing you – is cooing and billing over how wonderful you are for doing this. You want to impress me with an all-woman-peaceful world? Make it good enough that it will sell to Baen despite the publisher not being enamored of the idea. Then I’ll take my hat off to you.

Two is that it is such a gross violation of reality we know – with no explanation. And it gives people who have never experienced the unique female form of war and evil the mistaken impression that we born without a penis are some sort of angels. (It used to be most of the people who believed this were men, and that didn’t disturb me much, since deceiving them is just the nature of our game. However these days there seem to be a lot of young women raised on the fictions and neurosis of older women, who actually believe this. Unfortunately thinking they’re like onto angels, means they feel empowered to do ANYTHING: abuse, attack and attempt to destroy any victims of their collective wrath, for instance. The “mean girl” thing. Having seen this pulled on my son, I can neither endure nor countenance it.)

And if you’re wondering why I say it’s a gross violation of reality with no explanation, you’ve spent too much time in these books. And you might even believe in the original, primeval, matriarchal, all peaceful civilization…

Oh, boy. Get a chair. This is going to be a long one. I’m not going to pronounce on the original matriarchal civilization. It might or might not have existed. I suspect in some places it existed to an extent, in the dim future when the men traveled to “hunting camps” and women kept the fixed home-base. To the extent that women kept the place with its “memory” and ways of doing things, and raised the next generation of both males and females it’s quite possible they had the power in the society. But–

Peaceful?

I bring a tale of woe, my friends. Long ago and far away, I attended an all girl school. A terrible place, where I got to see the behavior of an all-girl society. One on one and woman on woman, women are less likely to pound and pummel. Too bad. Bruises heal and the friend you pounded last week becomes your friend again.

Women… sneak and betray. They tell tales. They build networks. They strive, continuously for dominance.

Pardon me if I sound mysogenistic. I’m not. This is the result of evolution too. Women gathered while men hunted. Our survival depended on manipulating the other women in the band so our children got priority and were watched very closely while we were busy with the berry bush. Bitch queens – bless their hearts – had a LOT of descendants. And their daughters did equally well if they bred true. Men, on the other hand, hunted. Yeah, they were more violent. On the other hand, a man who was unswervingly loyal to his mates knew a spear would rescue him form the mammoth’s tusk. Because he’d saved someone else last week.

(Yes, the patriarchal societies MIGHT have whooped the behind of the matriarchal ones, but my guess is the patriarchal ones were nomads, moving their whole tribe, and they waited till just the women were in the camp. It’s also possible the women didn’t have horses or the wheel. There are other explanations than women-good, men-evil. Not ALL losers were the good guys. In fact, in history… oh, never mind.)

So, are all males loyal, etc. ? Oh, please. There’s a spectrum. Just as there is for women. They are just differently VILLAINOUS. And differently violent. We know for a fact that most mass murderers who kill strangers are men. Most of the mass murderers who kill their nearest and dearest – particularly children in their care – are women. And it might be oppression making them do it, but I doubt it. The behaviors seem to hold true in every society.

So if we did away with me, what would we have? As it happens I have a novel plotted called Starsong, in which women are the dominant gender (there are reasons. It’s alternate history.) What would happen would be the Borgias writ large. At least that’s my opinion. Perhaps no armies in the fields – maybe – but a lot of inexplicable mass poisonings.

Given that, you see why the peaceful all-fem planet makes me ill. But, as announcers say, there’s more: to a vast segment of the male public (most of them in positions of power in publishing) this meme is even more of a win-win. Because not only do they get to don a feminist mantle and completely betray truth, but – even better – they get to have scenes of girl on girl sex. (Which at least one male editor [who, surprisingly, went on to buy me afterwards, for which he has me respect, considering the response I gave to this,] assured me “even girls like”. My response had to do with “only a small percentage.”)

And that ANNOYS the living daylights out of me. I have nothing against lesbians. Some of my best friends are lesbian. I wouldn’t mind if my (adopted) sister married one. BUT I do mind this sort of thing being used to scratch an itch and not even acting like honest porn but instead disguising itself behind high-minded nonsense.

If you don’t find this glorification of women at the expense of males, if you don’t think it infects society to a ridiculous degree, do me a favor. Next time you’re watching TV, take one of the commercials featuring a family. Change the roles of husband and wife. Now, are you offended? Should women be portrayed like that, as total dunces and men as all knowing?

If you tell me current commercials are more realistic, then you’re too far gone…

What memes seem to you to violate reality as we know it? What do you think has caused them to become entrenched? Which of them are just silly and which of them potentially reality-distorting in their ubiquity? And what do you think can be done about it?

*Crossposted at Classical Values and Mad Genius Club*

by Robert A. Hoyt

It’s that time again. Streaming live to you from the Entertainment and Sports Brain Network, this is your only source for real fantasy football, the annual Ultra Bowl game highlights. This year’s matchup is one of the starkest contrasts in playing style in Ultra Bowl history, with the New York Ninjas versus the Alaska Yetis. This year the game was held in the brand new Tesla Memorial Stadium in Colorado (Interestingly, the stadium was not built specifically for the Colorado C’thulus, who will be moving instead to a new home stadium in Ryleh. The project is due for completion sometime in mid to late 2011.). After some of the temporal and spacial problems caused by the malfunction of a local inter-dimensional transporter unit, it was thought that the field would be unusable. However, thanks to deft, and according to some, slightly illegal, deals with local safety officials, the field was cleared for use right on schedule. Fans marveled at the shiny weather-proof force field and luxurious ultra-modern anti-gravity seating, with most figuring out how to use said seating after sustaining only minor injuries.

· The Yetis, in characteristic fashion, arrived on the field loudly. The din from the arrival of the team was clearly taken as a challenge by the Yeti cheerleaders, who responded by jumping up and down and yelling back even louder. The sight of an angry, strategically shaved female yeti cheerleader is indescribable, but even if we could, for legal reasons, we wouldn’t. No one is entirely certain when the Ninjas arrived. The referees eventually had to ask where they were, whereupon they materialized from various hiding places around the field, including one player who was disguised,ironically, as a referee.

· The coin toss went to the Ninjas, who communicated their desire to receive through secret pieces of microfilm hidden in various places on each of the referees. One of the referees petitioned to have the Ninjas barred from the game on the grounds that “a man’s underwear is private”, but the writers of the Ultra Bowl rulebook (now revised twice a year, to be on the safe side), apparently hadn’t thought of that one yet. One of the Yetis, upset by the coin flip, thoroughly smashed the coin with a fist before plodding off to their end of the field.

· The Yetis offered a magnificent kickoff, which made it the 70 yard mark. Ninja receiver Arnold Itsimoru caught the kickoff with a magnificent triple somersault and began to run up-field. In an unanticipated move, with Yeti defenders closing in, Itsimoru threw a smoke pellet into the ground, and continued running as the bewildered Yetis collided behind him. The confusion allowed Itsimoru to get an unheard-of touchdown on the return.

· The Yetis bounced back quickly, unmercifully using their aptitude for snow and ice spells to literally freeze the Ninjas in their tracks. At this point it became clear that even a Ninja is not especially agile when suffering from severe frostbite. Counteracted by strategic and agile defense by the Ninjas, the Yetis made a hard-won struggle for dominance of the field, scoring a goal but failing the conversion thanks to a deftly handled Katana by Ninja defender Jordan Faraday. The teams were stalemated for the remainder of the first quarter.

· In the second quarter, Snowfang, quarterback for the Yetis, threw a high arc long bomb just out of the reach of the Ninjas to Windchill, a young yeti whose relatively small size (standing just seven feet, four inches), and uncharacteristic agility have made him a favorite for the MVP spot three years running. Although the ball was intercepted by Daniel Lee of the Ninjas, the speed lost in intercepting the ball allowed Windchill to catch him. A personal foul was called on Windchill, however, for proceeding to hold Lee upside-down and shake him until smoke pellets and throwing stars dropped from his uniform like confetti.

· The Ninjas managed to wrest control of the ball back from Yetis soon after, scoring a touchdown in quarter two. The Yeti line did not realize until it was too late that they had one additional player, Ninja tight-end Barry Wader, who had cleverly disguised himself as one of the Yetis, and who, upon catching a thrown bomb, proceeded to run the opposite direction at speed. The Yetis made a point of counting their players before each play from this point on.

· The Ninjas also scored via the brilliant tactic of using the imposing yetis as ladders before they could cast spells. Though not always successful, it was enough to put severe pressure on the Yeti linebackers and seriously disrupt their play style. Complemented by a variety of fascinating pyrotechnic abilities which counteracted the Yetis’ snow casts, the ninjas began to reclaim dominance of the field. Experts near the field began to pass comment about the effects of the spells on the fabric of reality, and asked that measuring equipment be brought in.

· Preservering, the yetis also scored a goal when Snowfang grabbed the ball, wrapped it tightly in his arms, and charged directly though the line of much-smaller ninjas. To the disappointment of Yeti fans, additional points were not counted for the three Ninjas and one Yeti Lineman kicked through the uprights by Pinecrusher on his mighty conversion kick, which ended the first half.

· The halftime show was provided by Pterodactylysis , a symphonic electronica band with strong big-band influences. The crowd thrilled to “Trilobyte Rhythm” which has enjoyed a three week run in the top ten on the pop charts. A brand-new, undebuted cover of the song “Ode to a Martian Girl” also made an appearance, the cool, thin harmonics striking a haunting and nostalgic feel in the air. But the mood quickly picked back up with “Towerfall” and finished with a spectacular rendition of “Heart of Krakatoa”, including taking advantage of recently perfected virtual reality technology in Tesla stadium, which finished the halftime show with a fully immersive simulation of a volcanic eruption. To say that the audience was surprised would be something of an understatement. Paramedics were called to deal with the results of the stampede.

· In an ironic note, therefore, the second half began with an opening play by the Yetis designed to even the field, wherein Snowfang cast a spell that deep-chilled the entire stadium, turning the supercooled grass into thousands of tiny spikes. The Ninja’s kicker nevertheless made an almost impossible leap off the goalpost to deliver a very respectable kick which was intercepted by the Yetis via throwing Windchill into the air. Fans scrambled to get out of the way as he tumbled from thirty feet in the air and plowed to earth, knocking over the goalpost and leaving a swathe of destruction through the stands, scoring a definitive return touchdown and moral victory for the Yetis.

· A t this point, officials in the stands started to pick up some worrying signals as the increasing levels of magic usage weakened the already damaged fabric of reality in the immediate vicinity of the stadium. After the goalpost was put back, the Ninjas took possession. Responding to the aggressive Yeti tactics, they summoning a full-sized dragon made of fire, which burnt craters into the ground and set yeti defender Winterbranch’s hair on fire. The fire dragon is a perfectly normal cast by the Ninjas in the late game, but in the circumstances it also mysteriously turned all the seats in the stadium into giant rubber ducks. It was generally agreed, however, that this made them far more useable.

· Not to be outdone, the Yetis called on the favorite Ultra Bowl tactic of tampering with the weather, encouraging a storm of freezing rain so aggressive that it shorted the weather-proof paneling on the forcefields (giving semi-serious electrical shocks to some of the fans), and seriously cooled off the dragon that had assisted the Ninjas in fighting their way up-field. Their ace lost, the Ninjas nevertheless scored an additional touchdown while they had the advantage of field position, Ninja Quarterback Francis Pretori spinning deftly down the field while touching the spiky turf only with a pair of knives. Two would-be tacklers on the Yeti side withstained superficial wounds while attempting to stop his advance up the field. In a related event, several of the vendors found that their wares had turned into horrible tentacled creatures with far too many eyes. Through a twist of good fortune, however, it was discovered that the creatures were delicious when wrapped in bacon or when dipped in chocolate. A major ice-cream company has since expressed interest in using them to expand their product line.

· The Ninjas began to move from their more defense-oriented stance, traditional for ninjitsu, to a more magic-heavy stance, casting an impenetrable haze of black smoke over the field to give themselves cover to maneuver. The Yetis, however, adapted to a very harsh environment often prone to conditions of limited visibility, soon proved that they were perfectly capable of detecting the ninjas through other means, swatting them away with suprising ease. The attack was finally ended entirely by a well-aimed freezing tornado that sucked up the smoke, four Ninja linemen, two jumboscreens and a chocolate-covered-otherworldly-creature-on-a-stick vending cart.

· To gain the upper hand, the Yetis strategically adjusted their weather spell into a thick downpour of snow. The Yetis managed to wail on the Ninjas through the tactic of magically packing on thick layers of snow and ice that both protected them against blows and increased their size and strength (an innate ability that gained yetis the name “abominable snowman”). Opposed only by the occasional well placed bomb, which would blow a lineman apart in an avalanche of snow, the Yetis proceeded to recoup two touchdowns with more relative ease than any team that has yet gone against the Ninjas, evening the score by the end of the third quarter. Key structural supports in parts of the stadium turned variously into glass, cookie dough, and a giant llama, but fans were evacuated quickly and no fatalities occurred. The llama, however, is still at large.

· As the fourth quarter opened, with everything still to play for, the Ninjas opted for a spell that caused giant, red-hot steel blades to pop suddenly out of the field without any apparent pattern. This is a rarely used spell for the Ninjas, but their superior training gives them an advantage that their opponents do not have, and it showed. The spell made the oversized, snow-packed Yetis too encumbered and slow to react sufficiently in their environment, and the Ninjas pressed forward for all they were worth, battling the Yetis to within ten yards of their goal line. In an unorthodox move, the Yetis used a desperate last minute spell to bury everyone, including themselves, in seven feet of snow. With their massive snowshoe-esque feet allowing them to tread over the top of the buried blades, the halfback, Iceclaw, pushed the ball back 40 yards, before dropping into a crevasse that had been melted in the snow by a blade. After a short consultation with the doctors, then with a necromancer, Iceclaw returned to play with only a slight lingering craving for brains.

. At this point, due to the ongoing magic usage, the traditional rules of gravity began to wear a little thin. Dense balls of snow and huge sections of ground hovered around the stadium according to local gravitational effects. Fans continued to cheer from the stands, some sitting on any available comfortable spot on the ceiling or wall, some having fastened themselves somehow to their rubber ducks, and in a few unsettling cases, some having used the seat-belts that the ducks appeared with in the first place. A confusing scrum started on the bottom of one of the larger snowballs which drifted slowly towards the Ninja side as the players fought for control of the ball. Most plays, however, involved the player in possession of the ball leaping from patch to patch, occasionally lurching sideways and falling into the bleachers or experiencing the dreaded fall-into-the-sky (at least until they left the vicinity of the stadium, whereupon they generally would fall back down). This allowed for some interesting ambush plays by Ninjas, who would often sneak up on Yetis from underneath to steal the ball (often to have a yeti smash the entire globe they were standing on a moment later). At one memorable point, a chase encircled one of the larger globes of snow four times before the whistle was blown. Despite the confusion caused by the fifty yard line drifting to roughly twenty yards from the Yetis and the thirty yard line for the Ninjas getting lost entirely, the teams appeared dead even.

· With one minute left on the clock, Snowfang fell back to regroup. In a final all-or-nothing move, he arranged the pieces of snow into a larger version of the individual snow-packing spell used earlier by the team. The resulting snow-golem, resisting the conflicting gravitational forces, began to trudge toward the ninja end zone with Snowfang on its shoulder. In response, a contingent of Ninjas quickly erected an enormous yin-yang patterned shield to block the advancing giant. But, taking advantage of an upward gravitational current, Snowfang jumped off the golem and high into the air above the stadium, shooting back down again at terminal velocity and puncturing the roof as he fell into the Ninja endzone, thus scoring the final touchdown of the game. Due to the combined duress of the golem spell and the impact of the falling Yeti, the entire outer shell of the stadium turned into Swedish to Venusian Dictionaries and blue peanuts and exploded.

So it looks like, though both teams fought hard for it, the Yetis will be the ones taking home an Ultra Bowl trophy this year. There will be a lot of very happy yetis out there tonight, especially in the cities along the Alaskan interior. In the meantime, Tesla Memorial stadium has been shut down, pending major repairs and an overhaul of local spacetime. Despite warnings, many fans are taking home their rubber ducks as souvenirs. Some investors are predicting a serious uptick in sales of jumbo bathtubs as a result of the event. A couple of Ninjas felt an unfortunate necessity to commit hari-kari after the match, but the good news is that many of the undead teams, such as the Baton-Rouge Bonedolls and Washington Zombies, have expressed interest in recruiting them. Thankfully, not all of them took it that badly. At least one is believed to have left the stadium disguised as a rubber duck. That’s all for this year. Thank you for tuning in, and goodnight.

I’m now deep in the throes of finishing the mystery. It looks like it should be done tomorrow at the latest (fingers crossed.) Unfortunately, I’ve reached that stage where I can’t really think of any other type of writing until this book is done.

This will happen periodically, usually in my last week of a book. I hope you guys can survive without my sparkling musings :).

I suppose I should have posted yesterday, but we went to a superbowl party at the home of an old friend. This is always pleasant, as we get to see friends we hadn’t seen in a long time. (Though this year we seem to be running into Rebecca and Alan Lickiss a lot more than usual — and that’s a good thing.) Anyway, they keep their house much colder than we keep ours — look, children, I grew up in a coastal Mediterranean climate. The air should be about seventy year round. That’s all — so by the time I got home and warmed up to Sarah-normal, I got sleepy, as one does.

So, today I’m going to sit here, with D’Artagnan the cat draped across lap and finish A Fatal Stain. If I have brain left by tonight, I’ll write something fun for you guys.

I have it on good authority that there will be an ultra bowl report from my son, later. If you don’t know what I’m talking about and even if you don’t — particularly if you don’t, maybe — care for football, you should check out:

Ultra Bowl 2010

Ultra Bowl 2009

I’m fairly sure I’m not to blame for this. At least, I hope not.