*Blame Marina Fontaine for reminding me of this post.  I was going to write one on a similar theme, but hey, it’s already here.  (And yep, went looking at houses yesterday.  One was ALMOST doable for our admittedly eccentric needs, but it’s too early in the process to settle.*

Giving Back My Middle Finger – A Blast From the Past Post From June 2012

Yesterday in the comments someone mentioned giving back to the community.  That is one of those phrases that makes my eyes turn red and smoke come pouring out of my ears in loony-tunes style.

Don’t misunderstand me.  It’s not that I don’t believe in “community.”  Or rather, I hate the word community.  I prefer almost any other word including “group.”

But I believe in groups of people and I believe in the synergy of groups – not so much, mind, that the group is better than the sum of its parts, but that the group is the sum of its parts.  Or healthy individuals make healthy groups.  Or whatever you’d like to call it.

I’ve been a member of several groups that for a while made it easier for me to reach my goals, and I still am a member of groups that do.  I used to be a member of a largish (I think we were ten people at our greatest size) writers group that, while it lasted, made it easier for me to focus and work every week, despite having small kids and a schedule so full that any writing time came off sleep time.  I used to get up at five in the morning so I had two quiet hours of writing before the kids woke up.

I’m now a member of a much smaller writers group that is not quite so focused, but which talks me through snares and supports me when I’m in the dumps.  The same applies to the somewhat larger group of friends (some of whom are writers.)

Of course, looking further back, I was a member of an extended family.  In my case when I title something “me and my cousins” I’m not just talking about the Arab proverb.  By culture or design (I never knew which) though my family ran to small nuclear families, the cousin-group was raised more or less in and out of each other’s pockets.  I used to think of my cousins the way Americans think of their siblings.  In many ways, I still do.  If I managed to be a solitary kid at all, it was because I was so much younger than the rest of them, being almost ten years younger than my brother, who in turn was five years younger than the (female) cousin who was raised (even more so than our other cousins) as our sister, and who is four years older than him.  The other day I almost died watching this video, because that baby elephant was me, from trying to get involved in stuff that was well beyond him, to giving up, throwing himself to the floor and trying to become the center of attention.  Yes, I had a very happy childhood.  Idyllic in many ways.  Not “ideal” which is not the same thing, but good enough.

And of course I’m still a member of that family, even far away, and I’m a member of my nuclear family, and our family sometimes worries me that it might be too close.  We didn’t raise the boys to be our friends.  That was not our job.  Our job was to raise them to be adults and to trust them to find their own friends.  Of course they have done that.  But we seem to accidentally have become friends, somewhere along the way.  Not equals, but you don’t have to be equals to be friends.  I realized we were going the friend route when vacations with the boys were way more fun than vacations alone with Dan.  We might now be at the point – with them living in the house through college, and us wanting to reclaim our lives again – when we need to resume running away from them for some periods of time.  BUT it can’t be denied that the family is a group, and a functional group at that, which allows each of the members to excel.

Heck, this blog has become a group of regular commenters, a “blog community” (one of the few times this word is more appropriate than group) which adds to my own experience in writing the blog.  I know whatever I throw at you will be enlarged and deepened, or just made more fun by your takes on it.

So, why is community appropriate in this case and not in the others?

Because “community” is – at least in my mind – a more undefined and softer edged critter than “group.”  A group is me and Bob and Joe and Mary.  A community is “the group of people who comment on this blog” which, yes, has some core groups, but meanders and changes and defines itself differently moment to moment.  In that sense, community is a term out of sociology.  Take a mountain village.  It’s a community.  Is it the same group it was a year ago?  Maybe.  Depends on how many people moved in and out.  Is it the same it was 100 years ago?  Oh, h*ll no.  With bells on.  People have died and been born, and, if it’s in the States, moved in and out.  You’ll be lucky if there’s one person who is a direct descendant of someone who lived there 100 years ago.  Unlike a group, also, you’re not aware of everyone in the group and usually don’t have any say in who joins and who leaves.

This might not be true in communities where you have to be voted in, like country clubs, and in many groups – families – you might not have much of a say on who joins or leaves, either.  And of course some groups are too large for you to be aware of every member.

Now that I’ve made a big muddle out of those definitions, let me try to make some clarity: I view a group as more of an association of individuals.  You’re part of a group because you want to be, and your individuality matters to the group.  A community, on the other hand is a group of undefined faces.  “People” belong to communities, but it won’t be the same over time.  There can be groups within communities.  There is a definite group of core miscreants in the community of regular commenters on this blog, and I worry when one of them disappears too long and start wondering if I did something to offend him/her.  But there is a larger community around that group: people who come in now and then, in a way that’s statistically but not individually significant.  In the same way, when the Baen bar was healthy, I knew “mine” in Sarah’s Diner, which was definitely a group (at least at its core) but we existed within the community of the Baen Bar, from which a few stragglers would join us or stray out on a more or less random pattern.  To make it clearer: My writers group, but the writing community; my family, but the community we live in; my friends but the community of writers in the area.

So, now that we’re clear as mud, let’s talk about “giving back to the community.”  (Give me a minute.  Must control fist of doom.  Okay.  I think– Yeah.  I’m all right now.)

Why does that phrase annoy me?  Haven’t I said that various groups, starting with my family have helped me along the way?  Aren’t I prone to books that become group efforts?  Even in Darkship Thieves, with an individualistic narrator, told first person, would Thena have got anywhere without Kit and his family?

Yeah.  Okay.  I’m not advocating the lone wolf way of life.  I’m actually – particularly for a writer – highly social.  My profile can tip introverted or extroverted, depending on how I feel.  And though I recently had the first party we’ve held in 9 years, it wasn’t so much not wanting to do it, as the fact that my schedule has kept me in “h*ll on Earth” for about that long.  I love AIM and email because it allows me to get work done AND talk to my friends every day, on my own schedule.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: humans are social animals.  It is both our downfall in many ways, and one of our greatest advantages.

No, what gets on my nerves is two fold “community” and “giving back.”

First of all, let’s define community as it applies to any individual.  What communities am I a member of?  Well, I’m an American (Thank you, G-d, thank you, for allowing me to find my tribe.)  I’m a Coloradan.  I’m part of the science fiction community and the writer community.  I’m part of a community of libertarian (note small l, guys) thinkers community.  I’m part of the cat rescue community.

So, what am I complaining about?  Shouldn’t I be giving back to those communities?

These are my middle fingers.  See them?  They’re waving in the air.  Yes, it’s rude.  But it’s not as rude as telling me I need to “give back.”

I should give back what?  What have I STOLEN or TAKEN from anyone?

“But Sarah,” you’ll say, “doesn’t being an American give you the freedom and peace of mind to carry on your life?  Don’t you like the rights you have as an American, to make an example of a community?  How could you have anything or be anything if you were squatting in a dirt pile, clutching a spear to defend your food?”

Uh.  Right.  And every one of the other American citizens has decided, FOR MY SAKE to make sure that we live in an ordered and lawful society, have they?  All this effort has been expended to let little Sarah achieve her goals, is that it?

“Well, no” you say “that would be ridiculous.  But we have these laws and conventions and customs that allow each of us to develop and do our best.  It’s a community.  You got to give back.”

See middle finger?  We are a nation founded on laws.  Those laws allow each of us to do our best – that’s why we have these laws.  It’s called our constitution and to the extent it’s not ignored, it works better than any other organizing charter in the world.  BUT it doesn’t work because we each wake up in the morning, sing kumbaya and decide to abide by it.  It works because it functions well with human nature.

To hell with you and your giving back.  My duties as an American are to defend and uphold the Constitution that made me an American (yes, I took that oath when I got citizenship.)  That’s not giving back.  That’s my duty.

“Okay, okay,” you say.  “What about the writer community?  Are you going to deny you’ve had mentors along the way, people who put themselves out to teach you and help you become the writer you are today in both craft and career?”

I have no intention of denying that.  Yes, a lot of writers help me and have helped me.  Yes, some sacrificed time and earnings to do so, or risked displeasing their publishers.

So, shouldn’t you give back?  Well… no.  What I got was freely given.  This doesn’t mean I’m a monster of ingratitude.  Most of the people who helped me along the way have claims on me.  I’ll do anything for them when I can.  Some have tested this.  BUT it is not “giving back.”  I didn’t steal something from them that I’m scrupulously returning.  Rather, I’m under obligation to their kindness and their friendship FREELY given to me.  And they have the claims of kindness and friendship on me.  What is the difference?  Well, for one I don’t feel I owe them a finite amount.  Their claim on me is infinite.  I’ll do what I can when I can until one of us dies.

I also pay it forward.  Some of you I mentor, even if I’m the world’s worst mentor ever.  (I hope this will change as I’m more able to control my own schedule and perhaps as health stabilizes a little after this upcoming round of “consorting with doctors.”) And I teach a workshop in Bedford, TX, ever September (and no, the price doesn’t go to me.  It benefits the local library.)  And I try to advise people online.

Do I do this to give back?  Well, hell no.  I didn’t take anything away from the newbies coming in.  I do it because I’m human and I remember being where they are.  I needed help (and eventually got it, but not a for a while.  I didn’t KNOW anyone) and so I give help.  It’s a love offering, freely given.  It’s also, in a way, a self-interested act.  When my newbies develop nicely, I have new authors I love to read.  As a reader that’s a plus.  (And I’m eagerly waiting Kate Paulk’s next con book.)

“You call it love offering, we call it giving back.  Why are you arguing words?”

Because words matter.  When you give back something, you return what you took.  It’s an obligation – sometimes a legal obligation – and it puts you under a constraint to act a certain way.  Now, I don’t know about you, but when I undertake work under an obligation, I feel like I’m lifting a very large rock, pushing and making an effort to get it where it needs to go.  I rarely fulfill an obligation, particularly while someone stands over me screaming “you owe me” with a light and happy heart. RES has made the point in the comments that it’s hard to do for money what you do for enjoyment, and the same thing applies.  I’ve found that I have an almost pathological distaste for editing – even though NRP is waiting for me to do some of it – if I’m obliged to do it by contract.  I will read/critique friends stories fine, but NOT if I’m the editor for an antho, say.  If I owe it, I keep blocking on doing it.  If I owe it, then I hate doing it, and will try to do it as quickly as possible.

Most of all I hate the idea of “giving back” because it presumes that the individual is nothing without the undefined, faceless community.  No one is going to dispute that people do best with rule of law and private property (well, the “community people” might dispute that last.  That’s all right.  They’re wrong) but the “community” doesn’t do that for the benefit of its members.  Rather, each of its members does that for his/her own benefit.

I also hate the (you knew we’d come to it, right) Marxist ethos at the back of that phrase.  In “giving back” is the idea that whatever you achieved was achieved at a cost to others.  Instead of a group, where we each do better because we have this charter that supports all of us (which is what the best writers groups I belonged to were) we end up with the idea that people did this FOR you and that whatever you have came at their expense.

It all comes back in the end to the idea of economics as a finite pie and a closed system.  This is completely insane (each of us now has more “wealth” than any king in the Middle Ages) but it is the only way Marx could define envy as a virtue, and, by gum, he was running with that.  Envy is only a virtue if anyone who does better is a thief.  Someone needs to “give back” only if he took more than his fair share.

This is my middle finger.  See my middle finger?

But I’m not a thief.  I didn’t steal.  And the faceless “community” can earn its own rewards as I have.  I will give, but I won’t “give back.”  I will volunteer, but I volunteer because I want to.  (A lot of my volunteering involves saving orphan and sick kittens, and much as the cats I’ve known have enriched my life, I don’t owe the “cat community” anything.)  VOLUNTEER should be just that.  Don’t get me started on the schools that “require” “volunteer hours.”  It strikes me as getting kids used to slavery, and I disapprove of slavery.

What I have is mine and I earned it.  I will pay back the debts I know I owe along the way – and the cornucopia of the retribution on those is infinite, mostly because what I was given was a free offering, and I return it as such.  There is no limit to what I can give in those cases.

For the others, the ones who want a piece of me because “you’re not squatting in the dirt and defending your possessions against all comers” can have my middle finger.

The end result of your envy and your belief anyone who achieves anything owes you something IS a society where we each squat in the dirt and fight off entitled little pests like you.  (Well, not really like you.  You’ll be long dead.)  I will fight to my last breath your attempts to make me “give back.”

Go and make your own.

*So, there is the promo post.  I might/probably will post again later, unless we can manage to go look at some houses we have bookmarked, in which case I won’t post till tomorrow.  IOW Keep checking this space.  Things are likely to happen.*

The Promo IS — Free Range Oyster

Joe Vasicek

Bringing Stella Home

Gaia Nova Book 1

The war has arrived at home. James McCoy, the youngest son of a starfaring merchanter family, never thought he would face an invasion. But when an undefeated enemy slags his homeworld and carries off his brother and sister, nothing in the universe will stop him from getting them back.

Not all wars are fought on the battlefield. Hard times show the greatness in men, and those who give all are changed forever.

This book is rated T! according to the AO3 content rating system.

Currently free

Cyn Bagley

Hilda’s Inn for Retired Heroes

In Delhaven, there is an Inn run by a retired mercenary. If you are a down-on-your-luck mercenary or men-at-arms, come to the public rooms and Hilda Brant, the owner, will give you a bowl of stew. If you want ale, hand over the coins. Hilda may give you floor space, but she expects you to pay in favors or coins.

Hilda is also an untrained mage with an elemental, which is another reason she is retired. Most mercenary companies are wary of mages for good reason.

When Lord Barton decides he wants the magic on Hilda’s property, Hilda pulls together her resources, including her brother a mage and her sister a brothel Madame, to save her Inn.

Hilda isn’t prepared for the damage and chaos caused by a dragon, black mage, and elementals. And a very angry Lord Barton.

CJ Carella

The Ragnarok Alternative

New Olympus Saga Book 4

Christine Dark faces her most dangerous enemy yet – herself.

In another reality, Christine became corrupted, evil, a murderous villain with immense power and no compassion or restraint, a tyrant who destroyed the world and surrendered to the Outsiders. And now she has arrived to Earth Alpha, bringing chaos and destruction in her wake.

The fourth book of the New Olympus Saga follows heroes and villains endowed with great power and all-too human flaws as they deal with the aftermath of the Genocide War and a new threat in their midst. This story combines action, romance, suspense and humor.

Some time back, I was reading a book on life in the middle ages, and they tried to explain the mindset of the middle ages, and how different it was from ours.  Like, you know, if you got sick, they wouldn’t think of giving you meds.  They’d tell you to go to confession and communion, and to live a holy life.  Because in their mind illness was not the opposite of health, illness was the opposite of living in grace.  For illness to penetrate, you had to be in sin.

In the same way, their households might be filthy, but they paid scrupulous attention to the… cleanliness of their spiritual lives, which was not what we’d expect.  I mean, it wasn’t so much concentrating on being good, and kind, and strictly moral, but more a superstitious appeasement of the disturbed forces of holiness.  So you might make sacrifices, or go on pilgrimage, or whatever.

This wasn’t that strange a mental situation, because I sort of grew up with it in the village.  People would naturally say things like “I knew that I got sick because I dropped my rosary in the dirt last month.”

And so, I understood and got it that this pattern of thought was the primitive thought that predated our scientific thinking and even our religious thinking, and was radically different from both, and yet still remained coexisting with our current thought.

It remained usually in the uneducated and the very young.  I know until I was about 10 or so, I had a series of things I did/didn’t do in order for tests to go well.  I still have occasional attacks of it.  You know, if I wear a certain outfit on the day a book launches, I know it will do well.  Something like that.  It’s harder to get rid of all of it, but since the enlightenment we’ve at least had the idea that education was supposed to help, and that the scientific, modern life was supposed to not function like that.

I am not against mystical thought, mind.  I think there is a mystical life, an attempt to draw nearer to something greater than us, perhaps to G-d himself, for those of us who are believers.  BUT this is not the same as this type of magical thinking, which is the opposite of it, a sort of ocd compulsion and a game of tit for tat individual or cultural.

It’s okay kept on the fringes of normal life, in private circumstances.  I mean none of us really care if you have to cut your sandwiches in octagons in order to be lucky in your work project.

The problem is that more and more — and unexpectedly — I run up against this type of thought in places I don’t expect.

We ran into it a lot over the puppy stuff.  No matter how many times we told them we were in it for the stories, and because our story taste was different from theirs, they kept thinking magically.  It went something like this “We’re good people, and we’re for minorities.  So if these people don’t like the same stories we do, they must be racist and sexist.”

This was part of the nonsense that started Gallo’s flareup.  She had some idea we’d get all upset at TOR publishing Kameron Hurley’s book.  Because you know, we have different tastes than those primarily on the left who controlled the Hugos so long, so we don’t want them to … get published?

This only makes sense if the person saying it is inhabiting a magical world, where objects/people of certain valences are played against each other like some kind of card game.

This is not real.  I mean sad puppy supporters might not — or might, I won’t because it’s not to my taste, but — read Hurley’s book, but we won’t recoil from it like a vampire from a cross.  A Hurley book doesn’t magically cancel out a Torgersen book.  Or vice versa.

On the good side, at least on that level, our side doesn’t act like that.  We don’t say “ooh” at a new Ringo book because “Oooh, that will upset those liberals”  we say “oooh,” because we’ll get to read it.  Books are books and people are people, not points in some bizarre game.

But it didn’t hit me how weird things had gotten and how far magical thinking had penetrated EVERYWHERE, even in academia, until the http://thepeoplescube.com/peoples-blog/u-t-austin-anti-gun-protest-advocates-cocks-not-glocks-t17067.htmlcocks, not glocks campaign.

University of Texas grad Jessica Jin has started a campaign called Cocks Not Glocks, asking students to protest the introduction of legal guns on campus by open-carrying giant fake dicks on campus—the logic being that sex toys, although they are not deadly in most circumstances, are still banned while firearms are permitted.

As Jin puts it, a dildo is “just about as effective at protecting us from sociopathic shooters, but much safer for recreational play.”

From here — and yep, I can see how this would baffle anyone not exposed to how our colleges work.

You see, I have no idea what Ms. Jin majored in, but I can sort of follow the tracks of her thought.  Logically, carrying sex toys to campus to protest guns makes absolutely NO sense.  I could see carrying signs, or … I don’t know, police whistles, if you’re convinced you’re completely safe if you can just call the police.  I can even see, in a more sane way, wearing a protective vest and claiming this is better than guns for defense.  I mean, at least they are in the same general kind of thing and sort of kind of address the problem in different ways.

BUT no.  Because this is not reasoning.  This is magical thinking.  WORSE.  This is magical thinking based on a world that doesn’t exist, a world that was sold to Ms. Jin (literally.  College is expensive) by academics so divorced from reality that they can’t find it with two hands, a cane and a seeing eye dog.

In this world, you see, conservatives love guns and hate sex.  This is all “explained” with pseudo Freudian patter about how guns are a substitute for the penis. This is total nonsense and old nonsense at that, stuff we LAUGHED at for being pseudo profound way back in the seventies.

But they absolutely believe that we defend the second amendment not because we want to be responsible for our own self-defense, not because we believe power derives from the individual and that therefore an individual must be capable of reining in the government when it gets out of control.  No.  They think we want guns because that’s the way we express our sexual repression. (Actually now I think about it, my gun obsessed friends are also the most sex-positive, so their idea not only is wrong, it’s bizarrely wrong.)

Since Ms. Jin has never considered that these stories she was sold are in fact stories with no relation to reality, her reasoning went something like “They’re carrying guns and that upsets me.  I must carry something that upsets them.  Ahah! Dildos.”

In an even mildly sane world, the press would have made her a laughing stock, because that reasoning makes no sense whatsoever.

But the press buys into the same imaginary world in which somehow the belief in guns for defense is a Freudian thing and so the “gun” value can be countered with the “dildo” value.

This is not grown up thinking.  It’s magical thinking, in which complex issues get reduced to amulets and symbols, countered by other amulets and symbols.

Again, this is sort of the human default.  And believing absurd things about those you believe to be the enemy is also completely normal.  The left calls it “othering” and is completely oblivious to the fact that they do it.  A lot.

But it’s still human-normal.

What is not normal, civilization speaking, is for a culture that reaps the benefits of science and rationality to devote a lot of its resources, its money, its personnel to TRAINING people into thinking this way and into treating complex concepts as magical symbols to be countered by other magical symbols.

More importantly I don’t know how we break through the indoctrination that these people so dearly paid for to convince them to think and discuss things in logical terms.

Before we all pay for it.

Make the Pink Mean Something – by Nicki Kenyon

It’s that time of year again. Secret messages permeate Facebook as women mysteriously make their male friends guess the color of their underwear. The endless sea of pink… pink ribbons, pink towels to wipe the sweat from football players’ faces, pink sneakers, limited edition pink mugs, “Save the Ta-Tas,” go bra-less… it just goes on and on.

At the same time, a slew of enraged cancer survivors will use blogs, articles in women’s magazines, and social media to angrily call on women to stop their lurid worship of the pink and do something truly worthy to help combat breast cancer!

I admit I was one of those angry women a couple of years ago. (http://thelibertyzone.com/2013/10/27/breast-cancer-awareness/) I impugned women for falling for the garish, pink gimmicks. I scolded them for reducing women to nothing but a pair of “ta-tas” instead of focusing on all forms of cancer and doing something substantive to eradicate this plague from existence.

When my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer 10 years ago, I was terrified. I did not know how to deal with the news. I always thought of cancer as a death sentence. I never thought this could happen to me and my family. I refused to acknowledge the illness, because cancer was something that happened to other people – to other people’s parents – not to my 60-year-old mom.

I refused to believe it even when I held her hand as she was being wheeled into surgery.

I refused to believe it even when I watched her sleep, all bandaged up after the doctors took her breast and her lymph nodes.

I even refused to believe it even when she underwent chemo and lost all her hair.

I couldn’t look at her like that – all frail, small, pale, and nauseous. I was scared to be in the same room with her. For the longest time, I refused to visit my parents at their home, because I could not look at her.

And so when I saw the tacky games, the bright pink accents at football games, and the merchandise, I was angry, because I thought they lacked the gravitas that beating cancer required. I didn’t think they understood the tragedy, the importance, the horror of cancer. They, with their stupid, perky breasts – breasts that were carved out of my mother – prancing around as if there was no suffering human being behind those “ta-tas,” and making a mockery out of what is so tragic for so many!

And I hated them.

There’s a part of me that still resents them, but now – two years later – I am trying to understand them a little more.

It’s got to be tough to watch friends, loved ones, and complete strangers get carved up like Thanksgiving turkeys, leaving both physical and emotional scars. It’s got to be agonizing to look at oneself in the mirror and see a whole, healthy body, while your mom/sister/aunt/best friend struggles to hold down food, hides under a wig, and isolates herself in her house in fear of contracting an infection.

So you wear pink, and you run around without a bra, and you buy the special edition merchandise, hoping that despite the fact that only a tiny percentage of that special edition pink junk will actually go toward research to fight cancer, maybe that one penny from their one pink mug will be the one that will make the difference in finding a cure.

I do understand the desire to do something. Anytime tragedy strikes, decent human beings give in to the urge to do something – anything. I suppose it’s selfish in a way – because it’s really about making ourselves feel better, about assuaging our own feelings of guilt for being healthy, while our loved ones suffer. But it’s in our nature to want to fix, to help, and to care.

And sometimes, we forget those for whom we do it.

And sometimes we neglect to acknowledge that other forms of cancer kill as well. Yes, it’s Breast Cancer Awareness Month, but there’s also prostate cancer, pancreatic and lung cancers, leukemia, malignant brain tumors, adrenal, esophageal… so much evil! So much to fight!

So go ahead and wear that pink, but don’t let that be the only thing you do.

Get vaccinated. There are vaccines out there that are very effective in preventing infections with HPV types 16 and 18, two high-risk HPVs that cause about 70 percent of cervical and anal cancers. Don’t listen to the conspiritards who squeal that it’s a Big Pharma plot to make money off you. Protect yourselves. Protect your kids.

Get tested to be a bone marrow donor. When I was in college, I volunteered to be tested, because a young man needed a donor, and a likely match would be an Eastern European Jew. I did not turn out to be a match, but I still did it. It would have made a huge difference in his life had I been a match for him!

Volunteer at a hospital. Play with the little kids, who have spent their young lives fighting this horror. Bring some joy into their lives. Sing to them. Read to them. Or visit with an older cancer patient. Make them feel wanted, human, loved, and appreciated. Show them their lives do matter, and motivate them to fight like hell against this malevolence.

Make that pink mean something more than just a cheap trinket, and I will try not to get angry when I see silly underwear games on Facebook.

*Two blasts from the past posts in a week?  Well, yes, I have guest posts, but as you know I hate posting those late, and yesterday was a day of getting nibbled to death by ducks.  Tons of little things, none of them important, all of them eating my time.  And this morning I woke up late, partly because allergies have my nose completely stopped. So forgive me.  About the post below, now more than 4 years old, let me assure you that ALL IS PROCEEDING AS I’D FORESEEN.*

Set My Bytes Free – A blast from the past post of August 2011

A realistic guide to new publishing economics for the Idealistic, the Angry and the Fearful.

In one of my articles on another site, in response to comments about teens not reading (which made any teen reading it justifiably indignant) a – from spelling and word markings – very young woman yelled back that they read all the time, they just do not buy the books. They get them from torrents and friends because “information wants to be free.” She also informed us, in no uncertain – if clearly thumb typed – terms that this was the way of the future, and if we don’t like it, deal with it.

This of course, feeds directly into the fears of the majority of my friends and contemporaries, roughly described as between thirty and sixty.

And both the innocent young lady and my contemporaries are wrong.

Let’s start from the top – this is not a post seeking to prove the concept that information or data “wants” to be free. (Though the animist, not so say personifying statement makes me cringe a little.)

I believe any raw data, and to an extent data collected with governmental money and support, (with caveats on that*), should be “free” to access. This is not out of any deep redistributionist impulse but as a qualification of informed citizenry. For instance, if you hear that during superbowl most assaults by men on women occur, you should be able to trace that factoid and prove it or disprove it. (You’ll disprove it. Or at least you’ll prove it can’t be proven. Try it if you don’t believe me. Yes, tons of people say it, but the statistics don’t back it up. At any rate, it’s flawed psychology. If you believe that, you also believe every teen playing first person shooter games is a murderer waiting to happen. That is something like 90% of teens. [rolls eyes.])

However most books aren’t raw data. And I’m not setting out to prove it wouldn’t be “fair” to not pay for them because “blah blah blah.” Neither the idealistic young, nor the scared old pay the least bit of attention to those bromides, nor should they. “Fair” is a beautiful word and works great in kindergarten where the teacher can enforce the distribution of crackers. And appealing to people’s morality is always risky. Most of them might not have any. And some of it might be different from yours.

Instead, what I’m setting out to do is explain both to the idealistic and the fearful why this model cannot and will not apply to either fiction or researched-non-fiction books. Or if it does apply, it will be for a vanishingly brief time and then collapse under its own weight, and something else will succeed it. Because what this “system” is happens to be economic Marxism by another name. And Marxism, whether called that or “happiness” or “social justice” has never worked as an economic system anywhere, since the dawn of time to now.

I know, I know. Look, I was young once, too. Yes, I know it’s hard to believe, but I’ve got the pictures to prove it. And though I was always reflexively, knee-jerkingly anti-communist, I grew up in a society even more steeped in Marxist principles than ours, from the elementary school room on. And I thought that “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” was a lovely principle. And then I stumbled across the essential question “Who shaves the barber?” and was floored. Because the question that principle begs is “who decides?” Back then I was a teen, and I ran my nearest and dearest, the people who purported to know me best, through my mind. Who would I trust to decide what I could “give” and what I should “take” – my mom, the woman with whom I had knock down, drag out fights on the subject of what shoes I should buy? And how much housecleaning I could do while attending school? My brother, the sixties idealist who thought I could write great literature by the time I was sixteen? And who thought everyone should subsist on love and a crust of bread? My dad, the poet, who had the vague idea I should write whether anyone bought it or not and perhaps live in a garret and talk to the sparrows or something? (Eating them would be out of the question. Dad likes sparrows. And not on his plate.)

The absurdity of trusting even these people, more likely to have my best interests at heart than any bureaucrat could, to decide for me what I wanted and could do made the entire thing a ridiculous notion. I decided it would be a great system if we could get angels who could see into every heart to come and administer it for us. Until then we had to make do with what each individual knew he wanted, and what he knew he could give. And it was all arranged through this wonderful means of exchange – money – which seems to appear in every society large and complex enough to require it. With money as a reward of effort (not of want, because as the wise man said “you can’t always get what you want) and ability, the person being rewarded (or in the case of midlisters trust me, children, punished) with it can then provide for his or her own wants and needs. It’s not a perfect system – see the part where we’re not angels – but it is the best we can get. And now that I’m older and wiser, if an angel descended from heaven, who could look into every heart, determine everyone’s wants and needs, and undertake to govern us, the shield for minds and hearts and the assassination plot couldn’t come fast enough for my taste.

Now, after this digression to explain what’s wrong with the system, lets look at the whole information versus novels or investigative journalism bit, shall we?

I realize that what we’ll call for lack of a better term creative writing, like raw data, is composed of words, and that it can even convey factual information, as well as emotions, feelings and point of view. This doesn’t make it raw information.

I can give you most of the raw information about the novel currently holding me prisoner in one paragraph. “Man who has been confined for fifteen years to one of the most high tech and unbreakable dungeons humanity has created, escapes. He finds he’s the heir to one of the highest-power positions in his world. He also becomes convinced that the system under which his world is governed is both unfair, unjust and ultimately counterproductive at providing for most people’s needs, let alone wants. Spurred on by the fact a lot of his co-rulers want him dead, he finds himself getting involved in the coils of a revolution to overturn the system.” There. Now you don’t need to read the book, right? Oh, wait, silly me. I forgot a little bit. “There is also a love interest.” So, now you don’t need to read the book, right?

Oh, you do? But why? You already have the information.

The answer to that, of course, is that creative writing is not information. While it uses words as its raw material, its objective is not to convey “what happens” but to make you experience it, feel it. Well done novels (and some creative non-fiction) are the only way you can experience being someone else for a while. It is in fact an “entertainment experience.” The difference between te raw data that goes into the novel and what the author does with it, is the equivalent of reading the lyrics of a song, or hearing it performed by a talented singer.

“But, Oh Sarah,” say the most classically minded of my frightened colleagues, “what you define writing as doesn’t matter. These children think they can get it for free. They’ll steal it. They’ll break our DRM. They’ll read our books without permission and we’ll starve in the gutter and dogs will eat us.”

To which I say, take deep breaths, reconsider DRM and think the situation over.

DRM is at best an irritating barrier, and at worst an annoying one. No DRM will keep your books safe. So, ignore DRM. I don’t believe in it, and it’s never applied to anything of mine by my request. Some of my publishers insist on it, and I let them because there isn’t enough time in the world to talk everyone out of it.

It is not DRM that will keep your livelihood safe. It’s your talent and – yes – your craft. Why? Because no one has ever worked for free, while starving to death, with no expectation of ever being paid and created good crafts or art. Even those romantic artists of my dad’s imagination, starving their garrets for the love of creation, weren’t doing it without the expectation of ever being paid.

We do have examples of artists who were paid what their betters thought they should be (usually not much, unless you kissed the right #sses) and trust me, children, it is painful to see.

As part of one of my native country’s forays into socialist correctness, our TV played eastern European movies. A lot. Let’s say the only time they worked as entertainment was when my brother and I sat together and made a running commentary about the movie, ascribing the characters and events the most outrageous motivations.

And mind you, these artists were being sort of paid – with greater access to the stores, or with villas in the country, or… But the thing is they weren’t being paid to produce entertainment. They were paid to produce “messages” and it didn’t matter how painfully bad those were as entertainment. They got “paid” per message.

How does that correlate with working for free? And – say my colleagues, pulling their hair – how can you say that when you work for free? Like, all your Austen fanfic?

To which I say stop pulling your hair. Half of you are already bald anyway. Also, yeah, I do Austen fanfic for free. I also embroider for free. And I make stuffed animals for free and, occasionally – I don’t have as much time as I’d like to, these days – I draw or paint for free. However, the Austen fanfic, when done for free, is done at the same level as drawing or painting. It’s done as an amusement. Before Naked Reader Press published A Touch of Night, which was the most professional of my fanfics, they had to do extensive editing and chapters and clarifications had to be added.

Let’s just say I enjoy the heck out of writing fanfic because it is NOT my best work, it comes without the pressures of oh… self editing; fact checking; making sense… etc. It’s also highly targeted and I cater irrepressibly to the people who read that site. I use fanfic, in fact, to try out techniques and because of the ready comments, to see how they play to “normal” people defined as “people who don’t write for a living.”

It is no more serious than a professional seamstress doing cross stitch in her spare time. And the work is not the same as that of a professional embroiderer. It’s relaxing because it’s not being done for a living. And I can do it because I make a living elsewhere.

And here comes the rub. The idealists believe it is possible to have a “right” to other people’s labor because they’re by and large not supporting themselves. Their livelihood comes from elsewhere, in large measure parents or other arrangements. So it’s perfectly plausible to them to imagine a world in which “people just work if they want to.”

Of course, when you’re a college student you do a lot of that on the side, because you want to. But let me tell you, as someone who has had to work for a living (besides writing) that while many of my friends manage it they do it for extra money on the side and in the hope of one day quitting and writing full time. There is no one who writes forever, on the side, with no expectation of reward. EVER. And no status is not enough, not when you grow up and have kids and start thinking that this time could be better employed, perhaps, doing something you could sell.

Yes, I’ve heard the utopian nonsense about a society that provides the basics for everyone and where people can work or not. Even if it were possible – it’s not. These are dreams of academics and white collar workers who’ve never been near enough to a farm to get cow muck on their toes. Yes, I can explain it one of these days, but not now – this society would last maybe a generation. We are not angels. We’re creatures designed by evolution. To a vast – and possibly sanest – majority of us “basic needs provided for” translates to “do nothing, wallow in your own favorite vices, get bored as heck, get suicidal.” At the very least it translates to no reproduction. Those people that survive will not be the contented aesthetes people who write about this tend to imagine, but nasty, brutish and short lived. And barbarism will come shortly after.

Yes, I’ve also heard “So writers stop writing. Big deal. We still have nineteen centuries of literature.” Right…. Look, chilluns, if you think you can pleasurably read anything pre-Shakespeare, power to you. I can, but I was trained. (Not for free.) And even I don’t do it for a lark.

If you think you can read nineteenth century fiction for fun the same way you read the latest Urban Fantasy, you’re either highly unusual or you haven’t read much of that.

Science fiction ages, of course. Quickly and badly. Heinlein is now alternate history (and others, more recent, are worse.) But – you might not realize this – fantasy ages just as badly. No, seriously. A lot of it (granted not all) is near unreadable now, because the language feels “stilted” and this is less than 30 years old. Mystery? Well… A lot of it has also aged badly. I know, I know, but mystery when contemporary is steeped in the moment. Even to me references to phone booths, let alone phone books, and encyclopedias, feel odd and stilted, and I have to put myself in an “historical” frame of mind to read that. Only it’s not written as historical, with support and cluing of the anachronisms, so it’s harder work. Romance? Well… Let’s put it this way: I love Heyer. Do I love other romance writers from her day? Children, I can’t even read romance writers from the sixties, for the greatest part. The way people interacted in the sixties taints even the historical stuff. And since I spent the sixties learning to walk and getting potty trained and, at the very end of it, learning to read and write, it also feels stilted and weird to me. And much as I love Austen, I can’t stand the Brontes, let alone any of their lesser contemporaries. I’m not alone in this. If I were, Gutenberg would be a SERIOUS challenge to Amazon. Particularly in these days of tight funds. (And heck, I’ve been known to buy books on Amazon that I KNOW are on Gutenberg, because they’re better formatted or have an active index on Amazon.)

So, let’s suppose the idealists managed to make all “data” to include artistic performances, such as novels, “free” – what then? Well, I predict within a very short time – probably within a year – some writer a lot of people want to read and who has stopped writing to work as a cashier in the local store, will be accosted and offered money to finish the next book in a well loved series. And then the old system will be back.

So, to the frightened I say, Stop pulling your hair! Wipe your nose! Wash your hands before you touch that keyboard. And don’t be afraid. Economics is a natural system (natural to humans, at least) and can’t be abolished by fiat. If you have something worth the selling, people will pay your for it. There might be some lean months or years, but eventually you’ll get paid. Will the pay be commensurate with your effort, craftsmanship and talent? Who knows? There’s a factor of luck in all this. But at least you can try and don’t have some know-it-all angel (or – shudder – bureaucrat) dictating what you can do, and how much you can get.

To the idealist I say, go ahead. Pirate that book. Steal that entertainment. You’re young. We were all young once. (Except my older son, who was born at the age of fifty three.) And you’re broke. We were all broke once. (Some of us have been broke for years. We’re EXPERTS.) And you really don’t have a clue what it’s like to be responsible for your own survival, your own comfort. Worse, you don’t have a clue what it’s like to be responsible for the survival and comfort of creatures – cats, kids, dogs, etc – wholly dependent on you.

So steal those books. Get hooked on them, now when you have tons of time to read. Please do. Because in five or six years, you’re going to want more. And then you’re going to realize you’re not entitled to having someone work for you for free. That’s called slavery and it’s illegal. And you’re going to realize that no one does their best work for promises and prestige.

And then you’ll buy the books.

* Note – The caveat on any data gathered by government programs being free is that some of that data can endanger innocent lives and also that (for continuing research) other data can rob the people who gathered it of their reward. Suppose scientists have been working for years, tracking a gene that allows humans to be far smarter. If all data is published as collected, then someone else can come in at the last minute and scoop them, rendering all their work useless. Why would anyone – government or not – pay for research only to be “scooped” at the last minute. The same caveat applies to proprietary systems and discoveries. If people won’t be rewarded for them, everyone will lose because this type of research just won’t happen. Sorry. “All data should be free” is a fantasy. A pernicious one that – in the end – means “wha, wha wha, why can’t I have a right to other people’s work?”

Many years ago, in a library sale, I came across a booklet of … well, science fiction scenarios.  From the context — not being absolutely stupid — I could get that it had been commissioned before the election in 80, and had probably been distributed for free by the Democratic party.  I am afraid to look it up, first because it’s the sort of quest that could take me something like three years (and be lots of fun, but no work would happen) and second because I’d hate to see which ones of my colleagues lent themselves to that rather preposterous effort.  Fortunately I lost the book in one of our many, many moves since then, so I don’t have to know.

Now, when I bought it, I was thirty, just about, but younger than that in craft, as I hadn’t started seriously thinking about world building and scenarios of world building till 22 or so, and I wasn’t yet… fully immersed in American culture.  For instance, how preposterous the scenarios were didn’t hit me at all.  (Yes, I used to be an innocent.  I actually thought anthologies about the coming Ice Age or about how we needed to disarm had no ulterior motives.  Probably self defense.  It allowed me to enjoy some art and literature, while, if I’d been fully conscious of its intent, I’d have thrown it across the room.  More on that later.)

So I read it and re-read it, admiring the extrapolation and trying to figure out how to do this in my own writing.  (Rest easy, I know better now.)

They really were preposterous scenarios. For instance the one where Reagan had gone elected went (Natch) into this scenario of endless war and of American soldiers sent home in sealed caskets which, if the grieving mothers dared open them showed corpses killed by a weapon beyond our comprehension.  (Which makes perfect sense, because you know, the USSR was so much more advan– Oh, wait, no, it was complete and unadulterated BS.)

Some of the scenarios I liked.  At this time I had virtually no political sophistication, and though I’d started reading Reason had no clue what “libertarianism” was.  And yet, instinctively I liked the scenario that I THINK was called “The center cannot hold.”

I think, so help me Bog, I was supposed to recoil from it.  Partly because it also started with Reagan’ s election.  But then DC and all the great cities get nuked, and the US devolves to a regional-centered organization.  First, this scenario was about as likely as feathers on a horse — because there was no invasion from outside following on the destruction of our centers of political organization — and second I think the picture the author was striving for was something out of mad max, or something.  Instead, what I saw was small, decentralized, and less regulation.  I saw thriving small centers of civilization.  I saw more individual freedom.  I ignored the rest.

Again, this scenario (All of them, really) was completely impractical, not to say impossible.  There is no way — no way at all — that kind of destruction would have led to regionally centered anything.  Yeah, I know a lot of dreams on the right and left start that way, but right now, the way we are, it’s more likely that widespread famine and invasion, and the other horsemen of the apocalypse would follow.

So it is funny that these days, looking at this great fractured polity of ours I keep thinking “The Center Cannot Hold” and it evokes both Yeats great mythical poem, and the scenario above, which means I end up dissolving in giggle fits at the unlikelihood of the scenario and missing the … ominous thoughts that the line should provoke.

And there are omens enough in the line.  And for a long time, I’ve been listening to that poem at the back of my mind as I read the news or think over some recent event.

Because if there is something that describes our current days it is exactly “The center cannot hold.”  And yea, anyone who trolls twitter can agree that

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity

And yet, just like the future scenario that was supposed to scare me spitless and make me not vote for Reagan (I didn’t, of course.  I was only an exchange student.  I did, however, work for his campaign) I look at this shattering and I listen to the ominous lines rolling in the back of my mind, and then I start grinning.

I’m not a nihilist.  I don’t smile at the end of the world.

But what is very important to remember is that his is not the end of the world.  It’s the end of a world.  (And if any of you ever read Ray Bradbury’s Almost The End of the World, that was closer to what is happening  in terms of major movements, than any apocalyptic scenarios.  Oh, not in WHAT happened, but in the metaphor of it.) However, behind that dying world, around it, beneath it, over it, unsuspected, unseen by the glitterati and the gatekeepers, another world is being born.

Okay, so our major cities didn’t get hit, thanks be to all divinities, since I think the result would be chaos and destruction.   Also, because I have friends in almost every large US city.

But the center is losing its grip anyway.  Mostly in culture.  But that culture is starting to influence politics, which is why there is this appearance of total chaos and the establishment (both sides) aren’t having it all their own ways.  Granted, the left still gets more compliance than the right.  It’s the nature of the beast and also part of how the culture fractured.

Which bring us to why we do have this impression everything is fracturing, and the “center cannot hold.”

This is a scenario not one of those big brains came up with.  Not a big stain on them, mind, since even after the computer revolution was well under way, even as Amazon was starting to take the pillars out from under the pillars of the publishing push model (the model according to which you could only find in the bookstore shelves, not what you might want to read but the books that the publishers had thought worth it to “push” onto the distributors.), most of the people whose job it was to foretell the future were saying that Amazon was maybe like one large brick and mortar shop, and it would make no difference.

As for ebooks, we got the whole thing about how books are a tactile and scent experience.  (Yes, I know some of you agree, but for the love of teardrops, I can’t see it.) And how ebooks would never displace “Real books” (listen, sonny, the scroll is here to stay and the printing press is a fad.  Shut up and copy.)

Blogs?  Some unwashed people in their pajamas. Not like those newspapers with layers and layers of fact checkers.  You know, the newspapers who were wrong so many times they’re bleeding money faster than they can plug it.  The newspapers no one under fifty really subscribes to anymore.  THOSE newspapers.

And the TV stations… Yes, yes, Dan Rather.  Fake but accurate.  Or something.

And then there’s the universities.  Oh, they’re holding on.  But the competition is coming up fast.  And I think they’re the next industry to truly get overwhelmed by catastrophic change.

Now, before we start dancing around the witch with the farmhouse planted on her snout, let’s be clear: none of these systems are dead yet.  It is a mistake to underestimate the enemy, particularly the wounded enemy.

There are still people — I know some of them — for whom the mainstream media is still the main means of information.  These are smart, thoughtful people, but they believe the weirdest things.  And that same media can do as much damage by ignoring stories as by beating the drum wrongly.  Benghazi, for instance.  It should be a shock and a horror, particularly the way that government officials lied to us and said it was all about a video.  But the media has refused to report on it.

And if you’re looking at that stuff, at the power still left in the mainstream institutions, you might get desperate.  You might think it’s all lost.

Except that the reason you feel that way is… that things are getting better.

Yes, I know that’s paradoxical.  But here’s the thing — cast your mind back to the time before we had internet — there were rumbles that, say, during Clinton’s time, the militias weren’t the big bad problem he painted it as, and there are more holes in the stories of incidents during that administration than there are — to paraphrase Heinlein — bastards in an European royal line.

BUT the point is you couldn’t know.  There wasn’t a web.  There wasn’t reporting first person what was happening.

In those days, the barrage would have held and we STILL WOULD THINK that Benghazi was the result of a bad video on youtube (only there wouldn’t be youtube.)  We would have no idea — as weird as this is — that there was anything wrong with Fast and Furious.  We’d just think that guns were being sold from the US down there.

In fact, you could say the reason their cunning plans keep misfiring is that they still control the media and therefore think they control everything.

Like publishers with the “paper books are coming back” fetish, most of the rest of the gatekeepers everywhere from publishing, to education, to politics are stuck in that place where they control all the means of communication, all the media, all the education and of course all government.  Because politics comes from culture.

They are so focused on the traditional way they don’t see that things have changed.

And so they miss one important thing.  We no longer feel alone.  We’re as disorganized as cats.  We’re as fractured as shattered glass, but we know we’re not alone.  And we know that the facade they have built — probably not as a big conspiracy; probably just because they all want to advance the “progressive” future-that’s-supposed-to-be so badly — is broken.

And that’s enough.  It’s enough for us to start talking about alternate solutions, to start building alternate structures, to network, to create, to keep our jobs even when we speak out.

Look, it only looks like everything is falling apart because the false consensus has been broken.  But at the same time that break is what allows us to build under, to build around, to build over.

One thing we know is that the structures they’ve taken over are no longer in contact with reality at any level.  Yeah, things look scary out there, and I’m not going to lie to you, they are scary, particularly on the international level.

Because the so called consensus was unchecked by dissenting voices, it has spun well away from reality.

But the new tech has given us a means of correcting that.  It might be almost too late.  And unless we have a miracle, there’s going to be the devil to pay for this.

Still, the correction is already in progress.  Their way is passing.  Our way is just starting out.

Funny how believers in dialectical systems didn’t see that coming.

Work.  Create.  Build under, build around, build over.  It’s all going to come apart more before some sort of sense can be made of this mess.  But the sense that’s coming, the ah spirit of the age embodied in its technology is moving away from big organizations and towards the individual.

And the individual?  That we’re fine with.

In the end we win, they lose.

Be not afraid.

I’m Not Crazy, I’m Just A Little Unwell – A blast from the past post 10/12

So, are writers mentally ill?

By whose definition?

Look, part of the whole problem with the deinstitutionalisation of the mentally ill, which goes all the way back to the early seventies at least, and as far as theory is concerned probably a lot further, is that health professionals started, DELIBERATELY blurring the lines between mental illness and mental health.

Part of this was – I think – a genuine effort to make it possible for some people classified as “mentally ill” to be able to make a go of it in the community.  A lot of new psychiatric drugs had been discovered which, while they didn’t heal, masked the symptoms of mental illness and therefore made it possible for these people to integrate in normal society – provided they would take their meds (more on that later.)

The other part – I know, my SIL took the mental-health portion of her MD in the late seventies – was the insane “equivalence brigade” which tried very hard to convince themselves that the US too did EXACTLY the same things the USSR did.  Since the USSR put political dissenters in mental hospitals, then the people in US hospitals MUST be also political dissenters.  This was hard to prove, since the Soviet system provided ideological support for mental treatment of dissenters: i.e. the Marxist system was perfect, so anyone disagreeing must be mad, while the American system mostly tried to get people off the streets who would do harm to themselves and/or others.  However the medical profession found their justification in an upside-down of the Marxist system.  Since Capitalism was bad for humans and other living things, then everyone who went mad under capitalism were, ipso facto, political dissenters.  So, if you happened to be a woman who liked to throw rocks at strangers and go into bizarre monologues on the subject of cabbage, you weren’t mad, you were a feminist protesting male aggression.

Now I have no proof this was intentional or a coordinated AGITPROP operation.  It’s entirely possible it was (merely) the predictable mix of ill-intentioned agents and well-intentioned idiot fellow travelers.

However the end result was making people too crazy to live alone into political victims and incidentally to give the USSR room to claim the capitalist system created homelessness.

Fortunately or not, the intervening decades have brought more and more evidence that a lot of mental illnesses have a physical basis.

Also, curiously, just like the “freeing” of women has resulted in a lot of them behaving like Victorian maidens who demand special protection from those all-masterful men, the blurring of boundaries has worked in the other direction too.

I’ve mentioned here before that … must be… 14?  13? Years ago, I had a UTI that didn’t let me sleep for a week, and then on my birthday, all the sixty stories or so that I had out came back rejected.  And I had a cold. Also, Dan was in the middle of one of those projects that caused him to work eighteen hour days.  He got out because it was my birthday, in time to take me to dinner.  We had a babysitter.  As I got in the car, Dan looked at me and said “You look dead.  What’s wrong?”  When I told him, he said, “We’re going to emergency.”

So, there I am on my birthday, getting prescriptions for various ailments and knowing when we got out it would be too late to go to dinner (which I’d been looking forward to for weeks) and the doctor tells me “You look depressed.”  I said “I am a bit” and explained why.  And he told me “No, no,  You misunderstand the process.  Depression is caused by an imbalance in your brain.  If I give you Prozac you’ll feel better and that proves it’s chemical.”

My answer was unprintable, and I think I called him a witch doctor.  BUT he was absolutely convinced of what he was saying.

Since then, older boy has taken psychology.  I read his textbook (you can’t trust these critters.)  And guess what?  ANY fluctuation of mood is now described as bipolar.  Apparently we’re supposed to be on an exact even keel all the time, like robots.  External factors are discounted and it’s all “brain chemicals.”

I think witchdoctoring is light.

But what this means is that more and more, I keep finding the “clinicalization” of perfectly normal conditions.

I mean, I knew growing up that dad was of what we could describe as a “depressive habit.”  Not that he moped, but he read a lot of history and he had this tendency to think our most principled days were behind us.  I also knew mom was bipolar and SHOULD have been on meds, because she could get outright scary.  One of these things is not like the other.  Dad was inclined to be saddish and think the world a sad place, but he never talked about killing himself.  To be honest neither did mom, whose stronger cycles are maniacal and involve things like painting half a house overnight.  BUT to the untrained eye it was very clear who could do harm to him/herself and others, and who wouldn’t.

Even for someone of a depressive habit who might have suicidal thoughts, if never acted upon, it’s probably not a concern (at least if they’re over thirty and aren’t doing anything else related to depression.)  But go to any doctor and admit you’ve thought of opening your wrists in a warm bath, no matter what the provocation, you go on the happy drugs.  EVEN if they had to prod and poke and ask if you ever had the slightest suicidal thoughts, and even if the thought was twenty years ago.

And my kid once quoted Ray Bradbury in a school essay to the extent that “I’m seventeen and I’m crazy.  My uncle says both happen together.”  Mind you, he went on to explain he was only fourteen, but he felt that adolescence was a difficult time period.  You guessed it.  They sent him to a psychiatrist without telling us.  Fortunately the younger kid is sane as a rock (literally.  He’s so stubborn and so sure of who he is at his core that he’s like solid rock) so the psychiatrist told the counselor she was making a storm in a teacup.

I would suggest (because I can, because this is my blog, d*mn it) the old definition of mental illness from the village – you might have all sorts of crazy beliefs in your own home, on your own time; you might believe that there is a miraculous shrine of the Virgin formed by mold on your wall, and you might pray to it everyday; you might think your dog is your kid’s reincarnation; you might think you have to wear purple or the demons get you; you might still be mourning your husband who died forty years ago.  No one cares about any of this, and people will laugh a little behind your back (sometimes.  Unless they’re crazier) but you’re still a functioning member of the community.  HOWEVER if you believe you see the devil in your kid’s (or dog’s) eyes and go after the creature with a knife; if you decide you can no longer wear clothes and start wandering the streets stark naked screaming judgment is coming; if you think you’re an onion and start taking slices off yourself, the village elders (after being prodded by their wives) are going to put you in a car and take you to the asylum, because you can’t function as a member of the community.  (Turned out the gentleman who was going around naked did so because he was convinced from the neck down his body wasn’t his, and that someone had replaced it in the night.  Turns out that this isn’t mental illness, but the result of a stroke.  We didn’t know that, and yes, mistakes will happen.  But mistakes will happen either way because we’re human.  He actually went around screaming “This isn’t mine.”  And yes, he died in the asylum, something that upsets my older son very much.)

So, are writers crazy?  Let me say right up front that even if you go by historical standards, no creative person seems to have his/her head on quite the right way.  I mean Da Vinci?  Van Gogh?  In the composers, it’s entirely possible Liszt was sane, but I’d like proof of that.  Among artists, writers are almost sane.  Or at least we can pass.  I mean, I could make guesses about Jane Austen, but no one around her seemed to think she was nuts.

Is this because we’re sane?  Look guys, leveling with you: I’ve had characters appear fully formed in my head and speak in such a compelling voice I had to write it (Lucius Dante Maximillian Keeva of A Few Good Men was one of those.  So was the Athos of the vampire musketeers.)  This can’t be normal.  I’ve had books come to a grinding halt, because I wasn’t getting the dictation right.  This can’t be normal.  I’ve had stories haunt me and hunt me down for years till I write them.  I write 4+ books a year.  THIS CAN’T BE NORMAL.

And yet, I raised my kids no worse than anyone else.  I keep the house clean(ish).  I have been known to curse/throw things at the TV, but only during political campaigns, and who hasn’t?

Am I crazy?  Probably.  Certainly I’m very different from the norm.  However, I can function as a member of the community.

And I’m not going to say that without MY peculiarities society would lose a great deal.  I’m just going to say that without the peculiarities of most artists – if those were cured or masked instead of tolerated, society WOULD have lost a great deal.

So, there is a method to madness, or at least a use.  And if it doesn’t impair your other functions, only a madman would try to “fix” it.

I’m sorry I’m monstrously late with this.  For some reason I seem to be sleeping till well past 8 am — my normal waking time being around 6 — and I have no idea why.  And then there were errands and stuff which inevitably get pushed to Sunday morning, since Dan and I and the remaining cretur in the house have things scheduled through Saturday.

Anyway, so, yesterday I had an interview for Sean Sorentino’s Wrong Fun podcast (out soon!) and it got me to thinking.

One of the things that came out was that the Puppy Kickers kept saying that we’d nominated “bad quality” stuff.  My normal stuff for that is to shrug my shoulders and say “de gustibus non est disputandum” or to quote mom in one of her more pungent moments “Tastes are like things, everyone must piss with his own.”

But to the extent that “Quality” is defined by established literary critics, yeah, they’re right.  The problem here though is that the type of quality defined by literary critics and the “quality” that makes a reader read the book, get excited, go out and hand sell to all his friends are completely different things.

This is where we get into the “Taste” of the elites, which is what literary critics define as Quality.

Until round about WWI when the wheels came off European culture (and in that strata, American taste always molded itself on European taste, starting before the revolution) “high culture” and “proper taste” which defined “quality literature” involved the author making sure the upper classes knew he was one of them.  That is, the story would be full of literary references, to either classical literature (a lot) or to various artists and writers which had become hallmarks of high culture.  (Shakespeare or Chaucer, not “quality” or high class in their own times, but rendered more difficult and therefore more rarefied a taste by the change in language.)

Then the wheels came off.  There was some insurgence and some of this type of thing before then, mind, but it was after WWI that self-loathing became the hallmark of the upper classes in Europe.  Then, because they were still the elite and (in their own eyes) the taste makers, the mark of rarefied good taste became the nostalgie de la boue.  Where Shakespeare and his like had written about kings and queens or at least Lords and Ladies, increasingly the “modern” and cutting edge literature bypassed even decent middle class who were despised as bourgeois and concentrated on ne’er do wells, the criminal element, the lowest of the low in morals more than in money.  Alternately it concentrated on the corruption and bankrupt morals of the noveau rich, the noblemen, those that could be seen as winners in life.

This is what Agatha Christie in her Miss Marple books more than once characterizes as “Unpleasant people in unpleasant circumstances, doing unpleasant things.”

This trend, roughly akin to an adolescent reveling in writing things that upset his parents, as communism became an established thing and the USSR reached out tendrils of propaganda to the west, turned into a mess of set-pieces, the “international realism” of socialists, about as artistically relevant as the national realism of the fascists.  It became set pieces to the point that you REALLY need to question your cultural assumptions to get at the truth.

The “literature” of this type has given us the exploited mill workers, for instance, living in horror and squalor.  While this is absolutely true when compared to the conditions of our time, those mill workers didn’t get the chance to live in our time, in the conditions of our time.  They had the choice of living off the land or going to the city and living in factories.  Life on the land has been painted with the soft tints of the romantics and the glorious tints of the early Marxists, but if you actually LOOK at the industrial revolution going on before our eyes in China or India, you realize people are coming to the cities and getting factory jobs because life is BETTER there than in the rural fastnesses they come from.  Sure, their lives as industrial workers would horrify American workers, but they’re relatively good for what they have available.

In this sense, the literature of that time did its job which was to sell a socialist future (though most of the authors who were trying to write quality were probably unaware of what they were doing or how the dictates of “quality” came from a self-hating and often outright traitorous elite.)  It shaped even the minds of those who are naturally suspicious of socialist tripe.

Then the wheels came off again, as in, the Soviet Union fell.  I know it’s hard for people now to believe it, but back in the eighties just before the fall many people believed the USSR life quality was roughly equivalent to the US’s, or perhaps a little better.  “There is no unemployment” was something we all heard.

When it collapsed it took with them the taste of the elites, as it took with them the vision of the communists who had become sort of, sometimes openly (in Europe) the patterns of the high culture.  (I don’t know, consider some of the hats that have been fashion in the past.  Fashion is always crazy.)

For a while communists went around looking lost.  Umberto Ecco referred to them as “defrocked priests” who have lost their vision of paradise.  And then … And then they decided we just hadn’t tried it hard enough or well enough.

But by the time they found this “new vision” (these doomsday cults never admit they were wrong, you know) they had given up on the idea of the proletariat conquering the bourgeoisie and rich, and had instead turned into sort of missionaries of victims and wounded people.

Instead of social class meaning what it meant to Marx, which was entirely economics based, it now meant “group vaguely aligned through some (usually natural) characteristic.”  So we have the oppressed class of oh, gay people who come from all backgrounds and regions and who face differing levels of acceptance from family and society, but who are deemed to be all equally victimized, and as such to need equal intervention from the elites to make them whole. Then there are racial groups, so factionalized that at some point we’re all going to become a race of one.

The elites took to this new way of viewing society like ducks to water, partly because you don’t actually need to do anything to help anyone anywhere.  Like Marx, who mistreated his illegitimate son from the woman who was somewhere between an indentured servant and a slave to his family, even as he preached social revolution and the triumph of the lower classes, they can simply preach acceptance and talk about how poor victims suffer without bothering to notice that their neighbor is unemployed and surviving on cat food.  If you ask them about this particular instance, they’ll tell you that, well, come the revolution he will have a job and food…  Meanwhile they’re working for the greater cause of bringing about the revolution.

And thus, more dreary than the “quality” that consisted of unpleasant people doing unpleasant things, we have the taste makers hailing the new “quality” which consists of “fighting patriarchy” or “white hegemony” or whatever latest crazycakes lens is applied to society.  Yep, the people with the power are accusing other people of keeping them down because they have a vagina or can tan or whatever.  (And the proof of this is the Dolezals of the world who find great rewards in pretending to be victims.)

Which brings us to “literature” by which you must understand I mean the stuff literary critics like.  That is inevitably what follows the rules of victimhood and points out some new victimhood or other.  Mind you, it’s not very fun to read, but it’s “quality” because it follows the taste of the elites and strokes their ego, same as references to Greek and Roman Myth used to.

And then we come to science fiction.  Science fiction was not “literature.”  Even if Heinlein made it more respectable, the actual literary critics still hate literature.  Those who write literary science fiction often deny it’s science fiction at all to get into the club.  Which is a little pathetic and makes me think of people with black ancestry “passing” in the time of discrimination.  Or, of course, Rachel Dolezal.  Because you will never be of them, and you have to deny what you are to PRETEND to be of them.  And yet they aspire to this.  (Of course, for some of them this means college posts and such, so…)

Which brings us to —

For the longest time, I’ve said that quality is personal, taste is personal.  But I’ve noticed a certain trend among those things the practitioners of what we’ll call human wave.  There is a quality of its own.

To me — note to me and note the elusive kind of thing it is, which might hit me but not you — “quality” fiction is that which portrays humans with such accuracy the characters impress you as people you know and the stories become part of you almost as if you’d lived through them.

To the extent that telling stories is part of what makes the human animal human — and there’s some evidence for this, both in passing on knowledge and in cultural binding — the stories that mimic reality (though making sense, which reality doesn’t.  Yes, stories must make sense) to your back brain enough that you find yourself in a situation and you think “Oh, this is like so and so, in such and such story” are the best.

Pratchett had that touch.  Though he wrote fantasy set in what we know is an imaginary world, his stories resounded with truth more than the truth itself.  That more true than truth quality made him, to my mind, the best practitioner of our craft in recent years, and possibly we shall not see his like again in my lifetime.

And that, to me, is quality, and what should be getting the publicity benefit of awards: and thereby bringing new readers to the field.

The rest, politics, markers of “elite” all that are the games rich (or at least upper class) people play to convince themselves they’re above the common run of humans and that their taste is more elevated than ours.  (Aristos should think deeply of their desire to be elevated.)

As for us, we’re a rabble with keyboards, an undisciplined peasantry, who refuses to bow and doff our hats to their “superior” taste.  Because we’ve read it, and honestly, the tulip craze makes more sense.

We have a “quality” all our own.

Ça irá!

*And I’m going to try to be done with it this weekend.  Then I finish Darkship Revenge. (I’m sort of trying to do weeks for Baen, weekends for indie, only the last few weeks have been House Things TM)*

Witch’s Daughter

Sarah A. Hoyt

The Letter

It has often been said that dead men don’t talk. In Avalon, this wasn’t necessarily true. Dead men could talk if a reasonably talented necromancer were willing to risk the death penalty for reanimating a corpse.

But Michael had never heard of a dead man who wrote letters.

The letter lay on the breakfast table, next to the only setting on it, on a silver salve between the spoon and the porcelain creamer.

Michael Ainsling, youngest son of the late Duke of Darkwater and brother of the current titular, eyed it suspiciously, while he took his seat. His eyes widened slightly at the name of the sender, then he frowned at his own name in the space reserved for the recipient.

He hadn’t slept well, and dark rings marked the pale skin beneath the dark green eyes he shared with all his male relatives.

A well set up boy at the age when one resented being called such, he had that look boys have when they’ve achieved adult height but not yet had time to fill in. He’d been the quiet half of fraternal twins, his sister Caroline being the garrulous and outgoing half until six months ago. Then Caroline had been sent to an academy for young ladies, where she was presumably still garrulous but far away from Michael, so that Michael had to do his own talking and endure social interaction.

It had been thought – then – that Michael’s recent experiences had left him too frail to attend Cambridge. Michael frowned with distaste at the thought, as he folded and refolded his napkin. He did not understand why it had been thought better to leave him here on the deserted estate. With Caroline gone, Seraphim, now the tenth Duke of Darkwater and the prince consort of the Princess Royal, spending most of his time in London and Mama having left no one knew very well where, Michael’s was the only place setting at the table designed to accommodate seventeen.

Most of the days he swallowed tea and toast and rushed off to work in his workshop. Today… He glared at the letter by his cup.

And realized that the footman who’d discreetly followed him into the dining room hovered near his chair. “You may go, Burket,” he said, without taking his eyes off the letter.

“Will you need anything else, Lord Michael?” the man asked and made a broad gesture as though sweeping the breakfast spread clustered around Michael’s place setting: fried kidneys and some sort of pie, and toast and butter and something else that looked suspiciously like fish cakes.

Michael didn’t sigh. “No, thank you, Burket. I have everything I need.”

Truly he wanted the man gone so he could look at the letter at leisure. The sender’s name was Tristram Blackley, and surely there couldn’t be more than one of those. The writing and the paper both looked fresh, as though someone had dashed off the note just this morning.

But Tristram Blackley had been dead for sixteen years. Michael had studied him among the great inventors of his time, the man who had created the carpetship liners that crossed the air between Britain and the Americas and took the upper classes of Avalon on pleasure cruises the world over. He remembered mama telling him, once, that she’d known Tristram in youth, that he was a lot like Michael himself, always dreaming up new magical machines, but how he’d died young and how sad it was.

“Beg your pardon, Milord,” Burket said, which was when Michael realized the man had leaned over to pour him tea, and had almost poured it on Michael’s lap as Michael lifted his head.

“No,” Michael said. “Thank you. But you don’t have to pour my tea.”

Only now the man was buttering Michael’s toast and setting it on a plate, and smiling enticingly at Michael while nodding at the toast as though, for all the world, Michael were a toddler in need to be tempted to his food. “I know, milord, but you haven’t been eating, and what are we to tell his grace, should he ask? And he does ask, you know?”

Michael picked up the toast, with what he knew was ill-grace, and took a bite, while still frowning at the letter. He could well believe that Seraphim worried about his eating and his health and everything else. And that was nothing to what Gabriel, his older half-brother, once Seraphim’s valet and now the king of fairyland would do. Those two had always mistook themselves for parents of Michael and Caroline. And he was sure someone in the household was in Gabriel’s pay, too, and sent him regular reports.

When you have two older brothers who are far more powerful than you, and determined to protect, cosset and annoy you within an inch of your life, sometimes all you can do is play along. But Michael wished they’d let him read his letter in peace.

He took another bite, gulped down the tea, which was still hot, and then took another bite of toast, doing his best to simulate appetite he didn’t feel.

He had spent a restless and turmoil filled night, dreaming of fairyland and his recent captivity in it, and it was all he could do not to allow a long shudder to go through him at the confused and patchy memory of that dream. That was the problem, too. In dream and memory fairyland was never anything clear and solid, anything you could rebel against and resent. It was a foggy, threatening recollection, in which places and people changed shape and essence, and in which pain and worse happened to you without warning.

“That is better,” Milord, Burket said, in the sort of kind, patronizing tone that made Michael wish they hadn’t forbidden duels and that it weren’t frowned upon to duel one’s social inferiors.

“Would you fancy a kidney? Perhaps a fish cake?” At Michael’s headshake, Burket stepped back, but didn’t leave, as Michael expected. Instead, he cleared his throat and looked towards the entrance door to the room, set next to the window that looked out over the gardens.

There was movement, and then two women and a man came in, all of them smiling wide, but all of them looking just the slightest bit embarrassed, as though they were doing something they shouldn’t be doing. The women were Mrs. Hooper, the housekeeper, starched and stiff in her black dress with its immaculate white collar, Mrs. Aiken, the cook, and the man was Dyer, the Butler.

What on Earth could be the matter?

Before Michael could even think to ask, Mrs. Hooper advanced, curtseyed, advanced again, curtseyed again, then beamed at him, again, as if he were an infant in the nursery, and spoke, “Lord Michael, since today is your seventeenth birthday, we thought it only fair…” She stopped and sniffled, as though she were fighting strong emotion, though Michael had no idea what that could possibly be. “That is, last summer, milord, we thought you lost, and we wish you to believe we all hold you in the greatest affection, and therefore…” She blushed, which gave Michael all he could not to let his jaw drop in astonishment. Mrs. Hooper had never seemed fully human, much less capable of embarrassment. “Therefore we got you this gift, from everyone on the estate, to commemorate your seventeenth birthday milord.”

She dropped a parcel wrapped in silver paper, and neatly tied with a silk ribbon upon the table, just north of the letter from the dead man, then beat a hasty retreat.

Michael’s turn to blush, and to fumble with the paper. And then he had the devil’s own time concealing the expression of astonishment on his face, and overlaying it with gratification. “Oh, thank you,” he said, staring at the tiny gold box with the miniature scene of Zeus in judgment worked painted upon the porcelain lid. A snuff box? Why in heaven’s name did they think he’d take snuff? Even Seraphim didn’t.

But he also understood, immediately, how expensive such a thing was, and how much of a sacrifice it had been to the servants to contribute to it. That colored his voice and his expression, as he stood and said, “I am not good at flowery speeches, but—” He lifted the box and looked it over, “I am most gratified at your kind thought. Thank you. I thank you most heartily.”

The four of them curtseyed of bowed according to their different sexes, looking gratified, and left.

Which is when Michael opened the letter from the dead man.

Escaping The Tower

The problem with a wicked stepmother, Miss Albinia Blackley thought, as she stood in front of the mirror, wearing Geoffrey’s clothes, and tucking her abundance of blond hair into a hat rakishly set on her blond curls was when the wicked stepmother was in fact your real mama.

It was all very well, after all, for Miss Albinia’s brothers – who always called her Al – because Mama was just the woman who had married papa when Geoffrey, the youngest, was seven, and was in fact no blood relation to them. So they had nothing to be either sorry or worried for. It wasn’t their mama who mistreated them so.

Oh, it had been terrible for them, from what they’d said, to find that their kind and absent minded father had married a forbidding and interfering woman who was a powerful witch to boot.

But at least all of them, even Geoffrey, remembered papa. Albinia didn’t. She didn’t remember anyone but Mama, the sole authority and arbiter in her sixteen years of life. Albinia locked the door to her room as she thought this, and sighed, because now she was on limited time.

Mama didn’t like her to lock her door, ever, and there was no point at all imagining that mama didn’t spell that lock, so that she knew the moment Al locked it. Mama spelled everything and kept track of everything Al did, which is what made this so devilishly difficult.

But spell or not, Albinia must lock the door, to at least delay mama and give her a chance to escape.

Because the thing was, Mama or no Mama, Al must leave and go find the boys.

She didn’t know if the boys had felt this way when papa left shortly after marrying mama. She didn’t know because they never spoke to her of that time, before Al was born.

What she knew was that papa had disappeared shortly after marrying Mama, and had never returned and was presumed dead.

And now the boys had disappeared. Al didn’t know where, but she knew two things. One, that mama had made them leave against their will. And two that wherever they were they needed Al. And at any rate, Al needed them. Even if Mama was her real mama, Al was not going to stick around and have the full benefit of mama’s attention for the duration. Whatever the duration was.

She scrunched under the bed to find the old sheets she had torn and tied together. They had to be old and discarded, because that was the only way to make sure they were no longer bespelled. It had taken her six months to find some and to braid them into a passable rope, in the few minutes a day mama left her alone.

Tying the sheet to the foot of the bed and throwing it out the window was the work of a moment. Al’s mind ticked where mama would be now.

Even if she were close by, say in her room, as she would be at this time, she had to come up the North staircase, down the hallway and up to the door. Right now, she would be on the top step.

Al got the magical kit, likewise assembled painstakingly over a year, of discarded bits and ends, so that she could be sure no one had bespelled or could track any part of it. The hard part of it had been buying the herbs, because she’d had to spend her allowance on them, in a shop at the other end of Wulffen Downs, so that mama wouldn’t hear about her purchases. And she’d had to wrap them so they looked like candy.

It had earned her a sermon from mama about spending her money on tooth-rotting sweets. But she had got the herbs necessary for enchantments.   She tied the pouch to a cord under her jacket, and then slipped the few silver coins left of her allowance into her sleeve.

She could now hear Mama’s step in the hallway outside. Mama was clearing her throat, preparing to call her name.

Albinia pushed the window fully open, knelt on the parapet, and held on to the rope with both hands. She had remembered to put knots on the rope, and she set her feet on the first one, carefully, otherwise it would be like when she tried coming down from the cliff when she’d been bird watching with Edmund, and had got her hands burned, with the speed of sliding down the rope.

She clambered down the rope as, from above, came the sound of knocks and mama calling “Open up. Open up immediately young lady.”

She felt the little puff of magic as mama opened the door with a spell, and she moved faster down the rope, because she had to be on the ground, and running by the time mama got to the window. She had to go to her brothers. Geoffrey needed someone to help him make himself understood when he started stuttering and Edmund was likely to lose everything, including his paints, and Aaron, Jeremy and Joshua would argue about everything, and William was likely to disappear into his music, and Samuel would just go all extremely disappointed…

Albinia looked down to see how far the ground was. She had measured the tower where her room was situated. She’d calculated the height to the window five different ways.

But as her stomach sank to her feet, she realized none of that mattered now. Because she was not suspended from her own home’s window, but from a window open on a façade of glass. In fact, it looked like she was hanging from a giant glass cube. Except that as she looked forward, she could see these were windows and that oddly dressed people were pointing at her and a woman was covering her mouth, but looked like she was screaming something.

Gone was the tower of the manor house on the cliff, overlooking the ocean and the familiar marshes. Mama. Mama and mama’s magic!

She could feel as though an abrasion upon her magic, as if something, in this strange place were trying to get through her shields.

Beneath her, there were flashes of moving things that she couldn’t understand and the sound of klaxons superimposed on a low roar as of a million voices.

She had no idea where she was, dangling here, between Earth and sky, on her fragile ladder of sheets.

All she knew was that the ladder ended far short of the ground. More than the height of Al’s tower.

Far above, Mama leaned out the open window, and Mama’s voice called, “Albinia Blackley, you little idiot. Hang on. I shall pull you in.”

And Al let go of the ladder.

She let go before she could think. She let go, knowing only she couldn’t stand to go back in and explain herself to Mama. She let go knowing that she must get to her brothers, somehow, but not knowing how, except that she must get away from Mama and Mama’s magic, first.

She tumbled downwards, head over heels, wondering how it felt to hit the ground so far behind.

Would it hurt? Would she even feel it? She hoped she didn’t land on some innocent and kill them, even as air escaped her lungs.

Rescuing the Dead

Michael frowned at the letter. It was undoubtedly addressed to him, by a man who couldn’t possibly have known of his existence, unless he had read the announcement of Michael’s birth in some society newspaper.

Swallowing tea and toast as fast as he could, Michael put the snuff box in his pocket and retreated to his workshop.

Properly speaking, he had two workshops: one in the house proper, a room that had taken his father a substantial portion of the family fortune to build and the other far deep in the garden, where Michael assembled and tested those experiments that might explode or other otherwise cause damage to the family.

The workshop in the depths of the garden, he’d all but abandoned. Even if a changeling had been left in the inside workshop, it was from the outside workshop he’d been abducted with a cunning spell from the now fortunately dead king of fairyland. And though Michael was quite sure the present king of fairyland, his brother Gabriel, had no intention of kidnapping him, yet he felt alone and vulnerable in that building. It had been violated once, and could be violated again.

The inner workshop would be harder to breach. For one, when it had been claimed from its previous use as a ballroom, it had been lined in leather between two layers of copper, the whole bespelled, forming an impassable barrier to both organic-affecting and inorganic-affecting spells.

In the ballroom, a sort of platform had been built, and up on it, Michael had his sky-observing apparatus, which observations came in handy when calculating what form of spell to use.

The rest of the workshop was machines of Michael’s own invention, many of which now seemed impractical and childish to him. Take for instance his careful replica of the planet Earth, in brass, rotating in proportional time around a miniature sun. It had been fun to build, but what practical use was it?

Since Seraphim had visited the strange planet without magic where the Princess Royal had been raised, and brought back ideas for useful machines, like shavers and mixers and clothes and dish washers, Michael had been working hard on magical replicas for such wonders.

The clothes washer was a success, except that the housekeeper had banned its use saying it was an abomination and would run laundresses off their jobs by the score. However, Seraphim had arranged to have it tested in the royal palace and it was well on the way to becoming accepted in other, less hidebound households than the Darkwaters’. Seraphim said it would make Michael a fortune.

The automated barber, though… Michael frowned at his creation standing by the workbench near the far wall of the room. It was not a little portable thing, as Seraphim had described, because Michael had believed by making it large and capable of giving haircuts as well as shaves, it would be more popular. Particularly if it could also dress the hair of young ladies.

But all the thing had done, in actual fact, was chase Michael through the house, trying to cut… not his hair. The bits of his jacket it had got had been enough. Michael was not sure what had gone wrong with the animating spell, because when a cylindrical, man-high thing is wheeling after you brandishing knives, razors and scissors in its many arms, the only possible thing to do was to run as fast as possible.

Which he’d done, until Dyer had shot the mechanical barber through the head with a fowling piece. Michael stared at the creature with multiple holes through the space where its directing magic had been. Well, never mind that. This was not a good time to attempt to reproduce that… experiment.

Michael perched on a high stool and tore into the letter, breaking the seal which showed – he’d swear to it – a lamb eating a wolf.

The letter started formally enough, “Dear Lord Michael Ainsling, You’ll forgive my addressing this letter to you, though we’ve never been formally introduced, or, indeed, introduced at all.”

And it proceeded strangely, “You might have heard of me, and have some idea that I am dead, but do not let that concern you, as rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated.”

Michael chewed the corner of his lip, perceiving that the person who’d written this letter, in strong angular letters, was what Mama would have called an original. And by original she normally meant that they needed help finding their way across a street, and were none too certain where they might have placed their head that day. She had been known to describe Michael himself in such a way.

“I suppose it will be a matter of some concern to you how you come to be receiving a letter from me, whether you think me dead or alive, and also possibly some curiosity as to what you can do to help me, or hinder me, or indeed do anything in my case.

“I’ll tell you the truth. I do not know. I have cast and recast these runes, and all I can tell is that there is only one person in the world capable of understanding my work – and you must understand what keeps me prisoner here is my own work – and disabling it, so I might perhaps be set free.

“I have never had the pleasure of meeting you and the last thing I’d expect would be the Ainslings to throw any kind of magical genius in the normal way. I mean, you’ll pardon me for saying so, but your father was one of the accredited adventurers of my time, in more ways than one, meaning he was rather more adept at using other men’s magic all too often in order to use their wives likewise. And while your Mama was one of the beauties of her day, and indeed a diamond of the first water, I never found that she had an inquisitive and mathematical turn of mind. But then, of course, sometimes every breed throws a sport, and my runes assure me that you are that. A magical genius, I mean, not a sport, though I suppose that also.”

By this time Michael’s head was whirling and he felt he should have had rather more than one cup of tea to fortify himself to deal with this very strange missive. Brandy for a choice, except that none of the servants would let him have it, or at least not without telling Seraphim.

“However, before I can request that you rescue me, though I do, of course, request that, I must ask you to find my sons. You see, the woman I married, in what I’m sure now seems to me like a fit of madness, has applied some sort of spell to them, so I can no longer track them nor communicate with them.

“I’m afraid she means to do away with them and use the lands of my ancestors to form a dowry for her whelp. And while I have nothing against the mite, who was not born by the time I got confined to this place, and whom my sons inform me is a pretty good sort, in the way young females sometimes are, and not at all like her mother, I do not with for my legacy to pass wholly into her hands and those of whichever rogue Albinia chooses to marry her to.

“I presume you have a row boat of some sort on your property, as I vaguely remember there was a lake there, in which much boating was done in the summer. I remember the lady your mother looking very fine in a lace dress upon a boat, in fact. At any rate, if you apply the formula I enclose onto a rowboat, it should bring you where you need be to start unravelling this knot.

“Since the full extent of the knot laid by the one I must call my lady wife is not known or understood by me, I must trust in the formula and in the kindness of a total stranger to do what must be done. And my scrying assures me you’re the only stranger who can do so.

“In full hope, if not trust, of your doing what is needful, I subscribe myself your most grateful and devoted servant, Tristram Blackley.”

Having laid the letter down on his workbench, Michael stared at it, fully wondering whether the person who’d written was the – presumed dead – author of magical carpet travel on a grand scale, or simply a madman possessed of illusions of being such a parsonage.

It was not till he turned the page and looked through the formula, written in a hand that gave the impression of impatience with writing, that Michael blinked, whistled under his breath, and realized that this was indeed the work of Tristram Blackley.

No one else, barring an equal genius, could have come up with such a strange mix of magical formulae, turning a simple rowboat into a vehicle of both magical transport AND divination.

And Michael knew, as he knew his own name, that he would have to try it out. It was like climbing the tallest tree or exploring the dangerous path of the woods. He’d like to believe he was doing it for the sake of the unknown Mr. Blackley who seemed to be in a terrible position, but in his heart of hearts, he knew he was doing it for the thrill of it and to prove that he could.

Enough of nights hemmed in with nightmares of fairyland, and of moping the otherwise deserted estate. Michael wanted to be doing.

When I was a kid I was always highly amused by reading Agatha Christie characters refer to it as “The Marriage State” instead of just “being married.”

Yesterday here someone mentioned taking relationship advice from Agatha Christie which might be marginally better than taking relationship advice from Heinlein, but not by much.  And yet I did both and it turned out okay, though it could be said that is partly because I was solidly embedded in a married-people culture.  A culture where everyone married, unquestioningly, oh, and didn’t divorce.  I knew happy couples, and unhappy couples and couples who had lived apart after a few years or a few days or in one case a few hours* of marriage, and who sometimes lived with someone else and had for so long that the scandal had worn off, but were married, nonetheless.

One of my own uncles had left his wife after a few years, and lived with another one.  The family was at a loss for whether I should call her aunt or not.  She of course was more obsequious than all my other aunts in her observances and gave me a pearl brooch for my third birthday.  I loved it because it had two little birds made of pearls, but it caused my mom (it was her side of the family) some heartburns whether I should wear it around her family.  In fact, I suspect she eventually traded it in on something else, because thought it was one of my favorites, it’s the only piece of jewelry I remember from that young age that I don’t have.  And what I have includes some I wore when I was so young I chewed it out of shape.

Anyway, so marriage was a constant and even when the village women said “He beats me but he’s my man” one couldn’t detach the couple with a crowbar.  It was assumed to be the law of nature, coming or going, good or bad.

And to give you an idea of how unenlightened the times were, one of our cleaning ladies (mom had a succession of them, because she had a successful business and no time to clean, or shop) told me when I was ten or so, that if I thought I’d get a man who didn’t at least slap me every now and then, I was air dreaming.

This was a weird perspective, as men in my family (on dad’s side.  Mom’s dad had issues) never raised a hand to a woman, their own or not, and at that never raised a hand to a kid if they could help it.  The women were always the disciplinarians, and the men … well, dad could stop my worst tantrum with the words “I’m very disappointed in you.”

Someone in one of my groups on facebook was complaining about marriage, specifically that person’s own marriage.  Well, not complaining so much as baffled and confused as to how it’s falling apart despite his trying to do his best.

I sort of know why it’s falling apart.

Take that overlay above, and the fact when I was born/grew up Portugal still issued family passports, and if a woman wanted a solo passport, she had to have her husband’s signature.  For that matter, if a woman wanted to have a paying job outside the home (cleaning house didn’t count.  In that time and place you were often paid in produce and eggs and a chicken or so.) she needed permission from her husband.  I know this because I remember vividly (yeah, mom had her own business and worked in the kitchen, then in her workshop after they moved when I was 7, but she was the principal earner in the family) being astonished at a neighbor who wasn’t too sure of his letters coming over for dad to help him fill that form, so the neighbor’s wife could get a job in the textile factory and they wouldn’t starve.

Then put on it that every one of my teachers was a “feminist” and if you think that it’s only feminists here who went running off the deep end, way past equal work for equal pay and into turnip (the currently popular movie is not ALL about women, so it’s sexisssssss) you’d be shocked.

We’re talking a country where wife abuse was rampant, where men did have legal holds that prevented women from making an independent living, where a woman in her twenties would be treated by the police as a runaway kid and brought home to parents.  (One of my cousins whose father took after less than sane granddad.)  Unless she was married when she’d be taken home to husband.

You’d think fighting wife-abuse and trying to get laws/culture altered would make sense, right?

You’d be wrong.  Oh, Portugal never went far down the “Let’s reform language” partly because it’s a Latin country. I mean, sure, you can make up a pronoun to refer to women, or a pronoun to refer to men, or call men and women something stupid, or claim we shouldn’t have gender in language because oppression.  But that doesn’t pass the laugh test when your house and your garage, your tree and your cart and your plow are all female pronoun and your cheese, your car, your sweater and your dress are all male pronouns.  You can’t say it’s oppressive to have pronouns when they’re used for objects and in a way that defies logic too.  (The tree being feminine and the boat masculine are two of those that make you go “uh.”)

I don’t know mind you, since the first wave of feminists were about ten years older than I, that they didn’t try the pronoun thing, but if they did the gales of laughter led them to drop it.

Other than that once you left the village school — where the teacher merely, rightly, taught that intelligence doesn’t lie in the generative organs and that males or females can be smart, so shut up, stop dreaming of a husband, and learn to use your head — I passed on to teachers about ten to twenty years older than I, mostly female (as mom would tell me “such a pretty job for a lady”) and mostly having learned from whatever theories were passing around other countries in the sixties.

So we got the full fledged feminist instruction, and as with gun control, I was raised in Europe, for a while I believed all this.

The gist of it seemed to be “you won’t do anything for any man.  Because a man asking you to do the simplest thing is aggression and oppression.”

Well, they never quite convinced me to stop making dad his coffee.  (Yeah, he has the same dark eyes my younger son has, and this way of saying “Only you make it so well” — and yeah, it’s irresistible.) However, I remember the rip roaring fight when mom ordered me to continue cleaning up after my brother.  (This was absurdly unfair, as he was much older than I, but if he left a banana peel in the living room and it discolored the table I was the one punished, because my job was to clean up after him.)  Yes, I DO still think it was ridiculously unfair.  I also sort of understand that’s how mom was brought up and she completely didn’t “get” why I had objections.

So Alvarim, showing a grace I still sometimes strive for, got tired of my being in the dog house and made a deal with me.  If I cleaned up after him he’d pay me from his tutoring money (I think the equivalent of $20 a month.  Enough for three paperback books.)  And we wouldn’t tell mom.  (I wonder how much we puzzled mom, because now that he was a CLIENT I felt obliged to do proper stuff, so I bought little chocolates and left them on his pillow after turning down the sheets at night, and I gave him periodic gifts.  Anyway…)

BUT some of it wasn’t funny.  The “you shall serve no man” thing sank deep, as well as the idea that marriage was slavery, which accounted for a string of turned down proposals and also for my learning very little of HOW to keep house (because I was NOT going to do it.)  This led to years later my standing in the middle of Dan’s apartment looking at a box of pasta and wondering how we turned it into the soft stuff you ate.

It took me years to stop resenting doing the housework, after I was married, and if it weren’t for my sense of fairplay I might have wrecked my marriage.  But fairplay came in.  When we got married both Dan and I had both jobs and artistic pursuits.  My training/former job didn’t apply at all here.  So he said he’d support us, while I tried my hand at writing for a living.

Mind you, Dan was also raised in “enlightened” times so he never came home and said “Yo, woman, where’s dinner?”  (He still doesn’t, though he’s been known to make puppy dog eyes.)  And if I hadn’t cooked, he’d make his and my food.

But the sense of fairplay got to me.  He was out working (computers, eighties) twelve to fourteen hour days so I could write, and I wasn’t even cooking, despite being home all day.  So I learned. (And we each gained 100 pounds.  I CANNOT figure out how to cook for two people.  When last boy is out, we might very well have to have me cook for several days.)  And I learned to do other things, because I still wasn’t making money when the kids were born, and all our friends had two jobs, and, well… I didn’t want the kids to live like paupers.

We’re not over-bothered about who does what, mind.  I turn my hand to carpentry as well as to sewing.  He does car repair as well as accounting.  But we each try to do as much as we can for the other.  I think if you were to tally it, he still does more than I do, and I’m trying to figure out how to do some more to give him time to write, because I too want the sequel to his book.

We make do.

But the point was to stop thinking of him as a male oppressor.  As far as I can tell my husband, personally, never oppressed anyone (kids’ claims to the contrary notwithstanding.)

However those of you of a penis persuasion, not to count those of you who are older women and didn’t get the full brain washing indoctrination, might not realize how hard that is to do; how hard it is to let your guard down and think of the man you love as an individual.  It took me probably a decade to get fully over the indoctrination.  Because they don’t teach you that life was hard and most people had no rights at all.  They make all history before the late twentieth century a morality play where men oppressed women, because they’re just villainous that way or something.

And ninety percent of the time when I see a marriage headed for divorce (of course there are exceptions, and as I said the remedy for “he beats me but he’s my man” is to get out as fast as you can and before he starts in on the kids.  I’m not talking about those, but the cases where the woman is vaguely certain the husband is “oppressing” her, often by keeping all the “fun” of a day job to himself or something) something like this is going on.  The woman resents the man not for anything he’s done, but for the presumed mind set of ancestors that never existed and is sure if she doesn’t keep him low and humble with constant attacks, he’ll crush her under his boot.

Then there’s the reverse of that, as a lot of entertainment portrays women as putting an end to Lads being Lads together.  Women are brought in as “adults” to stop sprees of video gaming or pie eating in sitcoms.  That sort of thing.  So men associate women with killjoys.  And women associate men goofing off with oppressing women by making them be the adults…

When we were newly married, for instance, we stopped watching Married With Children, because it seemed designed to foster mutual marital resentment.

But in either case, in most of these divorces, the problem is not the spouses so much as not keeping crazy culture out of their relationship, and not looking at who they married AS INDIVIDUALS.

My mom is fond of telling that her grandparents used to share a plate (apparently an old Portuguese custom for married couples.  It strikes me as bizarre, but I don’t even see why.  After all married couples normally share a bed, right?) And after they got elderly, he had dentures while she still had her own teeth, and he’d complain she ate faster than him and got the greater share of the food.

These were her maternal grandparents, and as she told it, her grandfather never even raised his voice to scold his wife, so it was a gentle reproof and it became a family joke.  Whenever my dad was doing something that mom thought was excessive, she’d say “you have good teeth, you’re taking all the food.” (Though they DIDN’T share plates.)

Anyway marriage is like that.  It’s impossible to draw a line in the middle of a marriage and weigh in exactly what you do for whom.  I used to do the lion share of the work when the kids were little, and I often thought I’d break under it.  But Dan now is picking up on housework, as I also have work that pays, and there are no kids.  It’s probably about equal, save for stuff I’m really good at like cooking, and stuff he’s really good at, like accounting.

But the point is, you go through phases where metaphorically speaking one of you is eating all the food because he has good teeth.  It’s okay, it equalizes, eventually, somewhere else.  It’s no reason to call it quits, particularly if you’ve been at it for more than twenty years.

The solution is to stop weighing who does what or thinking he’s a natural-born oppressor.  You’re just people.  If the burden is too heavy, figure it out. Don’t assume he’s out to dominate you just because he has a penis.

And I say this because — this is important — in our day the Marriage State has become not the default but (particularly in its happy mode) a rarity.  If this continues, the cultures that will inherit the earth are the ones where women aren’t even second class citizens, but something more like domestic animals.

I don’t have daughters, but I might have an adoptive granddaughter soon, and maybe by a miracle blood granddaughters later.  I don’t wand this for any of them.

In a state of nature, where marriage doesn’t exist, for biological and psychological reasons, women are always the losers.  The opposite of “He beats me but he’s my man” is not a state of freedom, but a state of the woman having to kill herself to support the kids, or if there are no kids, of the woman (or man) becoming old and grey and lonely.  Yeah, in extreme cases, you should get out as soon as you can.  But in cases of vague dissatisfaction?  Remember he’s a person.  And remember you’re one too.  Work it out. It’s not his job to treat you like royalty because some putative ancestor beat some putative ancestress.  It’s your job to learn to pull together at the same yoke and either raise kids or set money by so you’re not a burden on strangers in your old age, and more importantly, so you’re not resoundingly, echoingly lonely.  Because there will come a time the rest of the world will have no use for you.  And your kids will be too busy to spend time with you.  This is not a threat, it’s the inevitable tendency of the flesh.  And humans are social animals. You need someone.  Or you will.  No matter how free an independent you are.  Friends, or spouses are difficult to cultivate when you’ll not put a hand to do a favor for any male.

Remember that.  Remember the present doesn’t last forever, and that the past was not as bad as they painted it in school.

He might at times eat all the food in the plate, but if you remember kindness and common charity to each other (love is an unreliable thing that comes and goes, or seems to, till you learn to see it always there, in different forms) then sometimes he’ll push aside most of the chocolate cake, and say he’s full because he knows you like it better.

And that’s marriage at its best state.  And it’s worth everything.  You know how your parents loved you when you were little?  This is a hundred times better.

I know.  I’ve been at this for thirty years.  And mostly it works.

*Almost forgot… yeah.  The “few hours.”  This woman in the village, whose dad had died when she was a toddler, got married, and the newly married couple moved in to her mom’s house (supposed to look after her mom and all.)  I guess the mom had forgotten to tell daughter what marriage entailed.  So in the middle of the night, daughter cries out “Moooom, he’s interfering with me.”  At which point, mom throws the husband out.  They remained married and separated for the rest of their lives.

I know this because being village kids, and lacking video games, when we walked by their house (mom and daughter’s house) on the way from school, we’d scream “mom, he’s interfering with me.”  This never failed to bring the mom out like a jack-in-box, to call us names and throw sticks and stones at us, which we OF COURSE thought was the funniest thing in the world.  (Yes, we were VERY bored.)