Month: November 2013

 But who buys books just because they have a strong female lead? No one I know, and when I asked a small group of female authors, the immediate, visceral response was, well, unprintable. The trend to write women as improbably physically strong, with the morals of a bunny in heat, and the brains of a gnat makes most of us who are actually strong women froth at the mouth. It was pointed out to me that most people consider “that twit from Pirates of the Caribbean” a strong woman, and at that I blinked and stopped.

 Athena in Darkship Thieves is so strong she needs Kit as a governor. Bella in my story needs sort of the same thing. Not governor as a ruler, but someone who gives them a check on their respective temper and magical power. Otherwise they would run out of control, burning out and doing great damage they would regret too late. Sometimes having someone you can trust utterly is a very good thing, and in modern books, that person is never a male. Which is a damage to our society that is incalculable. If we fear and hate the other sex, we lose that which can make us stronger, the ability to pull together in harness. Because that’s what’s missing with the feminist reaction, knowing that both are wrapped up in it together.

 My Evil Muse (who inhabits the same body as my First Reader) keeps coming by and dropping ideas in my ear. The Left tends to want only the women in books to do anything good, because all men are brutes only good for sex and muscles. Men are to be feared because all they want is sex, and sure, that’s fun, but only when I want it and never with any commitments attached and oh, by the way, you males aren’t even allowed to look at me, or I’ll scream… the breathless feminist proclaims. Just look at the nonsensical harassment claims that proliferate on the internet. How strong is that, really? The last time I was being hit on, and couldn’t just laugh it off, I dealt with it by making it very clear I was with someone else, and the man backed off. It wasn’t that I needed a protector. It was that I had back-up. But he is much more than that. Confidante, friend, warmth in the night when I have bad dreams… And I give much the same to him in return. It’s a partnership, and that’s what I was trying to capture in Pixie Noir. That a strong woman and a strong man might need one another to succeed.

Snippets of Pixie Noir, here.

No, I honestly am not abandoning, Rogue Magic, but it might be on hiatus another couple of weeks, simply because I need to do reconciliation stuff, and halfway through another book, plus dealing with the onset of the holidays (which is much like a fever) I haven’t had time to.

So, I thought I’d give you a really quick update on the state of the writer, which you can sort of scan, as you run off for your black friday shopping.

First, No Will but His keeps selling and selling and selling, even though I don’t yet have my own paper version out and you have to dig to find it.  This is good and bad: good because of course I like making money.  Bad because it means in 2014 I’ll need to take a month or a couple of them and do refresh-research and write the other wives of Henry VIII, for my very own little mini-series.

I wonder if the reason it sells so well relative to everything else is that it’s tangentially romance (I mean, she does lose her head!) or because of reflected interest from the Tudors series (which I loathed, but never mind.  I’m not a TV person.)

Plain Jane the book I wrote under a house name about Jane Seymour is still selling too and has now paid me as much in royalties as the initial advance (or more, I haven’t paid attention recently.)

So, there is a strong impetus to write dead queens.  It should also be easy, since I know the time period fairly well.  It’s just more work on the slate.  OTOH maybe five of those, this time new and without a “mainstream” edition will allow me to hire an assistant and help resolve my fatal time deficit.  It’s worth a try.  (This one is only making me about $100 a month.  Not sneezing at it and not bad given its handicap, but you know… I hear these things are exponential, and maybe 5 books will mean $1000 a month. Worth a try, right?  So, on the slate.)

The musketeers are selling fairly well too, and I need to get sixth book finished.  Am not sure how to relaunch the series, so I might as well throw it out there for those of you like me who are sitting around and doing all your shopping (the little there is) electronic.

Should I just issue the book as I do my old ones, or should I bring it out with fanfare and send out ARCs for reviews, or just drop it out there and let the fans find it?  The chances of its getting a review in one of the mystery mags are — I think — low, but maybe Forbes will review it?

The same goes for Witchfinder.  Given my double plus ungood — and widely vented — opinions, let alone working for PJM I suspect my chances of getting a review in Locus, or even PW, are slightly less than a snowball’s in hell — and I don’t even mean a GOOD review.  OTOH this is the first “real” novel I’m bringing out indie, and part of me is insisting I should go ahead and send out ARCs (which means that those who advance-paid would get e-arcs before Christmas, btw. And then the book later, of course.)

I have the cover in hand and the edited manuscript, so I just need time to go through it, and to get the cover lettered.  So … at the rate things are here, two weeks are about right.  But that would delay the “real book” release to March, as opposed to bringing the book out before Christmas.

Is the ordering I’ll get from bookstores for the paper book worth it?  How many fans find books exist via the trades, as opposed to having my name on perma-search, as I have Pratchett and F. Paul Wilson?

I honestly don’t know.  I work in isolation from the trades, but I wonder if there is a significant bump?  Sound off on what you think, and not just “I want a book for Christmas, you ‘orrible, ‘orrible, teasing writer.”

Other things — I’m working on Through Fire and having issues not making Simon unsympathetic.  He’s twisted, but really, he’s fighting for (his own) survival and has pretty much always been.

And later on today I’ll put up subscriber content and hopefully upload a new novella to the sales channels.

Right now, I’m going to find an iv for caffeine and try to figure out how to pass for human, so I can get to the point where I CAN write.

It’s trite, it’s all too facile, but here is a short and incomplete list of thankfulness.  Sometimes, particularly in the middle of a hard slog, it’s important to remember that some things went better than could be expected.

I’m thankful that 29 years ago, on the rebound, I blundered into possibly the only man I could love my whole life.  And I’m thankful that in the few times the road got bumpy we realized it and stuck to each other.

I’m thankful for the boys.  Yes, part of me will always mourn the other 12 children I didn’t have, but if I had to have only two, I’m glad it’s these two: Robert who is brilliant and driven and serious, and Marshall who is quiet and inventive and unexpectedly very, very funny.

I’m thankful for the cats.  Yes, yes, no woman should have to mop the front hall at seven in the morning, even if it’s polyurethaned, because the two ex-boy cats are having a precedence thing, but the cats remind me there’s something outside the human world and also give me something to care for that genuinely can’t care for itself.  Some days it gets me out of bed.  Also, this morning when I opened the back door, Greebo, the not-our-cat, came running and engaged in elaborate purring and rubbing before even checking out his food dish.  (He’s just a big softy.)

I’m thankful for this blog.  Sometimes it feels like lifting something very heavy to get up in the morning and write this.  But it makes my day more normal “Get up, interact with other people.”  It also makes it less lonely to know you guys have the same concerns and often the same thoughts.

I’m thankful for the tip jar.  I swear subscriber material will start going up more often, and I’ll figure out what’s wrong with the zazzle shop so I can have t-shirts made and all.  But with all that, a couple of times the tip jar helped me turn a very tight corner.  It’s also helping me do things on the indie side far more professionally than I could otherwise.

I’m thankful seventeen of you trudged out in a very cold night, to meet at my favorite diner.  We had a blast and next year must arrange some thing with more time, and maybe somewhere we can actually all talk better. Also, we need to arrange one of these next Summer, when I come to Dallas.

I’m thankful that I can make a living doing what I love.  I wish it were a bigger living, but we’re getting there, both traditional and indie, little by little.  I expect next year the living will be better and the year after much better.  And that’s not something to sneeze at.  Not these days.

I’m thankful for Indie.  Yes, having to learn all this new stuff under pressure is driving me nuts, and I could use twenty times as much time, but you know what?  I like learning things.  It’s fun.  As is the feel of a wide open field and a limitless future.

I’m thankful for my part time job with PJM.  When I was a teen I wanted to be a journalist, and it’s fun to be one, part time.

But most of all I’m thankful for the USA.  Yes, I know it is an hour of great peril, and it is fragile, and we must fight in ways we haven’t even invented yet.

But think about how much worse it would be if it had never come into being.  And it was in the balance then too, you know?  It was all too easy for it never to happen.

Government by the people for the people might be a difficult thing to keep going, to ensure it doesn’t perish from this Earth.  But how much harder if we had to invent it.

I’m grateful for my inventive, rollicking, puritan, shockingly sexual, innovative, stodgy, fresh as paint, ancient as humanity, brilliant, noisy homeland.

May it live on.  Humanity needs it.  The future comes from America.  And America belongs in the future.

Or, as son calls it Hun-Hukkah.  If you’re in the Denver area and have time and are feeling brave, gather ye in to 1962, Colfax, Pete’s Kitchen, around 7 pm.  Try for a seat in the annex (it’s sort of a glassed in area to the side.)  Knowing my family, the Hoyts will roll in at +15 minutes.  I’m the middle aged, harrassed-looking broad.  (Middle-aged is charitable, mind.)

If not many people there, we’ll just have   a quiet dinner.  If many people there… who knows.  I hope Denver survives.

So I thought I’d give a report, only it’s not a report on the current state of my writing so much as on the current state of my psyche – and no, it’s not whining.  In fact, it’s surprisingly not whining.

It’s almost exactly a year since I decided to throw caution and social manner to the winds and be myself as hard as I could on this blog, as well as everywhere else.

I’m not even absolutely sure how to characterize this “coming out” since I find being called “conservative” an almost puzzling when my ideal state is almost a complete overturn of the current crony capitalism and also has bloody nothing to do with “conservative” in Europe which implies a belief in classes, etc.  But I know that when I decided to start talking about what I believe I KNEW the “establishment” would characterize me as “conservative” and also, therefore, as “a bad person.”

Look, first, I’m going to point out that having to hide your opinions, political or otherwise, is likely the normal state of the human race.  I’m not whining (or not much) except in comparison perhaps with an ideal state, where every man shall sit beneath his vine and his olive tree and no man shall make them afraid – something that has yet to happen in the state of human life.

One of the unspoken conditions of getting a job is to pretend to be the sort of person that your employer would like to employ.  This can mean something innocuous, like you’re the sort of person who is clean and polite and show up on time, but because humans are humans you pick people like you (or like what you want to be like) to associate with, so you’re likely to pick people on less tangible characteristics.  It is not a slander to say that religious people might prefer someone of their religion.  Throughout history, immigrant communities have preferred to hire someone of their own ethnicity.  And people who’ve gone to the “correct” colleges and hold the “correct” opinions are likely to hire the same.  Which is what we’re faced with in the writing community.

It only seems strange because it’s so uniform, and there used to be almost no refuge.  That is a side effect of both the concentration of publishing into a very few houses and of the “long march” that the extreme left has engaged in in this country.  (Very long – if we’re to believe Heinlein, and I do, then they were in a fair way to taking over one of the major parties in the thirties.)

To me, too, hiding my opinions was perfectly normal.  Look, guys, if I hadn’t learned the fine art of double think, there’s a good chance I wouldn’t have survived my high school years, let alone emerged from college with a degree in the liberal arts.  I just pretended, when answering the questions that they were set in a separate universe, where Marxism works.

So when I started trying to break into writing, I didn’t consciously think of hiding my opinions, but I also didn’t go out of my way to rub anyone’s nose in them.  And then, after I’d broken in and talked to some editors – including the surreal conversation with the one who thought libertarians wanted to ban the internal combustion engine (and also were close kin to Satan) – I started not only purposely hiding my politics but laying in a trail of confusion and razzle dazzle both in my works and out of it.

Mind you, my opinions are “diverse” enough.  As most of you know I have no issues with gay marriage, but I do have an issue with forcing churches to perform it.  I can see euthanasia being legalized as a personal decision (none of my business, even if I’d try to talk a friend out of it) but hate the idea of the creep (people who are allowed to euthanize while depressed/mentally ill) and also of the state (or even the establishment) convincing people to do this “for the good of others.”  I won’t say I don’t have an issue with abortion – in terms of “war on women” the health issues that attend it, the SOCIETAL issues that attend it, and the almost universal pressure to sanctify it are pretty icky.  I’ve talked about it on this blog, and I don’t intend to go there again.  I think the whole “you’re a human if mommy says so” corrodes our civil liberties.  I also think it’s almost impossible to stop before ten weeks, and the whole idea of a regulatory apparatus to stop it completely makes me queasy. In my more annoyed moments I wonder if the regulatory apparatus to stop the murder of ADULTS is worth is.

Beyond that, it’s a gut thing.  I was raised “pro choice” – no other option since I grew up in Europe and all the bien pensant were “pro choice” – but I haven’t called myself that since the first time I got pregnant.  Personal. Internal.  Intense.  Let it go.

However, the way the establishment works, it doesn’t matter how many things you agree with them on, if you don’t agree with them on something, then you are Satan.  It is, I think, the result of being a small, insular society, no different from a tiny village in an isolated region.  They are afraid of the stranger and those who are different.

So I learned to play on the opinions I shared with them and not mention the ones I didn’t.  The fact that they tend to assume “all smart people agree with me” helped me greatly.  As did the fact they believe “conservatives” froze sometime between the nineteenth century and the fifties.  The fact I think women have minds, the fact I believe melanin has nothing to do with capacity to perform intellectual tasks.  If I touted those, I was immediately assumed to be “one of the good people.”

Not enough, mind.  I was never willing to parrot the whole party line enough to become one of the precious darlings.  That’s fine.  But it was enough to keep publishing in a broad spectrum of houses.  And I didn’t go so far, I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror.

I thought…

I confess I didn’t realize how much pressure I’d been under.  I used a nom de blog to comment on political blogs (and cause mischief.)  I was in the background of several discussions as the Dan Rather thing unraveled for instance.  But in the daylight world, I pretended never to read anything outside Main Stream media.

Then Toni Weisskopf, who had been talking to me ABOUT Puppet Masters asked if I wanted to write the afterword to the re-edition of the book.

There’s no way I could pass that up, even if it meant outing myself.  In fact, at the time I remember thinking “Should I?”  then I thought “Come on, how many of them will read Heinlein?”

As it turns out surprisingly few.  In fact, each step in this “coming out” was attended with a few more whispers, but nothing overt, until a year ago when I finally started seeing doors overtly shut in my face. Which is fine.  I knew what I was doing.

It still comes as a LONG journey.  Four years ago, I practically spit coffee on my monitor when I saw my name mentioned on Instapundit (turned out to be about one of my books.)  The last year I’ve now and then helped out when Glenn is on vacation…  And yet it was only when I decided not to stay away from politics on this blog that people got upset.  And frankly the posts they get REALLY upset about are the anti-Marxist ones.  (All the while assuring me they are NOT Marxist and that Marxism is dead.  Guys, historians are going to have a field day with our time.  If enough civilization survives that there are historians.)

Have doors shut off?  Well, yes.  Though nothing overtly enough that I could tell you “this is because I came out.”  — I think in the modern day, discrimination, whether from the left or right, is more subtle than that, which is why people feel the need to fake overt discriminatory episodes.  They know it’s there, and they can’t prove it, and they go unhinged – and frankly, with the advent of indie at the same time, the couple of doors that shut off were a blessing in disguise – it meant I had SOME time to go indie in, in addition to my work for Baen.

So – a year in, what has my final throwing open of the ideological closet doors meant?

Externally, not much.  Indie gave me the ability to do what a friend had advised and I couldn’t do YEARS ago: a) never work for people I don’t respect.  B) don’t write something just because you can sell it and you need the money.

Even if I hadn’t come out politically, my external demeanor would be the same, because… indie.

Internally…

Internally… it’s a whole other matter.  I didn’t realize, honestly, I didn’t, how much effort it took just to hold up the false front.  Imagine that you have to go through an entire day holding up one of those Greek theater masks in front of your face with your right hand.  Everything you do is with your left, and you can’t shift your arm, you don’t have flexibility to rest that hand, you don’t—

Like that.  But over years and years.  The brain space devoted to playing chess with potential would-be guessers of my real opinion, and more importantly, the brain space required to not say something I couldn’t live with while not openly dissenting, were driving me batty, and I didn’t even know it.

Mind you, I wasn’t even any good at dissembling. I’ve since found that everything I think shows on my face (which explains so much.)

BUT just keeping this side of open opposition was taking so much nervous energy that it’s a miracle I could write at all.

A year later?  A year after being able to admit to my own thoughts in public?  How does it feel?

Well, it feels very strange – you have to remember I grew up in an environment where most of my beliefs are beyond heretical.  It’s the habit of a life time. – Sometimes I put up posts, and this will be one of them (note I’m putting it up the day before Thanksgiving with blog traffic in the tank.  I’m brave, but not crazy.) – and wait for the blow to fall and cringe at the screaming that will surely start.

But it also feels… well… the way to describe it is that I have more room to be myself in.  It’s like I grew up in a little box and now for the first time I can stretch out.

I feel – whole.  That would be the best way to describe it.  Just whole.

So – is that worth it?  I mean, I don’t go out of my way to yell my politics at the hairdressers, in the grocery store, on the street (okay, I do shout at certain bumperstickers, but I always did!  And it’s in the privacy of my own car) or in social occasions.  BUT when I’m having a discussion with someone, I can let my reason go where it will and not be afraid it will endanger my livelihood.

And when I’m writing, I don’t have to think “How does this belief sound if I were a NYC liberal?”  I can let the writing flow, and be what it needs to be.

That alone – that alone is worth it. A thousand times yes.  It’s not a luxury most human beings have been able to have throughout history.

The great artists of the past, and the great writers too, were all hemmed in on politics and had to step carefully.

But we’ve come to a point I couldn’t keep quiet any longer.  We might be playing for all the civilizational chips.  And it feels very good not to be on the sidelines.  And mostly – from a personal point of view – it feels good to be whole and to be myself as hard as I can.

Note – There will be a post on Write It Like It’s Hot — on what you can steal, what you can’t, and how to keep safe from copyright infringement over at MGC in half an hour.  Sorry to be so late, but my family has the day off and I was enjoying their company.

I sympathize with people who want to live forever.  Truly, I do. I have all these ideas and more importantly so many things I want to learn and do. Right now I want to learn poser, for instance, not so much for the animation (were there time and life enough, I’d want to do that too.  In fact if I were a kid right now I’d be looking at how to make animated movies on my own or with one or two friends) but for the character creation/drawing/background.  It would be easier, frankly, to do my own covers, but also if I got good enough you could put some of it for sale on dreamstime – another stream of income.

But the question is – if you lived forever, would you really?

Bear with me.

Recently I started putting the Musketeers’ Mysteries up.  I now have the first three, Death of A Musketeer, The Musketeer’s Seamstress and The Musketeer’s Apprentice.  These were books on which I thought I’d have to do minimal work before I put them up.  At first I had this vague, hopeful idea of doing a document compare between the published version and mine, and making some choices, and voila, edited manuscript.

It doesn’t work that way.  For one, assuming that the edits were sane or rational would be truly unwise.  I’ve been finding that changes were done after page proofs (this part I actually knew since the Shakespeare books, where I happened to read a passage in the middle and hit the ceiling, as someone had changed it to their idea of Shakespearean English, but it was actually illiterate English.)  A lot of them were done by someone who ran spell checker and ran merrily ahead with no idea of what difference archaic English has from modern one.  A lot of word-salad sentences.

For this reason, I went painstakingly line by line on Seamstress where I found a “brilliant” thing, where someone had changed Armand Jean Du Plessis, Cardinal de Richelieu’s birth name to Armand Jean de Richelieu – clearly not understanding titles, and also failing to get that the title was not bestowed on him till he was a Cardinal and the king’s counselor.  (And this referred to his young misadventures.)  I have no idea when that was changed.  Might very well have been before page proofs.  The two years in which this series was being written was the time at which my younger son was having issues in school, and then when I was homeschooling him.  THAT was rather the focus of my attention, and though I worked very hard at the writing (I have a map of Paris at the time that I bought from a war gaming site.  It’s right now behind a bookcase, but it will come out and onto the wall again when I’m writing the next one) and I ordered books from France for the things not covered here – but when you’re doing three of these a year, when the page proofs come back you might not have an enormous amount of time, and you assume(d) that while they might not be improving your prose, they’d leave your details alone.

You’d be wrong.

A similar detail got flagged in a review of The Musketeer’s Apprentice – and it was the same exact issue, only in this case I was fairly sure (still am fairly sure – it’s had to be absolutely sure as I can’t remember which of the ten versions on the drive was the one I sent in – I was naming them things like final, really final, truly, truly final.  Yeah, I need a system) that in the manuscript turned in there had been an explanation of the name, and a quip on it.  It’s in eight of the versions on my drive.  Did I delete it in one of the passes, thinking it sounded clunky and meaning to type something else, and then it never got re-written?  Wouldn’t be the first time.  Of course, as it stands it’s an insane error – and you’d think that the publishing house would catch it, right?  Guys, I’m not even sure that the underpaid flunky who went over it (the same bright flare who wanted me to say something about Porthos remembering “subconsciously”) didn’t remove it because it was clunky or because she had seen a movie which made that mistake.

The problem with that was that I didn’t go over Musketeer’s Apprentice as I went over Musketeer’s Seamstress – the thing would almost likely have hit me in the face – and that the version I sent to the people doing it for me was one of those without the explanation.  So the first version I uploaded still had the mistake.  (Yes, I’ve uploaded a new one.)

The other bad review made more sense, and is more to the point here – I gave absolutely ludicrous names to the walk-on characters, even if they walked on in two books.  Why?  I have no clue.  I have a very vague idea about its amusing me, but I have no idea WHY.  I think honestly, if you were to dissect it deep down by that time I was so deeply resentful of the publisher that it was a joke on them.  The same way I set the refinishing mysteries in Goldport because I knew they wouldn’t catch it.

But didn’t I think of my readers?  Well, not really.  Partly because this was the time when I had six books out and none made it to shelves.  Partly because I thought the readers would “get” it.  (In which I was not only wrong, but I can’t imagine what I was thinking.)

I’d changed that in the first two books, as I did the line by line, but not in the third because one of the ridiculous names was necessary for my denouement.  I figured it out, and did that, and reuploaded the book.

The problem now, though, is that I can’t POSSIBLY trust myself then.  It’s not just that the books were very badly edited.  The thing with the joke names shook me from the beginning, but it’s not just that.  Going through the first two – there are choices…

I don’t know how to explain this.  It’s not even word choices, though it’s that too – it’s a thousand little different choices in how you tell a story.  In terms of movies, it’s what you light and what you obscure. There are a thousand different choices that read as though they were made not so much by a clueless newby, but by someone completely different.

Now, I’m aware – none better – that you can’t just go back and rewrite everything you ever wrote.  Writers of the past didn’t, heaven knows.  And a few of my very favorite authors have a strong inflection in the middle of their careers, where the stuff before is pretty standard, even if touched with genius, and the stuff after is uniquely theirs.  But writers of the past weren’t faced with bringing out indie editions of their work, either, where you’re more uniquely responsible for it.

That said, two caution points.  A) the musketeer mysteries have their fans, and I still get requests for number six, which means as annoying as they are to me now, they can’t be that bad B) I wrote them after ten years of reading a lot of historical mystery, which in the last ten years hasn’t happened at all, or at least not deep-historical (coming from where I do, 100 years is not history, merely old news.)

So of course I’m not going to go back and rewrite the whole things, but I am, before I bring them out in print (I have a proof for DOAM in my hot little hands, but I won’t put it up until I have time to go over it step by step. Also, I had an attack of random capitalization, among other places in the blurb.) I’m going to go line by line and do my best to fix the most outrageous instances of “this isn’t me any longer.”

So, besides the fact that – I am that neurotic – I spent two days considering giving up the whole writing thing, because you can bet I’m making mistakes today that will make me cringe in ten years, it made me feel awfully queasy on “who wrote these books?”

It might seem like I’m being stupid – but it’s not that obvious from the inside.  Look, I know my own hand – any craftsman does.  In the decisions you make, I know how my hand turns, as it were.  I know my fingerprints in the clay.

But these books, written only – I think – seven or eight years ago, feel alien.  As though someone else entirely wrote them.  They feel not-me.

Was I not me seven years ago?  How do I know?  Do you?  Some of my older stuff might as well have been written by an alien, but this one shook me, because it’s still close enough and because I was already a seasoned pro.  Who is that woman who wrote those books? And what happened to her?

As we live longer lives who lives that lives?  What is the continuity in the human mind and heart?

 Charlie Martin and I were talking about how over the last fifty years life expectancy essentially doubled.  And yes, I know people will come in and say “if you survived childhood” – bullsh*t.  Lies, damn lies and statistics.  Yes, there were probably always people who lived till eighty in any population, and there would be the marked outlier who lived to 100.  But what people expected to live, what was considered old – all that has moved.

I remember being a little girl and hearing of someone dying at sixty and everyone shaking their heads and going “well, he was old.  It was his time.”

Shakespeare died at 58 and he was a very old man.

My son who volunteers at the hospital says barring accident MOST – like 80% — of the people who come in in really bad shape are in their hundreds. 

We’re living longer.  We’re living healthier.  When I was ten, I met someone who was 80, which seemed like an impossible age, and he looked/acted like the 100 year olds today.  My dad is 83 and is not a human wreck.

Are all of us going to live that long?  There are no guarantees of course.  Pie in the sky, they might invent rejuv and we might all live 200 years.

BUT the question is – who will live that long?

I’m forever stunned with both the continuity and the changes, and how they’re not what you expect, or anyone would.  A friend I hadn’t talked to in decades, but who is one of the few people who knew me growing up, wasn’t even vaguely surprised by my turn to the libertarian end of politics “Yes, but you were always like that.  You just didn’t have a name for it.”

Another friend, possibly my oldest friend, when I was raging at being stuck in a “literary” niche several years ago said “That would drive you nuts.  You never wanted to do weighty and worthy things. You wanted to write pulp.”  And that was accurate, but I didn’t remember wanting it.

In some ways, as I get older, I seem to become more and more myself.

But then there is going back and looking at things I wrote and going “who IS this stranger?”  It’s entirely possible, of course, that the stranger was the result of my having hit my head around that time (I understand severe concussion can take five years to fully recover from) and also of my being under intense emotional pressure, both because of what the school was doing to my son, and because of my situation in publishing itself, which often resembled running to stay in place.

But frankly, it feels more that, as a writer, I was a different person.

So, when I think I’d love to live forever – or at least till 200 – and learn and do and write, I wonder who that would be.

Perhaps we, each of us, die a little every day.  They say we change all our body cells in seven years (?)  Perhaps we change all our personality in seven years, little by little, by accretion, like the sea taking and depositing material, till in the end we’re someone completely different and our younger selves are dead and gone.

No matter how long we live.

My friend Cedar sent me a link to a page of writing advice, and I was going to fisk it point by point today.  The wretched thing is called 10 Things To Do To Become A Better Writer In 10 days and my first reaction to it was somewhere between anger and laughter.  Laughter because all the suggestions are ridiculous, starting with the first which is that you become an internet troll to learn humility or something and ending with her suggestion for how you should make yourself cry by imagining the happiness of the troops reunited with their families as The One This Author Has Been Waiting For “ended” the war in Iraq.  That last one, particularly, stuck in my craw like a red hot poker.  I know enough military men to be aware of the fact that they don’t sign up so they can sit at home with their families.  They sign up to keep their country safe.  And I know enough history to know that wars aren’t ended unilaterally.  We went in because Saddam was encouraging and rewarding Jihadists – and yes, killing his own people, but frankly that was a sop used to sell the war to liberals – and making it seem that America had lost face in a region of the world where losing face means you’re weak and ripe for the plucking.

And now we’re leaving, because American liberals who know no history and no war, and who think that they “ended” the Vietnam war, think that the way to end a war is for America to leave.

Mark my words, we’ll be back again.  We’ll be back again when we lose an American city.  We’ll be back again when the region is in flames.  Unless G-d really has made the United States his particular pet, and protects us beyond what we have any right to expect, we’ll be back again.

Mark my words, your grandchildren and mine too will pay for the folly of these protected precious flowers who think that the world is kindergarten, and if a kid just says he won’t hit anyone, he won’t be hurt.  (And a peculiar kindergarten at that.  One of those for really rich kids where they have an aid for every two kids.)

So, yes, when I think of the troops being pulled back from a war they’re not allowed to win, I do want to cry.  But not in the way the writer meant it.

So I was going to write a fisking – point by point – called “How to be a precious darling.”  It was going to be fun and glorious and…

Only I slept on it.  I slept on it, and I woke this morning with the whole thing making me feel vaguely nauseated.

The problem with that article – and this is not a writing thing, we’re doing this all around, including in admission to colleges – is that it has absolutely zero to do with writing.  Instead, it has an awful lot to do with morality and moral preening.

Worse, this has to do with a vision of what morality is that would shock almost all of the great religions (though not the small tribal religions of the most primitive people.)  It is “morality by general liberal consensus.”

Thus we get this advice on being a troll and then apologizing to “learn humility” – which makes one wonder what “humility” means to this author.  I’d like her to study a dictionary or historical definitions of humility.  Look, kings have dressed as beggars and gone among the people to learn humility.  They didn’t go among the people flinging poo and calling the people names, then apologize and somehow this teaches them humility.  (By the way the entire idea that writing is going to humiliate you and you’re going to have to be pre-humiliated to do this is mind boggling.  Yes, some parts of writing resemble and emotional strip tease, but the only parts that I think would require a taste for humiliation is if you’re writing your auto-biography and it’s close kin to fifty shades of gray.)

In fact, pretty much all the suggestions, while supposedly teaching you things like how to be humble, and how to become self-aware, are actually, in practical fact, an exercise in almost painful self-centeredness.  Being a troll disrupts the lives of people who have done her no harm, but she will “erase it” with an apology and take the humiliation onto herself… in a world where other people aren’t real.

And unless you spend the time alone/in restricted company, your keeping silent for a day will impose a burden on the people around you, some of them total strangers.  I can just see disrupting a cashier’s life by refusing to answer the question “is this cabbage?” when she’s trying to figure out the code to punch in.  (I often suffer from bad allergies that do leave me aphonic.  TRUST me it’s trouble for everyone around me.)

But the thing is, this isn’t for writing only.  The list in fact, has bloody nothing to do with writing, except for the suggestion that you spend a day writing a passage from various perspectives (which is a standard writing  exercise) and the suggestion that you go to the places your characters would be at that hour, which falls under standard research.  And speaking of research the suggestion that you spend the day doing research “so you learn what real work is” gave me a window into this person’s life and work.  Dear Lady, I’m a working writer.  I know what hard work is every day of the week, and twice on Sunday.  If I don’t work, I don’t eat. Oh, and some of us do massive research for anything that is possible to research.

What this list seems to be is “things that will make you morally worthy to join my exalted company.”

Sometime during the night I realized this applied to everything that is controlled by “the right people” (who are almost invariably left).

Oh, it is poisoning writing, right enough. Look, I was always aware while working for traditional-houses-other-than-Baen (Ton Weisskopf “I don’t buy personalities, I buy stories.”  — thank you, ma’am) that I was being judged.  Not my work.  Not my word slinging.  Not my plotting or story telling.  No.  Me.  I had to fit their definition of “worthy” which included holding the “right” opinions, or they would not publish me.  Even if my books did not touch on politics.  Every-woman-must-be-victim/hero, for instance.

Yes, sure, I can totally see why you’d not want to work with someone who is immoral in a way that affects your business.  Look, if I ever make enough to hire an assistant, I’m not going to hire one who has a known history of kleptomania, say. Or one who likes standing at the window flinging rocks at people.

But most of the “morality” that traditional publishing – and a lot of corporations, and certainly all colleges – enforce has bloody nothing to do with how you conduct yourself towards others.  Instead, it’s enshrined in the sort of moral preening that at best does nothing for others and at worst makes you an ass towards others.  “I’m not a consumerist” or “I drive a Prius” or “I’m ashamed to be male.”

This is particularly ridiculous when applied to writing, because some of the best writers in the world were complete asses.  Anyone in doubt should read Dumas’ biography.  Being cantankerous and dying with a pile of unpaid bills, let alone private debauchery and an inability to comprehend the real word all seem to be characteristics of the best among my fellow craftsmen.  (not me, but I don’t aspire to such heights.)

But it is equally ridiculous in university admissions, where the essays have become the way of selecting for this kind of thing.  I think they started so as to give the student a chance to talk about his status as oppressed, but since not everybody can aspire to being a victim, you can instead try to assimilate victimhood by doing the “approved” sort of contrition.  I was struck to laughing, when reading about colleges asking people NOT to tell them about their “service summer” in Africa because “practically everyone has that.”  And the fact that it costs a ton, (more than I could afford for my kids) and probably puts the recipients to a lot of trouble is the only thing that kept me from laughing.

But going back even further, that’s what high schools do with their volunteer hours too.  There is zero proof that volunteer hours teach students anything except that a higher authority can force them to be slaves. And there’s even less proof that the organizations receiving the “benefit” of these student “volunteers” are – or should be – grateful.  BUT to the high school bureaucrats, this is enforcing their morality – these are approved organizations, natch.  No?  Try putting in that you manned the phones for a Republican candidate.  I knew someone who tried – and therefore makes the students “better people.”

It is said that once men stop believing in G-d they’ll believe in anything.  What is not said is that when men stop believing in real morals they start believing in a sort of shamanistic morality, in which you appease the right “gods” and speak the right shibboleths and that makes you “good.”

The problem is not that we’ve lost the religious morality.  Look, I was raised in a very strict religious society, where even if you didn’t believe you had to behave as though you did, and at least 90% of those rules were as futile as this woman’s nonsense.  You had to wear “modest” clothes strictly defined as covering just THAT.  You had to guard yourself in certain ways (I think this was leftover from Islam, like unless there was a public spectacle or something, no unmarried woman was allowed to be seen at the window.)  Those rules were religious, but they weren’t necessarily moral.

In a plural society with many beliefs (and I do like the ability to believe what I want to, which is why this type of pseudo moral preening as a condition of advancement annoys me) you’re not going to agree on the “religious moral” rules. However if you don’t agree on the “moral” — don’t hurt others, don’t treat others like things — rules, you must be a post modernist.  Which, of course, most of these people are.

Moral rules?  I can’t imagine anything better than the golden rule.  I don’t know if G-d wants me to cover up my hair once I’m married (something my grandmother’s generation still believed) though at least one version of a religion I respect, believes that.  BUT I do believe that G-d wants me to treat others as I’d wish to be treated.  (And for that matter if you don’t believe in G-d, I believe it is still the best way to create a decent society.)  Do onto others as you’d have them do by you keeps you from murdering, stealing and for that matter from trolling for moral masturbation.  (Think of the trouble you’re giving everyone else!)

Being a GOOD person (let alone being good according to my religion – yes, I have one – which is a whole other weight to lift), one who lives in the world aware others are people and who tries to do by them as he/she would be done by is a worthy endeavor.  It’s also incredibly difficult, and most of us fall short.

Which is why it’s easier to default to shamanistic religion, where you can be a “good” person by “learning” humility or centeredness or anything in a way that would make you feel warm fuzzy but not translate to anything external.

And being “good” according to left-liberal shibboleths is not known to make you a better writer – though it does perfect your ability to mouth platitudes – or a better engineer, or even a better linguistics professor.

It’s just a tribal observance that tells those in power that you’re “in” with them.  Which is why it is now accepted procedure for any profession that might have any power.  It is the way of the world to perpetuate power.

And if that’s what you want to do, then that’s fine by me.  Live and let live.  Not my way, but I often fail at what I’m trying to do, and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone else.

But don’t go deluding yourself that you’re some sort of advanced moral human being or a great crafts-person.  You’re just following the mores and observances of your tribe.  Don’t preach them to others.

Oh –And on that first suggestion – there are parts of the internet I would not advise you to troll.

Duty is one of those loaded words that seems to mean different things to different people.  According to Miriam Webster Dictionary, duty is “something that is done as part of a job; something that you must do because it is morally right or because the law requires it; active military service.” According to the Ayn Rand Lexicon, duty is “One of the most destructive anti-concepts in the history of moral philosophy . . . The meaning of the term “duty” is: the moral necessity to perform certain actions for no reason other than obedience to some higher authority, without regard to any personal goal, motive, desire or interest.”

This dichotomy in definitions is one of the hurdles I had to clear when I sat down to write Hunter’s Duty. In the novel, Maggie Thrasher has put her life on hold to fulfill what she sees as her duty to her clan to hunt down and kill a rogue shapechanger. Maggie steps into the role of tracker after the rogue sets others on the clan in an attempt to kill the clan leader and as many others as possible. What Maggie doesn’t realize at the time is that she isn’t being given the training she needs to successfully carry out her mission. This isn’t some subversive attempt by others in the clan to make sure she fails. Far from it.

Even when Maggie realizes that her clan leader has failed to give her all the information he has about the rogue, information that could have helped her avoid almost being killed, she continues the hunt. Her sense of duty, for lack of a better word, prevents her from abandoning the search. This isn’t because she’d been ordered on the hunt by the clan leader. It isn’t even because it is something others might see as being “morally right”. After all, if she does fulfill her mission, she will have to kill the rogue without benefit of a trial.

No, she does it because it is something she knows has to be done. The rogue doesn’t care if he kills innocents, shapechanger or normal. All he cares about is attaining the power he feels is his due. Maggie has seen the results of his work, both in the carnage of the attack on the clan before Hunter’s Duty opens and earlier, when he first took a member of the clan and changed him into something that was only one step above feral. She’s lived with the nightmares of Joshua Volk for ten years. Now she has a chance to deal with him, assuming he doesn’t manage to kill her first.

The duty she feels is something very much akin to responsibility. She has the skills — or at least thinks she does — to hunt Volk down and kill him. If she fails, she knows he will harm others, just as he’d harmed members of her clan. But it is more than that. She knows that if he is allowed to continue his reign of terror, the normals will realize monsters really do exist and that they live next door or down the street. The bloodbath that followed would cost lives, too many lives, on both sides.

This isn’t an altruistic sense of duty, however. Maggie wants to live. More than that, she wants to live the life she’s chosen for herself and she knows she won’t be allowed to do so if Volk’s actions bring about the discovery of their kind. So, even though killing Volk would help all shapechangers, it will ultimately help her live as she wants to, at least until another threat comes along.

One of the things I liked about Maggie as I prepared to write the book and got to know her was that she didn’t blindly follow orders. It didn’t matter if it was her clan leader or someone else who was in a position of power over her. She weighed the situation, considered the facts and then came to her own decision. Her own personal code of ethics, her morality if you like, guided her along the way. She’s flawed and she knows it, but she doesn’t let it stop her. At least not for long.

In that, she’s very different from a lot of real “characters” that live next door or up the block. You know the ones I mean. They’re the ones who tell us we should do something because the President tells us to. We shouldn’t worry about what the law actually says. After all, if Congress couldn’t be bothered to read it, why should we?

That answer is really quite simple: because we aren’t just blind followers. We have no duty to comply just because it might be politically expedient for us to do so.

Or, to put it another way, we have a duty to question our representatives, whether they sit on our city councils or on Capitol Hill. If there is any duty, especially in the sense of “something that is done as part of a job,” it is our duly elected politicians. However, that is a “duty” all too many of them seem to have forgotten. How often do we find them more concerned with keeping the PACs happy or doing what they feel is most “socially” correct than doing what their constituents actually want? Or how often do we see them throwing the Constitution out the window in order to secure stronger positions in the Senate or House?

Don’t believe that’s happened? Look at the events of this past week when the Senate decided to go “nuclear” and change the filibuster rules. Until Thursday, to defeat a filibuster, there had to be a block of 60 senators to 51. The purported reason for this change was because the evil Republicans were holding up too many of the President’s judicial and other nominees. Under the new rules, nominees to the Supreme Court and legislation will still face the 60 votes to block a filibuster. However, this is yet another step down that slippery slope where the protections built into our government by the Founding Fathers are being eroded.

Another example is Obamacare. No, I’m not going to go into whether it is a good thing or not. Sarah has written on this topic much more eloquently than I ever could. What I’m talking about here is Obama’s decision to amend the law on his own, telling people they can keep their old insurance for another year. This executive decree, for that is all it can be, flies in the face of the fact that the cancellation notices being sent out before then were, on the whole, because the policies did not meet the requirements of Obamacare. Nor does the decree take into account the individual state insurance boards that have to approve the policies that had, until Obama realized just how badly his approval rating had dropped, decided to use an executive power he really doesn’t have. And then there are the insurance companies themselves. How many of them are really going to trust the government not to come back at them sometime down the road because they broke the law by issuing polices that didn’t meet the statutory requirments?

Where is the Congress in all this? If there is such a thing as a duty to your constituents, hasn’t Congress once again sidestepped it? No one there is making the hard decisions and no one is actually listening to what their constituents want. Instead, they are jockeying for sound bite moments with the mainstream media, all in an attempt to look relevant.

So, the hard decisions are up to us to make. Do we continue to go along, hoping that Congress finally wakes up before the existence of “monsters” is confirmed? Or do we take matters into our own hands? I, for one, say we step up and take responsibility for making sure the status quo is given a very strong shake. We have a duty to ourselves, if to no one else, to become educated on what our elected officials are doing. We need to understand where the candidates running for office are getting their money. I live in Texas. I want a governor whose ties are here, not to some PACs and money rich contributors in New York or DC.

So, the time is here to make a decision. The line, at least metaphorically, has been drawn in the sand. Do we fight to return to a time when the Constitution was respected or do we continue along the path we’re on? A path that allows off-duty policemen to force random drivers to pull off the road where they can “volunteer” for a federal study drinking and driving, one where the feds ask for breath, blood or even cheek swabs and “promise” the results will remain anonymous.

Call me skeptical. Call me cynical. But that is an abuse of authority and it is all too representative of what is happening in this country. It is time to return to respecting the Bill of Rights, of checks and balances in our government and of having a duly proposed and approved budget instead of stopgap measures that only increase the national debt while threatening continued cuts to our military and our infrastructure.

It is our duty to question, to learn and to demand answers and, if we don’t receive those answers, to vote out those in office who continue to be non-responsive to their constituents.

There has been an attempt to get local(ish) members of this crowd together at Pete’s Kitchen — 1962, Colfax, in Denver — for a pre-thanksgiving feast.  We’ve been favoring tomorrow at around 3pm but there is a disruption in the force (chill.  I can too mix references.)

Older son a) has signs of a stomach bug — which might or might not have affected the rest of us and it would be truly bad to get ya’ll sick to take back to your families. (Unless, of course, you don’t like your families?)  b) Older and younger son have tests all through Monday and Tuesday.  That means if we come up it would be without them, and this occasions major rebellion from the younger downtrodden (AH! they wish) masses in the household, because they love Pete’s Kitchen.

So — sound off.  How many of you could make it Wednesday the 17 27th (This is what happens when you type with a cat on your lap.  Kids, don’t pet and type!) at a dinnerish hour?  How many would even be interested?

*As I expected, I need to go over what I have on Rogue Magic, before I can go on.  In the meantime, enjoy a guest post from Alma Boykin, our very own TXRed. I’m going to be right here catching up on posts for PJM and writing Through Fire.  Also, it’s younger son’s birthday, so after he’s done spending time with his friends, I should block some time for hanging out.  Oh, Alma’s post is on Frontiers, and I want to add that working in indie is very much Life On The Wild Frontier, with circumstances changing and different things learned every week.  For instance, I have in my hands (well on the desk, I don’t have an extra set of fingers to type with) the first book I’ve designed — a trade paperback copy of Death of a Musketeer.  The surprising thing is how professional it looks — considering I designed it with word and a ten year old version of JASC paintshop, particularly (I chose clunkier methods over ramp up time.)  The other surprising thing is how much of a dits I can be.  For instance, the cover is great except on the blurb I got attacked by Sudden capitalization Syndrome, so it will have to be redone.  And inside one of the section breaks seems to have given way, leaving the filler pages numbered.  So I have to do that to, again.  But if you’d told me three years ago I could design and have a book printed… I’d have laughed. Now, it seems entirely “matter of course”.*

 Frontiers, New, Final, and Otherwise

by Alma Boykin

[Author’s note: This is a bit of a ramble and discussion piece as much as history bit.]

Frontier is an odd word, and probably an Odd word as well. It has fallen out of fashion with historians of the US West because of too many Davy Crockett and cowboy associations (thank you, House of Mouse). And then there’s the “high frontier” and “frontiers in medicine,” and “the final frontier” (space or Alaska, take your choice) to further muddy the wordy waters. Since we (historians) are supposed to be getting past the Euro-American-as-good-guy idea of western history, frontier is out and borderlands, cultural transition zone, and other such terms are in. Unless you are a geographer, or look at world history, which is what I’d like to do.

The word, its root, and its sense of “something past/beyond other things” go back to Indo-European. Latin gives us frons-frontes, meaning an eyebrow, a façade of a building, and the idea of something projecting out of something else. From there Latin added a military meaning, which became the Old French frontier meaning the front rank of an army or the prow of a ship (or of a fortification). The usage passed into English and by the 15^th century there are references to a borderland being a frontier. North America got its frontier in the 1670s, according to etymological sources and sites.

Prior to graduate school I’d never given much thought to frontiers. Then I decided that I needed the word. To cultural geographers, a frontier is a place where peoples and cultures interact, often exchanging ideas and practices in the process. Terry G. Jordan’s great book, The North American Cattle-Raising Frontiers, is one of the best examples of the geographical frontier, and provided the model I used in my non-fiction work. So a frontier can be anywhere that two different cultures intersect for long enough that information transfers occur. Those transfers often cause changes in behavior, as you would imagine.

Historians of Russia occasionally refer to the Russia’s far-eastern frontier, and point out surficial similarities between the Wild East and Wild West (fur-based extractive economy, contested lands, native peoples integrated by conquest, hostile physical environment.) There’s a sense of weak government presence and control and that the frontier is where real cultures meet before official culture arrives.

Did Europe have frontiers? Yes, several. The area east of the Elbe River formed a frontier for several centuries, as pagan (and later Catholic and Orthodox) Slavs collided with Catholic and Protestant Germans. Later, the plains of Hungary, Transylvania, and the Balkans fit the idea of frontier, as the Ottomans and Tartars battled with the Hapsburgs, Russians, and Poles, passing control back and forth for five hundred years. There are stories of heroism and depravity, of high honor and low treason, of cultural exchanges and ferocious rejections of the other side. As Andrew Wheatcroft points out in the introduction to his book about the Siege of Vienna and its aftermath, Hapsburg/ Austro-Hungarian policies take on a different cast when seen as efforts to secure and defend an eastern frontier. One reason Wilhelmine Germany/Prussia came to define citizenship by blood rather than by birthplace stemmed from the ongoing conflicts with Slavs who refused to assimilate. Brandenburg-Prussia and East Prussia faced an eastern frontier that lingered long after the end of the Teutonic Knights’ kingdom.

Southern Europe, most notably Spain and Portugal, were frontiers for 700 years. One reason why Spain never had quite the same feudal system as France and England stemmed from that frontier. Spanish Christians had to carry arms in order to fend off the Moors (and mercenaries). The Spaniards’ right and duty of self-defense made it a lot harder for the crown and nobles to impose control over the common people, no matter what early modern governments might have wanted to do. Geography played a large role as well, and explains why the conquistadores (many from Extremadura) reached the American Southwest and shrugged instead of blanching with dismay like Anglo-Americans did. And why they called the descendants of converted Indians genizarios, or janissaries.

Fredrick Jackson Turner, in his seminal essay about the frontier in American history, used the US Census definition of frontier as a place with less than 10 people per square mile. The Census Bureau declared the frontier closed in 1890. Turner thought this would have deleterious effects for the country, since it turned off a social relief valve of sorts. His frontier became the next generation’s Wild West. In the 1970s, New Western historians announced that “frontier” no longer served a purpose, because the idea had been shaped and defined by Anglo-American perceptions and ideology. Hispanos and Native Americans recognized no such place (wellllll, mostly didn’t recognize). At the same time popular culture latched onto it even harder, giving us the variations mentioned at the start of this ramble.

Some people talk about frontier values, either as good or as bad things. The frontiers I’ve looked at share some commonalities. Physical strength remains critical to survival, or the ability to use tools to give the advantages of greater strength. Men need to be strong, stable, willing to work hard and to fight to protect their holdings and families. Women have a somewhat separate area of work, concentrated on the home or on a home territory, but still need to be able to take care of themselves and their children/dependents when the fertilizer hits the impeller. Honor, trustworthiness, wary respect for others, and a willingness to learn from and about the “other” even as you fight/work against them are important, and appear again and again in legend and in practice. I’d note that the “other” can be the environment in some cases as well as other people.

So, is the frontier dead or just sleeping? Cultural collision points still exist, notably the Balkans, the Caucasus Mountains, and (potentially) the Himalayas. By Fredrick Jackson Turner’s definition, large swaths of the western US are once more frontiers, as the population has shifted and concentrated in towns and cities. Several readers of this blog have talked about space and extra-solar settlement as the next frontier, the next place of exploration, settlement, and possible cultural contact. Robert Ballard probably looks at deep oceans as a frontier, since they have less than ten people per square mile and large swaths remain only semi-explored and mapped. (Note that the population definition only includes humans and not Great Old Ones.)

It strikes me that Americans, including those who are Americans by spirit instead of by place-of-birth, need frontiers, need places “lost beyond the ranges.” They can be mental, cultural, or environmental, but some Odds are going to roam, and society benefits from a certain degree of self-reliance, a sense of identity, and the willingness to say “I protect my people” and “this I will not do.” Frontiers have shaped humans for ages, and I doubt they’ll disappear within my lifetime. No matter what some people might prefer.