Year: 2015

Years ago, when life had been an unremitting shower of cack, we’d take a day off and go to Denver and have dinner at Pete’s kitchen.  This was known as “altering our luck.”

Perhaps it was the psycho-somatic effects, but usually afterwards things improved, stuff we’d long hoped for happened, and we felt better about life in general. Perhaps it was our perspective that had changed.

Now life hasn’t been that bad, but there have been aspects of it we’re been less than happy with.  Mostly the fact that over the last 12 years I keep getting sick to the point that it finally stopped the writing (and the reading!) cold about two years ago.

Part of the decision to renew our vows before our assembled friends (and fandom) was to have that effect of shaking the dice cup and seeing if we could get a better combination.  The other half was that we’d never had a wedding for US with OUR friends.  Our first wedding (civil ceremony) was half a dozen people, at the York County court house.  We spent the rest of the day helping my sister-in-law move.

Our wedding in Portugal, the religious ceremony, was massive.  It was in fact too massive, including relatives who had flown in from across the world and whom I hadn’t seen in my cognizant life.

The end of it is that we never had a ceremony before our friends and the people who are in our life, more or less constantly.

So we decided we wanted one.  We wanted one for our 25th, only, you know, as these things happen, we were so broke we didn’t even come to Liberty Con (where, in the age of the interwebs, we get the largest concentration of our friends.)

Which is why we decided to do it this year, even though with rent and mortgage we are ALSO broke.  But it’s also because we’re taking the opportunity to fix the health issues we know about, and because the tenor of our life and family life is changing.  We only have Robert with us another month or so, and his brother wants to move out when the house sells, which means we’re somewhere between a month and a year (we don’t know when the house will sell) away from being empty nesters and completely rearranging the pattern of our lives.

And we wanted a promise to help us with it.  One of the reasons I’ve always said marriage is different than living together is because a promise taken before the people who matter to you has weight and heft, and you’ll hesitate to break it.  (Not that I wouldn’t, anyway, since oaths matter.)

Which brings us to–

Yesterday we renewed our vows before the assembled attendees of Liberty con who were here early and wanted to watch.

As usual, we had planned everything and had attendants… and then we forgot them.  We shared a joint ceremony with Cedar Sanderson and Sanford Begley, who were not in fact renewing but doing this for the first time.  And the whole thing took about 5 minutes.

In retrospect, the ceremony we came up with was very Libertarian, self-administered each of the couples speaking to each other.  And then we leaped two by two over a replica of Lady Vivamus, from Glory Road.

At the last minute Cedar changed her dress to green, which means that together we were Christmas, not patriotic, but we had red and white and blue bouquets (thank you Toni Weisskopf) so it still counts as the first ever Usaian wedding.  I think.

I’m assured the dress of provocation was all that.  I might put it back on for the reception today at 8 pm.  If you’re around Liberty con walk down the party room hallway (room 10 something) and you’ll find us.

And let’s hope that the shake of the dice cup works, and the next few years everything comes up right, or at least better.  Let’s hope this is a good omen as we enter a new phase in our lives.  Let’s hope it is, at least, no worse.

Dum Vivimus Vivamus.

A few weeks ago I was reading Ace of Spades, which most of the time does not raise my blood pressure, when I came across this dismissive, gloaty type of post about how we’re done as a free people, because look at how people go through airport security: they eagerly, quickly, get all their trays and lay out their everything, etc.

The implication is that people like or approve of the security Kabuki, and are doing it out of how much they approve and want to have their stuff pawed through, etc.

It felt wrong when I read it. But I couldn’t put my finger on it.

So, yesterday, while having my 4th amendment rights violated I realized how wrong this was, and why it’s wrong.

Going through the TSA’s tender ministrations ALWAYS makes me forget I’m an OWL (older, wiser, libertarian).  I want to put on my best innocent voice (the one I used to rile college authorities) and say “When was the fourth amendment repealed?” or “Excuse me, you have perhaps failed to realize I’m an American and we have certain rights?” or even “Can you direct me to the place where the constitution is still respected?”

However, I went through the line as “eagerly” as everyone else.  More possibly, as I take my shoes off before I even get in line.  A mother behind me was having near-silent kittens about her kid walking on the airport floor in socks, but heck, I used to eat sand on the beach and walk barefoot on village streets when horses and oxen were the main transportation.

I did not do it because I thought the authorities had the right, or because I approved of what they were doing.  Even if I thought the security kabuki (shoes, really?  I mean the shoe bomber should have been spotted just walking through) was doing anything (I traveled with a can of mace disguised as a lighter for ten years after 9/11.  Not on purpose.  I’d forgotten I had it in my purse.  The point is it was never found, even though what it was disguised as —  a lighter — is also forbidden) I couldn’t approve of what they were doing yesterday which was apparently training new personnel during one of the busiest hours I’ve seen DIA.  This meant every bag scan called supervisors over to discuss it for ten minutes.  I was happy we’d built in an extra hour, but we let people ahead of us who were already boarding.

So why was I “such a good sheep”?

Not for the authorities.  The mechanism made itself clear when obeying just as crazy an authority a few minutes later.

Unless you have flown more than one airline recently, you probably don’t know what I mean.  If you have, though, you know each airline has come up with a more “efficient” way to fill the plane.  They’ve done it all.  Zones based on your lateral position (Window, isle, middle); zones based on where you sit on the plane (front, back, middle), zones based on your first name, your last name and how well you dance the Macarena.

All of these have “studies” that show how efficient they are.  And none of them — save the one airline that lets you board at will because their experts have proven its faster — actually makes any sense when you throw real people in.  There is always someone battling a too-large-by-a-tenth-of-an-inch carry on.  There is always someone who boards wrong.  And even when it all goes “right”, even obeying all the rules, there is almost always a long wait in the boarding sleeve, something that never happened before all these systems.

Maybe there are people who believe these systems.  I don’t know.  Most people seem to be rolling their eyes so hard the concourse becomes littered with them.

But we do it.  “eagerly” and quietly.

We do it for the same reason, I realized, we facilitate the TSA madness. We do it not out of fear, not out of submission, but out of politeness to our fellow sufferers.

Imagine I had given in to my inner bastage and started asking them by what right they were bullying me.  Who would it have affected?  The TSA?  Oh, h*ll no.  They like cracking down.  They do their job in the hope they get to clobber one of us.  You can feel that.

But the people behind me would miss planes/have their day destroyed by my going into a kabuki theater of my own (It wouldn’t change anything, except I wouldn’t now be in Chattanooga, TN at the start of liberty con.)

Essentially we obey these irrational schemes, the government’s and the airlines’ both because we are being polite to those people with us both strangers and family/friends.  The being polite to/respecting strangers IS what makes a civil society work as a free society.  And it was the trap we’re caught in.

The search, in Portugal, is far less rigorous because there is much less feel that you owe anything to strangers.  If they tried to make them jump through the hoops we jump through, everyone would rebel.

Paradoxically that is what makes the country function less like a free society, because you also need tall, strong walls to prevent people stealing plants from your garden; you’d never put Christmas decorations outside; and you really can’t trust anyone you’re not tribally (blood or tradition) connected to.

So, while I agree that the TSA and the way we put up with it is a foot in the door for tyranny, it must be realized what they are exploiting is one of the very characteristics that makes the US work: consideration for strangers.

It’s sort of like the flu pandemic killed more strong, young people, because how violently your immune system reacted was the biggest risk factor.

It is possible for the TSA to go so far that the same “politeness” demands we stop obeying them.  I think they are aware of these limits, though possibly not consciously.  I’ll note the noodie scans are not being used as much/often are completely ignored while people go through the old metal detectors.  Also, the craziness a few years back, in which they were testing drinks sold and bought inside the security area, has been dropped.  That last one a) really p*ssed people off.  b) was not caught in the politeness trap.  If I’d been accosted, I’d have accidentally/on purpose poured my coffee on the tsa agent’s crotch, and what would it have affected, other than his wedding tackle?

BUT until they do or they step outside the trap, yeah, Americans will behave like sheep.  Not because they are, but because they respect their fellow citizens too much to want to hurt them.

Which is why these excesses must be fought outside the tsa line, legislatively and through incremental change in the people we elect.  It is also why government must be kept small, so it can never use our own best traits against us.

It can’t be trusted and it subverts everything.  As we keep trying to explain to the left side of the isle, it’s not that we don’t want to help the poor; it’s not that we don’t believe in equality under the law; it’s not that we don’t think some people who are in invidious conditions SHOULDN’T be given a way to access what others get by existing — it’s that we can’t trust government and work-a-day bureaucrats to do it.

It’s because when you give power to bureaucrats, we all end up, metaphorically, having to take our shoes off for strangers, while the underwear bomber and three guys with box cutters can walk right through.

It’s because ultimately government only has power over those willing to obey laws and considerate of their fellow men, hostages to the prepotent insanity of the people who are attracted to TSA like jobs.

Terrorist, criminal and those really determined to hurt others because of race, creed or sex, can do so anyway.  They’re not caught in the politeness trap.

Government when it tries to become everyone’s mother is like a gun aimed ONLY at the wrong people.

And it’s time we change it.  Long before we get on a TSA line.

As many of you know – because I’ve told you – I don’t have anything against sex. (Well, not at the moment. It would make writing awkward, and besides it would shock the cats.) I have been happily married for twenty six years and I have two sons, neither of which, despite their belief, is a virgin birth.

I am, however, getting sick and tired of sex in books. Oh, not sex as sex. I mean, most of you know I’m not a prude. I can read sex without much worries (except sometimes I wonder if people bend that way – in other planets, I know they don’t on Earth.) I’ll even admit there was a time when I was about 13 or 14 when I would read an entire book for the three paragraphs of sex. I suppose that was part of the age. You see, I’d never had sex, I assumed it would be an eon, give or take, before I had sex, and I wanted to know everything about it.

So, why am I getting sick of it? Because most of it doesn’t mean anything. Worse, it’s dreary to read.

It’s like there is some directive from above on “there must be sex here.” In fact, I know there is a directive out in Romance about x sex scenes at x places in the book. The number of xxx in which book depends on the line, but it’s carefully dictated. I can also say that in one of my series, I was told I MUST have sex scenes, even though I felt that sex didn’t belong in it.

So some sex in books is the result of pressure from what used to be the only means of getting books on the shelves. And on the part of the publishers, themselves, I think it was an effort to cater to what they perceived to be a universal taste.

Is it a universal taste? I don’t know. I can only tell you what I know and what I think.

I think a lot of the sex in books is boring. It makes no sense, it accomplishes nothing. If it doesn’t outright violate the character – really? A regency girl giving it up after one kiss? – it is at best oh um. They kiss they throb they flutter, they grind, they penetrate, there’s things that get hard and things that get moist, there’s how he’s never had it that good and she’s never felt this way before and zzzzzzzzzzz. What? Sorry. It’s just I’ve read so many of these.

Possibly there is some demographic out there whom this satisfies, who feels thrilled at the mere mention of sex. They’re probably thirteen. Or perhaps fourteen. But there are indications that it’s not the ticket to money and success (except insofar as marketing distorts things) that publishers believe it is. There is a certain hysteria of falling numbers and increasing sex under the belief that doing more of what’s failed is a sane business approach. (Do they teach this in the ivy leagues, or something?)

In my opinion, what sells is not explicit sex, but sexual tension (Something I doubt most publishers – jaded by books crossing their desk every day – might not be able to tell with two hands and a seeing eye dog) does sell. Sexual tension – as opposed to sex – makes the reader continue reading, makes us interested, makes us crave the moment when the two would-be-lovers, yearning for each other bur holding back, finally kiss or even touch.

For instance, Georgette Heyer’s Venetia or Silvester have enough sexual tension in it that at the end of the second, the phrase “Sparrow, Sparrow,” has more excitement in it than any of the multi-page anatomically correct sex scenes I ever read. And, FYI, Heyer is still selling very well indeed.

Not that sex is forbidden in this – I’ve read a few urban fantasies in which the sex builds the sexual tension, due to something the character can’t (or shouldn’t) overcome. Or must overcome. The point being the sex becomes part of the plot and entwines the plot and heightens everything else.

On the other hand, in a lot of urban fantasies and in 3/4 of the romances, you could take the sex scene out completely and no one would notice. Well, maybe the publishers looking for the x that marks the spot. And in many books it gets either clinical and dry, or silly and dreary. If you must describe a part of the female anatomy in such exaggeration that it sounds like a cabbage unfolding and unfolding and unfolding yet again, you’ve probably gone too far. Suggestion and indication – note not prudishness and playing keep away – are more… interesting than tons of ink spilled in the service of anatomic descriptions.

The best way to write sex is the best way to write anything else in a plot: irresistible force meets immovable object (again, and again, and again, harder, faster… er… get your mind out of the gutter. And then come back and toss a life preserver to my mind, would you?) Have your character want, crave, need and yet not be able to get for good and sufficient reason (and there must be a real reason, just as the need must be palpable not just “I want it bad.”) And then have all this serve the greater plot. And then, maybe, just maybe you’ll have something worth reading. (And if you’re writing erotica as such, I highly recommend How To Write Erotica by Valerie Kelly. Actually I highly recommend this book for the writing technique of “immediate writing.” She gives very useful hints on what to give in detail and what to shade in. Caution, it has graphic passages. Not for the squeamish or the faint of heart.) On the other hand, if you don’t want to write explicit sex, be brave and original and keep the graphic sex out.

I believe in the indie market place we’ll see more sex and more sexless books too. I can also easily predict that if the sex counts the book will do well, if the sex doesn’t count…. Yawn, who needs it?

This post is the result of very weird mind-mulch.

You know mind mulch, right?  It’s when you’re reading/looking at three different things at one time, and it all composts in your minds and comes up with a rich ah organic mixture you couldn’t have anticipated.

We’ve been working hell for leather at the other house trying to get it read (I think I have three more days of work, but I’m taking today off so I’m not unreasonably tired at LC.  I mean “I have” three days of work (with Robert doing the walls) and then we hire someone to do the “other stuff” that I can’t/don’t have time to do.  But anyway, the point is, I’ve been putting in a full day of work at the other house and it’s rather brutal physical labor.  Worse than that, it’s boring work.  No, seriously.  Refinished a baseboard, refinished them all.

As usual, like with house work, I deal with this by listening to recorded books and since — we’ve been stumbling tired and forgetting everything — I keep forgetting to buy new audio books (I have a subscription plan that allows me three a month.  It’s cheaper than a cleaning service.  Also, I also listen to them while exercising.)  So I have been listening to whatever was in the MP3 from three months ago.  In the last few days this has included Agatha Christie, Heinlein and Simak.

To be precise I listened to Citizen of the Galaxy and City, back to back.

At the same time I’ve been reading (while cooking, doing laundry, etc) P. F. Chisholm’s Elizabethan Scottish Frontier mysteries at the rate of about one a day.

And my bathroom book (bathroom books are essays or short stories, because if you have never gotten trapped by a novel someone had forgotten in the bathroom and lost the entire morning as well as all circulation in your legs, I can’t explain it to you) is a Daily Life In Medieval England thing. And most of the time I read something that I’m sure the authors thought was new and exotic and think “Well, heck, it was like that in the village.”

So, when I woke up this morning I woke up thinking of how time is different in different parts of the world, which is what the people (Heinlein and Simak included) who pushed for the UN and thought it was the way of the future didn’t seem to get (to be fair, in Tramp Royale it becomes obvious Heinlein got it when he traveled there, and realized it was impossible to bring such a disparate world under one government.)

A minor side note, while listening to City, there is a point at which Simak describes what he might or might not have realized was Marx’s concept of “perfect communism” where the state withers away because there’s no need for it.

Simak thought this would be brought about by perfect abundance.  There are no crimes of property when everyone has too much.  There are no crimes of violence either, because he seems to think those come from property.  (Hits head gently on desk.)

This must have seemed profound to me when I first read the book at 12, but right now I just stared at the mp3 player thinking “what about people who capture other people as sex slaves?”  “What about people who covet something someone else made, including the life someone made for themselves?  Just because everyone has too much, it doesn’t mean that they don’t covet what someone else made of their too much.”

Which is why I’m not a believer in either Communism or for that matter big L Libertarianism.  I don’t believe that humans are only a sum of their material needs and crime the result of the unequal distribution of property.  (There is also the unequal distribution of talent, or simply the unequal distribution of happiness, all of which can lead to crime — after all Cain didn’t off Abel because he was starving.)  And I don’t believe humans are ever going to become so perfect we can get away with no government, because humans will always (being at heart social apes) lust for power, recognition and heck simply control over others (which is subtly different from power.) So we’re stuck with our good servant but bad master.

Which brings us back, through back roads to the main point of this post.  I was (being evil) reading some of the entries in the medieval life book to older son (having brought the book out of the bathroom to pontificate) and I said “bah, it was like that for us, too.  It wasn’t that bad.”  And son said “mom, it sounds horrific.”  And I said “that’s because you grew up in a superabundant society, overflowing at both property and entertainment, which is why the problems we suffer from are problems that only affected the very rich in the past” (Crisis of identity, extreme sensitivity to suffering, etc.)

Which is also true.  And note kindly, that though we’re overflowing at the seams with material goods, property crimes we still have with us, not counting on anything else.

But for my child this is the normal world and it doesn’t occur to him to think of it as superabundant.  He just thinks of the conditions I grew up under (I think it was the “most people only had one change of clothes, including underwear” that got him) as barbaric and horrible.

I’ve long since realized that I grew up somewhere between medieval England and Victorian England.  Tudor England feels about as familiar to me as the present day which is why I like visiting now and then.

But even in Elizabethan England, there were different time zones, by which I don’t mean the artificial time declarations (though they went by the sun, so it was different too) but more that different parts of Britain at that time were in different “places” historically.

The Chisholm mysteries (highly recommended if you like mysteries that are solved through duels, kidnappings and pitched battles)  bring a London Courtier and presumed double cousin/nephew of the Queen, Robert Carey (his grandmother was Mary Boleyn and it was rumored his grandfather was Henry VIII.  There are reasons not to believe this, and the fact that the author believes it because of his “adventurous nature” …. pfui.  It’s a minor annoyance, but I don’t join in the cult of the Tudors.  They had Shakespeare.  It should be enough.  Anyway, I can ignore it to enjoy the books.) to the Scotland Borders to become deputy warden which, if you think of it as sheriff in the old west is about right.

(There are delightful things about the book, including character names you’d expect of the Feegle, and the wonderful understatement of naming areas of pitched battle “the debatable land.”  Charles, if you read this, I’m getting you those books as soon as I have money.)

I’m now at the beginning of the fourth book, delayed because yesterday house work was followed up by ironing, neither of which are suited to reading, and the main character has brought his Scottish (not really, but an Englishman fromt he border) helper to London.  And the two cultures are pitched against each other.

The Scottishish man cannot understand how Carey could be arrested for debts “if you have kin in town” because justice in Scotland is tribal.  It doesn’t matter if you killed someone, it matters if your family will fight to keep you out of the pokey.  Oh, and the ownership of horses and cows is very Masai, since every “surname” is convinced G-d gave them all the cattle.  If someone else owns any, it’s an injustice and should be rectified.

The borders of Scotland are “centuries behind” Tudor England on the road from tribalism to a modern state. This in turn means a lot of other things about it are “primitive” as the poor character keeps suffering through.

And then you get to things like City or some of the Heinlein juveniles, where you’re assured that the UN brought rationality to the world, one world government is wonderful and, as superabundance set in, humans shed religion as unneeded, and went forward to be perfect angels.

I’m not sure what caused this blindness that affected smart men in the fifties and sixties, and still affects academics, idiots and Marxists today, but I read that and I think “Okay, I can see how you thought this was plausible if what you looked at was the intellectual portions  of middle America where religion was a social thing, and where the whole “brotherhood of man” was a believed fable.  But can you imagine making Islam just “wither away” without major persecution, war and executions?  Oh, heck, even Catholicism in the more traditional regions.

There is probably no religious minority as thoroughly gentrified and intellectualized as the Jewish people, and I know that even if you’re a secular Jew you’ll balk and fight if they try to make you give it up.  And even those of us whose ancestors gave it up, haven’t really and there are weird survivals and bits that we cling to.

And then there’s tribalism.  Perhaps the EU has made the Portuguese and the Spanish live in peace with each other (I think they’re biding their time, but that’s something else) what about the myriad little tribes in Africa, or even racial/tribal minorities in Asia.

How could they think the nature of man would pass away so completely?

I attribute it to lack of contact with other lands.  I mean, the US is a huge country, and back then the industrial-news complex had absolute primacy.  You really only got the other countries filtered through the lens of your colleagues in the media.  And you only got even other segments of your own country filtered that way.

This was not malice, either.  I’m here to tell you that understanding another culture — or even understanding that another culture really exists, and they’re not just sort of playing at it — is REALLY hard.  Humans are very good at absorbing the conditions they’re born into and internalizing them as THE conditions, i.e. the only true ones, and then thinking of everything else as a bizarre variation.

At the simplest linguistic level this is manifested in my mom’s tendency to try to talk to my husband and kids by SHOUTING Portuguese words very slowly.  She’s fairly sure if they just stop pretending, they’ll understand her.  It’s not an intellectual belief, of course, she’s not stupid, but at some subconscious level, she’s sure of it.  Same when I used to teach languages.  I remember a student telling me in frustration that he got “cat” because “gato” is not that difference but “What possessed the English to call a cao a dog?”

In the same way, I spent a lot of time after I moved to the US (and remember that I had been primed by growing up IN Heinlein books) trying to make people’s actions fit into the motives I’d learned in Portugal (yeah, they sort of do, but you have to strip away the cultural matrix first, and that’s harder than you think.)

So it is a case of people who lived in a rather provincial group, and thought the rest of the world was like them.  IOW they thought all human beings were the same, they were just sort of “pretending” not to be (this is obvious in City where Simak says something like people stopped caring what their neighbors think.)

For me, who grew up in one culture, entered another when I went to school (think of it as being raised in Apalachia then joining mainstream culture.  I had to learn almost completely different language.)  and then came here for a year, went back for four while dating someone neither Portuguese nor American, then came here to live.  It gives you a very clear vision of both cultures.  And it makes it very obvious it’s not all just “pretending” to be different.

It still stuns me that in that time and in that place, intelligent well read men could believe this clap trap of “one world” and government and religion both withering away leaving behind this human being that if he ever existed would be truly alien.

It stuns me more than in our day and age, with blogs and news that show us clearly the differences around the world, there are people who still believe it.

I want to say it’s living in “different time zones” and provincialism that makes them believe theirs is the only “real” one, but I think it comes down to wishful thinking, and “there are none so blind as those who will not see.”

To which I would add grandma’s saying “I’ve seen them blind, but never without a place for the eyes.”

The funny thing of course, is that these people, nowadays, are in the end just as tribal as the most backwardly tribal of humans.  Their beliefs are simply mock sophisticate.

But their time zone is medieval.

Marriage is a State of Mind – Cedar Sanderson

I have long been a fan of Dorothy Sayers. I don’t recall when I first read one of her books, but I know that I just recently read one of her essays on feminism and it sparked a thought – several thoughts, really – in my head. I wrote some of it down in Are Women Human? which is a composite of her essay of that title and my own thoughts.

As I was reacquainting myself with not only the fictional romance between Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane, but the true life of Dorothy Sayers, I was forced to reflect on my own life and relationships. There are some parallels to where I am now, and looking back, I can see clearly in hindsight where my path has taken me. You don’t see it, while you’re walking it. It’s only later that you can piece it together fully, no matter how well planned you think you have your life.

I was married relatively young. I met the man I would shortly marry when I had just turned 19, and he was 32. I was, as I joking say now, insane. Not literally, just a very sheltered young woman who fell for the oldest trick in the wolf’s book: I don’t have time to waste on dating. Will you marry me?

Do I regret it, looking back with clarity? No. I have four beautiful and smart children I love that would not exist as they are had I not decided that I would be a dutiful daughter and become the housewife I was supposed to be. I’d been discouraged rather firmly from following my chosen career paths – from science, by the brute force of being told that I would not be allowed to graduate highschool until I did what was expected of me – and from the military by being told that enlistment was the last thing I should do (and this coming from two people I trusted implicitly). So I did what everyone wanted. I thought.

I went to work, he went back to college. He’d finish his degree, and then I would finish mine, turn and turn about. I’ll skip the long tortuous story, because anyone who has half a brain knows how this story ends. I’m going to finish my degree in a little over a year, 21 years after graduating high school. He never finished his, dropping out of school again six months into the marriage.

Marriage, if it’s done right, is a beautiful friendship. It is two souls in support of one another. Friends first, then lovers. I still believe that, with all my heart, because it is a truth that transcends all the bad marriages in the world.

I can’t say why all marriages fail. I know what I have seen, and experienced.

You can’t do it alone.

If only one person is carrying all the weight, the precious bonds of matrimony are going to attenuate, and in time, fail. The marriage might not dissolve, but there is a gulf between the partners that deepens and widens.

You are alone if the other person in your life tells you that you are worthless, that you are crazy, that you aren’t pulling your weight. You are alone if they demand constantly, but refuse to meet your needs. Even worse than flat refusal, if they constantly promise, but never fulfill those promises. “You can do that in five years.” Becomes never, and you stagger on under the load until one day you collapse, pressed flat, and under your feverish cheek the floor is so cool and you close your eyes and pray for the end to come quickly as you try to breathe.

Personal Honor comes with a reset button.

Lois McMaster Bujold’s stories about Ekaterin and Miles may have saved my life. I’ll probably never talk to her in person, and I wouldn’t tell her this, because it’s very personal and sounds overdramatic. But it was in the story of a woman married to a man who left her wondering ‘am I crazy, or am I crazy?’ that I began to find the clarity to see where I was and who I had become. Then, in a scene set in a dusty attic, when Miles gestures toward his belly button and asks ‘doesn’t your honor come with a reset button?’ I finally understood. It was not the end of me, of my honor, if I broke my vows under duress. To continue would be the end of me, and I had already come to grips with that. To die to self in the service of others is necessary and even good. I’d held that as a mantra for years at that point. To risk my children? To know that even if the other person in my life ended his as soon as I walked away, it was not my fault?

I pressed the reset button.

Having reset my honor, I needed time to grieve, to heal, to come to grips with my brokenness. Not that you ever are restored to what you were. That you can, in time, aspire to kintusukori. During that grieving time I tried to tackle another relationship, and made the same mistake. I was too loyal. I overlooked the little lies, until I was confronted by big lies. I walked away again.

I swore I’d never do that again.

I’d intended to live out the rest of my life alone. My children, my father who shared a house with me (my parents were divorced for years at this point), so not physically alone. But there was still a hole in my life.

I leaned on the support of my friends as I struggled to support my family. My once-partner had survived our breakup and seemed to be turning his life around but had no interest in supporting his family. I worked and worked some more, and at night when I was too tired to sleep I talked with my fingers to friends all over the world. One of them, an acquaintance for years, was going through a similar process, escaping a toxic relationship that had all but killed him in spirit if not in body.

We talked, a lot, but it was friendship, a meeting of the minds. He encouraged me to write, something I had been stunted in for years. It was like watering a wilted plant. I encouraged him to get away from the situation he was in, reminding him as I had learned – honor is important, yes, but when the other side of the equation has no honor? – and he did make a break.

Time passed. I managed to get a week to myself, with the plan of writing. I knew that if I stayed at home I would have a million distractions and the kids would come home early… I went to stay with my friend. A writing retreat, and it was. But it was also the beginning of an Odd courtship. Because we are both Odds. We fit well together, mentally (minds out of the gutter!).

Never From Gratitude

You’re wondering where I was going with Dorothy Sayers, now that I have wandered through most of my adult life. As I was reading her this last month, I realized that the reason Harriet Vane would not marry Peter, despite him being desperately in love with her, was that she thought she was only grateful to him, and gratitude is not enough for a marriage.

I found myself living with my dear friend rather suddenly. The plan had been for a summer spent working, making money with my business nearer cities – and serendipitously, we would find out if we were suited to one another. We knew that we were in love – I never doubted that – but I was afraid that he wasn’t ready, and I was being pushy, or clingy, or… Or that I was making a mistake again. But there I was, with no place else to go, and he took me in.

It could have been a bad scene. Up above I sketched out a few lines, and I could practically see my audience on the other side of the screen wincing as they read the set-up. He could easily have come to resent me being pushed on him with little warning (two weeks!) and nowhere else to go, and because I had started school and given up one of my jobs, no money to go anywhere else. I spent months asking him if it was ok. Did he mind my having come to him like this?

Sarah told me once that she had known the moment she saw us together, that we were meant to be together. I’d laughed. It had taken me nearly a year to even admit I was in love with him, and longer before he told me he’d loved me for…

It worked. Marriage, you see, is a state of mind. The legalities aside, which are picayune in the scope of things, knowing that you have a true partner, one that will pick you up when you trip and fall, who will love you unconditionally no matter how you make his sandwich… that’s the important part.

And yet…

I’d never thought we would get married-married. We were already husband and wife in our hearts and souls. Honor, after all, is what you know about yourself, and reputation is what others know about you. Another truth from Lois McMaster Bujold (wise woman, and one whose writing I study). He’d reached a certain age without ever giving his hand in marriage. I had, and after thirteen years had forsworn myself. Simply having gained a partner was enough, and a sufficiency to the end of our lives together. Not that I wanted to be able to walk away. I am not capable of that sort of lightness.

When he asked me to marry him, in an oblique way with a casual tone, you could have knocked me over with a feather. As I was driving at the time, I settled for being grateful there was no traffic and a clear sky. I realized something in that split second. It does matter.

Oaths

We speak oaths in front of witnesses for a reason. This is a tradition since before men made words on paper, or even stone. Speaking only one to another, we can use the same words, and mean the same things. We can hold ourselves to the words, and the one we spoke to, we are accountable to.

In the presence of witnesses, the words gain a gravity, a force, that causes them to bind tighter. We can chafe against those bonds, or recognize that they give us a certain freedom.

“I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.” –Robert A Heinlein

Marriage is not a prison. It is a home, with two hearts in it. Later this week, my First Reader and I will sign the deed, so to speak, of that home. As we stand up in front of witnesses and repeat oaths that bind us, so also are we joined not only that we know, but all others do, as well. It’s not gratitude, nor is it coercion. It is friendship, and mutual admiration, and a thing so lightly called love.

Love is ever elusive to define. I was taught, years ago, that love was wanting only the best for the one that is loved with no expectation of anything in return. I was also taught that there are three loves, as defined in Ancient Greece. Philos, brotherly love, was the love between friends, siblings, comrades in arms. Agape is a holy love, the love of God for all mankind, a pure love that transcends any worldly concerns. And Eros is the love of sensuality, the attraction that sparks and leads to passionate embraces.

A marriage, I was taught, should combine all three of those into a cohesive whole. It’s not, I know now, easy. You must work at it, and you cannot do it alone. There will be days when the oaths you swore – before witnesses or simply in the dark of night to one another – are all that keep you together under one roof. If both of you aren’t holding tight to that, if all of this is based on gratitude for a home, for friendship, for sex; if that all there is, then it will fall apart.

In the end, it’s all come down to this. I am his, and he is mine. We are two, yet one. We live, and in living, love. Scars knit, baggage balanced, we take our chances that life holds more joy than sorrow, if only we can be in it together.

“Dum vivamus, vivamus!”

I’ve realized sometime ago my books tend to have great fathers in them.

That is, of course, because I had/have a great father.  Dad was the sort of dad any kid would want.  For one he knew everything, from the nesting habits of local birds to how to translate the Latin inscriptions we came across on our rambles through the nearby woods.  And he has this thing where cats, dogs, even wild animals, come to him.  As they should, because he’s a good man.  (Though not a Good Man.)

My concepts of honor and duty come from dad, and though sometimes they’re onerous enough, they serve their purpose of making me part of something more important than myself: of making me part of civilization and family and humanity.  Without dad, left to my own devices, I’d probably long ago have been kicked out of the human race for shoving.

He taught me stuff like “don’t hurt those weaker than you” and “protect the helpless” and ALWAYS stick up for the truth.

And then I was lucky enough to marry a man who became a great dad.  It’s hard to be sure when you get married, and you’re both striplings (really, 22?  WHO THE HECK LET KIDS MARRY????) but Dan is a great dad.  He talks to the boys when I can’t (as in “you talk to them or I’ll just start screaming” and he solves math problems with the youngest and composes math with the older and along the way teaches them those things you never learn directly: hard work and dedication, and care of others.

So, right now?  I’m going to wander off and make my husband’s father’s day happy.  Ya’ll carry on with your planned chaos.

There will be promo post later.

As some of you know Dan and I will be renewing our vows of 30 years at Liberty con.  Part of this is because we wanted to do it for the 25th, but we couldn’t being broker than broke and not even going to LC (if I remember.)

Of course, this is the way of the world, so we’re broke this year too.  It’s temporary and more than usually self-inflicted because we chose to move this year to a rental and get the house ready to sell.  OTOH it’s not entirely self-inflicted.  Our other house is near a high traffic road, and our porch furniture gets covered in black sludge within 3 months.  Given my particular respiratory issues, I think that is if not what has played havoc with my health for the last 10 years (there were other things, including a worsening condition now hopefully fixed) at least a strong contributing factor.  Given that, we needed to move.  But there’s more to it than that.

It’s starting to look like when the house sells we’ll be empty nesters.  I have a bit of trepidation about younger son on his own, but it has been pointed out to me by his father that at three years younger than him I crossed half the world to live with strangers (and meet my future husband) and that sooner or later, even engineer-birds must fly.

I don’t know about other people’s lives, but our lives move in segments, from well established routine/setting to another with a brief, often terrifying trasition, where we often attempt to go bankrupt.  One such transition was from childless couple in Charlotte, NC to couple with kids in Colorado Springs.  There was some lag and leading indicators (Robert was born in Charlotte and was one when we moved here) but our life didn’t establish a new pattern/rhythm until we’d moved, a process that almost broke us.  Same with our last move, between couple with little kids and couple with more or less autonomous and certainly self-explaining teens.

This is feeling like another one of those, and these transitions are needed in a way.  They “reorient” you.

To explain, you get caught in habits that existed for a good reason, long after the reason is gone.

In cleaning this house and fixing it for sale, I’m coming across this a lot.  For instance, when we moved to this house, I made a lot of my own clothes, a substantial amount of the kids’ clothes, as well as almost all of the household stuff (It’s been years since I took a sofa apart to re-upholster.  I just realized that.)

This habit had been got into for good and sufficient reason, the reason being that we were keeping up with dual-income families on one income.  This meant the person who rarely made more than 5k a year had to make up for a lot of the money she didn’t bring in.  Refinishing, reupholstering, making most of our stuff, including things like slippers for the kids, were part of how I compensated.

Only this last move, to the house we’re now cleaning was also when my career started moving (sideways and upside down, as usual) so I not only had a lot of work, but I also, suddenly, inexplicably, found myself making about the same I would if I’d done what mom tried to talk me into 20 years ago, and finished my doctorate (depending on the college and the field I chose, between one and two years) and became a college lecturer.

The problem is, there were habits.  Habits from the times mommy didn’t make enough to justify not interrupting her.  Habits from the time when Sarah was, of course, the logical choice to spend all day looking for a missing paper.

Those habits proved almost impossible to break in that house.  Here things have started shifting somewhat.

BUT more importantly, my mental habits hadn’t changed, so I continued picking up bolt-ends and other ridiculously low priced fabric, in the vague idea I’d use it for this and that.  I haven’t because I don’t have the time to sew I used to.  When moving I made the decision that other than some vintage patterns/fabric which I’ll eventually use to make myself clothes, I’m going to narrow my sewing focus to “making stuffed animals.”  Mostly because so many of you and so many of my friends have littles, and adopted grandson ALSO totally needs a dragon a year to grow on.  I still have a room full of fabric, which depending on arrangements at the next house might or might not need culling down. It also depends on where the next phase takes us.

It’s always hard to figure out what shape the future will have till you’re there.  These transitions tend to have that “earth-shaking” feel and the boundaries of your quotidian life change in ways you couldn’t anticipate.

For instance, when we moved to Colorado Springs, I expected (and we looked earnestly at) a suburb like the one we’d lived in in Charlotte.  Perhaps more rural, since we’d been looking that way before the move.

I couldn’t have anticipated a housing shortage, due to MCI moving to town, which shuttled us into a student apartment downtown, which in turn reminded me how much I liked walking neighborhoods and consigned us for the next 21 years to living in Victorians, in walking neighborhoods, mountain village and urban neighborhood. Which in turn shaped not just the texture of my everyday life, but also the boys’ upbringing.  (For one since the age of six, they’ve been free to go off and buy their own lunch.  At six, corndogs from an arcade stand in a little mountain village.)

In the same way I don’t know where we’ll end.  I think we’re done with walking neighborhoods, or rather our definition of walking neighborhood has changed.  You see, it used to be I liked to have enough stores within walking distance to force me to walk.  Thing is, I’m now buying most such things (books, okay, mostly) from Amazon, and what entices me out is more likely to be a walk around the park with my husband.  (Mind you, I wouldn’t mind being close enough to the museums in Denver to walk to them, but I REALLY don’t think we can afford that.)  That texture has already changed, only we’re sort of caught betwix and between.  But it has changed what we look for in another house.

Other things that weren’t a consideration when we moved last, are a consideration now.  We’re in our fifties and the “winter” of life is still a little off, but if we live in the next house twenty years or so, it won’t be.  So proximity to medical services and ease of ambulance reach are a plus.  As is accessibility to an airport, because I’m getting right tired of having to get up at six am for a nine am flight.  Not to mention the four am for a seven am flight. Kevin Anderson tells me I need to make more public appearances.  I don’t like it, but I’ll assume he’s right, and in that case, ease of transport becomes a big thing.

We’ll of course be looking for something with a decent office space for me, and possibly husband together (we’re that odd thing, a writing couple who likes sharing an office.)

In my dream world, we buy something near friends, and we settle down to take a walk morning or evening, work the rest of the time, and share housekeeping duties. I take Sundays off, and read or sew.  Oh, and evenings, I get to do stuff while Dan watches TV.  I’m not “always on” and always late with books (though that is likely to be true, once health settles.) I know, it’s a pedestrian dream, but it’s mine.

I’m hoping to keep at least those outlines.  The rest… who knows. The new pattern whenever it comes (It’s dependent on house selling, so who knows?) will have some surprises.  And some of them will be pleasant or most will, once I change my mental parameters.

I don’t know what the future holds, but I know we’re at an inflection point and from here on “things will be different.”

You can fight those, or you can embrace them.  We’re choosing to embrace this one.  The renewal of vows is our way of saying “this we’ll take with us.  This we’ll keep.”  And it is therefore important.

The rest… we’ll see.

If I don’t thank all of you who’ve donated — you made the room awfully dusty, and there’s a lot of you — I am grateful.  I’m hoping the amount is enough to get someone else to redo the fence, and maybe, if we’re lucky, to fix the balcony.  I’m now in the “cleaning and staging” phase in the second floor and older son is finishing painting bottom floor (he’s very good at it.)

If it all goes well, by Monday all the hard work will be done on the inside, we can pay someone to do the outside after we come back from Liberty con.  And I can settle into at least a “trial” pattern of having time to write and spend time with my husband (even if the house will still take a thorough cleaning, and probably won’t go for sale for two weeks, because of contractors doing other stuff.)  I’d like that.  For one I want to finish Witch’s Daughter (Michael’s sequel to Witchfinder) and also Darkship Revenge and Bowl of Red (Shifters.)  And then I want to do the dragon trilogy.

I want to write.  I want to have time with my husband.  I want to stop being carpenter and painter and jack of all trades.

And once the house sells, I want to visit my dad, because he’s 84 and time is running away from us.

It will come.  Transitions are sticky and scary, but they pass.  Just.A.Few.More.Days.

This too will get done.  This too shall pass.  And the future will be good.

Terry Pratchett, famously tuckerizing the Marquess de Queensbury as the Marquis de Fantailer said the Marquis was a small and timid man who made rules about all the places people weren’t allowed to hit him.

I confess to having less than no interest in the art of boxing. When I grew up boxing was the only sport dad would not watch on TV (oh, and bullfighting, but that’s not so much a sport.) and I never saw any point in it.  I have friends who love it and weirdly I found an appreciation/interest in it in Georgette Heyer’s characters.  I presume this would be the boxing popularized/made formal by the Marquess de Queensbury, and while I still have less than no interest in it, I also understand that the rules were designed to both make the spectacle of two guys slugging each other entertaining and to minimize the amount of real damage taken by the fighters (so the fight can go on.)

I like physical fights about as much as I like emotional fights (not at all) but many times found them necessary and when necessary I always felt — particularly when going up against disproportionate odds — a surge of panic at the beginning.  Then I stopped thinking about it and used the panic to fuel the fighting.  (At least until/unless the berserker kicked in, at which point … I have no idea, because it’s not me.)  Having heard of “fighting like a cornered cat” I thought it was funny, because I always fought like that.

As someone who doesn’t like fighting, if I engage in it, I engage in it with everything I have and d*mn the rules.  It’s not a spectator sport, and it’s not a gentleman’s entertainment, and the Marquess de Queensbury rules don’t apply.

Which is good, because the left always fights by street-brawlers rules, regardless.

This came up yesterday in the comments, when talking about elections and the GOP.  There is a large number of the GOP who thinks it’s more important to behave like gentlemen than to win.  (Even when winning doesn’t cause any particular moral conflicts.  They confuse being nice with being good.)

It also came up well, in my engagement with Club 770.  The number of people who’ve told me that he means nothing by it, and at worst he THINKS he’s neutral while not being was… interesting.  Marquis de Fantailer would approve.  We should be polite to those slugging us and– wait, what?

I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again.  There is on our side the assumption the other side are not bad fellows, they’re just misguided.  Largely and for a long time, particularly for those living in Europe, this was an easy if unprofitable illusion. Given the level of Agit-prop used by the Soviet Union, it was easy for people to just REALLY be genuinely deceived.

But this is not the seventies or the eighties.  The Soviet Union imploded hard, its sewer-like innards were exposed.  There’s books and heck documentaries and the history of various collectivists societies are around for everyone to look at.  It is high time we presume anyone in a Che t-shirt knows he’s wearing a t-shirt with the face of a man who delighted in killing students, children and dogs, or else they’re completely and totally stupid.

It’s the same thing as let’s say keeping a blog that claims to be “neutral” in fandom issues, but which maintains a readership that is, to quote one of you in a private group “where mentally ill fandom goes to die.”

I’ve maintained a blog for five? Six? years now, with a regular and vocal audience.  You don’t do that without catering to a point of view, and of course I don’t in any way, shape or form, pretend to be neutral.  I’m me.  My opinions might be all over the place, but they’re mine and I don’t pretend to not having any.

It would be really weird, if I claimed to be neutral and had managed to attract a following of freedom-minded rapscallions incapable of following a direct order if their lives depended on it.

And if I had genuinely done it while thinking I was “neutral” the only option would be that I was simply not very smart but had a sort of subconscious bend that shaped my beliefs.

Now, is that latter possible? Oh, heck, yes.  Possible, of course.

But is it likely?  More importantly, is it likely that someone in such a position wouldn’t have NOTICED the sort of following he or she attracted?

Um….  Are we talking about an alien species?  Or are we still in this same world?

Do I ever give the other side the benefit of the doubt?  Sure. I do think Irene Gallo was so immersed in the lies about the puppy sympathizers that she honestly thought what she was saying was completely non-controversial.  Does that mean she’s stupid?  Possibly, at least in the verbal arena, since she’s a visual person.  But more likely she’s simply insular and insulated. (Part of the Insulata, according to the term so aptly coined by my friend Sanford Begley.)

Now do I think someone who runs a blog which attracts the same type of insular and a little insane fringe that fed Irene Gallo is doing it inadvertently?  It would take a miracle.

I do think it is possible that he didn’t think through the layers of connotation and denotation involved in linking my post with that heading which finally and once and for all sent me over the edge.  (It’s the Latin female thing.  No, really, I’m not joking.  Ask Dorothy about it sometime.  You can’t see me, but I was totally slapping my right hand with the back of the left.)  And it is possible I read that much into it because I’ve been following his smirking shenanigans for months.  But then it’s sort of like having sand kicked in your face.  It happens to everyone at the beach, particularly if your idea of a good time at the beach is reading a book.  You’re down there, and kids and strangers walking by will kick sand in your face.  It happens.

Now suppose though that there is a teenager near you, and he bounces a ball on the sand and sprays sand in your face.  The first time, he’s all charming and says sorry, and you smile and say never mind.

But then he’s playing with his little sister with sand toys and sprays sand in your face, and he says “Sorry, I didn’t mean to do it, you can’t control where the sand goes.”

You nod, but you’re not quite so happy.

By the fifth time, when he runs by and sprays sand in your face, you’re going to think he did it on purpose, whether that one was genuine or not.  And you’ll be right, or the kid has a problem with his reasoning. THAT time might have been an accident, maybe, but he’s been picking on you all day, and at the very least he didn’t CARE if he annoyed you, and probably enjoyed spraying sand in your face.

And frankly, even if that last one was an accident, you have trouble believing all of them were an accident and “oops, sorry.”  As you should.  Because people are not that bottomless stupid.  Not adults.  And they really can’t ask us to believe they are to one person infantile and brain damaged.

Again, there is something on the right side of the isle I don’t fully understand.  Perhaps it comes from the fact the other side immediately accuses you of being crazy if you point out what they’re up to.  And who wants to be called crazy?

But it’s time to take your foot off the cement bucket.  It’s time to stop thinking all the people on the other side are just mentally defective splendid chaps.  If the last six years or so haven’t shown that; if the disproportionate aggression from the other side over trying to diversify the nominees and voters of the Hugos hasn’t rang it home, then you might consider that you simply don’t want to fight, ever, and prefer servitude to freedom.

I’m not going to be mad at you in that case.  Remember, I fight because I have to, but I hate it with a passion.  But don’t try to hamstring everyone according to the Marquis de Fantailer.  Those rules are for how to lose with style.

Me?  I assume that after the last 100 years of history, anyone insisting “this time we’ll do it right” on collectivism, anyone dividing people according to arbitrary race/class/gender Marxism, anyone who is over 25 and believes all the cr*p their progressive professors spouted is an adult who chooses to be blind and who prefers to stand with the oppressors: either out of fear or out of what they hope to gain.

I don’t think the other side is full of splendid fellows and wonderful women who simply need to be told the truth.  There might be a few in the mushy middle who can in fact see the light.  They’re low information and too busy with life to have paid attention. But those on the left? Those active and engaged on the left?

I assume they’re adults and that if they’re kicking sand in our faces they’re doing it because they like to, and not because they’re mentally damaged. Until and unless proven otherwise.

They assume we’re monsters of avarice, cruelty and prejudice.  The least I can do is assume they are capable and responsible for making those assumptions and those choices.

That is not crazy.  The crazy thing would be assuming people who are older than I, well educated and well read are incapable of knowing what they’re doing or what sort of following they’ve attracted and what flag they’ve enlisted under.

No matter how much they scream otherwise.

This is where Sarah slaps herself for forgetting the old injunction about wrestling a pig.  Or, more importantly, about forgetting her own childhood.

I was thinking the other day that the defining characteristic of my childhood was “loneliness” and this is true.  For various reasons, some of them because I caught everything that crossed the village or even entered the county and was therefore quarantined a lot, but also because I was the youngest of a large brood of cousins, and the next youngest was my brother almost 10 years older than I.  I often say I learned to read early in self-defense because it was exasperating to hear my brother and cousin (who was raised with us) argue over books, and I couldn’t join in.  Earlier than that, barely remembered, was the time I tried to talk about this book I’d “read” which I’d totally made up.  I couldn’t figure out how they caught me.  (Let’s say three year olds lack experience of life to make up westerns.)

Part of the problem is that I had the issue of all young kids raised with adults.  I had no clue how to relate to kids my age.  And there was a particular technique that infuriated me: this is where the kids would make oblique remarks and needle and push, until I finally lost and beat them.  … and got punished because I could point at nothing specific.  And even if I had, dad would say that beating was not proper return for teasing.

I grew up physically brave, but all too easy to kill with unkindness.  It was part of the reason (beyond fear to my career, duh.  And no, I don’t want former editors to assure me that no, they don’t discriminate on politics.  If there’s something the puppy fight has shown is that they do, they have, and it’s so ingrained they don’t even notice) I was in the closet so long.  I don’t like fights, and I hate the sort of needling tease the other side is so good at.  The “What?  Why are you looking at me?  I didn’t do anything?” smirk in the face of a village urchin, in other words.

When I entered this fight, I knew it would get bad.  I entered it because I was given no choice.  I have kids.  If I didn’t even have kids, I’d have stayed in the political closet, secure in the belief of “apres moi le deluge.”  But I have kids.  And the insanity of tearing Western civ apart out of some perceived longing for a utopia that doesn’t exist will affect them and any kids they might have.

So I came out of the political closet.  And I knew there would be consequences.  I’d like to claim I’m an innocent and thought the left would fight openly.  I’m not stupid.  Part of what kept me in the closet for years was seeing how they engaged to destroy anyone who disagreed with them.  I knew the whisper campaigns and the “you don’t want to be seen with HER” to the point you knew nothing wrong about the person but you were sure they had committed abominable crimes.  Too abominable to be mentioned.

It didn’t take long, either.  All it took was some intimation I was less than happy with the results of the 12 election (ah — this is where “I told you so” comes in.  I was never crazy for Romney (too statist for my tastes) but the man should run with that slogan.) The insane started pouring in.  The German contingent posited that I came to the states to escape the revolution (at 11.  Which is the age I was at the time.  Shut up.  I’m that precocious.)  Mind you most of the people who did so came from Africa, the alternative being death.  But apparently running in front of Soviet “consultants” and their Cuban shock troops makes you a fascist.  There were others.  There was more.

I knew things were thoroughly out of control when the Passive Voice linked me ON A POST ABOUT EDITING and my colleagues who had heard what a horrible person I was flocked in to blacken my name and talk about how I was a “fascist.”  (Apparently libertarians are the same as fascists.  Who knew?)

Among other things I’ve been called a white supremacist (blink), a fascist (blink), homophobic (blink, blink), racist (blink), a “fan of the Portuguese regime deposed in the seventies” (this by the German wonder who doesn’t get that one can oppose both a regime and its replacement.  Ah, for a mind that simple), atheist (blink, blink, blink), Mormon (blink)…  Well, let’s say and save time that I’ve been called everything but a good person.

It wears on me, not so much because they’re insults, but because they’re crazy insults.  I am aware that at some level, permanently, my name is tainted with a large selection of the public.  This doesn’t worry me perhaps as much as it should, because a) most people don’t play that much on the net, much less in our circles b) there’s always indie.  I can duck out, go fully indie and write historical erotic romances, for all I care.  (No, I didn’t write them.  No, I don’t advise you to look, but while researching?  Henry VIII Catherine of Aragon lactating erotica.  I didn’t see anything past the title, and I don’t even.)

And then there’s the speshul that’s file 770.  You guys aren’t at the controls and don’t see it — and to the members of the ELoE who pinged me to tell he is a good guy, you didn’t grow up in the same village I did — not only the crazy sh*t that gets linked, but the commenters who come over and who open with “You’re such an idiot” and therefore don’t get approved.

Mike Glyer is at least as smart as the cobbler’s son next door when I was growing up. He’s not stupid enough to openly call names, but there are his choices of what to link.

When I said that I couldn’t mention the letters “H-u-g- and o” in the same paragraph without getting linked, I was right.  Or I might not mention the Hugos at all, or only in passing on the last paragraph.  But if the post supports the narrative the puppy-kickers are building, sure as shooting it will get linked.  Like my post about a new Golden Age, which got linked because in their blinkered little minds we’re calling for pulp.  (Sometimes one wonders about the minds that build this narrative.  You are aware someone who grew up on pulp would be 100, right?  You are aware that Heinlein not only wasn’t pulp, but was in many ways the anti-pulp.  I mean, I read Burroughs, but mostly Tarzan, and it wasn’t my favorite.  I read him because grandad had him, so I read him by 5 or 6.  Books were expensive and we had those. But his technique was outdated by then.)

But it supported the narrative, so it got linked.  The same way that its subsequent “Oh, for the love of frack, no one wants pulp” follow up wasn’t.  The same way my friend Sanford’s post over at Otherwhere Gazette, exploding their nonsense wasn’t.  The same way my post pointing out that I felt they were linking me to homophobia and how stupid this was wasn’t.

Oh, it’s very carefully done.  There is an image being built, and he links to those posts that support it.  Then when caught it’s not his fault and he can’t control his commenters, and he can’t see everything.

And, as I said, I have been conversant with these techniques since dealing with the cobbler’s son next door, while growing up.  (Weirdly he didn’t become a communist politician, and has instead racked up several jail terms.)

So Mike Glyer is smarter than the average bear, and much better at Alinsky techniques, and I’m an idiot to fall for them and come out swinging, which meant I had a spanking coming.

In my defense, but not as an excuse, I’m spending 10 to 12 hours a day painting/scraping and sanding, and by the time I get home can only see so far in comments, deal with a lot of the ones I don’t approve, and… I’m tired.

For whatever reason, my body has decided to be violently allergic to SOMETHING.  If I knew what I would avoid it. We’ve now been over every inch of this house with a fine tooth comb and TRUST me there is no mold.  There is dust, and I’m allergic to dust, but I’ve brought over my epa-filtered vacuum and the appropriate masks. I have no idea what is triggering an all-alarm auto-immune.  The last time I had an attack this bad I spent two nights with feathers in my bed (the hotel kept swearing there were none, till I found the label in the middle of the night.)  And now that the steroid prescription has run out, I’m heading downward again.

Beyond that there’s mere tiredness.  We’ve all of us been working all our free time, including the boys in time from classes/jobs at violent physical labor, so we’re ALL stumbling tired.  Which accounts for injuries, which in turn make the whole thing harder.  Yes, we’re using money we don’t have to pay some people to do some of it, but see the “money we don’t have.”  My last two years have emptied our savings, which come from my writing, mostly. So there’s a limit to what we can pay.

And up there you have an encapsulation of how the left wins/has won most cultural battles.  First, because they don’t care if their narrative is true.  They cast it in stone and then find anything, no matter how much they have to twist to support it.  Second, the rest of us can’t defend ourselves from accusations so stupid they’re not even wrong.  Accusing me of being a White Supremacist is roughly akin to accusing me of being an uplifted purple wombat.  It’s so crazy that how the h*ll do you even combat that?  Third, we have real lives.  My blogging posting and commenting is right now squeezed into a few minutes morning and evening, around brutal manual labor.  And when that is done, it will be squeezed around finally finishing books, so I can put up the sequel to Witchfinder, continue the third (Rogue Magic) and deliver Darkship Revenge and Bowl of Red. Because I’m not a dilettante and I have family depending on me.

Again, this is not an excuse.  I’m smart enough to see the smirking trap, even while stumbling tired.  Unfortunately I was tired enough not to care, because taking a swing at last felt so good.  And it was dumb.  And I knew it even while I did it.

This is their game.  As I said, I knew when I came out of the political closet what I would get called.  Fascist, of course, because not wanting a powerful state makes me just that.  And racist because I disagree with dividing people by races and a system of spoils.  Homophobic because, of course, not giving a really good hot d*mn about who people sleep with makes you homophobic.  Even if you endorse SSM, (which I’m on record as doing back to 06) because, well, you don’t approve of the activists’ dirty pool tactics.  So you are against them.

I knew all this because in the seventies in Portugal I dealt with the original, unadulterated, unapologetic communists.  Yeah, yeah, yeah, over here they’ll say they’re not (except for their approval of every communist regime ever) and bring up stuff about not wanting to expropriate means of production.  Only it works like a communist, it talks like a communist, and it goes “forward” like a communist.  And their tactics haven’t changed in close on to 100 years.

I was surprised with the Sad Puppy fight.  I shouldn’t have been, but I was.  I was particularly surprised because Brad is several shades to the left of me, because the suggested list was of all political colors, shapes, ideologies.  But the “racist, homophobic, sexist” came out again, and the “neo-nazi” and the smart operators shape the narrative and the truly abysmally dumb ones (and yes, from the lack of self-consciousness in saying it and the lack of butt-covering Irene Gallo is one, though perhaps not so much dumb as specialized dumb.  Many artists and art directors are thick as cement with words, though brilliant with visuals.)

They brought everything to bear, because they always do.  They started with the most extreme accusations because they always do.

The end result is that sane people, working people, people who give a d*mn about life and don’t think everything is politics tend to walk away shaking their heads.

The good news is I’m not doing that.  No one ever accused me of being sane.  Also, I wouldn’t have got in this fight (both politics and puppies) if it weren’t worth fighting.

I know damage has been done when a friend who’s known me for years tells me something like “I’m not as conservative as you are.  I support SSM.  I don’t care about people’s color” and I have to point out what the other side says not only isn’t real, it has no basis in reality.

I do disagree with “progressive” (Lord deliver me from those progressing into the past) methods to do things like help the poor.  Minimum wage laws can’t and don’t — they just promote the importation of more illegal workers, because some businesses simply lack the margin — for instance.  But that doesn’t mean I want to kick widows and orphans out in the snow, and their saying so don’t make it so.

I’m a libertarian (note the small l), or if you prefer a rational anarchist.  I don’t believe we can survive without government, but I believe that government is a bad master indeed and must be hemmed in as much as possible.  Weirdly — coff — I don’t believe the eternally-hacked-into, file-losing, its-own-ass-chasing government is a force that can propel us to the bright new future.  If you believe so it’s up to you to prove it.  Throughout history governments have been good at one thing: creating oligarchies.

I don’t believe in oligarchies.  I believe in self-ownership and self-responsibility.  I believe in equality before the law (regardless of race, creed or sex).  I believe in doing your best and looking after those who depend on you.  I don’t believe in special accommodations for anyone, but I believe noblesse oblige and that the strong should help the weak.  (I have.  I do. Often to our own detriment.)  Because we’re all weak sometime.  I just don’t believe in the government mediating it. Government is just another self-interested party. Give it power and it only grows itself.

And I believe in the future.  I believe in the human race.  (What other race would you have me believe in?  Are you by any chance a beaver or a rat?) I believe we can survive, we can improve.  And we should. I believe with some disgusting interludes the future is usually better than the past.

I’ll continue working to make it so.  I’m not going anywhere.  I will also try not to take swings at smirky cobbler’s boys.  Because they are inconsequential.  Instead I’ll feel sorry for the deluded who follow them into the abyss.

This year is shaping up to be a right b*tch even without the various illnesses and accidents.  So I’ll be busy, but I’ll continue talking.  About the puppies?  Oh, now and then.  Though the topic has limited appeal.  And there are other things, like books I’ve found.  And other stuff.  And national politics.  All of which will come up, as they usually do.

And now, if you excuse me, I have a thousand square feet to sand and wax. And I probably should call the doctor and tell him I’m having trouble breathing again.

Life goes on.  And life is important.

UPDATE: Welcome Instapundit readers, and many thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the link.

I’m sorry I’m so late with this post. This time there’s really nothing wrong, except for catching up on things that were thrown out of rhythm in the last couple of days. (You know, you have a rhythm in a house, like who does dishes, and such. It’s all off between working on the other house, and the minor illnesses/accidents of the last few days.) When one thing goes off everything gets off kilter, in this case to the point of my coming to my office (which is air-conditioning intensive) without a coat and sitting here trying to write the Mad Genius Club post and wondering why I’m freezing.

Anyway, all that is incidental and doesn’t matter, and normally I would do a blast from the past. Normally I certainly wouldn’t be wading into the Hugo mess because it’s inside baseball, it’s tiring, and who the heck cares who isn’t in this field? In fact, how many people in this field really care? I care only to a certain extent, as in the previous regime I had long ago written off the Hugo and in the present mess, I never expect to get one. Beyond which I don’t know how much importance the Hugo has for sales. The Prometheus greatly helped mine, but even there, I think the results vary.

But I’ve been on a slow simmer since the Irene Gallo comments, and that was brought to a boil yesterday.

Why yesterday, you ask?

Because the hypocritical scum (I apologize to any scum I might have offended) who runs file 770 has been gleefully linking anything of mine that even uses the letters H-u-g- and o in the same paragraph, but yesterday I wrote about his hypocrisy in taking a sentence of mine out of context and linking it with a clever-daft punchline of the “Hydrophobia that falls on you from nowhere” to imply I was homophobic.

Did he link yesterday’s post? Are you kidding? Even though he’s fairly sure his blinded followers will rarely click through, he couldn’t afford to explode his narrative. He’d on the flimsiest of “evidence” – i.e. my refusal to go into details on same sex marriage and other accommodations for more “exotic” orientations in a post to which it wasn’t even incidental – declared me homophobic, and he couldn’t risk the narrative being exploded.

I confess that when my Baen colleagues were making fun of file 770 and going on about “Mike Glyer, Fifty Hugos” (the number of nominations he’d had) I thought they were being a little mean. After all, the man was just well-intentioned and blinkered, and believed the narrative.

Guys, I was wrong, you were right. He’s not deceived, but he willfully deceives. He is not a useful idiot, but one who would seek to make idiots out of others. He’s not the sheep, but the judasgoat.

Why does that matter to me? Why do I get so upset if it’s not true? Isn’t it an axiom (at least on the left side of politics) that you only get upset if it’s secretly true?

No. It might be an axiom on the left side, but consider how their leaders lie and every other stupid thing they consider an axiom. It’s sort of a facile pseudo-Freudian thing, and I can disprove it in a moment. Say I accused you of being a pedophile. Would you get mad because you secretly want to do it? Or because it’s a repulsive lie? Say I accused you of killing puppies for fun. Do you have to actually want to do it to be mad? Or would you get madder if you actually spend all your time volunteering to rescue puppies in shelters?

Accusing me of being homophobic is not QUITE as stupid as accusing Brad of being racist. I think – that I know, I haven’t interrogated the boys, because it’s none of my business – no one in my nuclear family is gay. HOWEVER for the first 22 years of our kids’ lives, i.e. while we had a minor child, the designated guardians and executors of our wills were a lesbian couple. (They still are, but we need to change that now both boys are legal adults.) Beyond that, we’ve always had gay friends, not because we sought them out but because of where we lived or worked and because frankly we don’t care. Neither of us intends on sleeping with our friends, and our only contact with our friends’ preferences in that regard is to treat their partners as an extended part of our circle and to approve/disapprove of them according to how they treat our friends. That’s it.

Furthermore, I don’t think it’s possible for anyone, EVER to even read the descriptions of my books and think I’m homophobic.

Which is why I’m furious. Because truth matters and because Mike Glyer Fifty Hugos  intentionally lies and rapes it to make his followers blind and to make them follow him and do what he wants . He’s not the only one. People on that side have been recklessly lying and calling people heinous things, and threatening to end careers — for no better reason than their own power and self interest.

The end result of this are dumb bunnies like Irene Gallo who are absolutely sure they’re only saying what “everybody knows” when they accuse the most unlikely people of being “racist, sexist, homophobic” let alone “neo-nazi.”

These are lies told by their opinion makers, like Mr. Fifty Hugos, for the simple purpose of keeping primacy in AN AWARD FOR A FORM OF FICTION. For power.  For vainglory.  That’s it.

Let’s make that very clear: they’re willing to blacken characters and destroy careers in order to hold on to plastic rockets and the accolades of fools.

Which paradoxically is what makes the fight important and why we can’t let them win.

When I was contemplating this post, my friend Peter Grant posted and my friend Cedar echoed it.

I read Peter’s post and I realized we were both talking about the same thing. We’re talking about the truth. The truth that matters. You can’t rape the truth, no matter how holy you think your objective.

If you rape the truth you mislead sheep like Ms. Gallo and make them think they’re fighting a holy cause, instead of just keeping you in Hugo nominations. (To the extent that Ms. Gallo is innocent of slander it is because her friends and associates lied to her.  Not an excuse.  She’s an adult and she should have verified.  But she’s not as guilty as the stone-cold-liars who deceived her.)

It is the fact that the prize is so small that makes the lies and manipulations more heinous. If they lie like this in small things that bring them no monetary reward, what do you think they’re doing to the truth in things that matter?

Go read Peter’s post. He’s even angrier than I am and with better reason. His experiences in life have been harsher than mine, because it was Africa.

One thing that’s struck me very forcibly in the whole Tor situation is how utterly blind to reality are many of those on the left/liberal/progressive/SJW side of the debate.  It’s incongruous to read the comments on ‘Puppies’ posts at File 770, those left in response to Tom Doherty’s post at Tor.com, and from many of the authors and others ‘leading the charge’ on that side of the debate.  They appear to be living in an echo chamber where they feed off each other, constantly repeating the same old lies like a stuck record.  That’s the problem – what they’re repeating is, in many cases, simply not true, but they ignore that and carry right on saying it, as if repetition will somehow magically make it true.  It won’t, of course.

Truth is determined in relation to reality.  If a fact is objectively true, if it can be verified according to evidence, or tested in a laboratory, or otherwise shown to be actually (rather than merely claimed to be) the case, then it’s true.  It’s no good saying that something is ‘true for me’ if it’s not actually true at all.  That means you’re living a lie.  Period.  An excellent example is the current fuss over Rachel Dolezal’s claim that she ‘identifies as black’.  I don’t care what she identifies herself as being – I want to know what she is in reality.  The fact of the matter is, she isn’t black – so no matter how many wishful thoughts she may have, and no matter what deception she foists upon others (including the NAACP), the reality is that her life has been built upon and around a lie.

The charges leveled against the Puppies campaigns by the SJW’s are largely lies.  They take statements made (or allegedly made) by one or more individuals (often quoted out of context to make them sound either worse, or different from, what was meant), then apply them across the board to all ‘Puppies’ of whatever description.  This is simply not true.  It isn’t real.  It would be as if I took the views or statements or actions of a radical progressive/liberal/whatever (like, for example, Pol Pot) and accused all SJW’s of sharing them.  That wouldn’t be true, so I don’t do it . . . but why do so many of them do it to me?  It’s as I said last week.  They focus on the narrative, not on the facts, because the facts don’t support their views.

Go read the whole thing.

Then think about what these people are doing to the truth, in a petty, stupid little fight. And think of what they accuse us of, like voting blindly for a “slate”, while they’re the ones treating people like sheep and leading them in an unreal and bizarre fight, of which ONLY the leaders benefit.

Mr. Fifty Hugos, you’re beneath contempt. When you call people names, it’s a mirror you’re looking in.