Year: 2015

*For those of you who follow Nocturnal Lives, Amanda is posting the same thing the two places today.  Sorry.  My entire inner circle has been hit with interesting lives recently. – SAH*

It’s Not Your Job to Indoctrinate My Children – Amanda Green

The wonderful Dave Freer has a post up at Mad Genius Club this morning about an online encounter he had with a librarian. It seems this woman really loves her job, at least that is what she kept telling him. For a moment, I was excited to read that there was a librarian somewhere who did still love what she was doing. There are times when I feel that is as rare as finding a teacher in the public school system who truly loves teaching. All too soon, however, I realized that she didn’t really love her job. What she loved was being able to push an agenda on those who come to her for a recommendation about what they should read.

You see, like others who have been attacking the Sad Puppies, she seems to feel that anything that doesn’t fall under the aegis of the SJW cause du jour is something to be avoided at all costs. We shouldn’t be exposing the minds of our youngsters to such horrible things like Heinlein or — gasp — Correia. It is her job, her duty, to push socially relevant books and hurray for big publishing for recognizing that duty.

Sigh.

This isn’t anything new. At least the attitude isn’t. It is the same attitude I faced when my son we in elementary and middle school. Summer reading lists were the things of horror, not only as a student but as a parent. Teachers and librarians would sit there come September and scratch their heads and blame the parents when students would come back to class after the summer vacation and admit they hadn’t read many of the books on the list. Rarely did a teacher or librarian actually ask the student or the teacher why they hadn’t done so. If a parent commented on they why, we were either treated like unwashed heathens who didn’t care for our kids or we should have known there was this super secret, never to be discussed alternate reading list we could have chosen books from.

What folks like this purported librarian seem to forget is that people will not read if they are not entertained by fiction or interested in non-fiction. Force feeding kids — or adults — some artificially determined “right think” will only work for so long and only with so many folks. The rest of us, those raised to think and question will soon grow tired of the self-appointed powers-that-be trying to spoonfeed us intellectual pabulum.

Where does the blame for this fall? There is no one person or sector where the finger can be pointed. Why? Because a lot of folks had hands in it. There are those parents, all too many of them, for the last 20 – 30 years who took the stance that they didn’t have time to raise their kids or discipline them and turned it all over the the schools, only to threaten lawsuits and more when they suddenly realized the schools weren’t doing what they wanted.

Then there are the local and state governmental bodies that control the school districts, either directly or through funding. Athletics — read football — were promoted while minor little courses like languages, art, music and the like were cut back or cut out altogether. Back in the dark ages of my elementary school days, we had music every day. We had French and Spanish lessons two to three times a week. We had recess, something else that all too many schools have done away with because someone’s little darling might be picked last for the kickball team and have his feelings hurt or little Susie might fall and scrape her knee and we just can’t have that.

I also blame the federal government for forcing things like No Child Left Behind on districts without anyone really thinking about how it would impact most districts. In order to fulfill the requirements of that horrid piece of legislation, all too many districts wound up gearing their curriculum to the lowest common denominator in the classroom instead of spending the money for programs to help bring that lower denominator up.

Oh, wait, I forgot. Too many districts that would have done just that couldn’t for too many years because of another wonderful piece of state legislation (at least here in Texas). We had the Robin Hood provision where the more affluent (and boy did they have an odd definition of affluent since my mainly blue collar to middle management district was included) school districts had to send a proportion of their monies to the lesser well-off districts. The result of that was that all districts were harmed.

And, in the middle of all that, while concerned parents were watching their school buildings age and technology wear out while new football stadiums were being built or new natatariums, what are children were being given to read went from inspiring biographies and histories and fiction that made our kids’ imaginations soar to “socially relevant” books. Think about it. As a kid, especially one on your summer break, what would you want to read? A book about Hank Aaron and his baseball career or one about a 13 year old in the projects who had been raped by her uncle? Would you rather read Have Spacesuit Will Travel or read about teen suicide?

But it is even worse than that. The books our kids are being forced to read, the textbooks they have to study for class teach them that it is bad to be an American. If you have a son, he is taught that he has to atone for the “sins” of all the men who came before him. That is especially true if your son is of the pale variety. We have districts adopting curriculum that alters words and phrases from our core political documents so they now support the current SJW causes.

But we, those who remember what those documents say and those who don’t want our school indoctrinating our children to become parodies of the Stepford Wives or Westworld, are the evil part of society.

It is past time for us to step up to people like the librarian Dave interacted with and say “No. It isn’t your responsibility to teach my child anything. If my child comes to you, looking for a book about climate or ecology or even wanting a fun science fiction novel, you don’t give him a book that concludes with humans evil and must be destroyed to save Mother Gaia. If my son comes to you wanting a book with adventure in it, you don’t give him one where the bad guy is automatically the businessman and the good guy. You don’t give him a book where someone is declared evil just because he happens to be male. You don’t get to choose what topics and stances my child gets educated in, especially since you are not educating. You are trying to indoctrinate.”

In short, it is time for parents to take back the job of parenting. It is time for educators to remember what the word “education” means. Hell, if they still don’t get it, point them to what happened last week with Brian Williams. Here was a so-called respected reporter who got caught “misremembering” the events that happened in an active war zone. He chose to make the story about himself instead of remembering that the duty of a reporter is to report the news, not make it. Unfortunately, that is something all too many of his fellow “journalists” have also forgotten.

But the fact of the matter is, our education system has forgotten that it is there to educate. That means you give students all sides of an issue and you teach them how to examine the facts, draw inferences and come to their own conclusions. But maybe that is too abstract of an idea for our liberal arts colleges to wrap their collective minds around these days. It is so much easier to simply tell students what they should think and believe in and then turn them loose like a bunch of lemmings and see how many of them actually jump off the cliff into the pile of glitter that awaits all true SJWs.

No Excuses, No Regrets

 

I was talking to Charlie yesterday about the problem of “social justice writing.” By which we mean writing that is more concerned with conveying the “right message” delivered by the “approved group” writer than with telling an entertaining/uplifting or otherwise interesting story-that-earns-its-own-keep.

First of all, of course, there is the fact that a story that relies on “right think” to justify its right to exist might not bother with less glamorous bits of craft such as making sure your reasoning makes sense throughout, or that you have established the character’s traits to evoke an emotional response from the reader and catharsis at the end of the story.

In fact, in this “writing to effect social change” shares the exact same drawbacks as writing fan fiction. As a former fan fiction writer (Jane Austen fanfic. Yeah, I know. Exciting. Shud up.) I’m just glad I was a professional before I started playing in fanfic. It is all too easy to acquire bad habits from writing fanfic. For instance, if you’re writing Pride and Prejudice fanfic, all you have to do is name the character Lizzie, even if you set it in modern day, and the reader immediately imbues it with every characteristic of the Jane Austen character, without your having to do any heavy lifting. In the same way if you name a character Whickam, everyone knows he’s a cad or worse and never mind making his faults believable or foreshadowing them.

Writing the politically correct story is much the same thing: introduce a minority character, be it racial, sexual or religious, in one of the approved “categories” and the readership, which are “fans” of social justice will immediately imbue that “victim character” with all the characteristics of noble victims ever penned since Jean Jacques Rosseau rode the noble savage into the sunset.

Because of that, “message writing” will always be inferior to “entertainment writing” when viewed in the dispassionate cold light of day.

Change how fashionable the message is (and frankly the left seems to do that every few years, as a matter of course) and today’s “masterpiece” becomes a story only of interest to historians of passe modes of thinking, if not an outright heresy to the people trying to pretend that we’ve always been at war with Eurasia.

But there is more moral peril to “message writing” because of the very mode of thought it encourages amid its practitioners; a mode of thought best described as “seeing oppressors under every bed.”

I’ll illustrate by admitting that when I first came to the US, within the first three years, I fell in with a group of people who were generally minorities (racial, sexual, cultural.) Nothing strange about this. A lot of my friends (perhaps a majority) still fall in those categories. However, my group these days is mostly conservative or libertarian or yes, which makes them a completely different type of creature.

You see, the first few friends I made were people who obsessed over what today would be called “micro-aggressions.” Oh, macro too. And there was some reason behind their paranoia (and mine, at the time.) Where I was at the time, and the faux-pas I committed as I tried to adapt to living in the US did cause a lot of very strange reactions, and some of them outright hostile. Some of my friends at the time had similar causes of complaint.

I mean, just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.

For instance in my first (retail) job every guy (including the ex con) and every “white” (mostly blond) woman was taught how to open the safe and trusted with it, but myself and the black woman (who had an MBA and was only working retail due to a recent divorce, while looking for another job) were not. However, when money went missing, we were the only two people questioned. (Turned out the ex-con was taking money out of the safe whenever he felt like going out to dinner. I know you’re shocked.) This was definitely outrageous, but instead of taking from it that one should strive not to work for *ssholes, we took from it that everyone was bigoted against poor little us.

Anyway, at some point, it hit me that we were getting together to share grievances, and that most of our conversation, not to say most of our thoughts revolved around injustices done to us and how unfair the world was.

And then it occurred to me that more than a few of my friends, and to an extent I, myself, were using these ‘injustices’ inherent in the system (so to put it) to justify not doing anything, not trying anything and not making any efforts to improve our (relatively invidious position.)

Now, I want you to know that yes, there were injustices against us. It wasn’t all in our head. And yes, we were in a relatively difficult position.

But that wasn’t the point. Having realized the effect it was having on me; realizing that my resentment and my feeling of being victimized were holding me captive, I decided to set myself free.

I broke up with my comfortable/encouraging/justifying crowd overnight, and resolved that while I might be discriminated against, I didn’t have to let it define me. That is, while people might think I was less capable, I wouldn’t allow them to make me less capable.

For my own sake, not theirs, I would from then on ignore any discrimination against me (save for occasionally finding it very funny, like when the school was persuaded my younger son had a speech impediment because my husband and I spoke Russian at home. [Why Russian? And why poor Dan who was born and raised in New England and Ohio?]) and proceed to take no excuses for underperforming.

I might or might not be able to prove discrimination against me. I might or might not be in fact discriminated against in some particular. But the fact remained that I couldn’t control those who might or might not discriminate against me. I couldn’t even predict it, or the reason why.

Discrimination is not, as the left seems to believe, a rare thing or confined to minorities. Yes, I know, part of the reason they go crazy about white male “privilege” is that they assume there’s a hierarchy and that white males are the least discriminated against.

I suppose that is true if the white male is you know, one of the Norse gods with inherent superior looks and abilities. But even white males are never exactly what it says on the package. Any white male of less than say five feet six is going to be discriminated against. So is any over 300 lbs. So is any who is just Odd enough to have to back-engineer other people’s reactions to figure out how to react himself. So is any who is too smart or stupid for his own good.

In fact, once you figure out the various kinds of white male, there is no privilege left. And the same for every other “category” of human.

So, most of the time, the obvious form of discrimination against me comes in reaction to my accent. And it’s not even exactly unjustified. I find myself worrying, too, when talking to someone with an obvious accent. You’re not sure they can understand you, and you automatically dumb-down the talk.

But I’ve also been discriminated against because of culture. And I don’t mean Latin (though the boss in that first retail store being a dumb *ss did think I was Mexican. He also thought my name was Feliz (as in Feliz Navidad) – loooong story.) Many people (my inlaws included) just don’t “get” science fiction and fantasy. My mother in law thought and might still think that I invented “grown up stories with elves” and at one time told me I should write for children because ‘they’re the only ones with a mind as open as yours.’ She’s not alone, though most people in that position wouldn’t dare voice it to my face, so I don’t know most of them.

I was even discriminated against when I was young and slim and pretty for being young and slim and pretty and fairly well dressed. For instance, at a gathering of an unnamed high IQ society I was repeatedly asked whose date I was.

The truth is that people make judgments based not on social justice but on past experiences/what they’ve read and watched/the bottomless depths of their own weirdness. The good people revise them later, but almost every one of us has been discriminated against for something or other. And sometimes for nothing at all, but the idea in someone’s head when they first saw us.

Having realized this, I figured that if I became hung up in every time that someone didn’t treat me fairly I’d be paralyzed.

And so, in my head, I’ve decided I’ll ignore those who discriminate against me. (Save for occasionally pointing and making duck noises, because that’s only fair.)

If I let their oppression define me, I’ll be a captive of the impotence that their oppression engenders.

If I ignore it, pretend I’m the mistress of my own fate, and continue pushing to get better and to do what I want to do, then no one can stop me. Because it’s all dependent on me and how hard I’m willing to work.

And that is how I have avoided the moral hazard of victimhood. And why I feel sorry for all the writers entrapped into writing “socially relevant” fiction that enshrines and deifies victimhood.

The chains of defining yourself as a victim are a tourniquet wrapped around the soul.

The only way to stop it is to declare yourself free and ignore those you think are trying to limit you. The only way to break the chains is to believe you alone are responsible for your state of happiness and prosperity or lack thereof. Yes, other factors (including the animosity of strangers) might influence that state, but if you are willing to work hard enough you can overcome additional factors. And if you aren’t willing to work hard enough nothing, not even the most favorable of circumstances, can make you successful.

The chains of victimhood are insidious and will destroy your soul as well as your writing.

Fortunately the key to freedom is in your own hands.

Refuse excuses.

Set yourself free.

 

I remember a more innocent time when we watched Law and Order AND didn’t snert behind our hands at “Ripped from the headlines.”

Now we don’t watch it, but my eyes on twitter has been branching out, and he told me their gamer gate episode was about how all these guys were upset at there being a female game developer, so they kidnapped her and raped and stuff.

Uh.

How can they even? I mean, the worst PROVEN thing that happened to one of the SJW shills in gamergate was that someone wished she would kill herself, which she helpfully translated as “death threats.”

And Dan works in software and has for 30 years (though now the software has a math component at last) and the only time he hasn’t had a colleague who is in the same profession in his office and is female is for the last three years, and that’s because there’s only two developers. (They do have a female co-worker, but she does non-software stuff.)

Now, I know software isn’t the same as game design and gaming, but I’d be willing to bet there’s a massive overlap/similarity of conditions.

Female developers isn’t even a surprise. There might be fewer than men (not where my husband has worked, but hey) but not many fewer and they run the gamut. From what I understand, there are fewer in game development but if they are true geeks, they’re not only accepted but lionized. (I’ve experienced a similar effect as a space/science fiction true geek, (meaning I spaz on the concepts/science, not the feels) a community in which females are pretty scarce. Let me tell you, once a guy realizes I really am interested in space travel, it doesn’t matter how ignorant I am (and I am.) All their lives women have looked at them quizzically over this obsession. Finding out a woman shares it brings forth their very best.)

Besides, though I admittedly am not a gamer, I have skimmed enough articles to know that the problem here is not that WOMEN are writing anything, it is that there was suspicion of corruption in game journalism which happened to involve women. And also, as the catfight extended, that some gamers disliked a certain type of games they felt were getting unfair good reviews. Is that true? Don’t know. However, judging from the arguments the other side put out “games shouldn’t be fun” and “escapism is bad for you” I’d say whether journalists were corrupted by coochy or not, they’ve been corrupted by the same sort of “fake promise of prestige” that has seduced science fiction reviewers. In other words, they’ve become convinced of the rather juvenile idea that the purpose of entertainment (which is ultimately what science fiction and games are) shouldn’t be fun, but should be a lever for “changing society.”

And then I started thinking of other “moral panics” driven by the media (and they never tell you they were driven by the media, no matter what basis there was or wasn’t for things.)

Take the militia panic of the nineties. Every TV show, every conspiracy, the answer was “militias.”

There never was any real basis for it. Sure, there were crazy people. Fundamentalist cults. White supremacists hiding out in the country.

There always are. This is a very large country. There were even militias. We know. We were friends with a guy who was in one. He owned a large amount of guns and so did his friends. On the weekend they engaged in healthy exercise and shooting up targets.

Were they a menace to the government? Not any legitimate government. Not even Clinton. They were however concerned with the direction of the government expansion and they were survivalists preparing in the eventuality the S would hit the fan.

So, how to spin an entire moral panic out of this?

Well, you see, the media was guilty. To wit they were guilty of covering up for Clinton when his attorney general caused the death of the Korresh cult and when his ATF killed a family of white supremacists. [It has been pointed out to me Ruby Ridge happened under George H. W. Bush.  I checked and this is true. [And not a surprise.  H.W. or his son for that matter, were not exactly anti-statists] It is interesting in my mind I remember it as happening later, under Clinton. Now, I got my news at the time from TV and the papers.  It tells you something that when I heard a lot about it was under Clinton, to justify crackdowns on “militias.” The murders might have happened earlier, but the full court press was under Clinton.]

I’m not saying, understand, either of those sets of people were good people, but they were the victims here, not the perpetrators.

In this country there are always crazy people doing crazy things. There are very few crazy things anyone deserves to die for.

But under Clinton this stuff happened, and the only way to deflect it was for the press to go on an almighty panic about “militias.” Until people forgot what the question is.

Or take the “satanic child abuse” panic of the eighties. If you hear the media talk about it now, this was the result of some fundamentalist parents going crazy and stuff. (Rolls eyes.)

In fact I was there and lived through it. I remember the TV programs filled with speculation, when they weren’t trotting out psychologist-abused children to babble lurid details. I remember newspaper articles going on and on about ZOMG satanic cults, their history, etc. For pages and pages, and pages.

I don’t remember any PROGRAMS on it, but then back in the eighties I was new in the country and the shows Dan and I watched were mostly vintage star trek and old sitcoms. There probably were some, though. These things always seem to be a coordinated effort between news and entertainment, one winding the other up.

Anyway, just from the headlines/tv programs, one would be excused in thinking that every daycare was a danger. So everyday parents who had to work and put kids in daycare worried. As they should have, given the barrage of “truthful” and “respectable” sources claiming this.

The truth behind it was a little more complex, and has been swept very deep indeed. I don’t know how many of you even remember this, because possibly you might have needed to be in the circles I was at the time (mostly my brother’s circles, which were hippie/ex-hippie/avant guarde. I mean, in my teens we watched an Ingmar Bergman film cycle in the smallest theater in town. You know what I mean.)

There was a very hip, very transgressive, very intellectual and credited in intellectual circles, idea that children were (and should be) inherently sexual with adults, and that to withhold sex from them retarded their development and trampled their rights. (Now my brother’s circle – at least to my knowledge – never engaged in the active side of this, not being thus inclined. One of the fondest memories of my childhood was going to the beach at eight with a group of ten or so long haired (male) hippie freaks, and – since we couldn’t afford a changing booth and they just wore their swim trunks under their clothes – having them form a circle facing outwards, so I could use the center of the circle to change in.)

I heard an echo of that in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s testimony. It was clear she’d heard this theory and internalized it, which caused her to buy the excuses of her pedophile husband. Science fiction writers – and readers – being Odd are capable of convincing themselves of the strangest things. As in “you have to be very smart/an intellectual to believe that utter bullsh*t.”

And I can’t tell you this for sure, because a) I was very young. b) there was no alternative media and this stuff has been pretty thoroughly memory-holed, though you can sometimes find echoes of it, particularly in European stuff, but I suspect our media and intellectual establishment fell for that theory head over heels.

Then when they realized the absolutely horrendous results and that child abuse leaves the victims scarred for life, (if not in therapy.) they swung around and created a whole moral panic over those other people abusing children. In this case the “other people” being some sort of mystical believers, though at the time they weren’t bold enough to accuse Christians. But after all, Satanism if a co-dependent belief with Christianity, so that was fine.

And then when that panic was revealed to be crazy, they accused everyone but themselves of it.

Now the panic is that in these geeky/low prestige fields people the journalists don’t fully understand are afraid of “the other” be they women, people of other races or sexual minorities.

This one is so weird that it leaves me trying to grasp it. As I said, all the geeky fields I know are not just welcoming but ridiculously welcoming of women who are genuinely interested in their passion. It’s the only thing that explains why at my age and avoir du pois I count as “hot” in my circles. But not only is it what the other side believes and resets to, but it is clearly and obviously the “narrative” that will be pushed.

They want to believe the issue people have with the way science fiction has gone, the way games are reviewed, etc are because some imaginary troglodytes, in a cave, probably in Alabama, object to the fact the people creating sf/f and games have innies instead of outies.

The thing doesn’t pass the smell test.

So, what is the truth of it?

The press and the intellectual establishment (which includes the publishing establishment) have been pushing science fiction into an unsaleable/unpopular direction for years. They had, for a while, control of what ended up on shelves, and people didn’t see anything else. They still have control of news.

And the direction they’ve been pushing in is “it shouldn’t be entertaining. It should effect social change.” (But why must it always change TOWARDS Marxism? Marx is after all a dead white male. Eleventy ;))

That is the prestige position in journalism and academia, and so that’s what’s got pushed.

However it’s been disastrous for print runs. So, as the field lays gasping and they’re all out of excuses (indie has proven that people DO still read and no, the American public isn’t illiterate) they have to justify their stunning lack of success. “It’s because we have women and minorities! The evil troglodytes hate women and minorities.”

The fact that women writers are now a majority in the field (and have been my entire professional life) and that if you add in that most editors are women there’s mighty little difference between SF cons and RWA doesn’t even give them any pause.

They’ve got to convince the public that the problem is hatred of women and minorities, because then the explanation for the collapse of the field is someone else’s fault, and they’re the enlightened heroes.

And the same, of course, goes for the gaming field. “Don’t look at the crap we’ve been praising and pushing you to buy. Don’t look at how difficult it is to find something you actually want to read/play. Buy the stuff we tell you, because otherwise you hate women and minorities, you evil h8ter.”

In fact, it is the games books vehicles of social change they’ve been pushing that are excluding of “others” if the “others” are male, or working class, or religious (of a religion not Muslim) or most things that are not white females in an academic environment.

But they hope to make enough noise and use it as the plot of enough TV shows (ripped from the headlines! Eleventy) and movies and articles to convince us they were right all along, the collapse of the field is not their fault, and we should believe them, not our lying eyes.

But we have an internet. And pointing fingers. And laughter.

I don’t think it will work.

Trying to do a blog post, and faced with the fact that I’m in a very weird mood and also really, really tired.

For instance, the first idea was to write a short story called The Dino Who Loved me.  This is because my husband was looking for an excuse to buy dinos from the modelling site.  Also because of course when faced with dino-porn, my mind goes instead to a spy story with dinosaurs.

You see, dinosaurs left the world in a spaceship, but now want to see if it’s safe to come back, and then send T-Bond.  James T-Bond.  He belongs to a species of dino that hasn’t been found yet, and is roughly man-sized.  After various surgeries, he can pass as human, at least from the neck up.  From the neck down… let’s just say there are no T-Bond girls.

To make things worse, my son has the office next to mine, and is in a babbling mood.  Overheard, “I always was wildly attracted to aliens. But I didn’t make the cut and had to settle for a human.  I’m not saying I’m not happy, but sometimes I wish he had tentacles.”  Since he tends to mutter out what he’s writing, I’m wondering what kind of story will come out of his keyboard this week.

Oh, and yeah, we’re officially renting, while getting the old place ready to sell.  Right now it seems like an impossible endeavor, much less in the month till surgery.  But it must happen.

This means if you have business with me and I seem to be giving you the brush off, by forgetting to answer/forgetting to do something/forgetting my name, chances are I’ve been painting/cleaning/packing — just poke me again, this time with a sharp stick.  Seriously, if you don’t remind me, everything will be forgotten.

Oh, and, I have two books in the running in this.  If so inspired, go forth and vote.

 

For those of you who have no idea why I’m answering this — there is a rather long (if polite) question in Portuguese a few entries back and because it is a polite question — for Portugal almost excruciatingly polite — it deserves an answer.

Considering I write historical fiction and that, if history were oil, Portugal would buy and sell the rest of the world, I imagine this looks odd to people from Portugal or of Portuguese descent.  Unfortunately I have many reasons not to write fiction set in Portugal — and this is not strictly true.  I sold a Portuguese History story to The Book Of Final Flesh and I sold a Henry the Navigator story to the Mammoth book of Historical Detectives (#3, I THINK.)  And one, very recently, to Universe.  And I’ve written several others.  I’ve just never published them.  But no, I haven’t tried to sell novels set in Portugal.  Unfortunately because, of course, if Portuguese History were oil, I’d have a fast track to becoming a multi-millionaire.

So, this post will set out, in generality, the reasons I don’t write fiction set in Portugal.  I will expand on this in other posts.  In fact, this post is little more than an outline.  There will be a post immediately after this expanding on point 1.

1 – Because no one will buy it.  And no, it’s not those racist Americans.  (First of all, get a grip on reality.  Which self-respecting racist sets out to hate whites belonging to the mediterranean sub-race.  Gee.  There are cogent reasons it doesn’t sell in the US, unless literary or small press and they would apply to practically any other country not Portugal.  Well, maybe Portugal too, but I doubt it.  You could knock me with a feather when I found out recently Portuguese are a protected minority.  To anyone out there intending to protect me, kindly stop it.  I have hands and feet and a nasty disposition.)

2- Because sources of reference for Portuguese history purely SUCK.  They’re better in the US than they are in Portugal as are most purely historical scholarly books — unless you’ve tried to buy in both countries, kindly shut up — but they still SUCK.

3 – I don’t write things set in Portugal in general because I know nothing of current day Portugal.  I’m fairly sure my parents think I abandoned the country.  I’d like to submit to them and you that the country left me behind.  I truly don’t recognize most of the places I grew up in — they’re paved and covered in stack-a-prole apartment buildings.  The only way for me to go home would be a time-traveling machine.  If anyone has one of those speak up.  I’d give ALL my current worth and a good part of my future for another hour with my grandmother.

4- I don’t generally write about past Portugal because I know nothing about past-Portugal.  I don’t mean historical.  One of the advantages of historical writing is that no one can pop up and say “I lived through the Spanish takeover, young lady, and the Spanish takeover was nothing like that.  We didn’t FEEL like that, and that’s not what it was like in Freixo de espada a cinta.”  They CAN do this for my lifetime — the last almost half-century.  And they would be right and I would be wrong.  Part of this is that i left Portugal very young — 22 — and never lived in it as a self sufficient adult.  Part of it is that, while still in Portugal, I bought Heinlein’s Stranger In A Strange Land on the title alone as “Oh, Lord, that’s how I feel.”

Okay, part one after I shower and have coffee.  Part one I’m afraid will have to go into “What a writer has to do in terms of where you set up the story and themes for it to make cogent sense and sell.”  Or “Sarah’s little book of secrets about marketing to editors.”  Mind you, given my track record of marketing to the public, the well-informed will take it with a barrel of salt, but this has been my experience as a professional writer.  Your mileage may vary.

Be Right Back.

WHY I WRITE THE THINGS I DO

(You should read the post previous to this to know what the rant is all about.)

I’ve been accused — in fact, I’ve been accused recently and by someone who should know better — of writing to market.  This is not true, though it might not be immediately obvious.  What I choose to write — what I have to say in each short story or novel — I want to write.  Often desperately enough to do it — often — for the drawer.   And, hell, if I wrote to market, I’d write a lot more thrillers, romances and women in peril.

With one exception — my one write for hire book — I write a story when it chases me down, pins me to the desk and makes me type.  I write it because I must.

This doesn’t mean I’m writing Real Politik stories — all message no fun.  When I was a little kid I DESPISED the “goody-two-shoes” books that pushed the moral or religious POV.  There are no words for the level of bile and hatred I had for those so unsubtle as to have at the end something like — Moral: Good always wins and evil always loses.  Being who I am it immediately made me want to go out and write a story “proving” the opposite.

I feel exactly the same way about the politically correct pap the kids get assigned in school and half of what’s being cranked out by publishing houses, too.  It’s not, my friends, that I disagree with their contentions — I do indeed qualify a lot of them, like the whole men versus women thing, and others are so a-historical it’s not even funny, but in general — it’s that most of them are only repeating received wisdom and, furthermore, received wisdom that, disagree with it or not, no one will oppose.  Just like “Good always wins and evil always loses” is a load of patooey in real life.  BUT it is the way we all wish it were.  And at the same time it is a message repeated from all the churches and institutions catering to the young since there have been churches and institutions.

In the same way the tenthousandth Empowered Woman Defeats Evil Males saga might posibly contribute to the self-esteem of some severely battered woman who SOMEHOW managed to avoid all other identical tomes rolling off the presses for the last twenty years at least.  For me they are just a “oh, heck, yeah.  Go sisterrrr.  YAWN” as I toss the book aside.  (This should not be interpreted to mean that all empowered women characters are a bad thing.  Or that you can’t have evil males.  In my upcoming DarkShip Thieves I have both.  In spades.  I mean a black-and-white dichotomy of women-good-because-they’re-women/men-bad-because-they’re-men.  And don’t even get me started on the men-as-supervillain school of same.  That’s where men are amazing beings who have kept all women enslaved for six thousand years, change history, suppress thought AND in their spare time display amazing mind-control powers.  “It was date rape.  He TALKED me into having sex, officer.  What could a poor woman do against his male mind-rays.”  {again this can’t be taken to disparage all cases of date rape}  But that’s a rant for another time.)  Most of them, these days, don’t even get me mad enough to want to write the exact opposite.  It’s just all too much of a muchness.

So, no, my books don’t have an obvious message.  They have messages, of course.  Usually several.  All of which fits into an overarching view of the world.  Mine.  I’m not preaching at people — there are things I just have to say and that I think are more likely to make an impact if you absorb them subconsciously through fiction.  Things like “Yes, you’re oppressed.  That doesn’t give you an excuse not to TRY.”  Things like “You’ll be much happier if you love others as well as yourself.”  And I’m sure quite a few more, if you look carefully…

All that said, and granted I’ve written things “for the drawer” which will not see the light of day till I’m dead or the kids put me in a mental institution and get custody of my work, whichever comes first, writing is essentially communication.  You write to be read.  Otherwise you’re just murdering a bunch of innocent Pixels and — if you print it — dirtying paper on one side.

So when I write I try to maximize the chances that the books or stories will be accepted.  Much of this — at this point — takes place at a level I’m not even aware of.  Also — though it might not look like it — a lot of my writing planning is sub-conscious in the real sense.  Take Draw One In the Dark (advisable, really.  There will be a new cover for the paperback and that hard cover will be a collectible.  TRUST me.)  The characters — both main characters and Rafiel — came to me fully formed.  I have clue zero why Tom is short.  I just know I can’t change it.  I have no idea why Kyrie is KYRIE of all things.  (Not only does it mean Lord in Greek — apparently — but Kyrie Grace is the name of my friend Alyson’s daughter, which i did not want to steal.  The poor girl will grow up expecting to change into a panther.)  However, when I first vividly saw her in my mind I kept thinking that Kr was in there somewhere and and “i” sound too.  I tried Kris and Carissa and… you don’t want to know.  Finally it was borne upon me her name was Kyrie.  And from that moment on, I KNEW her.

Beyond characters, I often lack control over “voice.”  Each of my novels has a voice it wants to be told in.  Books in the same series have a slightly different voice.  Until I find the voice I can’t write the book.  This is responsible for 90% of my late deliveries.  (Health is responsible for the rest.)  I’ll find myself cleaning toilets, raking the yard and/or petting cats while I look for the voice.  Once it pops in my head — once the story starts speaking in its own voice, I’m home free, pretty much.

Given that, there are things I can control.  Above all, there are things I SHOULD control.  And those involve removing as many obstacles between story and reader as possible.

This is why I don’t write stories set in Portugal.  Without going into the other instances of it, let me point to you what “Portugal” conveys to the average American.

The first, and because of previous conditioning is “oppressed.”  If I’m not writing a story of someone (usually the US for these stories) oppressing Portugal, then I will have to consider very carefully whether to set it there.  (For those of you confused by this — every American has been conditioned by previous books to expect a book set in a small country to be a book of US oppression.  The editor who reads the book will expect it too.  If it’s not I’ll get a rejection telling me I dance around the point.  Or that they don’t understand what I’m getting at, or…)

Second, Latin country — and by this I mean that a lot of Americans — those not in the North East of the US at least — will assume Portugal is in South America.  Or that Portuguese speak Spanish.  This means that a book set in Portugal will NEED to be about Latin culture.  It will almost for sure have to feature a woman overcoming patriarchal society.  Or perhaps a book about the beauties of the Spanish language.  I simply haven’t felt like writing the type of book that would require this.  (Patriarchal society can be as well served by setting book in Victorian England.  And, oh, by the way, if I ever feel like writing a book about the beauties of the Spanish language, I’ll tell you. Don’t wait with sandwiches by the phone.)

[And here I pause to inform all those intending to deplore American ignorance to take a chill pill.  WHY should America know about Portugal?  Oh, the discoveries, you say?  Yes, they should.  And the way the discoveries are taught in American schools is laughable, giving most of the credit to England.  That said, it’s still HOW it’s taught, and I can’t change it.  As for the rest, how much do my Portuguese readers know of small countries with which we haven’t had a war in forever?  If I say Outer Slovenia — without looking up in google, do you know if it exists?  And where would you place it mentally?  Requiring Americans to know geography impeccably is stupid.  It’s the corollary of men-as-super-villains.  As a proud American I’ll admit to many virtues.  But contrary to what you might expect, we’re not all assigned eidetic memories at birth or naturalization.]

Third, What do you mean, they’re not just like us? — The assumption in the US (and in the rest of the world, though Europeans travel more to other cultures by virtue of living in a geographical space where you can’t swing a cat* without hitting some poor peasant’s head in Outer Slovenia.  What Europeans don’t know about America and the American mind and way of life, otoh, could fill several books.)  Any book set in Portugal is immediately rowing against the current to get into an editor’s accept pile.  This is true of any book in an unusual location.  You can choose to beg exceptions in your characters lives to make them “almost American”, to stay “on the surface” so that the true differences don’t appear” (both of which negate the point of setting it in another country) or you’re going to have to explain every single thing, every step of the way.  And if you don’t, you risk giving the wrong impression of how you feel about some of these differences too.  One of my early stories set in Portugal got me a rejection accusing me of being a xenophobic American who’d never been out of the country.  This was based on one paragraph describing pastries kept not-under-refrigeration, but in glass domes on the counter top, in a deli in Portugal, which was normal in the early eighties.  (Though probably not now.)  It’s the small things, too.  I am sometimes still tripped up by this, as my own mind is still set for “what do you mean they’re not like us?” and my childhood and early adulthood was spent in Portugal.  At a workshop I almost came to cuffs with other writers over a scene in which someone makes a big bonfire with the photographs and letters of someone who just died.  “But why would anyone burn antique stuff,” was their thing.  And they couldn’t believe anyone did it without a special reason.  (The special reason is, of course, that in Portugal, if you don’t do that to the vast majority of such “inheritances” they’d be wading through old letters and papers, having had those since at least Roman colonization onwards.)

Because of all of those, if you set a novel in Portugal — PARTICULARLY if you grew up there and know the real country, not the image in people’s minds — you’re going to have a hard time selling it.  Unless you’re working on one of the themes above and intend to do the work necessary to Heinlein in all the odd details without slowing the narrative down.

To me, what this means is that half of my Portuguese short stories never sell.  The other half take a long time to sell.  And most of them I have to distort in some way to make them ‘acceptable’.

The game is not worth the candle.  I can write the same story and set it in a time with the same characteristics and which American editors and readers are familiar with — the history of the English speaking world provides a lot of places and situations — and avoid the hassle.

This doesn’t mean I won’t ever write a novel set in Portugal, just that I have yet to find a compelling reason to do so.  And there are other reasons NOT to.  Those, I’ll deal with in the next few days.

And now, back to the real work.

*I am required here– by Miranda who is glaring at me — to say that the cat swung is entirely metaphorical and that anyone attempting to swing an actual animal will have to deal with Miranda aka cat princess of infinite power.  Cats should be carried, cuddled and petted.  Not swung.  Or she will pee on your books.

(It might be helpful to read the entry previous to this and the one immediately before that, to understand what I’m talking about.)

I’m continuing to discuss why I don’t write things set in Portugal — or at least not long works and not with any true degree of involvement in it.  This post covers points  2, 3 &4 — all of which try to explain some degree of alienation from my native land.  For those readers inclined to be offended or upset by it, I want to make clear I’m not making broad inferences, here.  This is my life, it is how I perceived/perceive things and it is my relationship with the place where I was born and raised.  Some of it I have no explanation for.  Other parts I can make broad guesses at what caused them.  Most of all, though, this is my life and this is my relationship with two countries.  I’m telling you right now you have no right to be offended by anything I feel or felt.  If you do, take it up with yourself and your relationship with your own country.

Let’s start by establishing that I’ve always been a stranger in a strange land and, to some extent, I’ll always be one.  However, as far as I’m concerned, I’m home now, having not so much immigrated as returned to the place where my soul always belonged.  I have pinned to my corkboard the following quote, which says how I feel far more eloquently than I ever could:

“I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place.  Accident has cast them amid strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage.  they may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever known.  Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves.  Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history.  Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs.  Here is the home he sought, and he will settle amid scenes that he has never seen before, among men he has never known, as though they were familiar to him from his birth.  Here at last he finds rest.” — from The Moon and Sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham 1919

It should be pretty amusing for future historians that the Obama administration had a brief fling with a “reset button.” Which of course actually meant something else, as per usual, but never mind that.

It should be pretty amusing because more and more I find myself wondering about progressive reset buttons.

The proximate cause of this is my finding myself, yesterday, in a Facebook argument on Brad’s page (well, okay, it was Brad’s argument, I just stuck my nose in. Look, guys, if my destiny hadn’t been wrenched out of its track by science fiction/Heinlein/student thing in the US/falling in love with my husband, by now I’d be bossing the entire village around, and making people tremble at the thought of getting my attention. All I have is Facebook…)

The critter, unless I misunderstood him, and I don’t think I did, was maintaining the old chestnut that sad puppies is all because we not of the SJW persuasion are afraid of “other” in science fiction.

Not only is this argument a puzzler on the face of it: if we were afraid of “other” (i.e. not like us) in science fiction, we probably wouldn’t read science fiction at all. (Not to mention that the least “other” possible characters in science fiction to me are the ones in books by SJWs. I have a post graduate degree. I lived around people like their book characters – neurotic, overeducated, self-absorbed or alternately absorbed by their “different” (it’s not) identity – and them for most of my life, both studying and teaching.) I mean, let’s posit a person who either never existed or who is at this point an insignificant minority in the US: white male, has no contact with people of other races, no female co-workers or friends. He doesn’t want his perfect little world to be disturbed.

The last thing this man is going to want to do is read about starships, aliens, differently organized societies, or even disruptive magic, monsters, and possible supernatural underlying reality.

To the extent such a person exists (and I don’t think he does) and reads, he’d probably read contemporary novels about people like himself.

But this argument is patently and obviously wrong if you look at the people representing both sides.

Yeah, sure the other side has some allegedly (rolls eyes) African-Americans and other people of color, but if you scratch even slightly at their background, you find most of them have a first rate education and come from a relatively – or outright – affluent background. Their claiming victimhood and exclusion is sort of like Lena Dunham claiming victimhood and exclusion as though her dad weren’t (for reasons that will make future historians p*ss themselves laughing) paid an unreasonable amount for painting cartoon females with exaggerated sex organs, and as though she hadn’t grown up in the upper crust of NYC.

Our side, OTOH has genetic and background diversity and I think you’d be hard pressed to name a person associated with Sad Puppies who comes from the upper class. Most of us are strivers, who have made/grown/created everything we own.

Of course that makes sense on why they hate us. The people who elected a man president for his incredible pant crease and “upper crust” credentials really despise anyone who doesn’t have old money credentials. All the old money in the world is now fashionably leftist, and they find our refusal to fall in line incredibly gauche and disgusting, kind of like wiping your nose to the tablecloth in a five star restaurant.

But of course they can’t admit that. They must have the politics as positional good: “See, I stand with the good people. I’m a leftist like smart and sensitive people are supposed to be.” And they must pretend not to be biased at all. Or to be biased in favor of the downtrodden.

Therefore they must pretend the people who oppose them are not male, female, white and brown, and various flavors of tan, of poor and middle class background (though generally, I admit, my friends are overeducated, even if not in academic positions. But then again, they paid for their education themselves, by and large. And a lot of it was for sheer interest in learning.) They must pretend all of us – even me – are white males born in the deep South right after the Civil War and we’re terrified – TERRIFIED, I tell you – of women and gay people and people of different backgrounds writing science fiction.

This is why, of course – that terror – I have to make sure I don’t catch my own reflection in the monitor while writing, because I am, after all, female, Latin and foreign born. Terrifying, I tell you.

And as for gay, I have never – Nevah – tried to talk my gay friends into writing sf/f. (Okay, three of you can stop laughing like hyenas. And you, you know who you are, I’m still waiting for you to finish that novel. I know, I know, you think you’ll never do it. Ah! I can wait. I’m patient.)

So – why do the progressives keep rewriting reality, every time it’s brought to their attention? An how can they?

Well, because if they don’t rewrite it, they’ll have to admit their desire to control SF/F is part the will to power inherent in their statist philosophy, and part a disdain for the great unwashed. They’d have to look at themselves in the mirror and see themselves for the rotten aristos they are.

They can’t do that. They must continue to keep all the power they can – and use the wins of increasingly irrelevant awards to pad their pathetic academic resumes – while screaming they’re for the downtrodden.

This is how they could take a comment about how SJWs are destroying science fiction and turn it into how the other side thinks women (or gays) are destroying science fiction. Not only have they spun two sets of anthologies out of this, but they continuously pat themselves on the back all over the comment sections of anyone who opposes them. “I believe women should have equal rights, that means I guess I want women to destroy science fiction,” was the claim of an idiot in Breitbart’s comments the other day.

When you have to put words in your opponent mouths, you might not in fact be answering them.

You might be trying to hide the ugly truth – that you’re an elitist, ignorant, self-praising egotist – from yourself.

This also explains their insistence that there were almost no women winning any awards before the famous all-female nebula, that women have been discriminated against in SF/F, and that all of the golden age SF (or Baen) is about straight white males.

When shown evidence they’re wrong about that, they go back to repeating their claims. Just like they go back to repeating their claim we’re afraid of women/gay/ethnically varied writers or characters.

They do it because they have nothing else to protect themselves with. If they remove the thin veil of denial and illusion, they’ll see the writhing mass of corruption and evil they’ve become.

They’ll have to admit their Marxist religion has not only destroyed SF/F but has killed more than a hundred million innocents around the globe.

So they reset, reset, reset. And try to convince themselves they’re the good guys.

Privilege

 

To being with, it is my privilege to address you today. No, seriously. I’m typing this on a piece of equipment that would have made the Golden Age writers go weak at the knees, and posting it over an electronic network that would have made ME go weak at the knees 20 years ago. As in when I read in Friday of the net she used for research, I thought I’d trade everything I owned plus years of life for the right to use that.

Now I have it, and I can type my thoughts and post them for the world [Sometimes half-baked. Apologies again to Abyss and Apex. I’m in the middle of moving, and things are… confusing.]

And you can read them without even the effort of going to the corner and buying a paper off the paper-seller, as my dad had to do for his share of news of the world early morning.

I’m doing this in my PJs, in a comfy heated office (filled with cardboard boxes) sitting at the black glass desk of Evil command. I’m drinking a beverage grown on another continent and transported by tech and human power across the world, so I can enjoy it.

I’m privileged. We are privileged beyond the dreams of kings and queens of past centuries.

Unfortunately when they tell you to “check your privilege” that’s not what they mean.

This is a phrase increasingly deployed by people (usually women – rolls eyes) with an academic background and its meaning is … liberal squid ink. If you’re telling them that Welfare was a disaster for black families (it was) and that affirmative action not only has been a disaster for many organizations, but corrodes the soul (you never know why you were hired. I have friends in that position) and institutes birth-privilege based on who your ancestors were (aka nobility) they will say “check your privilege.” This really doesn’t mean a heck of a lot. It can’t, because they have no idea who you are, or indeed if you have ever received any privilege growing up.

What it is base don is the idea that our society is so inherently racist/sexist/homophobic that just by being straight, white and male someone receives better treatment than someone else who isn’t one or more of those things.

Like most lunatic ravings of the left, it has a point, except for the “male” thing.

Is there some sort of automatic boost you get for being a member of the majority (which women are, despite being accorded minority status.) Of course. You’re a known quantity. Just by virtue of people having interacted with someone like you, you’re going to get “helpful” treatment, even if you are supposedly a minority.

Take me, for instance (well, don’t, Dan would be upset.) Suppose I meet a stranger on the street. Portuguese. What the heck do you make of Portuguese? If you are in a region like Boston that has Portuguese gangs (I had a cousin in one) it might carry a negative connotation. Anywhere else in the country (sorry) most people will think “South America” and have a vague idea I should be herding llamas and wearing colorfully woven stuff.

For a long time, the answer to “Portuguese” was “April in Portugal” or “Portuguese Washerwoman” because of songs.

Now suppose I was from Mexico. Meeting me would be fraught with a lot of stereotypes, but those would be both negative and positive. I mean people would go “illegal?” but then there would come the “Plucky immigrant” and “family values.” On the whole people would treat me better than neutral, trying to make up for their momentary bad-thought flinch.

Same applies, for instance, to being a race other than white that is fairly well known. Even Indian. And if you are a woman, you get the negative stereotype of all the pretty-pretty vacuous women yeah (when I was young and pretty, people assumed I was an idiot.) But you also get the strong push we’ve been seeing from media and even commercials of “women save the day.” On the whole, people will treat you slightly better, because, well, they feel bad for that first flinch.

OTOH white male? Unless you’re upper class, well dressed, etc, people are going to assume you’re a doofus, just like in all the commercials. Because of all the propaganda about how you dominate the world, if you’re not successful, people will think you’re an idiot.

This sort of unconscious evaluation is human, can’t be helped, and will always exist.

Several years ago, Dan and I were shopping for a car. Our friends Alan and Becky went with us. To the eye we all present as white (unless I’ve been in the sun a bit, but even then, I could be Italian.) All of us were casually dressed. Alan, however, was tall, blond, blue eyed. Becky is tall and blue/grey eyed. She was also slim.

Dan and I are both short, and were both rather overweight at the time. We were the ones looking for a car, and we had the cash to buy it outright. They – for various reasons – didn’t. The salesmen swarmed them and fairly ignored us.

Micro aggression? Privilege? Oh, sure. No, not really. It amused us greatly, but at first scanning (and there were more details I don’t remember now) our friends presented as “having more money” so they got the attention. Fine. We still looked at cars.

This is the sort of privilege they’re talking about. In the long run, it really doesn’t mean much. What matters is what you make of it. The first glance might make salesmen run from us, but once we start talking about what we want, and how much we’re willing to pay (no, not now. That car is 17 years old, but you get the point) they’ll come back and (duh) sell us a car. The difference? We don’t go away in a huff when they make a mistake. And we don’t take unreasonable insult from a reasonable assumption.

The reason so many academic liberals deploy it as a war cry, though, is because they are mostly academics from – da – privileged backgrounds. This sort of “insult” is the worst they’ve ever suffered. They’ve never been low man on the totem pole with sh*t flowing downhill for things you couldn’t even vaguely control.

So they imagine these casual slights are the worst thing ever.

It’s sort of like kids who always got all the candy they wanted, feeling crushed because you said “no chocolate before breakfast.” It’s the worst thing ever, because it’s the worst they’ve ever experienced.

They also find it useful to shut up opponents because well… if they say it, any normal rational people thinks of my opening to this post. They think “Well, I am unusually blessed, maybe—”

Don’t. Just don’t. Most of the people who use “check your privilege” could buy you and sell you outright. The real “downtrodden” battling to get to the top will often have the same reaction YOU have.

The point is, we’re all equal under the law. Human discrimination is not something you can stop, but it’s also not something that is triggered to the Marxist categories of race, orientation or even class. It’s usually more subtle. I might discriminate against someone because something about him bothers me: accent, gestures, something. I might not even know why. It might be unjust.

It’s just a result of humans not being perfect. No human society can get rid of it. Giving people the power to point and cry privilege to shut others up will just privilege a bunch of academics and bureaucrats who will use it to their advantage.

When told to check your privilege, I suggest you answer “it’s fine, thank you. How about yours? A bit overlarge, no?”

 

So, I’ve been packing/cleaning (painting starts this week, hoo hoo — not) house so we can put it up for sale for two weeks, and then we spent five days sitting/listening to lectures at a seminar.  (Was good.  Got to see Boss-Lady, aka my publisher.)

I got up much too late today, and I don’t know which of my regulars was supposed to be up.  I didn’t prod him/her, obviously. Yesterday afternoon/night we got home just in time to clean and do some things that couldn’t wait any longer, like laundry and dishes.

Overnight I started feeling like I was coming down with a cold and so I was intending to take a break and write something light, maybe fiction, for the blog.  (BTW I have talked Stephen Green, aka. Mr. Vodkapundit into doing an audio of “It Came Upon A Midnight Clear.”  We’re going to put it on audible and see how it does.  What do ya’ll think.)

So I get up and I’m checking comments, and I found I’d been linked back by someone who is very upset indeed at Sad Puppies and linked back to my Puppy Sadness Has A Cure post.

I’m going to admit right here, right now that I didn’t read the whole thing.  The bits I got to see on preview were hilarious enough that if I read the whole thing I’d probably end up in the hospital for a sprain of the laugh muscle or something.

First of all, this person says that Sad Puppies is about awards no longer being based on talent or popularity or anything but politics. At which point I thought:

Because, got it in one.  Sad Puppies is about no longer rewarding the “cool kids’ and the “correct thinkers” with awards that have nothing to do with ability or good work, but only with “We want to endorse this message.”

Of course, they don’t mean it that way.  And of course, they have a point, right?  After all, who could be against awards going to such immortal works as If You Were A Dinosaur My Love or Redshirts?  Talk about fiction that will live forever!

After all, I mean, who the heck wants to reward unpopular works, like say, Monster Hunter Nemesis?  I think I’m one of five people in the world who has read it.  And by five, I mean five million.

And as for ability how can people who want to be PRESERVED from reading anything right wing (by which they mean anything that deviates from the sacred gospel of Marx and Lenin, in case my readers are at risk of getting sprained brain trying to figure out how I’m right wing) know if those works they refuse to even open have talent and ability or not?

Oh, wait, they can’t have talent or ability, because they don’t hew to the sacred gospel of Marx and Lenin, which “all smart people” and “all good people” believe in, so they must be stupid and bad, right?  And this, of course, is how the “smart people” think.  For… er… a definition of think. You know, one that includes tourettes-like noises of approval for the left and no actual, oh, yeah, what do they call it?  Reasoning.

Which is why sad puppies this year is running a solid right wing slate? Right? Including such notorious right wingers as Kevin J. Anderson and Jim Butcher.

But then I read the rest of the preview in the tag and it said “Sarah Hoyt thinks you should think of the children — will no one think of the children — and that they should read only adventure stories.”

I was wrong.  They can be that stupid.  In fact, they can be that stupid with flares on and a little outboard motor to get to dumb as heck FASTER and with more style.

Do these poor creatures get an ironioctomy at birth?  Don’t they know “do it for the children” has been a joke phrase since the nineties?

And do they honestly, in their heart of hearts think that all the other side writes is “adventure stories”?  REALLY?  Hell, the story I mentioned the other day, Tom Bailey is more of an introspective memoir than an adventure story.  And has anyone who read my stories, particularly short stories, HONESTLY think all I do is “adventure stories”?  (Oh, like Thirst or What She Left Behind, or Never Look Back, or….)

And I realized what we’re facing is not just people who are stupid (though a few of them are.  And it’s not made better by their thinking their political ideology makes them “smart”) or people who are crazy (though a lot of them are, particularly the ones who honestly think humans are not influenced by sex hormones int he way they think.)  No, what we’re facing are the deliberately blind, the ones who put out their eyes so that they can avoid seeing “the wrong thing” and questioning received wisdom.

This is one of the great sins. It is a sin that enables all other sins, too, because if the received wisdom demands you believe some people are not human, you can’t correct for it if you’ve deliberately blinded yourself to all expressions of humanity from those you are told are the enemy.

And that is what we face. And that is what we fight. People who deliberately believe in lies.

I was talking to my friend Bill Reader about “If You Were A Dinosaur, My Love” and I told him my moral certainty that the story started as a gay short story (I have a vague idea that I might have published with Abyss and Apex [I’m reliably informed that I maligned Abyss and Apex, and the silly dino story came out in Apex.  OTOH I still don’t remember if I was published in Abyss and Apex], maybe, unless they were the ones who sent me a rejection saying I clearly had never been in another country and was “a narrow minded pain” — I can’t remember.  After 120 short story publications, they all run together.  However I do know that my stories with gay protagonists, like Songs or Never Look Back got a lot of pushback and editors saying “if you just change it to” before someone published them as is.  No, I don’t know why.  There’s nothing shocking in these stories.  But progressives imagine the rest of the country are homophobic troglodytes.  It’s important for their self image.  Which is part of the point I’m trying to make.)  “Not because it makes more sense that way,” I told him.  “But because liberals are convinced any gay man entering a rural bar will get beaten to death, even though the instances of exactly this occurrence are… let me see… I’m thinking… exactly zero percent a year.”  And he said “No, I know what you mean.  It makes liberal-sense.  I’ve started calling this “para-logic.”  I.e. the sense that they live in  a parallel world, and if you buy the premises of that world, instead of your lying eyes, and believe that the rest of the country are frozen somewhere between the middle ages and the imaginary 1950s filled with Stepford Wives, then their stories and actions make perfect sense.”

Bill is a better man than I and better able to articulate these things.  When faced with liberal paralogic, like the idea that I was serious about “do it for the children” or the idea I think children should only read adventure stories…

I just…

Because I work in the imaginary world, I try my best to see the real world as it is. Really see it. And reading this stuff is like reading dispatches from crazyland, so that I am caught between laughter and crying, but mostly I’m sitting here with my mouth hanging open…

So, yeah, Straw-Sarah, the one who is a twit and wants you to “Only write adventure stories” “for the children” would like to remind you to go look at the Sad Puppies slate and maybe to read these people and consider voting for those notorious right wingers, like Kevin Anderson and Jim Butcher, and Mike Resnick, or indeed any other right wingers you want to vote for. Or left wingers. Or people with no wings. (What the living h*ll, I’m a libertarian. Do whatever the heck you want. Just try not to vote for cr*p no one reads because that hurts the prestige of the award and hurts all of us professionals in the long run.)

Mind you, I don’t expect us to win. I know that worldcon has an elderly and conservative (in the sense of supporting those in power) fandom, who will not only not speak truth to power, but who are trying to support power as hard as they can. This is normal for the elderly and out of touch, and we shouldn’t blame them (too much.)

But then again I also didn’t expect these blog posts about Straw-Sarah. So maybe I’m out of touch. Or maybe I’ve come to the point where pointing and making duck noises is not enough.

So, as soon as I get my PIN (what is TAKING THEM SO LONG) from Sasquan, I shall read the books recommended, and other books/stories, and I shall carefully make my selection and vote. Because they need to know we’re out here, and we’re not whatever straw-creature they like to make up.

Defeat para-logic. Vote Sad Puppies. Show that you believe your lying eyes!

Do it for the children! Because, yeah, we’re totally about the children. You know, the children who read the “adventure stories” which is all we write.

Go. Write. Read. Have fun. And when you come to the place you can no longer point and make duck noises, shake your head and pity these people. They once had the ability to think, but they turned it in for a pot of message.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So, some of you know I finished the Superstars Writing Seminar this weekend, which is why this will be a very short post. There’s a field trip today and I’m going. (And yep, this afternoon will find me typing away on Through Fire, because I was writing by hand at the Seminar.)

Anyway, it occurred to me that writing is such a strange avocation, pulling things out of non-existence and putting them in someone else’s head that writers – by which I mean true writers, not people who write so that they can get their next promotion in academia or what have you, but people who are compelled to tell stories – need these seminars and workshops, even if they learned nothing new at them. Why? Because we spend three or four days in the middle of a bunch of our peers and we start thinking we’re not the cursed outliers of the human race.

Now this is the third year I’ve attended Superstars. I’m not going to say there was no information. Among other things, we had the inimitable Kris Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith as speakers, and even if you know the information, you always catch some nuance in what they say that lights up a lightbulb.

There was also a lot of info I’m not ready to use yet, and might never use – Hollywood, comics – but which is good to have in my quiver because one thing in this business your career is likely to do is take a sudden turn to the weird when you least expect it.

That’s all fine.

But the most important thing about it for me, this year, was feeling energized by knowing I wasn’t alone and even my peculiarities (writing a book while listening to talks) were shared by some of my peers.

After the seminar yesterday, a friend asked how she could finish her book really fast, and ramp up on her career (she writes romance) to where she’s making money.

I wished she’d taken the seminar (I tried!) but since she couldn’t this year, I am going to distill some stuff from the seminar for her.

 

• Don’t stop. You can’t sell books you haven’t written.
• Write through the distractions. There is never going to be a distraction free life while you’re alive and in the world.
• Keep writing. Particularly in the indie game, but really in all of it, you need productivity to make actual money. As in, living and buying groceries money.
• If at first you don’t succeed, pick yourself up and write again. This business is WEIRD and even the best get knocked down. The long-terms continue working through everything.
• There is money in them there hills, but it is work to get there. So – as Kevin Anderson says – the books ain’t gonna write themselves.
• Vary what you do. You never know what will hit. The more tickets you have the better the chance of winning the lottery.

And now, I’m going to go to my field trip and to write. I’ll be back on Tuesday with more reasoned commentary.

Meanwhile behave and ix-nay on the pink walls hey.

Being Prepared – Cathe Smith

There was a farmer and his wife, and they had a beautiful farm on the rolling prairie. There was the 80-ft hand dug well faced with local limestone, and the numerous outbuildings required for small self-sufficient farms in the early 1900s. There was the sheep pasture in the front of the house for the sheep, and the spreading Burr Oaks lining the ravine. There was the barn with foundation walls a foot thick and made from fieldstones, with its walls held up by eight-inch beams.

The house was a solid thing of cement blocks with a deep basement and lots of windows to let in the light. The farmer and his wife filled it with music from their record collection, and the wife decorated with crocheted pillowcases on the beds and anti-massacres on the chairs.

And the farmer and his wife loved to read; history books, how-to books, biographies, everything and anything that caught their fancy. They filled their house with love and books. Every room of their farmhouse had homemade bookcases filled with books. The farmer and his wife were known in the community as readers, and their friends would call upon them to settle bets or find information.

Eventually the farmer’s wife died, and the farmer cleaned out a few of her things from the house but kept the china and kept the 50^th wedding anniversary plates they had been given. He kept her scarves, and the crocheted pillowcases, and kept her crafting books and magazines. In the fullness of time, the farmer himself died and the house, all of belongings of the farmer and his wife, the farm, and the farm land were inherited by a sister.

The sister did nothing with the farm or the house, and so the books sat on their shelves waiting. Eventually vandals and thieves broke in, looking for things to steal and wanting to cause mischief. The books were flipped through, because sometimes old people hid money in them, and then they were tossed on the floor. They knocked over furniture, looking for hidden things, and ripped out wiring from the walls.

Then came the kids looking for a place to party, they threw things around sometimes just to hear the noise something made when it was broken. They scattered old clothes around, and threw the silk scarves the farmer had kept onto the ground. The books on the floor became just another surface to stand on. Or try to burn.

In the quiet times, the animals came in looking for a place to shelter. Raccoons and opossums used the books as their litter box, and rodents used them as shelter. Birds nested in what was left of the light fixtures and vines grew along the ceilings. And underneath it all, the insects came in. The Dermestid beetles eating old paper and glue from the bindings, the book lice eating the mold and fungal spores, the caterpillars eating the rotting cellulose, and the centipedes and spiders that made their homes in such a rich hunting ground.

And with that first window broken, the damp came in. It settled into the books and helped mold and mildew grow. It warped covers, and destroyed bindings. It caused ink to run and colors to fade.

For 15 years the house stood, with its furnishings slowly going to ruin. There were those in the community that pleaded with the sister to sell the contents of the house and put the farm on the market. It was on the rolling prairie, the soil was good and the property was desirable. But the sister did nothing until her health was failing and she started disposing of her property to pay for her care.

By that time, the books were beyond saving. I shoveled first-edition military history books into a front-end loader along with biographies of interesting people, old crafting magazines, and early scientific farming books. And every load was dumped into the brush fire. I used a barn shovel to scoop up scattered books a foot deep in the house, and watched them all burn.

The almost physical pain watching those books burn caused in me was surprising. I was telling myself that the books were just things; just possessions and that I was being overly emotional, but books aren’t just things. Books are some of the longest lasting repositories of data storage we have, they are what help us remember what are, show us what we can be, and remind us of times when we should have known better.

And to watch someone’s book collection, and indeed 98 percent of their belongings put on the scrap heap, made it worse. No matter what a person believes about the afterlife, or if they believe in one at all, we all hope that the things we leave behind will make someone happy. We hope that the boxes of books your family sells at the auction will go to someone that will get some enjoyment out of their use, that the set of china you leave your niece will help her set up her house one day, that the set of old knives you leave your son will help him pay off the debts he never told you about.

So the lesson I learned that dreary day is this: It is not enough to have someone to leave your possessions to, you must leave them with instructions on how to dispose of it. Because if you don’t, whatever you hoped would happen, whatever joy you thought you’d left behind might all end up in smoke on a cold day in January.