Thoughts on Money and Freedom

I have a piece on collaboration/group work my son sent me, which I’ll be putting up later, but for now I’m faced with the old dilema of having to put up something while my mind is definitely not in blog-post mode.

I’m still battling the weird feeling that my body is trying to get sick: a scratching at the back of the throat, a feeling that there’s weakness under the strength. I suspect I need a serious long-term physical work up, and I’ll try to get that as soon as I dig out from under deadlines, G-d willing round about November or so? Meanwhile, I take some zinc and soldier on.

This morning I woke up late – see that trying to get sick thing – and didn’t want to get up at all, but life rarely affords that type of indulgence. I went for the usual 3 mile walk (If I can get another ten pounds down, I’ll start running again. Right now I’m afraid to damage the knee I injured years ago) came home, had breakfast, and answered email. I’m now sitting here with a cup of tea trying to collect thoughts which are all hanging out Thena and Kit as they get the heck out of dodge – I mean Eden – in a gambit to both save Eden from itself and, possibly, save Kit from a fate worse than death. So, the following are random and stray thoughts:

– listening to Starman Jones  – another I thought was JUST a short story – during my walk, two things struck me: the fact that “guilds” are hereditary and that the man at the top of the guild is effectively an aristrocrat concerned most of all with position. This struck me as oddly prophetic, but not surprising since it’s the way human societies go, given enough time. Also, the fact that Heinlein states the market will find a way around laws and restrictions. Where there’s demand, there will be supply. You can distort it and twist it but not stop it. I have only recently realized that and it is something to think about. If you assume you can’t stop whatever the market is – drugs, risky surgery, or more mundane things like luxury goods – you can only twist it, the law of unwanted consequences SHOULD stop most laws from being written, if people in power gave it any thought. Do they? I fail to see any evidence.

– on the funny side, somehow the Darkship universe partakes bits of even Heinlein books I never read.  There are genetics that have nothing to do with DNA (as Pratchett would say.)

– related, in the sense of “supply-demand”, and also in the sense of entrenched “power” becoming a de-facto aristocracy and, like all such, slow to respond to technological change: Watching the traditional publishing world implode is both horrifying/terrifying and exhilarating. It’s horrifying because I always expected, having paid my dues, to have a staid career and, as it were, grow old in my quarters. This doesn’t seem to be in the cards. OTOH swimming for your life is a very … Invigorating experience, and can’t fail to make me feel younger. Also, it opens up a whole panoply of options that I never even thought about before. Prognosis: guarded. Further prognosis: I’ve got a million to one chance of emerging out of this with a paying career, even as the publishing houses self-destruct spectacularly. In other words, to quote Terry Pratchett, by the laws of narrativium, it’s a sure thing.

– I still like working at home too much, so I’m not sure of the advisability of an office. But I have to make this work, somehow, because I think over the next sixteen months or so, I need to write more than I’ve ever written before. Wish me luck.