Month: November 2013

Because it’s Sunday and I’m lazy and I don’t have anyone do anything more interesting today and because some of you are crazy enough to even like my grocery list, it’s time for another update on the state of the writer.

This week was very bad for writing.

One of the things that annoys me about “not quite sick/not quite well” is not being sick enough to justify not working, and yet being unable to work, anyway.  For the last seven days I found myself struggling from word to word.  I could do work – and did – of the clean up/fix up/redo old covers, but let’s face it, I need to be writing, and a lot of it, and this isn’t helping.  It just helps pile up the work.

Seems to be still/again HVAC.  This week we started the heater, and I suddenly became all congested.  The cause was not far to find: the house is drier than the Sahara.  Since for the last year or so I have had to turn on a little humidifier, I just grumbled and put that on the list.

Then I went to the basement to find the artificial pumpkins because it’s one of those years I didn’t get around to buying any (I MEANT to.)  Well, I couldn’t find the artificial ones, either, and went around the corner of the furnace… to find a small lake next to the humidifier unit.

Since it was serviced just six months ago – when for the first time (after seven years of doing yearly servicing on it) they told us it even had a filter that needed changing (much less changed it) I was HIGHLY not amused.  So I called in.  Was told it was the water pump and that it goes bad over time, and no, this wasn’t a do over and I had to pay.  We won’t even go into that.  It might all be true, but I still feel wrongly done by.

So they fixed it, only the humidifier doesn’t seem to be kicking on.  Yesterday was particularly difficult and I woke up with one of those ineradicable headaches that made writing the blog post a trial.

I’ve gone down and fiddled with it, and will presently go and see if there’s another lake.  But at least words seem to be easier, today.

(And don’t get all worried about mold or mildew, truly.  In CO, to get that, you need to keep it soaked in water for YEARS without drying in between.  What I’m fighting now is rather extreme dryness.)

To contribute to the mess this week, Miranda cat seems to have trouble finding the box.  She’s 13 and has a heart condition, so this is to expected, but it gets old getting up in the morning and cleaning cat doings on the front hall or the art nook or – once – Robert’s bed.

That’s the wine.  On the good side, the words seem to be coming back, and I did get some publishing done. Not PARTICULARLY apty, mind.  I need to fix both Musketeer’s Seamstress and Death of A Musketeer since I seem to have uploaded the wrong versions to the ibook store.

Most of all, I’ve come to the conclusion I need more time to write.  Yes, I know.  I’ve always known that.  And yet it’s true and I need to figure out how to isolate/concentrate so I can write more, both for Baen and for indie.  (The vintage mysteries set between the wars are getting very loud, and then there’s this romance series – regency with a touch of fairytale.  Yes, I know you guys are saying “ew” but you’ll probably survive.  And there’s still all the other stuff I’ve excerpted here.)

On the good side, while talking – of all things – about politics with an online friend, I figured out the motivation/what Simon is trying to do, which will help me get the MIDDLE of Through Fire, which is what has been holding me up.  I have the beginning and the end, but I couldn’t figure out what the d*mn man was about.

Now the issue is making him NOT an outright villain.  He isn’t, you know – he is more sinned against than sinning.  His disposition – genetically speaking – might be bad, and he had an amoral upbringing (most of the mules did, of course.  Lucius was lucky to have Sam as a surrogate father.) but he’s just trying to survive.  It’s just what when you add “amoral” and “trying to survive” things get odd.

But I want him to learn, not need killing.  Ah, well, we’ll see.

I’m putting the first fifty pages (or so) of through fire in the subscriber space.  I meant to do that yesterday and lost it.  Those of you who don’t like snippets shouldn’t read it, of course.  I will put up a full novella I’m working on getting up sometime later this week.

I’m really sorry I update that so irregularly.  It’s all being semi-sick so that I know I should do it, but after doing the blogs for PJM and at least trying at both writing and indie publishing, I feel like I’m out of spoons.

This also goes to explain why I so often forget to read things people send me/lose guest blogs.  It’s not that I’m ignoring everyone, it’s that everything non-essential tends to slip off my schedule, and do that long enough and it gets buried.  It’s probably a self-preservation thing.

Anyway, if I’ve forgotten your blog/story I told you I’d read/whatever, please poke me.  I feel awful when I break promises, and it’s never on purpose.  (On the other hand, if I didn’t tell you I’d read something, chances I’ll do so this year are slim, because all the not-quite-illnesses have made it essential to do the following in this order: Finish Baen Books, asap.  Get Witchfinder out. Finish Musketeer’s Confessor, because I have people waiting for it. Ditto with Hell Bound and half a dozen half finished stories (including The Brave And The Free, which will probably go to Baen.)  Start my Holiday publishing/free story thing again.  It worked really well last year, so the idea is to put out a short story a week and take it free between probably next week and new years.

OF COURSE what I want to do is go to the zoo and gawk at the elephants in what might turn out to be the last mild weekend of the year.

What I’ll do, though, is update the subscriber page, write a chapter of elf blood, get more coffee and sit down to work.

Later today I’ve got to proof some essays for the boys (for school) and maybe Robert will have time to go for a walk with me.  The neighborhood is looking very lovely, with all the gold in the trees.  Tonight, if not totally out of spoons I’ll write supplemental posts on writing proposals and on doing covers for PJM lifestyle.

And I have a (male) nude on the easel (deal.  It’s not even slightly prurient.  I mean, his leg hides everything) which I’d like to take at least half an hour to play with.  I’m trying to do it in conde Earthtones, with no real color.  We’ll see if I find any time.  I haven’t had time/energy all week.  I’d guess it depends on the ratio of cat-poop-clean-up today.

BUT I probably will fantasize about the zoo like anything!

UPDATE: Elf Blood is Up — late because I was putzing with the cover.  (Sobs.)  It’s like a disease.

I was trying to come up with the whole idea that there needs to be a narrative, some way we see ourselves.

Humans are made only partly of physical being, the other part of us story, a myth that extends beyond us.  We’re none of us stupid – or too stupid – we know where we come from and we’ve seen what happens to the generations before us.

Leaving religion aside for a moment – yes, religion is part of a narrative that encompasses everything around us and extends into the future from us, but it’s not the only narrative – if you look at the normal course of human life, we know we are born, we live, we die, and (in all but very few cases) we’re forgotten.  To a certain extent, unless you’re a king or your name happens to be Shakespeare, we’re all forgotten – even if we’re remembered in some historian’s footnote.  Heck, even most of the kings are not that important.  When is the last time you were fascinated by every small detail in the life of Ethelred the unready?  (Suburbanbanshee, do not answer that one.)

Now why I said leaving religion aside—yes, religion is a narrative that makes sense out of life, and it’s always been there.  It’s still there for those who believe, to the degree they muster their belief – is that there used to be a civic narrative too.  Patriotism.  In the old world, this amounted to the belief that your “race” defined as your nationality was the bestest ever and supposed to recreate the feats of the Romans (Portuguese poems went on about this a lot) or to civilize the world, or whatever.

These narratives weren’t questioned openly, though of course no one but the youngest school children took them literally – no?  Read any books written at the time.  They had as many doubts as we have about the purity and heroism of the past.  They just didn’t obsess on them, and elevate them above the “narrative.”

People might have had doubts aplenty about good queen Bess, but they didn’t tell their children that, when the children were learning the national narrative.  And that meant when the children grew up, somewhere, in the inner recesses of their being, they still took pride in and believed in the greatness of their country and their past.

Then came the twentieth century.  First, the insanity of Germany in WWII was taken as an indictment of all patriotism.  I don’t think this was right to do, just like it’s not right to assume if you prepare for war, you’ll have war.  And second we got deconstructionism and the charming art of laughing or sneering at the past, and thereby – with no accomplishments, no new ideas, nothing to our credit – considering ourselves more important than them.  George Washington?  Pah, he wore dentures, and he was an “ambitious man” and that invalidates everything he did, right?  Thomas Jefferson might or might not have slept with a slave, thereby of course he was an awful man, and everything he did was tainted and should be forgotten.

And so it goes, taking down one by one the giants of the past.

If that fails, if we have nothing concrete to level against them, then we point our finger and say they didn’t conform to our prejudices: they were racist, sexist, homophobic.  As though someone running around their time holding the opinions of our time wouldn’t be killed or locked up.  (And no, don’t tell me our opinions are superior.  No, I don’t agree with them on race or their beliefs about homosexuals – though even in those cases I understand how they formed their opinions in their time – but the entire crazy idea of women being exactly the same as men except where their superior should still get people locked up for insanity.)  And in the rare cases it’s fairly sure that the people were none of those, we can point our finger and accuse them of being rich.  How much could they care about the poor, when they were rich?

What about the people who gave it all, to be ascetics, or missionaries?  Well, clearly they were clinging to an outmoded and intolerant religion, so how good can they be?

 

I sometimes wonder if this is yet another way of salving the wounds of WWI.  Europe looked the carnage they had created in the eye and decided the thing to do was sever all ties with the past and at the same time prove themselves superior.

Like the little kid who found his dad is a secret drinker and runs around saying his REAL father is a prince, we run around telling ourselves stories that make us feel better, but have nothing to do with reality and create nothing new in the world.

And meanwhile the only coordinated narrative is Marxism, which is an evil and a blight onto the world, disdaining humans as they really are, considering all wealth theft, and holding up as its highest ideal the sort of equality that’s only possible when everyone is desperately poor.

How can young people feel inspired to achieve, to invent, to create, when they’re taught the civilization they are born into is evil and that all its ever done is steal from others?  Even though this is patently false, and they should be able to tell by looking around them that no other civilization has tried so hard to achieve prosperity and equal opportunity for all, they’re taught the opposite when they’re very young, and some of it sticks.

So they want to go up to be government bureaucrats; to work at redistributing wealth; to fight the evil “rich” who cause all he problems.

How could we doubt it?  It’s the narrative.

They will become reporters who don’t see the malfeasance of one side, because well, how could they?  These people are against western civilization and therefore on the right side of the internalized narrative.  They become politicians who hate their own homeland and the military who are the means of that land’s defense.  They become teachers who teach the kids to spit on the heads of those who made us what we are because “Racist, sexist, homophobic.”

 

The problem is that this narrative doesn’t conform to the real world any more than the extreme hagiographic narratives of the past did.

 

Look, I’m not advocating lying to the young.  Yes, men and women in the past were human, with foibles and follies, just as we have them.  Great and visionary kings had sexual peccadillos and, worse, sent to the block people they didn’t like.  There might have been cannibalism among early colonists to the new world (out of hunger, mind.)  Yes, the Puritans were rather insane and thought they could live in a proto-communism of sorts. Yes, medieval Christianity had elements of totalitarian political system.

But does Jimmy in first grade need to know only the bad things about the past?  Can’t he be told that so and so financed the discoveries, and that very brave people came across the ocean to settle in an utterly strange land and create what they hoped would be a better way of living, and that Christianity stopped the human sacrifices that were common to the ancients and introduced the idea that man, being made in the image of G-d, is in a way sacred, to all of what used to be barbarous Europe?

Later on in their sneering phase you can let them know about the warts.  And still later on, when they’re coming out of the sneering phase, you can bring them to understand that no work of humanity is perfect.  Yes, these great people had warts, but that didn’t mean they were less great.  No, they were more so, because they were great despite their warts.  And they too – the new generation who surely knows themselves as flawed – can be great, if only…  If only they try to combat their baser nature and look for something great.

Instead, we teach them that there are no heroes, that the narrative of history is one of one man beating the other for a slice of the finite pie.  And then everyone dies.

And we wonder why the kids have no direction?  We wonder why they aren’t getting married and having kids?

The wonder is that the suicide rate isn’t higher.

If you look at it objectively, it is rather childish to pretend that only the dark and dreary view of society is “right” — it is the view of posing teenagers and not adults.  And such an infantile narrative can’t propel a grown up civilization.

The problem with the narrative offered, at all levels, from history to fiction, from science (“humans are a plague upon the world”) to religion (where in most streams churches redistribution is preached instead of charity and using the power of the state to make everything “just”) the whole “progressive” narrative is not only that it’s at variance with real history (any narrative is, to an extent) but that it’s a dark, dreary vision of history that in the end amounts to a condemnation of humanity with all it entails.

We need to give kids – and adults – something to dream on.

That is of course part of the Human Wave project when it comes to stories, but we need Human Wave history, too – history that shows the flaws and the struggle, but which lets the greatness shine through, as something to aspire to.

History that feeds the soul.

The deconstructionist plague has laid waste to everything of value humans do.  It’s time to gather the pieces and rebuild.

 

*Okay, this is very short and you can’t kill me.  Yes, I could do two, but that would totally pull me out of TF, and I can’t do that.  So, live with it  Eventually I’ll catch up.

Meanwhile Witchfinder is back and edited, but I must get Through Fire to Baen before I sit down to go over the edits, at which point it will come out.  So, I’m going to clean boxes and go back to work, okay.  Meanwhile, enjoy this which I admit is more of a teaser than a chapter.  (Though it moves the plot forward.  Oh, does it ever.)*

*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

Interlude with Monkeys

 

Wolfe Merritt, Manufactories and Properties Manager for the Right Honorable Earl of Savage.

 

I hit so hard that for a moment I wasn’t sure at all I had survived.

I’d let go of the rope inside the gut of a fantastical beast, as I said a spell to restore us to our right world.  Beneath me was a pool of acid.  If the spell didn’t work, I was going to die in a horrible way.

And for a moment I wasn’t sure I hadn’t.  I fell hard, and my brain rattled, and I might have lost consciousness for a little while.

At length I became aware of soft grass under me, of a smell of flowers, and therefore that I could not be in acid, in the gut of a monster.

But I can’t have been unconscious too long. Opening my eyes, I saw Lady Helen falling, just near me.  She fell, as I had, onto a cushiony grassy mound, and rolled down, and lifted her head, glaring at me, “You!” as though she were surprised to see me, or perhaps as though I’d engineered her fall.

I was vaguely aware of her maid, Betsy, falling near us, and then another man, I wasn’t sure whom, but I caught sight of a human form falling.

This was followed in short order by the sound of chattering monkeys, and a lot of noise like tree leaves being ruffled.  I turned over and saw that there were indeed trees.  We were in a clearing.  It was a good thing we hadn’t fallen through the trees.  I suspect while not as lethal as the acid, it would be just as bad.

Betsy was gathering herself, and Lady Helen was still glowering at me.  “You,” she said again.

I blinked at her, because it still felt like the tumble had made it impossible for me to think, and she said, “Where are we?”  She crossed her arms.  “Where did you bring us?”

I looked at her, then around me, then up at the trees, where Hannuman’s monkeys were chittering and swinging from branch to branch.  “Somewhere,” I said, “not inside the monster.”

A male chuckle answered that, and turning around I saw it was Hanuman, himself, in human form, and I had a moment to rejoice he was wearing clothes.  “Indeed, it’s not,” he said.  “And you should be grateful enough for that, milady.  An eternity I spent in that vile place.  This is not it.”

I got a feeling he knew where this was, and a strong pit-of the stomach clench of anxiety that it was nowhere I wanted to be, but I didn’t say it.  Instead I said, mock-cheerfully, “It could be somewhere pleasant,” I said.  “it could even be your country estate, and your brother somewhere nearby.”  As I said it I thought my mother and my son would be nearby too, and I longed for that with near painful need.  To walk into mother’s kitchen, to have—

“I think not,” the Monkey-king said, at the same time that Miss Blythe said, “The power aura is all wrong!”

“Where are we?” I said with nascent alarm.  The monkeys were approaching now, very quietly, walking like men, closing in.

“We’re in my world, Mr. Merrit,” the Monkey king said, and grinned ingratiatingly.  “The Myth World.”