Month: November 2013

This is a non-scheduled silence.  No, it’s not that the silence is continuing.  It’s really a partial explanation of the silence.  I have been feeling the “something viral about to land” signals, but discounted them as a source of the silence, because it took so long to fall – slowly worsening over a week or so.  Now it’s here, and it’s some sinusy thingy, which means I slept late.  Weirdly, I feel fine as to words today.  Just clogged up and a bit sleepy.  But not wondering over what exactly is causing me to feel ick helps.

And now, before fall into the my description of my ills which doesn’t interest anyone, not even me, just a quick post about baffling stuff.

What do I mean by baffling stuff?

Oh, I don’t know.  Things that change in the surrounding reality that can’t have changed in the surrounding reality.  Like… like the world changed while you were asleep.

No, I’m not talking about politics, or economics (though for the love of Bob (Heinlein), if that’s a world change, change it back!)

I’m explaining this very badly.

Let’s start by saying that we science fiction and fantasy writers and readers can make up truly twisted stories about the world, while other people shrug and say “well, I guess I’m misremembering.” Or “I’m imagining things” or… whatever.

Only sometimes you KNOW you’re not seeing things, and you’re not misremembering, or else the rest of your family is misremembering along with you, and the SF geek in you steps back and goes “What if I (and the family) stepped overnight unawares into a parallel universe where this, this and this is different?”

Or of course, what if the dreamer dreaming reality missed a step or two, as an author does, sometimes, calling the character Helen in one chapter and Elene in the next.

What on Earth am I talking about?  This: have you never known – know for absolute sure – that you’d put something in one place, only to find it in another, when no kids/cats/husbands could have changed it?  Too often for simple memory failure?  Or when someone else remembered it too?

Take when we moved from our first joint apartment to a home we were renting in a city 30 or so miles away.  We were twenty three and tired, and besides we’d been moving all day.  The last thing I remember, with startling clarity, was my purse sitting on the arm of the sofa we were abandoning (in retrospect I wish we hadn’t, but that’s something else) in the apartment.  Halfway on the road to the new place, Dan remembered it too and said “We’ll have to go back and get it tomorrow morning, before the landlord comes in.”  Only when we got to the new place, my purse was there – on the arm of the sofa we’d taken there.  “Okay,” you say.  “Memory tricks.”  Except impossible, because in that trip to the old place, to get the final stuff and do the final cleaning, we’d stopped at Food Lion for me to get cleaners, and I went in with my purse.  If I’d left it in the new place, I couldn’t have paid, or Dan would have needed to go in with me.

What’s the explanation?  I don’t know.

The ones that creep me out are stories I KNOW were half finished, but that I find in my drive completely written out.  Sometimes stories I JUST planned to write.  Okay, maybe I sleep write.  That’s an explanation.  If so, d*mn I’m good, and can I do it more?  But you’d think Dan would wake up, right?  Since my office is half the bedroom.

Then there’s … what prompts this post – well that and the fact I’m feeling exceptionally silly.

My cats have always hated three types of food: Science Diet (which every vet tries to push at them); “chunks” food – the one that’s tasty slices or tasty lumps or whatever.  They like decently can-shaped food – and anything poultry flavored.

So, in the name of Ned, how did they suddenly switch to eating science diet, chunks and poultry like it’s going out of style.

We bought some science diet because it was very cheap, and I thought, well, even if they don’t eat it all, it will pad out the rest.  Instead, they  devoured it and asked for more.

Okay, my first thought was that SD must have changed their formula, right?  Right.  But the last time at the pet store, Iams slices was on sale very cheap too, so I grabbed a few just to try, and a few of both SD and Iams in poultry flavor.

And they’re eating all of it.  In fact, they’ve doubled their food consumption and eat these once-despised foods, just fine.

What is going on?  Yes, yes, cats mess with your head, but this is too much of a switch, and besides the four of them would never coordinate.

So – what is going on?  Did we step into a parallel world unawares?  Did the dreamer who spins reality forget that detail?

Or are they REALLY just very small spies in fur suits who have replaced my cats?  And if so, what are they spying on?  The word deposition rate of the not-so-sane writer?

What is so fascinating about that?

What do you guys think?  Should I blindfold the cats?

 

This is not (just) a post about writing, but it will seem to be at the beginning.  Bear with me.

I tend to get a little nettled when people tell me how fast John Ringo writes.  No, it’s not that I don’t like John or his writing – so put your heckles down, Ringo fans – it’s that I keep thinking “Hey, I once wrote a novel in three days” (Not an experience I wish to repeat, no.)   I have finished two novels in a month.  I have—

I have fallen into six months of silence and this year the silences have overwhelmed the productive types.  These are weird silences.  They’re not, as you’d expect, “I’m sitting here and not writing.”  They’re not even exactly block – block in me more often than not is writing hundreds of the same page, with two commas changing back and forth and a couple of adjustments to wording.

What I mean is block in me is active.

These silences – and this year has been the worst for it – tend to be I’m sitting at the computer, and time seems to woosh past me, and nothing gets done.  It’s like the monks of time are playing with the procrastinators and borrowing all my time away.

There are other symptoms: a reluctance to write/think/speak in words.  This is very weird because I remember thinking in words from about two.  I don’t really have a brain mode beyond verbal.  My younger son tells me he thinks in images.  Whatever.  I can’t. So what you get if there are no words, if the words somehow “hurt” is this dumb, reflexive reaction that would make the behaviorists happy. I have been spending weeks in this state.  Even reading “hurts.”

I don’t think it’s block, not as such.  As I said my block is different.

When I’ve complained of this state before, I get well-intentioned people – mostly on FB – either “giving” me ideas or telling me how to figure out where the book is going next.

That is not the problem at all.  I know exactly where both Through Fire and Darkship Revenge go.  At this point I know all the movements.  What seems to be lacking…  If you visualize words as stones, I’m rolling these stones upslope, one by one.  And even though they don’t roll back, it takes very few to tire me out.

No, this is not a long sustained whine.  I’ve been trying to figure the mechanics of the silences and what they are for some years.

Because look – and this is the part that applies to everyone, not just writers – we live highly unnatural WORK lives.  Oh, everyone has, yes, since the agricultural revolution.  We’re designed for short bursts of activity and then days of semi-hibernation till the next burst.  That’s what humans used to do for much longer than we’ve had this “workaday” world.

But even if you go back to agricultural days – fact is you don’t need an awful lot of mental acuity to work the land, or to work the line, or anything until you get to these jobs most of us here do, where the main instrument of our work is the brain.  Even in the depths of the silent, I can do things like non-fiction articles about things I know really well.  Because that’s more or less by rote.  The words still hurt, but not as much.

And I can clean, and I can organize, and I can even sew.

But create?  The strength (why should strength be needed to write imaginary events?  I don’t know, but it is) just isn’t there.

And here’s there thing – I’ve always had silences (though the “can’t think in words” is new) that lasted a month or two.  This is what accounts for my house not looking like something out of hoarders. I used to work full tilt for three months or so, and then crash mentally for a month, which I used to disturb all the spiders and hunt the dust bunnies in their preserves behind the furniture.

I’ve always worried about their nature too.  Are they a form of block?  Or are they like my younger kid’s computer which was shutting down because one of the fans wasn’t working, and when it hit 95 degrees it shut in self-preservation?

Because if it’s just a form of block, I can power through.  But what if it isn’t.  Every time this year I pushed through, I got ill.  Really ill.

There’s no denying we drive our minds into highly unnatural acts, month after month, year after year, and perhaps the shut down trigger gets sensitive.  Maybe it shuts down earlier/longer.

This is important, because, of course, Atlas is juggling and it’s entirely possible that us few – we few, we lucky few, we band of strivers – who are still over 100% employed are keeping the entire thing going.  And we’re taking more duties.

But if that causes us to shut down, then what do we do?

I don’t know.  I know I wish this entire situation had come about oh, twenty years ago, when I had more energy.  But did I really, or was it an artifact of not having this much to do?

I know part of the way I feel is just stress, because the only thing these silences resemble is the silence when my publications-not-Baen were spiraling down the drain and I didn’t know about indie.

This time the stress is not just the work – I know, I know, between editing, publishing and new writing I’m full up – but other stuff.  Personal stuff, family stuff, family health stuff, extended family stuff, and the continuous break down of house stuff this year has visited upon us (which in turn does what it does for financial stuff.)

And I’m a worrier, of course.  I always worry three steps ahead, which of course has kept me alive many times, but is a pain.

And I know the stress is counterproductive, but how do you deal with it?  I need to find a way to stop spinning in place through the silences.  I need to work, if not at my peak capacity, at least at a book a month.  The stories are there, mind, stacked ten deep, waiting.  Because even through the silence new ideas and new novels form.

We, all of us, need to find a way to keep the top spinning, if we are to survive what’s headed for us.  (If you haven’t read Vodka Pundit’s Monday morning dose of doom and gloom, all you need to know is that I agree with him when he recommends bourbon for breakfast.  Only I can’t.  I have work to do.)

Right now, what I’m trying to do is power through Through Fire – and it would help, truly, if it were a SLIGHTLY less intense book, yes – and then Darkship Revenge – which unfortunately is also an extremely intense book – before the end of the month.

This  means… I don’t know.  I’ll probably be running guests on the weekend, so if you ever dreamed of your very own star slot on ATH, this is your chance :-P

And I shall be twisting the boys arms to help.  And if you’re trying to get something out of me that’s not related to those two novels, you have to keep poking, because it WILL fall out of my head.

… and I’ll report my wordage here, at the end of each post, but only wordage on the novels.

And I’ll report if this breaks me.  I guess if I get really ill, the silence was real.

I just wish I had some way to tell in advance.  And I wish I knew how to keep Atlas Juggling.

You know, I get sick and tired, and a bit more than that, or I used to, when I went to the school and all the teachers’ cars had “question authority” bumperstickers.  These were also the sort of people who – of course – would come down on a kid like a ton of bricks for using the red pencil instead of the yellow, or for deviating a micron from the assignment.

That I managed to get through the kids’ schooling without either keying one of those cars, or putting in a little addendum on the bumpersticker saying “but bow to mine” is a miracle and a testimony to my upbringing.

But the whole matter of authority – by which I don’t mean physical power, even through troops – is an important one, and one we should be more aware of.

By authority here I mean a certain type of trust.  For instance, my husband is the authority on computers in the house.  If he says “we’re not buying this system because the bzzg is rgdrd,” I believe him because he knows a hell of a lot about computers, and I know next to nothing.

In the same way, if the kids have a piece of fiction writing, I’m the authority, even though Dan knows a bit about it.

Or if the cats just threw up in the hallway, I’m the authority on how to clean it.  I mean that type of authority.  The “I know more than you do about this, let me do it/tell you how.”

There are some types of authority that must exist for a society to make sense.  For instance, you must have people you know more than you do about running large economies. (And I wish we could find some.)  And I should hope my doctors know more than I do about surgery and infections.  (Not always true.) And… you know, about anyone would know more about growing a lawn.  (Don’t go there.)

The problem comes when authority becomes credentialism, and when authority is being claimed in soft fields that are a matter of opinion.  You really can’t tell me “I know more about how to raise children than you do” when your subject is how I’m raising MY children.  You might have read a heck of a lot about raising children, but you don’t know MY children (who tend to be oddities.)

This appeal to authority in soft subjects often melds into appeal to credentials.  So, the kids teachers would tell me, “I know more than you do about this, because they taught us this and this and this.”  One of them told us group work was essential “because the future of work is group work” – this was insanity, because it’s actually going the other way.  But she was “TAUGHT” so it’s credentialism.

My parents absolutely believed “experts” when it was things like teaching and medicine.  I think it was because neither of them had enough experience of them.  So, when my teachers said I needed to do something one way or another, my parents believed them, even if it was absurd.  That was something I couldn’t break them of.  And doctors… I remember when I was 20 I had this horrible pain which I swore was from a tooth in which I’d had a root canal.  Dad took me to the dentist who told him it was psychological, and dad should “marry her off soon.”  (I swear.  Doctor was a woman, too.)

Five years later, in the States, pain became unbearable and the local dentist in Charlotte, said the root canal was never properly done and there was a massive infection which involved my jaw bone and a bunch of nerves.

But dad believed the dentist and had a long talk with me all the way home.  (I don’t think I ever told him either, because what’s the point?)

In a sane (ah!) society there is a balance between the authority and deference to authority and questioning authority.  Either acquiescing to everything the authority says or questioning everything is a sign of trouble for a society.  And pasting “question authority” on your car when you intend your authority not to be questioned is a special kind of insanity that makes my eyes cross.

About twenty years ago I started noting a weird tendency for people – some people – to make appeals to authority.  And it was always soft subject authority.  Things like “Well, you know, she’s a teacher.”  Or “She knows a lot about this, she’s a Women’s Studies major” (When I explained why I wouldn’t be oppressed, even if people tried.) or…

And it wasn’t just people.  If it were just people, it would be endurable.  It was the mass culture.  All of a sudden we were getting stuff pushed from the media-industrial complex along the lines of “We can’t publish cozies, because amateurs don’t solve mysteries.  Policemen do, that’s why they’re trained to do it. They’re professionals.”  Also, you weren’t allowed to have a bumbling police officer in a book because it was “disrespectful”.  The same happened in other fields, at the same time.  Part of the death of SF as a well-selling genre was that you couldn’t write cooky ideas.  Yes, I know the idea of a past human civilization at the same level or above us is highly unlikely, but some of the best books of my youth posited just that, and came up with creative ways to explain the lack of remains.  It made for exciting reads.

All of a sudden, in the late eighties early nineties, houses were requiring both that science fiction have a “big science idea” – which largely excluded the human element – or that “you can’t violate things we know to be wrong.”  Which sent a bunch of people running screaming into Fantasy.  Even me, for a while.

Was this a conspiracy?  No.  I think it was when the boomers achieved some prominence in their fields – again, not because they’re boomers but because they’re a large cohort of generally the same age .  There’s a tendency in your middle years to appeal to authority and feel threatened by questioning and try to support other authorities.  So all of a sudden – and partly in reaction to their own youth culture – the boomers wanted people to respect those with learning in whatever field.  And because by then they were in command of the media-industrial complex, this idea pushed everywhere, even in places it shouldn’t go, like entertainment and teaching.

Even I was jaw-droppingly shocked when in a kerfuffle on my then LJ blog, a bunch of my kid’s classmates said I couldn’t question their teacher because… duh, she was a teacher.  Even though a) what she was teaching them (that culture was genetically inherited) was inherently wrong (and evil) and b) she was younger than I and had FAR LESS schooling than I.  But the kids were by then one generation deep in “must respect the authority of the credentialed ones” – their parents probably were taught the same, and therefore the teacher was an “authority” and we must respect her.  (PFUI.)

I would guess this is part of the issue we face with police abuses “but, we’re the authority.  We get to protect ourselves with military gear, and we can do no wrong.” And with teacher abuses, and to an extent with “doctoring by computer models” and don’t EVEN get me started on climatology.

Plus there was a tendency to put an “authority” veneer on a ton of things that are more art than science, like sociology.  And to confuse things like economics with “social justice” aka “Wishful thinking.”

However – and at the risk of Foxfier accusing me of being Irish again – I think the insanity itself is a good sign.

Why do I think it’s a good sign?  Because in other countries the authorities aren’t shouting QUITE so loudly “Listen to me” and “respect me.”

I think part of the shrill screaming here is that they sense a large number of people don’t believe them/respect them/think they’re all that.

This leads to vicious attacks (sometimes physical, as in the case of police forces but mostly calling you things like “Climate change deniers.”) and to much screaming and trying to overbowl people with their “authority.”

But what I keep thinking is this: I live with people who are very knowledgeable in the sciences, and have several friends (hi Speaker!  Hi Les!) who are real-life-scientists.  Those don’t scream “Believe me” or “respect my authority.”  Instead they bring out the figures and explain things to you.  And then you do believe and respect.

Because they know they are right and that you will respect them, once you listen.

Which leads me to believe all this sound and fury is because they know their position is precarious.

So, make them more uncomfortable whenever you can.  When they tell you “But I know this, I studied it in school,” and it’s clearly false, (Keynesianism) laugh at them.  Pointing is optional.

Question authority.

… It drives them nuts and gives them a sense of perspective!

 

*Okay, so, Witchfinder is edited, but I’ve not had the time to go over it, and I’m still waiting for a cover.  Also, I’m working as hard as I can to get Through Fire to Baen.  This week our furnace gave out and it’s been a right mess, not counting the expense (not fixing your furnace in CO is not an option.)  So it will probably be another two weeks.  Meanwhile I’m doing a final read through on Musketeer’s Apprentice, to put it up tonight.  I’m still in need of time travel or a duplicating machine.*

*This is the new free novel I’m posting here a chapter at a time.  This is pre-first-draft, as it comes out.  It is a sequel to Witchfinder which will soon be taken down (once edited) and put for sale on Amazon (It’s now done and with editor and we’re getting the cover done.  My wretched health this year delayed everything.  (Meanwhile, if you donate $6 or more, I’ll get you a copy of Rogue Magic, once finished and edited, in your favored ebook format when it’s done.  Of course, if you’re already subscribing to the blog at a level at which you get whichever books come out that year, you don’t need to worry. )*

NOTICE: For those unsure about copyright law and because there was a particularly weird case, just because I’m making the pre-first draft of my novel available to blog readers, it doesn’t mean that this isn’t copyrighted to me.  Rogue Magic as all the contents of this blog is © Sarah A. Hoyt 2013.  Do not copy, alter, distribute or resell without permission.  Exceptions made for ATTRIBUTED quotes as critique or linking to this blog. Credit for the cover image is © Ateliersommerland | Dreamstime.com

For previous chapters, read here

A Centaur in London

Lady Caroline Ainsling, sister of his Grace the Duke of Darkwater,

Perhaps the decision to go to London wasn’t the best we’d ever made.  London was not that far, but it was far enough, and the London road from our schools would be the most traveled of all roads around.  Plus the journey would take us well into daylight.

I think it took Akakios only half an hour or so to realize this.  What he did then surprised me.  He stepped off the road, and it seemed to me into the dense woods.  I was about to tell him that this was foolishness and that he would twist his ankle in some badger hole, when he started running.

I’ll never be able to explain it, but what it felt like to me, was as though we were running in a dense wood, only trees jumped out of the way when we approached, and Akakios galloped like no horse I’d ever ridden, each leap seemingly miles long.

It wasn’t till he stopped, in a very different sort of wood, one that seemed manicured, and had a lawn near the cluster of trees in which we stood, that I found the breath to say, “What did you do?”

“That was—” he said, and paused for a deep breath.  Indeed, his jacket and coat were wet with sweat.  “That was a bit of transport magic, the sort of thing we used in Fairyland.”

“Did you—Did we cut through fairyland?”

He shook his head.  “No.  Too dangerous.  If we have to go into it, we have to go into it, but for now, no.  No, this is a magic called Broken path.”

“I’ve never heard of it,” I realized my voice came out a little shrill.  After all, one likes to be sure of one’s magic and what it can do, and after all, again, when one has been exquisitely well educated in magic, one expects such a handy thing as this spell to have been taught to one.

“No,” he said.  He’d calmed down, but I could feel beneath my hands, clasped across his chest, the ragged beating of his human heart.  Centaurs have two.  One in their human chest and one – and a bigger set of lungs – in their horse body.  Needed, of course, for that enormous body.  “No.  Until now there was not enough magic in this land to support it.  Caroline, if magic is pouring in here, the way it is…  Night Arrow—”

I primed my lips, though he couldn’t see me, and put on my haughtiest of voices.  “I refuse,” I said.  “To admit my brother might be dead.”

Akakios didn’t say anything to that, only “Well, we’re in Green Park.  I don’t know how to get from here to your brother’s offices, and I’m afraid to sense him, because with the magic out of kilter, who knows what—”

I nodded, again for my own reassurance, though I was aware that he couldn’t see me.  “We came here for the season ever since I was little,” I said.  “Mama didn’t like to leave the little ones in the country, so I know London.  If we’re at Green Park, we must be near the meadow where they pasture cows during the day, of course.  If you would but walk that path, and when you come to the road, take a left.”

I led him, step by step towards the royal palace and Seraphim’s Witchfinder offices.

I’d thought it would be much harder, I own, to ride a centaur through London without attracting any attention.  Only it wasn’t.  Not at this time of night.  As we walked along darkened streets, I took care to stay away from theaters and offices, and other places where people might cluster in great numbers.  We met only two people who even looked twice at us – the other people hurrying past in the demi-dark, I assume didn’t look closely enough to realize it was a woman riding a centaur and not two people on a horse – one of them a woman who wore rather gaudy clothes and who I’d guess was what mama would have called “not quite the thing.”  She knit herself with the wall and stared, open mouthed, as we rode past.  The other was a man who was walking in the weaving step of a drunkard and who stared at us with his mouth open then said, “Strap me.  Centaurs now.  As though hookah smoking caterpillars weren’t bad enough.  I swear by all living I’ll never touch blue ruin again.”

It was inevitable we’d run into more people near the royal palace, where Seraphim’s offices were, but even there, no one seemed to pay attention to us.  The reason was obvious after a startled blink.  The statue that had stood in the plaza royale since … ever, I presume, the statue of Richard the Lionheart in both his forms, had been shattered to fragments no larger than pebbles, and a mort of judicial magicians was wandering around it, taking readings and sensings and doing who knew what.

Seraphim himself, stood at the door to his office, and must have come out in some haste, because I’d never before seen my dignified brother in his shirt sleeves in a public situation.  Even in our house he normally didn’t show without his jacket at breakfast.

Akakios picked his way slowly through the rubble, so it wasn’t until we were almost upon Seraphim, that the person next to him turned and saw me, at the same time I recognized my tiresome twin brother, Michael.  Since he was tiresome mostly by spending his days wrapt in machinery of a magical kind, and by not being forced to attend a school for young gentleman, which in fairness he should have been sent to if I was sent to one for young ladies, I was not amused that he said, “Caroline!  What are you doing here?”

And then Seraphim turned.  He looked at me and started to open his lips, doubtless to ask me why I’d left school.  Then he saw Akakios and seemed to realize what form Akakios had taken.  He opened his mouth, closed it, and he turned the approximate color of milk.  I’d never seen someone so pale and shocked.  “What—” he said.  He never finished it.

A grand coach drove into the square, seemingly heedless of the fragments of statue all over, or of the judicial magicians for that matter.  Three of them had to jump out of the way of the magnificent team of matched bays.

The door to the carriage opened before it was fully stopped.  It opened so fast that no one could see the emblem on the door.  But the man who more or less spilled out was none other than the earl of Sydell, who is – and it’s no use at all Seraphim tellin me otherwise.  I’m young and I’m female, but I’m not stupid – somewhat more than Gabriel’s close friend.  His cher amie in the sense men use it around town for women with whom they cannot contract marriage but with whom they contract everything else would be closer.  And no, it’s no use telling me I’m wrong.  You see, I’ve seen the way they look at each other.

He’s a short man, with a shocking mane of blond-red hair, and while he was wearing a jacket, he looked like he’d dressed himself by touch in the dark, with his cravat all in a big lump, his jacket not matching his pants and looking, besides, as if he’d slept in it.

Which I gathered was exactly what he’d done, when he said to no one in particular, “I beg your pardon.  I would have driven and gotten here earlier, only I’d been up working on a spell and I needed to sleep, so the coach…”

“Why would you need to get here earlier?” Seraphim said, his voice suddenly found, his expression fulminating.  It took knowing Seraphim very well to know that tone of voice meant that he wasn’t angry so much as terrified.  Though he gave away the reason for his fear in the next second, making me wonder what had happened here before our arrival.  “Is it Gabriel?”

The earl of Sydell nodded.  “Night Arrow,” he said, in elven, which made sense because he was himself part dragon and part dryad and who knew what else.  “Gabriel.”

“He’s dead!” Akakios said, and brought Sydell’s startled gaze to him.

“Dead?” Seraphim said.  He staggered back to lean against the door lintel as though his legs would give out.  Gabriel was probably of all the siblings the one closest to him.  Even though Gabriel was illegitimate and had only been brought to live with us at the age of seven, he and Seraphim had quickly become as close as twins.  Well, closer than Michael and I.  If I lost a brother, I’d lose part of the other as well.

“No,” Sydell said.  “Oh no, no.  It’s  much worse than that.  He’s split.”

*I’ll post a chapter of Rogue Magic Tomorrow.  Yes, I’m having issues with it, mostly because it has reached that middle point where I need to go back and read through and make it coherent before I can go on.  Not sure that will happen this week, to be honest.  But I should be able to do a couple more chapters before I’m in deep water and HAVE to go back.

The fact that Ginevra is SUCH an unreliable narrator doesn’t help. Nor the fact that our furnace quit in the first bitterly cold day of the year, so that we have had repairmen around most of the week, while I’m trying — rather unsuccessfully to write.  I don’t know what it is about repairmen in the house, but they steal my brainz.  This morning I feel a bit like there’s a thick fog on my brain and there just ain’t enough caffeine to wake me. So, I’m doing chapter tomorrow, and today I’m turning the floor over to David E. Pascoe, aka Kilted Dave, aka #3 son (by adoption.)*

The Intersection of Personal Faith and the All Myths Are True Model of
Contemporary Fantasy

David Pascoe

The thing about contemporary fantasy (look, mine happens in rural
environments: ain’t nothing urban about it. so far) is that usually,
all myths are true. So you’ve got all the gods of everyplace hanging about
somewhere, with nothing better to do than muck with some poor mortal’s
existence. Or – and this isn’t uncommon – all the gods of one place
in particular, be it the Tuatha de Danaan, classical Greece or even ancient
Khem. But more often, at least with American stuff, you either have
enormously powerful creatures that might as well be gods, or you have the
genuine article. Often both.

What’s a monotheist to do, when creatures that – by current orthodox
theology – should not exist begin crawling from the metaphorical woodwork?
That’s the question I undertook when I started writing the Edge of Faith
stories (see what I did there? ehhh?). My protagonist is a young Christian
hospital corpsman attached to a Marine unit in Afghanistan. At least to
start with.

I decided that I needed a pretty white-bread character with a few
peculiarities. So my boy is a mainline Protestant with some somewhat
permissive attitudes, owing to his time in the military. At the same time,
when things start to get really weird, he has to decide to believe his
Sunday School stories, or his own lying eyes. I won’t tell you how the
encounter goes (there are more after it, though *cough*) but the characters
have to deal with the usual “no, really, Virginia, there actually be
dragons, here,” period. At lulls in the action, they – more specifically,
he – have to figure out how to live life according to their new
understanding of reality.

In many UF stories, we’re treated to an in media res introduction,
often where the characters already know about What’s Really Going On. With
the Con books, they’re generally the only ones who do. The Secret World
motif is a common one, especially with UF. Larry’s hung a fun lampshade on
it in the MHI books, where the government, in the form of the Monster
Control Bureau, has been chartered to prevent the *potentially*
destabilizing information of the existence of the supernatural from leaking
to the general public. Thanks, Big Brother! In other settings, the
supernatural world polices itself, often utilizing a Pratchett Principle
where mundane folk only see what they want to.

For my stories – at least these stories; there are so many others, so very
many – I wanted to look at it from the point of view of someone who should,
by rights, be hostile to it all. A Christian, given a mainline to
conservative theological perspective, should treat anything supernatural
with a great deal of suspicion, if not outright hostility. This is
supposedly our world. Consider it: you’re going about your business,
shopping for groceries, when a too-pretty young man with an air of power
tells you God needs you to do something. Most of us would probably ask,
“yeah? Whose god?” But we’re in the distinct minority. Even among other
Christians, I’m a little odd, and I’d say something like, “prove it,
Sparky.” Point being, how does a person of faith – of any faith, but
specifically a Christian – deal with the physical manifestation of their
belief system?

Christians are often held in low regard in fandom. (Nota Bene: this is not
the place for theological discussions, or discourses on how the current
Church fails. If you want to do that, we can go over to my blog and hijack a thread and beat
each other about the head and neck with blunt parables. “I demand
satisfaction! Sharpened rhetoric at dawn.”) There are plenty of reasons for
this, some legitimate and some less so. But few genre writers are openly
Christian, at least in fantasy, and so the Christian perspective is rarely
explored. Sometimes it’s well-treated. I’m thinking here of Michael
Carpenter and his family in the Dresden Files. Or Miles the Mad Gun Wizard
in the MHI universe, whose faith blew the stuffing out of a master vamp. No
small water, that. In other stories, it’s not touched on. Not really. Oh,
people have faith, but God just doesn’t come into the question. The
characters struggle against principalities and powers more or less on their
own.

As a doubting monotheist of much practice, this has always troubled me.
Science fiction is the literature (NOT lit-ra-chewer, TYVM) of questions. Of
“what if?” And nothing has felt nearly as “what if” to me – personally, down
at the core of me – as “what if there was proof of other gods, but not of
mine?”

That’s the core question of the whole series. What happens when a believer
encounters phenomena that seem to defy his understanding of reality? How
does he deal with it? And since that’s the stew I’ve swum through my entire
life – I don’t know about others, but God’s never spoken to me; at least not
audibly, despite claims from otherwise reliable folk – I chose to explore it
through fiction. With fight scenes and eldritch monsters and demons and
angels and fey creatures light and dark.

I’m still not certain how it’s all going to work out. But that’s the thing
about faith: I choose to believe.

That said, I’m coming at this from a distinctly Western Protestant
perspective. While I’m certain of what I believe (mostly. most days. more or
less) and am going to use that to inform my fiction, there are plenty of
people who have a very different understanding of Christian scripture. Many
of whom wouldn’t even remotely consider themselves Christians. Recently,
Mrs. Dave and I discussed this in relation to the long-running vampire
huntress series, where the primary character is a natural raiser of the dead
and a faithful Episcopalian. (In the interests of full disclosure, I haven’t
read the books. Urban Fantasy interests me. Paranormal Romance – generally –
does not.) I asked, “how does she reconcile her faith with behaviors
introduced in later books?” Mrs. Dave told me the main character assumes
that as long as the cross she wears around her neck continues to glow in the
presence of vampires, she and God are still tight.

I’m not satisfied with this answer, and so I’ll probably end up reading the
books to get a sense of it myself. But it doesn’t seem to explore the knotty
theological questions that crop up from my irritatingly fertile imagination.
Mrs. Dave pointed out that the Roman Catholic tradition is just a wee bit
different than even the atypical Protestant understand to which I cleave.
That being the case, and with the understanding that we’re all Odd, how
would people of various faiths treat sudden incursions of Old Ones,
spiritual entities of all stripes, the Undead, or even deities of other (to
the point of contradictory) traditions?

I confess yesterday I was very depressed.  I don’t think it came across how depressed I was – I was trying to be reasonable and being, by nature, depressive, I’m aware of how to compensate for depression – but I was.  Between certain speculations on who will run against Hilary in 16, which prompted me to say “In that case, I don’t have a dog in that fight,” and “let it burn” there was an article about how thoroughly screwed my kids’ generation is.

The article was written from the POV of “you bought this, you voted for this buffoon.”

Except that not all of them did, of course.  (At least I hope not.)  When I was manning the phones, many people my kids’ age were there and they were fully aware of what waited them if the buffoon won.

So to have them be told “you’ll never pay your student debts, you’ll never have a decent job, you’ll never be anything but some sort of retail aid, no matter how brilliant or what your degree is” depresses me.  It depresses me more than it would if you told me that I had no hopes of ever getting anywhere.  Because I know my limitations.  I’ve stared my potential failure in the face.  I don’t even expect full success at this point, just “not dying” as far as career goes.  I’m me, I can cope with that.  But not my kids.  I’ve known them all my life, I know their potential.  Yes, I’m their mother, but I see their failings too –but they’re not the sort of failings that should consign them to a life as debt slaves.  They’re hard workers, they’re focused, they’re battlers.

Don’t tell me “But they’ll be all right then.”  Meh.  Guys, I grew up in a country where my limitations were stark and clear.  For instance, I never considered writing as more than an hobby, because in Portugal it wouldn’t be.  The excuse is that the population is too small to support full time writers without government grants and stuff.  I call poppycock.  The population is large enough for writers – multiple – to earn a living.  I suspect the Portuguese publishing industry is even more effed up than ours.  Not that it matters to me at this point, except if I had money – like, if I won the lottery – I’d start an ebook publisher publishing exclusively in Portuguese and serving the entire Portuguese speaking world.  License to coin money – maybe – but above all a chance to destroy the entrenched publishers in Portugal.  (Okay, I was born a trouble maker.  Deal.)

And I knew just how far my lifestyle could go, and where it was limited.  In the same way, even in the States, my generation’s chances have been limited in comparison to the older boomers (which fuels some of the generational hatred on blogs.)  Inevitable given their population-bulge and the fact they were post war babies.  (It’s really not their fault, not even the lefties.  We just like slapping them.  But it’s irrational.)  We have friends who are ten years older than us who never had to make as many sacrifices, and who are looking at retirement.  We aren’t.  By the time we came along the housing market had been inflated, and a lot of our work has been running to stay in place.

What I mean – I don’t want to start boomer bashing, so please none of that in the comments.  It really is a matter of chance.  No one chose this – is that when you are born and when you come of age, and when you enter the work force shapes your life and limits your choices.

And d*mn it, I don’t want my kids’ limited.

So, I was a wee bit depressed.  Sort of.

You see guys, I have some insight you don’t have.  Some insight I’m sure those who want to bring us to the level of “other countries” don’t have, because they’re pampered little snowflakes, whose pampered paws never touched hard ground – and it’s encapsulated in that title above, which I woke up with it running through my head, “Don’t look down.  It’s a long, long way to fall.”

Look, I grew up upper middle class.  I also grew up dirt poor.  Yes, both are true.  For the village we were “of good families.”  My family had never been barefoot laborers, we owned land.  We didn’t own enough land to amount to anything but a small farm, but…  And my grandfather was a skilled worker – a cabinet maker – and my grandmother ran her own business (would you believe hand painting/building cosmetic boxes?)  Yeah.  And my dad had a college education and a white collar job.  And all the grandkids attended college.  (Though a couple didn’t finish.)

We were not “peasants.”  I doubt we ever had been.  All my ancestresses as far back as memory stretches knew how to read, which is not normal in Portuguese peasants.  And we had some nice China and stuff.

So, why do I say we were dirt poor?  Oh.  Well, there was the three suits of clothing, one for best, one for everyday and one for rough.  (We might have had double that, because mom made them, but honestly, she stored ALL our clothes – for the four of us — in ONE dresser and one wardrobe, when my brother was a teen, and I was little.)  I had a never ending succession of pinafores, which is what I wore to keep the “good clothes” clean.  There was the ONE alarm clock in the house, which had to be moved around depending on who needed to get up (and for these purposes the “house” included my grandmother’s next door.

But perhaps nothing will encapsulate it as well as the fact that it was normal, both from my family and other middle class families to take a sweater apart, redeye the yarn, and make a “new” sweater.  You could go three or four rounds before the yarn itself became too bad to use.

Relatives from abroad brought us chocolates as gifts when they visited.  You know, your normal multi-square candy bar.  We hoarded it like gold, and ate a square or two a month. (Yes, there’s Portuguese chocolates.  I believe they are categorized as soap.  Or were, at the time.)

I don’t say that to induce pity.  We were neither conscious of being poor nor were we in bad shape in relation to other people.  On the contrary.  And in a comparison either with the world or with historic norm, we were rich.  Rich beyond the dreams of avarice.

This is something that shocks Americans born-and-bred.  But it is true.

We are so rich that even the rich of other countries don’t fully get us.  They don’t see how well off we are.  They don’t see how our MIDDLE CLASS lives better than their upper classes.  Sometimes, and in some things, better than their middle class could dream.

Portugal is considerably better off (technically, though it’s all apparently borrowed money) now, but still, guys, I’ll be blunt with you.  I’ve been to their grocery stores, and I don’t know how people live.  I know what they make, and their salaries seem to range about half of ours, but everything – EVERYTHING – is in a smaller package and costs more.

I submit to you a lot of our stupidity is the stupidity of the well off.  You can decide to be vegan – if you have enough money.  You can be very tolerant of stupid people yelling at you for being imperialistic, if they don’t destroy your way of life.  You can pick odd styles of dress and “go back to nature” because you have enough money and because other people are well off enough they don’t care.

That I’m very much afraid is coming to an end.  I’m not a clairvoyant, if I were I would not have spent two years trying to break into short stories and twelve years trying to keep a foot in other-publishers-than-Baen.  I’d simply have gone Baen only twelve years ago and right now would have piles and piles of mysteries to go up.

But I do have the ability to get pictures in my head that describe a situation. Sometimes a situation I can’t explain rationally, and one no one believes me on.  When I first came into publishing, I could see it as a rotten ladder, breaking low and middle.  If I got to the top, I’d be safe, but there was no path there.

Everyone kept telling me I was seeing what wasn’t there.  “Publishing has always been in trouble.  It’s okay.”  It wasn’t okay.  The combination of consolidated publishing houses and big bookstores was killing the field, low and middle, and only the darlings survived (but lost readership every book.)

The image in my mind right now, with this Obamacare insanity, is of someone taking a car that is barely running, opening the hood and pouring a few buckets of fresh cement over the engine.

Don’t look down.  It’s a long, long way to fall.

And as I said, the prospects for my kids, and for all the bright kids of their generation HURT me.

But we’re all born where we are and even I can only do so much to prepare the kids, and to ensure they’re not hurt by this.  And cr*p like what is already in the pipe and flowing at us?  It’s going to hurt EVERYONE.

However, I’m no longer depressed.  I’m no longer depressed because… well… turn that around.  “It’s a long, long way to fall.”

We could lose half of our easy wealth and we’d still be better off than 90% of the world (let alone history) and that’s if THEY don’t fall too.

And that’s the other reason.  The crap that’s flowing down the pipe?  It’s going to hit the whole world.  America is a late-buyer into teh shiny (I typed that initially whiny) of socialism.  Which is why we’re the world’s largest consumer and the best well off.  And the shiny is running out of other people’s money all over the world, because the system promotes redistribution, not creation of wealth, which means people slowly get poorer.

America is going to hurt.  I’m not going to lie to you.  Are we going to hurt as much as the rest of the world?  Impossible.  Wealth doesn’t vanish over night. Look, I think I admitted to you before I buy most of my clothes from thrift stores.  This is something that’s not even really available in other countries (oh, yes, it exists, but there isn’t that much surplus.)  Nine times out of ten the clothes I buy are new, sometimes still with labels.  Someone bought them/got them as a gift, and either gained/lost weight and never wore them.  I think it’s expensive to pay $10 for a pair of designer jeans.  I wait for the half price sale.  This is only possible in a VERY wealthy country.  And that wealth won’t vanish.  Not for a decade or two.  The surplus is still around.

There is another reason – when societies are shocked, they revert to their founding myth.  It’s not by chance that things like Golden Dawn are resurgent in Europe.  A lot of the countries are going to revert to their founding myth which is both racist and triumphalist.

BUT that’s not our founding myth.  We were founded in liberty.  Yes, there are many who think this mean “liberty to have everything I want given to me.”  But those are not the active, able people.  Those who can stay on their feet during the tumble are people like us, who believe in individual liberty.

Is this guaranteed?  Oh, h*ll no.  We could end up with a strong man.  (Only we won’t.  We’re ungovernable, as the idiots at the top are finding out.  A state or two could go for a strong man.  The rest of us?  — pah.)

The statists think out of disorder will come communism.  Guys.  Remember they’re a religion.  A particularly dopey one.  There’s almost no chance of that, because communism requires a strong man.  The current buffoon ain’t it.  Nor are any of the people around him.  And given present-day America, there might be no one strong enough.

My biggest fear is that we’re wealthy enough to limp along another three generations, by which time we would be tenderized as it were, for the “Strong man.”

Bah.  Won’t happen.  They want the full socialist shiny and they want it now.  They’re pouring the cement over the car, because the engine is still running.  And if it stops – communism!  (The poor dears never get over the idea that the starving masses are JUST waiting for the intellectuals to lead the revolution.  Poor num’kins.)

A rebirth of liberty is far more likely than communism.  And it something we can fight and work for.

As for my kids and their future?  Well!  Who in the depths of Carter foresaw the Reagan boom.  And guys, if we can arrange for a boom now, it will be bigger and better than Carter.  Has to be.  Like after WWII, the rest of the world will be in a shambles.  Which is why my kids are so lucky to be American.

Is this pie in the sky?  Not hardly.  You’re going to have to work for this one.

First, the preparation for the crash, which you should already be making: pay off/streamline/prepare.

Then the preparation for the resurgence: this has to do with what makes us uniquely American and I can’t give you instructions because I’m not there.  Which is good.  You’re Americans.  Make your own instructions.  “An Army of Davids” – what the man said.

Roll up your sleeves and see what you can do – ideally what will make you money (multiple streams of income) and also keep things going.  If you don’t have my brown thumb and have land, growing some food might not be amiss (I think food will get expensive and there will be disruptions in delivery.)  If you have the time and the inclination, learn how to keep cars running.  People are going to be holding onto them for longer, and it will be needed.  Other stuff like that – not preparation for the stone age, but for the conveniences getting more expensive and harder to find. Figuring out how to keep computers running, or small appliances, might not be a bad idea either, though there is a lot of wealth between us and new ones being utterly unaffordable. Learn to cook from scratch if you don’t know how.  Learn to make bread by hand.  Flour is cheap.  So is rice. (I wish I could have either.)

I’m a fairly useless person, other than telling stories and doing some art, but yes, I’m working on both of those.  People don’t live from bread alone.  They’re still going to need entertainment.

My kids are in STEM degrees and hopefully they’ll find jobs, but if not… well… I told them my best advice, the one that kept me working throughout 10 years in which everyone in the publishing field except Baen seemed to be actively trying to sideline me: I won’t die.  Even if they kill me.

I’m now giving that advice to all of you – and to America in general.  Refuse to die.  Even if they kill you. (Metaphorically speaking, of course, though if you find how to do the other, do let me know.)

It might be, and I always certainly guarantee will be, that you’ll hit the wall on what you’ve done all your life; what you know how to do.  Don’t sit there and go “it’s all over.”  Despair is a sin. It’s also a sure route to utter destruction.

Instead, go “I won’t die, even if they kill me.”  Find new ways to do what you love, or find something new to do.

Go under, go around, go over.  Use their regulations against them.  And never give up.

Don’t look down.  It’s a long way to fall.  Fortunately, we’re on the high wire, and as long as we keep moving and doing, we’ll be fine.

 

*Give me a break okay?  The furniture refinishing mysteries will ONLY be written to Evita.  Other music, nothing happens.  And then you guys wonder why I cry, bitch and moan about writing another of those.

There is this story from the heyday of anti-nuclear science fiction stories – or I should say the anti-American-nukes stories, because the bright idea in all of these was that we should unilaterally disarm, because the USSR, the same country that had brutally starved its own population, the same country that used its Cuban mercenaries to wreck and brutalize Africa would then become as lambs and disarm – whose title and author I don’t remember.  I don’t remember because I read it when I was twelve or thirteen. Even then it struck me as a very bad argument for unilateral disarmament.  As someone who lived in the other tip of Europe and who had the heard the – apparently true – rumors that the USSR had plans to get to us in three days, complete with printed road signs to show their troops how to go on, I was less misty eyed about this whole idea that if the US suddenly, voluntarily became sitting ducks, then the USSR would magically become peaceful and sweet.  Pfui.  Yet intellectuals in the US believed that.  Which brings us to the other stuff they believe.

But first let’s talk about that story.

In the story – and remember I read it more than thirty five years ago, so details might be fuzzy — some genius scientist had a mentally disabled son.  The scientist has just invented a new and more lethal than ever weapon.  A time traveler from the future comes to beg him not to share that weapon with the world.  The scientist refuses, until the time traveler hands the disabled child a loaded gun.  After the scientist manages to recover it, he asks the visitor why he did that (as opposed to decking him, which is what any man would have done, or shooting him, which is what I would have done) and the visitor asks him “Would you give a loaded gun to a moron?” (I read this in Portuguese.  In English it might have been idiot.  But it was a time before political correctness, so it was something blunt.)  Of course, on those brilliant words the scales fall from the scientist’s eyes, he destroys his own weapon, and peace reigns – until the other side stumbles on the same super-weapon, but never mind that.  The things the people in my field convince themselves are possible go a long way to explain their prevailing politics. (And the fact that it was reprinted in the language of a country far away, by people who found it equally profound tells you a lot about the prevailing illusions of educated people.  I hope for the sake of my respect for humanity that there were nuances that my young mind didn’t pick up on.)

So, let’s go into their politics, and the things they do.

They wouldn’t give a gun to a moron.  Given their choice, everyone would disarm, as though that would somehow forever bury the impulses of Cain when Abel’s sacrifices were better received.

Never mind that.  If I start on that and on their belief that the lion will lay down with the lamb if only Mrs. Colt will let them, we’ll be on that point all day.

Let’s consider instead that they are by implication calling the forces of government morons.  Morons who can’t be trusted with a loaded gun.  Give them a loaded gun and they’ll point it everywhere at random and hit friend and foe and “yes” indiscriminately.

Why then, in the name of sweet sanity, would they trust the government with ANYTHING?

I know why, and you know too.  It’s because they don’t really view what they give government as a gun.  They view it as a butter knife, with which the moron can butter his bread.

Would you give a moron a blunt knife?

Sure.  And so they do.  What is he going to do?  Dispense butter indiscriminately?

Well, yes.  And the butter must come from somewhere, and when it’s the government, he’s not making the butter, he’s taking it out of circulation.  And that means there isn’t enough butter to go around and the price of butter rises, and the economy wobbles.

But if that were all.  The moron that is the government also goes around doing crazier things.  Think of all the things that can be put on toast, so that no one wants to eat it.  I’ll mention, as one, nowhere near as noxious as others, metal polishing cream.  The moron that is the government will spread bread thick with it, and then he will make you eat it.  Because he can.  Because government IS a loaded gun.

No?  Then tell me why anyone bothers to follow laws?  Oh, a few and well defined and restricted laws a lot of us would follow out of principle.  We – most of us who have been properly socialized – will not willfully murder or rob.

But if all of us followed even those implicitly, there wouldn’t be any laws against them.  They would JUST be things “people don’t do.  They don’t do.”  There used to be a few of those – notably against cannibalism and bestiality – which some states were recently shocked to find weren’t on the statute books, because it never occurred to anyone that people would willfully do THAT.

They are on the books (and so are the laws against cannibalism and bestiality) because some humans will do it.  And to restrain them, one needs force.

In the same way you and I obey the more piddly, insane, counterproductive laws, even those we know will harm everyone, for one reason only.

Because the government is force.

Oh, sure, if you open an unlicensed food stand, they won’t tie you to a pillory and flog you.  But putting you in jail, and fining you for everything you own is also force.  It is carried out by a state in possession of a police force and an army.  And if you do a rolling stop in New Mexico, you might be given several enemas and a colonoscopy against your will, because the cops have convinced themselves you carry drugs – or perhaps just want to take you down a peg because you failed to show the proper deference, who knows – and then the hospital will charge you for it.

Force.

Government is raw, naked force. It’s the ability to force the recalcitrant in your midst to do what they would otherwise not do.  Even for the wisest of purposes – say, common defense – there is always one or two even in a small group who thinks he doesn’t need the rest, and why should he give the rest the benefit of his effort.

And that’s why governments are created among men.  But they ARE raw, naked force.  And they always, inevitably, fall in the hands of morons.

No?  think on it.  In monarchies this is fairly easy to see.  The brilliant father (or in Portugal’s case) the brilliant uncle, will raise a successor who — either because of natural issues (those people really needed to get a clue about marrying their cousins) or because he was raised in luxury, catered to from birth, and never had to do anything to justify his existence, while, at the same time, everyone told him how brilliant he was – will be a moron in power.

But in democracies this happens too.  Democracies are often victims of their own success.  The generation that strives and fights raises the generation that is much like the king’s heir.  The generation that builds an industrial empire  raises the generation that says “Wouldn’t it be great if we had a war on poverty?  And isn’t the government just the instrument to use?”

From there it descends to crazier things: wars on drugs, on tobacco, wars on salt and fat, and sugar.  Wars on child obesity.  Wars on profit.  Wars on achievement.

Because sooner or later, the gun that is government will fall into the hands of a moron.

Keep government small and starved.  Then when it starts pointing the gun inappropriately, and shooting at shadows, or at people just for fun and with total amoral enjoyment, you can immobilize it and take the gun away.

Okay, it might be too late for that. People who thought that giving the moron a butter knife “to give everyone health care”, people who think of the moron as the dispenser of all goodness have taken us to where we stand.

The moron has a loaded gun… and he’s shooting all around.

The only way to make this even remotely safe is to unload that gun, to take as many things as possible that people rely on the government for, and find other ways to do it.  Let government play with its shiny toys, but learn to ignore, circumvent, go under, go around.  Try to live your life as much as you can without either asking anything from government or letting it reach into your life to destroy anything you care about.

Yes, I know that’s a tall order.  But we must do it.  We must build over, build under, go around.  We must create a structure that keeps us going when the moron has shot himself in the foot and is bleeding to death.

Because it’s our only choice.

This is a sort of follow-up to Atlas JUGGLED.

I’ve been thinking of a lot of things, partly because I’m buried under stuff and new stuff keeps coming up.  For instance, I woke up with the beginning of Bowl of Red in my head – this is very bad, since before I do it I have to do Darkship Revenge and finish Through Fire.  The thing is, the novels arrive when they’re supposed to and pay no attention to the fact I’ve been sick and everything is late.  Like part of my brain doesn’t talk with the other part.

Which is par for the course, and explains this nagging feeling I have, like I’m the world’s laziest person.  Objectively, I roll out of bed and do this blog (Okay, later today, because I was doing… stuff around the house that couldn’t wait.) Then I write fiction as long as the brain holds out.  Then I write non fic, then if I have any spoons left, (which is rare) I work on getting stuff ready for publication.

This includes going over old novels that have reverted – right now that is The Magical British Empire, which is printed and waiting line by line re-edit, so I can keep some of the editing I liked, but well, change its slant vis a vis Western civilization a little.  This is going to be difficult, and I won’t lie and say all the PC stuff was the fault of the editing.  A lot of it was, particularly the way it was emphasized, but a lot of it was my doing from the beginning, because I was working with the old system, I knew an adventure book in exotic locales would only sell with a certain slant, and I wanted to keep publishing, and the kids needed shoes – and clothes.

But now I can do it the way I want to, so it needs to be gone over very carefully.  (BTW, the way I want to is not necessarily an absolution of what the Western Powers did in Africa (or other places) King Leopold will never be one of my favorite people. (Though our worst export to developing countries has been Marxism.  It links right in with tribalism, and it has made a right mess of those lands.))

So, anyway, those books – approaching goat-gagger size, are printed and waiting line-by-line.  I have Musketeer’s Apprentice back and ready to go over edits, to hopefully put up at the end of this week. I’ve finished both the cover and interiors workshop – and truly owe Dean (Smith) a write up on it for PJM – and I need to figure out this “create space thing” at some point.  Because the sales on books still available in paper (they are allowed to sell out of stock) and particularly the really old ones, are much slower.  My idea is that a paper edition will get them de-linked from the old Berkley editions.  We shall see. Time for that is not on the horizon till maybe January, because (always) the books for Baen come first.

Which is a problem, since I’m being attacked by books that are NOT Baen (mysteries, mostly.) And I’ve promised fans of the musketeer mysteries a new one for Christmas, and don’t think I’ll make it.

Oh, yeah, look at that description of my day and consider that into that also fits laundry, the minimal house cleaning required so my allergies don’t kick up (which is not immaculate, but it’s pretty close by today’s standards) dealing with cat, family and own illnesses, doing laundry, and research.

This is not, though it might sound like it, the equivalent of what my grandma (who had no other vices) used to do when I visited.  She used to give me a litany of everything she’d done that day.  She felt a need to tell you everything she’d done that day, to prove how hard she’d worked.

That is not what I’m doing, but it might be related to why she did it (or why I suspect she did it.)

Before I knew her she used to run a business out of the house, and of course, look after the house, raise the kids (granddad worked abroad for most of her child-rearing years, so she was on her own with three boys and a girl) cook, clean, and look after the little home-farm (it was that, though divided among four or five plots we either owned or “had the right to” cultivate) which provided wine and some fruit, and vegetables, and eggs for the entire family.

When I knew her, she had dropped the business and ‘retired’ into doing everything else.

I think the reason she gave me the laundry list – so to put it – of what she’d done that day was that she always felt like she hadn’t done enough.

Which is how I feel.  I feel like the world’s worst slacker, because there’s always stuff I haven’t done (since I was doing other stuff.)

I was talking about this with older son, who is taking more hours in college than a sane person would take, doing Ninja nun, writing two novels, learning Russian, volunteering at the hospital, and keeping up at least a little (not much, this semester) of the house cleaning.  Plus driving crazy me to the zoo when I miss the animals (though not this week, because he’s having finals.)  He was telling me how lazy he was…

I told him he wasn’t lazy, he was overcommitted, which FEELS lazy from the inside, because you’re never doing as much as you “feel” you should be doing.

But that brings us to something that’s sort of been bothering me at the back of my mind.

I’ve talked before about how we’re going to a world/model where everyone works for himself, though he might be a contractor for a dozen employers.

This is not Obamacare’s fault, though that crappy law is bringing it about much faster than it would otherwise, and therefore bringing us on a collision course with a model most people aren’t prepared for.

And that brings us to something I hadn’t given much thought to.  I thought, you know, the transition would be gradual and over twenty years or so.  My kids are taking on old enough professions that they’ll mostly have to work on the site of the job (Robert almost for sure, though there’s remote controlled stuff…  Marsh… who knows?) but most people their age won’t, I think, have “real jobs” where they have to be on site, and work at one thing only for more than ten or so years of their working lives.  (Note, I say most, not all.  Like my kids’ wished-for professions, a lot of work has to be done in person – but not the majority, and not for the majority of people.)

And I thought the transition would be better for most people – I still think so.  It will free up people from having to live in a particular place, and it will allow most people more time with their families.  I think when the transition is completed – and I don’t expect to see that, though stupid laws and all, well… — barbaric institutions like daycare, where you give in your infants to be raised by strangers according to outdated models of education, will be if not a thing of the past, at least things “that happen to other people.”  Most people will end up raising their own kids, and that’s a good thing.  As is the ability to change careers or do more than one thing, if you feel the need.

All of which is good, but here’s the rub.

There are really slackers.  And they’re not necessarily lazy.  They’re just people who need to be told what to do and when.  (And no, I don’t mean politically.  I mean in terms of work.)

When I first started looking at want ads in the US, I came across this expression that puzzled me “Must be self starter.”  Dan had to explain it to me.

Well, I don’t feel like a self starter, but I’ve been working as a contractor and ultimately for myself for the last 12 years (counting only the time I’ve been paid) and even though the last five years have been a mess for deadlines, in general I deliver (enough to get paid and make a living) and I’ve started the indie thing on the side, so I guess I am.

But here’s the thing – a lot of people aren’t.

Whenever I talk about a future where people mostly work for themselves, I get people yelling at me that I’m being racist, sexist, (not homophobic yet, but I’m sure it’s coming) and IQist.  (Why they lump the first two with the last, I don’t know.)  They tell me some people are too… communitarian, or too docile (ah, they don’t know the women I do) or too stupid to work for themselves.

Poppycock on that.  Where I grew up most women were EXPECTED to run a business out of the house.  Taking a job in a factory was an admission of failure.  And most people did run productive businesses out of the home, as well as the duties of a pre-industrial housewife, which always included some small scale farming and fabrication.  (Yes, I grew up in a very backward place.  Deal.)

Most human beings, throughout most of history have worked for themselves – and done enough to survive.  (Well, the ones who left descendants.)

And IQ has nothing to do with it.  I know several people who would test very badly in IQ who can do things that I can’t.  Lately with the economic crisis, there is one working class neighborhood near us where signs have started appearing on the side of residential houses “Haircuts” and “I repair small appliances” and “call me for your car trouble.”  (BTW that’s a discussion for another time, but regulations are tamping down a lot of that, which means they’re making the economic crisis worse.  And not all governmental regulations.  Neighborhood covenants can be worse.)

And I know several high IQ people who just do what they absolutely have to do and not one step further.

In the industrial age, where you worked under a supervisor and clocked in and out, this might limit their upward mobility: they would never go to a job where they didn’t have someone watching them/making sure they clocked in.  BUT they survived.  And they could do very well.

But what happens when most jobs – particularly for people who work with their minds – are “make it yourself, from scratch and bits”?  What happens when part of your job is creating your job?

What happens to all the people who are not self-starters?  They might be gifted, talented, brilliant, but they won’t work unless they have a structure that makes them do so.

And in a world of relative abundance (still) they’re never going to have to come to a situation where they need to work or starve.  And even if they do, they might NOT know how.

There is a type of mind that looks at a kitchen with dishes piled everywhere, rolls up its sleeves and goes “I’ll start cleaning here, and stop when it’s all done.”  Then there’s a type of mind that looks at it, doesn’t know where to start and becomes paralyzed.

The same applies to the real world, but on stilts, because sometimes what needs to/can be done is not immediately obvious.  It takes a type of mind to see it.

What seems to already be happening is that those who are “self starters” are doing three and four jobs, and keep coming up with new ones.  The ones who aren’t, are either unemployed or holding on to their one job by their fingernails, and bewildered on what they’d do if it goes away.

These are not lazy people (well, not all of them) they just don’t come up with things to do out of the blue.

We don’t even know how many of them there are.  There are probably fewer in the US than elsewhere, simply because we tend to roll up our sleeves and say “let’s get her done.”

But we know, almost for sure, there’s more of them than us.  The hundred plus years of the industrial model allowed them to grow and prosper too.  People who followed orders well could make a very decent living.  Showing up on time and doing what you were told was a survival skill.

There will still be some jobs like that, but not for the majority of people – and Obamacare is hurtling us towards a future where jobs means something completely different (the process started with the temp jobs in the eighties, to be fair.  And yes, a lot of it was even then pushed by government regulation.)  It means “temporary, contract, task-oriented, to be finished, and then another started up.  A lot of my generation has already gone through this, most of our working life, but it’s been “one employer, and then another” not… “I do the job in my own time, at my own pace, to employer specifications, either alone or while doing other jobs, and then I look for another, and another.”

A lot of us, who apparently despite ourselves are “self starters” are going to be doing the Atlas Juggled dance, with more than we can fit into a day.  Sometimes we might even be happy with it. (Once the kids are out of the house –? – and my work there diminishes, I should have an easier time, myself.)

But what about all the non-self-starters?  A lot of them genuinely won’t do well.

The left is worried about a future that excludes low IQ.  I think they are, as usual, full of it.  And they flatter themselves that they’re high-iq.

But there are people, IQ not mattering, who simply can’t adapt to a “find your own work, do your won thing, create your own job” world.

The lefts approach to the people they think are too dumb to survive is to create ever more lavish welfare.

Is ours going to be the same?  I don’t think it can be. Even with technology, there’s a minimum number of people who need to be working very hard to keep society going.  Confiscate their rewards, and you’re going to end up with them breaking early (In my experience Atlas can’t shrug.  He doesn’t know how.  But he can break.  And does) and having to be supported.  And even then, even if this weren’t so, there’s a minimum number of producers needed to support the others.

We’re nowhere near it, but this very bad law is hurtling us towards that future.

I don’t have an answer.  I don’t know what to do about the people who are not motivated to find their niche in this do-it-yourself world.  I don’t think the left’s “give them make work and welfare” works very well even now, and I think it will break down big time as “traditional jobs” become scarcer.

But I don’t know what to do about it.

To pick up on the title of the post, with another song – This could be heaven, or it could be hell.  And it will undoubtedly be both at once.

People used to make their own work, their own survival.  Those who couldn’t, didn’t survive.  Then came a way of earning your living that required you do do as told and do just so much and no more (in a way probably back to the agricultural revolution.)  There were  greater rewards and greater risks for trying to do it on your own, but it wasn’t mandatory.  Then in the twentieth century “jobs” became interchangeable with sinecures provided you did a minimum.  And if you didn’t, in the late twentieth century, the state would take care of you.

That was the blue model, which works well enough provided that the producers are more than the takers by some amount (I don’t know how much, though declining life standards could mean we’re already on the down slope.)

The blue model is collapsing, but what comes next?

 

 

So two days ago a friend sent me this “quote”:

“America is like a healthy body and its resistance is threefold: its patriotism, its morality, and its spiritual life. If we can undermine these three areas, America will collapse from within.” – Josef Stalin

It appears it has been all over face book.  It seemed wrong to me. I mean, it appeared on the order of “Ninety percent of quotes on the internet are wrong,” George Washington.

What appeared PARTICUARLY wrong was, so to say, the “psychology” of the quote.  It’s clearly how some Americans view America, but is it how Josef Stalin would see it?

Let’s leave aside the whole question of how much he believed in communism or whether he did.  He was a psychopath, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t dress his wishes in some form of ideology, and if he did it was communism.  If he believed in communism, the idea that America was “moral” is right out.  In fact, we know he had this idea that America just pretty much was promiscuously commercial from his quote about selling us a rope.  (And that one sounds real.)

In any case, whether he believed in communism or not, he would not say that aloud if he believed it.  Think how bad it would be for someone continuously denouncing us for that criminally evil regime – capitalism – to say we were moral.

Besides, children, veddy bad news, but despite our puritan streak, no one in the rest of the world views us as moral.  Mostly because we’re more open at our weirdness than they are.  It’s like a friend tells me the Japanese are in general very straight-laced, which is why their porn is so wild.  But HERE we get the porn and the tentacle anime and… and we assume that Japanese is a seething mass of bizarre and sex.  That’s sort of how the rest of the world sees us.  If you start an internet rumor that a fad of putting goldfish in your ears for sexual satisfaction is spreading in America, they’ll believe it.  And they would probably even more so when murderous uncle Joe was alive.

The “America is a healthy body” is also something he would not say aloud.  Because again, whether he believed communism or not, that was what they were selling to the masses, and in communist doctrine no capitalist country is healthy as such.  (It’s in conflict, in contradiction, just waiting to be transitioned, you might say.)

Then we have “its spiritual life” – oh, BROTHER.  Let alone that communists are atheists, and that there is a good chance Stalin saw his god in front of the shaving mirror every morning…  Even if he subscribed to the idea that a spiritual life of some sort was good, he would look at us and think we had none.

Look, it’s unfair.  It’s like our being the prudes that everyone else thinks are the class sluts, because we wear makeup and our skirt is a bit short (meaning we don’t pretend to be holier than thou) but as much as America is more religious than other Western countries, measurably, statistically, this is NOT how the world sees us.  They see our multitude of religions.  If you’re devout, how can you be friends with people who believe differently?  Clearly, you’re not devout.  They see our crazier manifestations – and that’s mostly what they see there, the snake handling sects, the spiritist sects, and then the fake churches like the idiots who picket soldiers funerals.  It’s mostly what they see because it’s what their media finds “interesting” – and they think of our religion, here in America as somewhere between a carnival and a freak show.

Why would someone viewing that think of it as a strength?  It would be more “Keep those crazy americans busy with their crazy religions, they’re less likely to believe we’re infiltrating.”

Of all of that only patriotism makes sense, since communism is an international creed and us such believes that undermining patriotism is essential to its spread.

So, yes, I went to snopes and the quote is fake.  Or at least “likely fake.”  (Trust me, it’s fake.)

Which bring us to why I spent so much time analyzing it.  No, it’s not to inure you about future bad quotes.  They will go around, and all of us will fall for some of them sometime.

The reason I spent so much time introducing this is that when I went to Snopes, I found this listed under one particular kind of lie.  The “The enemy is so clever” lie.

We’ve seen this with the Russians far too much and all through my life.  “They’re so clever, that they engineered this and that and the other thing.”  “They’re so brilliant, this is happening just according to their plan.”

Guys, take a deep breath, step back.  If this is all according to their plan, it’s the only plan of theirs that ever went right.  I mean, seriously, they couldn’t feed their own homeland with all those five years plans, but they can do a near hundred year plan to take over the rest of the world?

But Sarah, you’ll say, you say we’re still suffering from the effects of Soviet agit prop!

Oh, sure we are, but agit prop is not a careful plan.  Look, communism is very good at proselytizing.  Arguably it’s the one thing it’s good at.  It hits, like all other communitarian doctrines, the part of the human brain that’s both looking for “fair” and longing for a return to childhood, with benevolent overseeing parents.

Put enough agit prop over there (and they put a lot) and some of it is going to hit and corrupt the vision of other countries.  Besides, communism is so tailor made for intellectuals, explaining how things would be better if the intelligentsia ruled us.

BUT that is not a plan.  Not unless it’s in the sense of “we do this, and this just might happen.”  Witness for instance, that a plan would have come to fruition much earlier – like, before the USSR collapsed.  Also, people that good at planning would have made sure that their system worked.  (It is one of the funniest things about communism that they are central planners, but their plans never work.  Okay, funny in a bitter way.  I’m not laughing at the mass graves their delusions have caused.

There is a tendency to look at trends we don’t like in society and things that aid ideologies we don’t approve of, and think that it’s all a fiendish plan.

Both sides do it.  The left looked at the tea parties and panicked, because it doesn’t fit their conceptual universe for people to protest high taxes.  So they invented the boogey man of the Koch brothers (rather libertarian old bachelors whom a friend who worked for them assured me are very nice.)

Soros is not on the same level – because, well, we KNOW he finances all sorts of left causes (and given his history, anyone who thinks he’s one the side of angels and works for causes he endorses, should think again.  Once you sell out your own people as a kid, well… you’re done, morally speaking.  Particularly when you still brag about it as an old man.)  And he has more money than the Kochs ever did.

But does that mean it’s all his “plan”?  Is it all going according to his plan?  Oh, please, guys – OWS.  No, seriously.  OWS.  Yes, we all saw the ads on Craigslist, but nowhere did it say “must poop on police cars” okay?

He’s a man who wants to see the world burn and to that end tosses a lot of money at various disruptive causes.  But he does not have a detailed plan, and everything does not go according to his plan, or you’d be looking at his face in a big screen every morning, while you did your mandated exercises. (Big Soros is watching you.  Ick.)

Here’s the thing and the reason I don’t believe in the “conspiracy theory of history” except in the sense that some humans will look for power, and that the way they do it is always predictable: humans are strange.

No, seriously, humans are strange.  There has never been a satisfactory enough theory to the way the individual human mind works.  Oh, somewhat… but each school of psychology has hold of an end and no one has the full elephant.  Which is why psychology remains a semi-soft science.

This simplifies somewhat when you have a crowd, but it’s still not conclusive.  And when you have something like a country, which is a conglomerate of crowds… well…

History takes sudden turns, precipitated by events and one or two odd individuals in a crowd who don’t react the way you expect.  “Scientific history” is poppycock.  If it weren’t, the United States wouldn’t exist.

Yes, it is all explainable in retrospect, how we came to be. It’s easy to make up just-so stories about the past.

I doubt there’s ever been a human plan that worked, throughout history, and those of us who believe in a divine plan also believe it has taken some weird turns to accommodate us.  Or as grandma would say “G-d writes straight on crooked lines.” (Or for those of you don’t believe, yes, those could be “just so” stories too, but if it’s all the same with you, I’ll throw my lot in with grandma.  You see, I knew her, and I trust her judgement.)

We’re not G-d.  Yes, I know.  Very upsetting.  But we’re not.  This means that any plan that takes more than a generation will take some very weird turns, go sideways, and slide upside down, in the game of telephone that’s multi-generational belief.

Take for instance old Joe’s supposed quote above.  Even if it had been true, could he have predicted the effect of a massive demographic bulge on American culture which did most of the loosening of said culture?  I doubt it. I think the man had a talent for killing and terror, but no demonstrable intelligence otherwise.

Then why are we attributing G-d like intelligence to him?

Well, both because it puts the other side in the light of traitors and because it means we can’t do anything – see how comfortable that is?  We can’t do anything, so why try?  We can be absolute lumps and lecture all our friends still trying to turn things around and save us from a crash with “You fools.  It’s been planned for decades.  There’s nothing you can do.”  Which is very comfortable and morally superior.

I see it all the time, even now, even from respectable thinkers, about the deblacle that is Obama Care.  “They planned this all.  It’s all incredibly smart.  Game over, man.”

Oh, please.  You don’t need to drink their ink.  No one in their right mind could have planned that insanity.  Did they plan for the plan to collapse into single payer?  Surely.  But not by the sheer incompetence of governmental administration.

We’re well outside their plan, guys.  They’re the gang that can’t shoot straight.  No, this doesn’t mean they’re completely ineffective.  They’re very good at destruction and destruction is half of their job.  BUT it means when their plan goes wrong (and it always does) there is an opening for us to come in, to save things, to fix things, to make things work the way we want.

Will it go exactly according to plan for us?  Oh, heck no.  BUT we can push it in the right direction and keep working.

We’re good at working and at building.

This morning, I got up and I cleaned poop from the hallway.  Our geriatric cat is having diarrhea.

Being a conservative/libertarian is sort of like that.  You’re always cleaning poop you didn’t make.  And you don’t want to, because you have no interest in power over others.  But if you just leave it there, someone will slip on it and make a bigger mess.

It’s not a plan.  It’s just that you know where the spray cleaner is, and the paper towels, so you do it.  And you change what would otherwise have happened.

Be of good cheer.  Destruction is not a plan and incompetence is not a destination.

Giving up would be premature and despair is a sin.  In the long run, destroyers always lose, and you always need the person who knows where the cleaner is kept and how to use the paper towels.

Square your shoulders and be alert.  You, those you love, and perhaps the entire country depend on you.  This is not time to go wobbly.