Month: March 2019

People Who Hate People – A blast from the past from July 2012

A few of you have asked me to write about Human Wave, and I know I have to – having come up with this harebrained idea, I have to continue with it and give it some shape.  Like a cat or a kid, it followed me home and now it’s my job to look after it.

Leave aside for a moment the fact that I think each of us, Human Wave writers can do more for writing and for the culture in general by writing fiction than by prattling on about what our fiction is or isn’t.  Humans are curious beasties, sometimes when faced with the Rocharsh stain they need to be told if they’re looking at the hideous crone or the beautiful woman in the hat.

While I agree with Charlie that the guiding principle of Human Wave is “You may” we all know there are things that we read that are HW and things that aren’t.  Even if sometimes we come down to “I know it when I see it.”

Well, let me bring a flashlight down and point it at the picture so you can see more clearly.

Part of this is Scott McGlasson’s fault, with his inferiority complex vis a vis his characters.  (It’s all his fault mommy.)  And partly it’s the way we’ve joked about loving/hating humans and how much butter exactly it takes to love them.

It is also at the heart of Darkship Renegades and if you squint intently, at the heart of my future history.

My future history starts with nations expropriating all those embryos resulting from in-vitro and making a bunch more and having them gestated in bio-engineered large animals (kind of like the mice who grow human ears) in an attempt to make up a massive short fall of people.  (Yes, I do think world population is already falling, or if it’s not it’s because older people are living much longer.  The problem is the modern state depends for its structure on having more young people than old.  At any rate this is supposed to be 50 to 100 years from now.  Shut up.  Making predictions is hard, particularly about the future.  You lays down your money and you makes your bet.  That is mine.)

These people are by and large not quite normal.  Part of it might be the timing of hormone baths and enzymes, which would be impossible to get right, no matter how modified the animal.  It could also be the environment, since they’re raised in batch lots.

And eventually people get funny and decide, instead, to create supermen and to “improve” their own children.  And then it all goes wrong because humans can’t be perfect, and being perfect can be the biggest flaw of all.

I was about to say we humans are a crazy animal, when it occurred to me that of course I don’t know how other animals are, not really.  We have reason to believe – now – that cats and dogs have some form of memory and ideation.

Perhaps all animals can dream of an idealized version of themselves.  Who am I to say?
I do know humans do.  I am – on a good day and with enough caffeine – human, or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof.

And we humans can see an idealized version of ourselves – a perfect version, without any of those flaws and imperfections that mar the human body and soul.

It has run throughout all of human history: the thought of super-humans, or of angels, without flaw.  For some of us those humans existed in Eden, seemingly perfect, until the flaw was revealed in the taste for forbidden fruit.  For others, there was a perfect civilization where a mother goddess was worshiped and everyone was happy, until the unhappy ones – what?  What’s that you say?  No, no, I read the books, that seems to be the gist of it – subverted the whole thing.  For others – Rousseau will never be dead enough – humans were noble and perfect before civilization.

We can ideate perfect humans.  We can ideate a perfect life.  And then we turn to our workaday world, chockablock with briars (and blockheads.)

This used to be disease prevalent in adolescence, particularly for well-off people.  (By historical standards, we’re all well-off, which is why adolescence is actually a recent concept.  Okay, Romans had it, but it was a… er… different thing.)  The “Why does it have to be that way?”  And the “But I hate humans” always sound, inherently, as though they were said by a sixteen year old.  (And fresh from parenting a sixteen year old, the whine-that-can-cut-through-glass is loud and clear in my memory.)

It used to be for most people, though, wealthy or not, after adolescence, some form of integration was achieved.  People came to see the ideal for what it was – something to strive towards, not something to demand.  And sometimes, in special circumstances, they came to see their flaws for… well… good things.  (Sometimes they are.  Sometimes what causes people to do best are their worst traits.)

The reason people mostly came to terms with reality is that, well… what is there besides reality?

And that’s where we got tripped, starting around the fifties or so.  I think, honestly, the issue was television.  It looks real, but it is or can be flawless.  I’ve often wondered how much of our divorce rate is based on the flawless, effortless families of the fifties sitcoms during the formative years of most now-adults.  It seems as though study after study has shown we can’t tell the difference between TV and reality.  Weirdly, no, I don’t think the down-glare on married life and what I’d call the “all relationships are sh*t” view of humanity prevalent now helps.  Neither is actually reality like.

Anyway, the problem is we now have – all of us – both wealth (you don’t usually worry where your next meal is coming from.  Heck, I don’t, though there have been times in my life I did, they were brief and limited) and a vivid, collective fantasy life.

This has the result of a sort of extended adolescence.  Our arts, the collective expression of our collective soul – or our culture for lack of a better word – have got stuck in the adolescent whine of  “I hate people.”  Which means the “moral” behind just about every novel, painting, story is “Humans are bad and we should all die.”

So, what’s wrong with hating humans, you say.

Nothing.  Nothing if you could choose between humans as are and your idealized humans that can exist only in syrupy shows.

The problem is those humans don’t exist.  And the problem is the reaction of culture to realizing this was to go into a prolonged tantrum that amounts to “If we can’t be perfect we should all die.”

This is a problem because it’s starting to have an effect.  It’s become controversial to say “I love people.”  It’s become controversial to say “Humans have achieved great things.”

All of which would be fine, again, if you could choose to be something else.  But you can’t.  For good or ill, we’re humans and humans are all we have.

Did humanity produce Stalin and Mao?  Sure.  But humanity also produced DaVinci and innumerable saints.  Were any of the last without flaw?  Well, no.  They were human.  All humans have flaws.  Sometimes the reason humans strive to be good is that they see themselves as worse than they are.  That’s one of those flaws that’s good for you.

But seeing yourself – or your species – as unredeemable is as blinkered, as pathetic, as seeing your species – or yourself – as angel-like, with no flaws.  Neither of them have reality and frankly both of them lack internal tension.  Both of them are therefore just plain bad art.

So, can Human Wave be dystopian?  Sure it can.  You don’t really need to scratch very deeply into the world of Darkship Thieves to see that Earth is a dystopia and Eden is a barely balanced near-utopia, but one that crumbles on contact.  Humans are still humans.  Unspeakable things can happen (contemplate Max’s fate, or for that matter Nat’s revenge.)

BUT through it all, humans are still humans.  The ones who are good can be very very good.  The ones who are broken are broken in interesting ways.  The villains are – to borrow from Shakespeare – punishe’d.  And the good, if not rewarded, have a chance to reward themselves to a measure.  And the mixed can redeem themselves in future books.

Human Wave: it might be very dark, but a ray of light is allowed in.  We don’t hate humanity, because if we do we can’t love anything.  And there is always the option for a sequel.

You heard it here first.

It has long been discussed, when talking about public figures “is this malice or stupidity?”

I remember the previous administration inciting this question, and I don’t remember that it was ever resolved.

Post 2016, having observed both the transparent malice and rampant stupidity of public figures (mostly, but not all, on the left) as well as the way they think that stupid malice or malicious stupidity are attractive, has led me to formulate a new axiom, which I first stated inverted, but RES suggested it this way, and it seems to be more fitting: sufficiently advanced malice is indistinguishable from stupidity.

No?

Let’s take the case of our former president. For reasons that a child psychiatrist should have made sense of long before the man came of age, he hated and resented America, the (white) grandparents who raised him, the mother who didn’t desert him, and in fact everyone and everything connected to America, to the point of not liking very much the pomp and ceremony associated with our flag, and refusing to show it any kind of respect.

Look, it’s not even that hard to understand. Boys want their fathers, and if the father is absent they tend to idolize them. For Mr. Obama, this led him to idolize Africa and socialism as well.  (His mother likely contributed to this, as did his grandparents who were, already, themselves, red diaper babies.)

This means that he hated America both for ideological reasons and reasons of history.

Which means that he did stupid things, like go on the apology tour, or try to bring the US economy down in the full belief that this would cause the rest of the world to be better off.

This is because hatred makes you stupid. You can’t help it.

Just like love makes you see everyone and everything related to your love in a golden light, and think that you share far more than you do with your chosen mate, hatred makes you think anyone relating to the thing you hate is tainted and needs to be ended.

Mr. Obama hated us, and everything about America from free trade to the Constitution must be wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong, and to be destroyed.

Which was stupid, because he owed everything he was to America, and could survive nowhere else. And also because people aren’t completely stupid, and despite the treacherous media, and his hidden organizations, America eventually caught on.

In the same way, Occasional Cortex might not be as stupid as she sounds.  It’s just that she was raised expecting to automagically succeed.

I can tell you that, because she is, give or take, my kids’ age, and no young woman, let alone a MINORITY young woman ever got called on their sh*t be it academic lack of effort, or bullying classmates and generally making themselves pains.

No, every girl and young woman, particularly minority ones, got given what used to be called a gentleman’s A, now surely a lady’s A, and told they were a bright shining star and the world would be astounded at their brilliance.

And then they hit the cold cruel world. What we know about Ms. Very Occasional Cortex, is that she had a rather undistinguished working career, from bartending to trying to start her own business and flopping.

Of course she’s convinced — trust me, as someone of a similar sex and race background, I got told this every time I failed by one or more helpful people.  “Helpful.” — that this is the fault of racism and sexism and capitalism.

And she hates them. She hates them, my precious. She hates them and that awful place called America.

Which means it makes the Green New Deal (green nude heel) fatally attractive to her.

Sure, it’s obvious that she can’t do arithmetic except in the sense that two plus two equals coconut. And she can’t figure out how economics works. That you can blame on her schooling.

Mostly though, she is blinded by hate of the “cruel” system that didn’t treat her with the respect she’d like to be entitled to. So blinded that even had her comprehension of science and economics been greater than zero, she would still embrace the Green Nude Heel. Because it must be true. It must work. It must.

Like Mr. Obama, wanting to fundamentally destroy transform America, she seized the boogeyman she was threatened with all through schooling (my kids were): Global Warming.

With this boogey man she can convince people to fall in line, stop all this unfair striving and succeeding people do without permission, and thereby become “the boss” and dictate what everyone gets to have.  And of course, the system will be caring and compassionate even to those unwilling to work.

Her malice makes her so stupid that she states these things out loud, while her confederates have only whispered them behind closed doors.

Is she stupid?

Oh, dear, with either of my examples, if they were as stupid as they seem to be, it would be doubtful if they could walk and chew gum at the same time.  Mostly they’re malicious: full of anger and hatred to America and all Americans. And this makes them stupid.

As stupid as Hillary Clinton when she decided that calling us “deplorables” would make us vote for her.  Who even thinks like that?

So, sufficient malice causes people to be stupid.

Do not let yourself be blinded by hatred. It’s all right to hate the ideology, but try not to hate those who spout it. Instead, try to understand.

Because one stupid faction is enough for a century or two.

And the stupid don’t tend to survive.

As you all know (or at least should strongly suspect, since we’ve talked about various aspects of them all the time) we live in interesting times.

Technology is changing so fast that it’s changing the way everything happens from courtship to cooking, from politics to leisure.  And most of us aren’t exactly particularly well adapted for this level of change. Not even those of us who welcome it and try to change with it, surfing on the surface of the change like somewhat adroit acrobats.

Look, human beings, evolutionarily, weren’t designed for rapid changes in circumstances. Those are usually known as cataclysms.

Sure we conquered the globe and adapted to many different environments, but we did it over generations, slowly, where each one moved incrementally towards the goal. It’s not like in cartoons where an ape came down from the trees, shaved and got a briefcase and went to work.

In many ways we’re in no way adapted to the environment we created, which is funny, except in the sense it’s not funny at all.

I meant to go indie back in 2011. Only health intervened, and made it almost impossible to JUST fulfill my traditional contracts.  Which means while I was sitting forcibly out of the game, and biting my nails, I spent a lot of time observing.

Sometimes I’m still struggling with it.

Because you’re so used to seeing things one way that you have to keep recalibrating just to remind yourself that things have changed.

Take for instance organized fandom and cons.  They used to be the lifeblood of your career. And of course, you thought — or assumed — this was because you made fans that way.

It’s entirely possible this was never true.  As I detailed yesterday, part of the thing was that book selling and book publishing had become symbionts, jointly deciding what would be published AND seen. As an author, what you saw was not necessarily what was happening.

So you saw that going to conventions and particularly seeing your publisher/editor (which is why big cons like worldcon, world fantasy and now Dragon were/are important for those in the trad publishing game) led to bigger laydowns and sales, and you made it a point to attend.

In my case, seriously, I wish I had back all those summer weekends spent at worldcon. Best decision I ever made was to stop attending and, instead, start going to Denver to the amusement park with the boys.  And I regret all the Halloweens we left them with babysitters to attend world fantasy.

Sure, it kept my career going, at least for a while, but if I knew then what I know now.  Never mind. If I knew then what I know now, beyond minimal publication to keep the boys in shoes and vacations, I’d have spent my time writing books to come out in indie as soon as possible.

Because it turns out conventions have bloody nothing to do with selling to the public. In fact, the public that attends conventions, and even the public that will talk to an author on facebook or online are not the same public that buys masses and masses of books.

It’s like the old explanation of parallel worlds, you know: two worlds, side by side, one much larger than the other, and each operating by completely different rules, each unaware of the other.

What I’ll call gatekeeper world, because it encompasses both publishing, bookstores, and to an extent, conventions, is contracting. There are more and more people looking for sins and looking to destroy those who commit them. This applies to anything from an inconsidered tweet to a character they don’t like in a book. For instance I was recently told that female characters should have no flaws.  I have also recently come across a bunch of reviews of my books which try to divine things like what kind of man I like from my books. (Which btw is a step beyond insanity. I write men my female characters will like. I already have a man, thank you so much.) Anyway, amid all this nonsense, they have completely forgotten they’re in the business of selling books. So books are more and more indistinguishable from “moral tracts on the condition humans should have” and — unexpectedly — sell less and less.

My friends still trad only are scrambling to stay employed and reporting lower and lower advances.

Meanwhile in indie, people are thriving that I never heard of, and you haven’t either.

People who started writing less than three years ago are making multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars, and even in my circles where everyone reads voraciously, have never actually made the radar.   They are unknowns. Just rich unknowns.  Certainly no one at cons ever heard of them.

Because I’m curious and of an exploratory type of curiosity I’ve sampled some of these authors.  Yes, many of them are clumsy and badly written.  Not all though.  Only some.

The thing to remember though is that they are well written enough.  Well written enough for what?

Well, well written enough to sell.  If you go back and read Burroughs, say, you’ll find that he was not a particularly good writer on the word level. What he was was a great storyteller, often by violating every known rule, including telling you a vast amount of how things should be, instead of showing how they were. But it worked, and obviously he was to the taste of his contemporaries.

What I see in indie is, weirdly, like a return to the old days of pulp. Novels are shorter.  They start somewhere around 30k and usually top out at 50k.  An 80k word book is rare, and 100k plus very rare.

The reason for this actually makes sense. The change in book length was driven, more than anything, by the need to make a book large enough to sell for $5 — later $8 — dollars for a paperback. They could fudge it some. A friend who did very well never could write more than 65k, but her books were printed with larger type.  But less than that? no.

So, books are returning to the size that most people can consume at one sitting or in an afternoon.

More surprising is the plotting. Let’s just say I’m starting to doubt that the public’s tastes ever changed away from pulp. Grand adventures, improbable events, big battles seem to take the day.  The carefully crafted lengthy stories of interior development traditional publishing favored? not so much.

In romance, sure there’s still a space for sex, but most of the romances doing really well are not ALL about the sex, as traditional publishing had become there, ten years ago.  And there is a vast and lucrative niche of “traditional romances” by which you should understand stuff in the Heyer tradition with little more than a kiss.

In fact “things traditional publishers hated” are a good way to make the big money in indie: Romances without sex, space opera, mil sf, cozy mysteries.

It turns out all these things they told us no longer sold, didn’t in fact sell, but not because the public didn’t want them, no.  It was instead because the public didn’t get to see them. The publishers decided what the public would see, and the publishers decided these weren’t “worth” selling.

I don’t know how much of that was in conjunction with most publishers being the graduates of a few select colleges who viewed it as their job to enlighten the benighted, and how much it was simply “I want to brag about what I publish at parties, and my friends hate this stuff.”

What I know is that they no longer have any say on what sells and doesn’t sell.

And that there’s a whole parallel universe out there they’re not even aware of and can’t influence.

And that it’s worth exploring and seeing what’s there.

Which by itself is a pulp plot.

Remember when Amazon killed bookstores? Cool story bro.

Except for the fact that it is entirely fictional.

I came across it most recently in a facebook group where someone informed me that in 1993 bookstores (chain and indie) in his area were doing perfectly well. This is fine and it was true in our area too, more or less.  More less than more, if you looked closely because the seeds of destruction were already sown, but we didn’t know it/see it, unless our lifes revolved around reading and writing.  Arguably mine did, but only arguably, since I had a small child and another on the way, so I had more things worrying me than the current novel, let alone than what I was currently reading.

At any rate, in 93 I was broke, so buying a paperback could stop me being able to buy groceries for a couple of days, so most of what I read came from the free bookcases outside the used bookstores (you remember those, right? It’s where they put things that they’d turned down for trade, but the customer insisted on leaving behind. I spent two or three years reading a lot of Gothic romances, out of date biology manuals and some “history” on the level of ancient astronauts. On the bonus side I acquired a strange interest in cryptozoology that didn’t in any way imply I believed the sightings.

Anyway, onward. We were at the edge of paying off our debts (mostly the debt for the birth of #1 son by emergency caeserean while we were on COBRA, but also the debt for moving across the country.) and it would usher in five or six years where we went to bookstores a lot.  In fact between us and our best friends we setup a weekly “date” in which we’d leave all kids with a babysitter and head off to the dollar theater.  We’d buy tickets then kill two hours by going to Barnes and Noble and — if we were flush — to eat.

By 1997, we started referring to our bookstore trip as “going to be disappointed by Barnes and Noble.”  Because largely it was.  More and more, I found it difficult to find anything at all to read on the fiction shelves.  When you consider that I read science fiction, fantasy, mystery and in a pinch various kinds of historical fiction and romance, this was nothing short of astonishing.

Mystery at the time was often in the grip of what I called “waves of crazy.”  The one I remember best happened later, around 2005? and it was bookshelves filled with nothing but what I called “Sex in the city” mysteries, where the single protagonist obsessed on sex and shoes. It was bizarre, disturbing, and I still have no idea what the publishers were thinking, except that apparently a TV series translated to general readership.

Fantasy had fallen down a hole of “the poor deserving heroine gets a sword” and the fascinating, intricate civilizations that are, to me, the redeeming feature of heroic fantasy had vanished.

Science fiction…  Well, our stores, both indie and B & N seemed to mostly carry game-related and tv-series related fiction.  Since I’m not interested in either, I slowly stopped reading SF.

Oh, and indie stores weren’t better (and were often worse) than B & N.  In my area (and I grant you we lived almost next door to a college) they were populated by people who spent a lot of time trying to radiate intellectual superiority.  One stock phrase was “We don’t stock THAT.” And “that” mostly referred to the sort of books I liked to read.

I did buy — from the discounted tables — a vast quantity of history books, most of them “swords in the middle ages” type of general information things.  Not deep, but the sort of thing a writer needed in pre-internet age, when you hit a point in the story and went “how thick was the blade in this time period, again?”  Having set up my library this last week (I need to find the digital camera and get a picture of the shelf system that took forever and took over our garage for four months. The weird thing is that at eight feet high it looks tiny compared to the built ins. It will be replaced by more built ins, as soon as we have the money.) I came across a ton of them.  Some I can now get rid of, but some are a source of highly targeted info that doesn’t allow me to be captured by internet squirrels.

But what we actually went there for, with ready money to burn, that we couldn’t find.

These years, say 93 to 98, I was buying fiction, but mostly used.  In fact, (we lived in the Springs at the time) Murder by the Book in Denver was how we started our incredibly ritzy vacations.  I.e. we went to Denver for two (or if particularly flush three. Though usually more like two and a half) days, stayed at embassy suites with the kids (because two separate rooms and free breakfast which if eaten at around 10 held the kids till early dinner at 5) hit the museums and the amusement parks, and generally painted the town a very pale pink.  Before that all started and an important consideration for “when to leave on Saturday” was “Murder by the Book” where we stopped and (sometimes the guys waited in the car) I went in and filled two large bags (or boxes) with used books.

For whatever reason I read cozy mysteries like people eat popcorn. I will read one after the other, requiring nothing but momentary entertainment.

During this time I started noticing three things: one, most of the books I was buying were very old indeed. Like, first published in the thirties.

Two: most of the newer books, particularly the ones (I was learning to recognize this at the time) whose cover and numbers indicated they’d gotten “push” were almost unreadable. I remember the ones that took long breaks in the middle to preach politics, but it wasn’t even that. It was say the ones where the professor characters sneers at everyone not an academic. Or the ones where characters’ moral worth is assigned by political orientation or….

Three, I often found writers whose voice and worlds were engaging and set out to find more (often by researching in the still-infant internet) and found out they’d been published two or three years before (but had never been on my local new store shelves) had written three books and disappeared forever.  As a reader this was frustrating and exhausting.  Mystery readers, particularly the ones who read mysteries like popcorn, get very invested in “their” series. I hated falling in love with new surroundings and knowing there wouldn’t be any more. It made me reluctant to try out new writers.

I also bought other books, in the used bookstore I could push a pram to.  One of the authors I found around that time was Terry Pratchett.

And I found others, too, it’s just that my rate of buys slowed to a crawl compared to when I had been able to buy books before.

In this net argument the same person asserted that by 2003 all these stores were in trouble, and it was self-obviously Amazon’s fault.

Now, I have a pretty good memory, and I was one of Amazon’s first customers. My desperate search for reading material sent me online, despite having to purchase with a credit card (for a while we kept an account exclusively for this purpose), having to wait two weeks for the books (no prime) and generally missing the browsing experience. But I could — and did — get the books I wanted.  Even if most of the series died at three books.

But 2003 was before ebooks were a thing, and though Amazon was — I think — bigger than a really big bookstore, it was not the weight in the world that it is now. By and large it was “just a store.”

It certainly didn’t have the power to kill other bookstores.

And yet, I agree, by 2003 bookstores in trouble.

The thing to remember is that just because a model was succeeding it didn’t mean that the model that succeeded killed the failing model. Sometimes industries, models and general ways of doing things commit suicide.

Which is the best way to explain what happened to publishing and bookselling in the nineties and oughts, and hell, still today.

There were contributing factors, outside the industry(ies) scope, which I didn’t even bring to mind right away when we started the discussion.

I maintained the most important thing was that book publishers and book sellers forgot that their primary motive for existing was “making money by selling books.”  Instead, they were publishing things they either thought would impress their NYC cohort or — often — things they thought “would sell” from a completely non-reader perspective. Hence the Sex in the City mysteries.

Which btw, speaking of yesterday’s post and provincialism, might seem weird to those of you not in publishing, but was part of how the business worked (and for all I know still does) to the point that when the Shakespeare series wasn’t doing well, they told me our only hope was that someone would do another “Shakespeare movie.” (Rolls eyes.)  The model was apparently based on the idea that movie goers and genre book readers are exactly the same people, and that popularity in one translates to the other.  Oh, and a total allergy to market research.

But there was more, and some of it, bizarrely, from outside the industry. There was the Thor tools case, for instance, which made it impossible to warehouse vast unsold inventories (or iow how careers in the field were made when your books, like mine, are “slow and steady sellers.”  You keep the inventory and grow that long tail until eventually the writer is selling massive amounts per book on release.)  Because, you see, you were taxed on those per cover price value, from what I understand.  So print runs got ever tighter and laydowns smaller, and writers started being treated like lottery tickets, who either paid big money up front or were let go or had to change name.

The need to absolutely predict sales numbers, and the fact that even an inaccurate prediction that led to a bestseller could undo an editor’s career, in turn, made the booksellers embrace “by the numbers” stocking, aka ordering to the net.

Which is a brilliant idea, maybe, for a tiny bookstore. It sucks mightily for a large chain which then allows the publishers to manipulate laydown.

You see, ordering to the net is very sound, if all books got the same headstart. If you have a store full of books that each stock say five copies, and some only sell two copies, and some sell 5, it makes more sense to reorder the 5 and only order two from the authors that only sold two copies before. Of course it does.

What it makes no sense though is in a world where some books have 100 copies, others have 1 or 2 per stores.  The chances of your finding, let alone buying that one copy are infinitesimally small even if you don’t throw in that many of that single or two copies WERE NEVER UNPACKED. As I found over my first series debacle, the books would show on stock on the computer (I was trying to do drive-by signings) but the massively overworked clerks never unpacked them. What that showed was stocked 2, sold none. The fact it would take a miracle to sell books that were in the closet (even when I showed up to sign it took days to locate them) didn’t matter to the computer.

Publishers, pressured to “print only what sells” welcomed this chance to manipulate what sold.  They routinely told the bookstores they had high confidence and were printing 100k books (which meant they were actually printing 50k. It’s lies all the way down.)of those books they wished to push.

Which in turn led to push marketing.

All of this adds up to: between 93 and 2003 the publishers and bookstores colluded to push on the public ONLY what they believed the public should read.

The end result — which I’m sure shocks everyone — of books being chosen and pushed ONLY by an insular (provincial) NYC establishment is that the books — unexpectedly! — stopped selling and people were turned off from reading in droves.

This in turn led to… bookstores failing.  Publishers are arguably still going (and I have ideas on how and what it means, but that’s something else again.)

So, apparently to the man on the street, this means that Amazon killed the bookstores (and video killed the radio star.)  No, seriously.

What I say is that if you’re a business that forgets your primary concern is to sell, you weren’t killed. You committed suicide. In the market place. With a smug assumption of unearned superiority.

All Amazon did was exploit a vastly under-served market.

 

Having had occasion in the last month — because I’m the one who speaks both languages — to mediate two bureaucracies of the same organization across two countries, I’m now convinced most people are not just bizarrely provincial. They’re unaware that the customs of their tribe are not a law of nature.

And people run on automatic with this, even when it doesn’t make any sense.

For instance, when I changed my name at citizenship, I didn’t know I was going to have to engage in a pissing contest over older son’s birth certificate.

You see, North Carolina has — or had 27 years ago — the sort of ridiculous paperwork for producing a birth certificate that would only occur to people who never gave two thoughts to how things are done elsewhere.

Instead of asking for the mother’s maiden name, it asked for mother’s maiden surname, and then drafted a birth certificate using that and the mother’s name.

My name at marriage was Alice Maria da Silva Marques de Almeida. But when I wrote my maiden surname was Almeida they proudly gave us a certificate saying Robert’s mother, when single, had been Sarah Almeida.  Head>desk.

I tried to explain this was a massive problem, because if anything happens and they need to trace their ancestry and/or need to prove who I was before I was married/changed my name, it will read like fraud.

At which point they told me it was okay, because when you change your name, they go back and change your birth certificate.  (Bangs head slowly on desk.)

I had to point out that, as far as the Portuguese government is concerned, I’m not even married yet. Because I’d have to pay a bazillion (more or less) dollars (okay, it was 4k and travel to places with a Portuguese consulate) to have that recognized in Portugal, and I’m just not that invested. Recognizing a name change from another country? not on at all.  Hell, I’m not sure they do the birth certificate thing when you change your name in Portugal.

They eventually conceded and changed the certificate but it took forever and a day, and they kept insisting that of course my birth certificate had to be changed. That’s just the way things were done.

Let’s say what I’ve been battling is of the same order, if slightly more explainable.

This arrant provincialism penetrates everything.  For instance, in conversation with my mom a few weeks ago she told me the doctors that treated me in childhood had no idea what the antibiotic doses were for a child, so they just gave me adult doses.  Later I mentioned this in a party of family and friends, and they all told me it was impossible.  All, of course, except the friend who has spent time abroad, dealing with their medicine, and who just nodded.

Because of this, politics at the international level is blind man’s bluff both ways.

Particularly since all the press is determinedly invested in misreporting and both ours and their sides tilt as left as possible.

A friend abroad assures me that in her country the people think that US anti-abortion protesters are troglodytes and religious fanatics (and also very few) but they don’t know that our abortion laws aren’t the same as theirs. I don’t remember if her country has an utter ban after 10 weeks, or 8 weeks, which they of course assume is exactly the same here. They don’t understand that if they were here and faced with actual attempts at legalizing post-birth infanticide they would, if they’re capable of morality at all, also be anti-abortion (and morally outraged.)

People in Europe, whose countries nationalized/socialized medicine shortly before or after WWII, solemnly tell us that it would be barbaric to just let medicine be private, and that they’d have people dying on the streets for lack of care… as we have.

They have absolutely no idea that our hospitals are bound by law to give care to anyone who comes in. It is in the best interest of their press which is by and large leftist to keep them uninformed and thinking that the alternative to their slow, sclerotic, biased system is “dying on the streets.”

And of course, they have no idea of how many innovations our medical system implements, that are unheard of in their countries.

Then people here hear how satisfied people abroad are with single payer, think it’s a great idea and we should have it here.

That’s not even counting the people who, during the cold war, kept telling me if Russia really were such a hell on Earth, surely people who lived there wouldn’t speak so well of it. The entire idea of suppression and fear meant nothing to them.

And let’s not get started on people who say things like “But it has to be that way. It’s like that here” because they think the way things happen — anything from finding a job to getting married — in their place is the only way they can happen anywhere.

I run into this more often than other people, of course, because of dealing with family on both sides. So I’m more aware of it than the average person.

So, what is this to people who dojn’t have family both sides?

Two things: first the globalization thing. The left still doesn’t understand why it doesn’t work, and the only reason they can figure out for us to oppose masses and masses of immigrants coming in is “racism.” Because they don’t understand how deep culture is, or how much it changes… everything, from work habits, to attitudes towards law and order, or learning, or innovation. To them culture is different attire and interesting food.  And the only reason you could disapprove of those is that you are a vile racist, of course.

They honestly think giving pamphlets to Middle Eastern men in Germany telling them that rape is wrong, m’kay is going to change attitudes towards women that have been taught and propagated for centuries. Because of course, culture doesn’t mean anything.

I don’t, btw, understand how they correlate this with their belief that culture is genetic and can’t be changed, but then, you know, if they were consistent they’d also have to explain how the sexes are exactly the same except for reproductive organs, meaning they think and feel exactly the same, and yet it’s worth it to go through massive surgery because you feel like the other sex inside. Or how saying that people start diverging by sex while in the womb is “transphobic.” (After all why change if you’re already the same. Pfui.)

But this ignorant provincialism is why the left thinks that they can just bring people from everywhere here and nothing of significance will change except they’ll be more progressive by nature because neo-Marxism, through the person of Gramsci, told them so.

Second thing is that as communications bring our world ever closer, and enmesh various cultures into work groups and companies, more and more as tech gets better, the cultural clashes and the assumptions that blow up in people’s faces are going to be spectacular.

And only being aware of the differences will allow people to survive.

Paradoxically, better communication will bring the world closer and further apart, and might perhaps for once and all put paid to the idea that nationalism is meaningless or dead.

Interesting times ahead.

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike

So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.

We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: Border

*This post amused me, because ALL the drama has got more so in the last –omg — 8 years. And organized fandom, cons, and increasingly trad pub mean even less than they did then. Meh. Shine on you crazy diamonds. I’ll be in my office and I’m not to be disturbed. – SAH*

One of the problems with being a writer is that you end up living way too much in your own mind.

This is fun when what you’re doing is… oh, coming up with wonderful worlds, or even horrible ones, alluring characters, or perhaps even horrible but interesting ones.

What I’m trying to tell you here is that it’s fine to let your imagination run on the page, but do not under any circumstances let it run free in your real life.

Okay, fine, so I admit that I’m the sort of person who has to control herself not to make the story of her trip to the grocery store more exciting.

Early on I realized that telling my mom how I was attacked by brigands on the way to get peanuts at the corner store was a bad idea.  If it didn’t sound realistic, I got grounded for lying.  If it sounded realistic, mom went on the war path.

So I learned not to lie.  Though I reserved the right to tell the story of the hunting for the peanuts in as thrilling a way as I could, “And then there I was in the isle, when, looking to the right, there it was: PEANUTS.  Oh, how joyous I was—” etc.

For the rest of the stuff I wrote stories.  I mean, people in general don’t expect stories to be true.  Though there was the gentleman who chided me for making up elves in my biography of Shakespeare.  (Yes, he DID mean Ill Met By Moonlight.  No, I don’t know why.)

For the rest of the stuff I still write stories.  You can sort of assume that if I’m telling something as true, it is true as far as I know, always barring errors of memory and the way the past becomes colored in our minds.  (How is it that I always remember things happening at six, eight or fourteen?  I think the Author forgot to fill in the other years.)

I do know the limits of memory and what you think happened in the sense that after about twenty years things blur a bit, in my case particularly visual details.  There are places I’m sure I knew so well they live inside me and places in my head (the places I make up) look just like them.  My grandmother’s kitchen has done the turn of fantasy palace kitchen and science fiction kitchen/cottage.  And…  And yet, would I be shocked if I could go back to it?  Would I find I’d miscounted the number of chairs?  That the cabinets were the wrong shade of blue?  And how come I can’t remember the color of the walls at all?

Memory, particularly when you’re a writer, when it softens with the passing of years, tends to make things “better stories.”  Usually it messes the timing.  Say that this is the story of how I found a ring.  (No, I don’t think I ever did.)  In real life, I might never have found who the ring belonged to.  But my mind will conflate it with the story I heard years later of the woman who threw her engagement ring away, and I’ll be sure I found out that was her wedding ring.

Not, consciously, you realize – just over the years, as they pass, the random events assemble themselves into story.

That’s fine.  It’s human.  The human mind creates stories out of random.  It’s possibly what makes us human. The ability to turn “don’t go into the forest because there’s a 20% chance you’ll fall and break your leg and no one will find you in time into “don’t go into the forest, there are rodents of unusual size and swamps of flame.”  And if you made the story good enough, the kids believed it, and nothing bad happened.

However, there is a tendency being writers to make stories out of other things.  Specifically, to make stories out of things we don’t understand.  And since most of the things we don’t understand are people, there is a tendency to make up stories about how people are behaving this way because they personally hate us… or something.

Years ago, when I took the Kris and Dean Professional Writers Workshop, they kept telling us “Try very hard not to make up stories about why publishers or editors are doing things.  THAT can kill your career because you’ll decide they hate you and act weird.”

I’ll grant you it was easy to decide all publishers hated you. If you go by once it’s a mistake, twice it’s a coincidence, three times is enemy action, all of us midlisters were under enemy fire ALL the time.

But most of the time, it was just how the system worked.  Doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t walk, when you finally could.  (Free, thank the Lord Almighty, free at last.) It just meant that your editor was not doing it on purpose.  He/she/it worked for a very large house, and if you weren’t one of the properties hotly defended you were more likely to get trampled and the book’s chances destroyed in bizarre ways than of getting off the gate with nothing bad happening.

It was almost impossible not to get paranoid, and of course my FEELINGS were often that everyone was against me, but realistically I knew mostly they didn’t remember I existed.  Sort of like the old joke “Everyone hates me.”  “Don’t be ridiculous.  Most of them don’t know you.”

But because my rational self knew that whatever the emotions, most people in NYC publishing didn’t in fact know I existed, I was very surprised when, telling an older writing friend about an editor missing an appointment with me, he teased me by saying “Oh, yes, he hates you and is trying to destroy your career.”  I guess he thought that’s what I was thinking because of how distressed I was.  I was distressed because I wasn’t absolutely sure I’d kept the appointment at the right place.  (I have no sense of direction.)  And paranoid or not, it’s not a good idea to stand up editors.  (Turns out we had each heard a different hour, and he called me and it got straightened out.)  But at the same time I wanted to say “Oh, that, no.  Thank you.  I’m not that stupid.”

At the same time, I couldn’t blame him.  I watched people go into meltdown because their editor didn’t smile at them in the elevator.  Writers and the sort of explosive emotional situation old publishing created resulted in… drama.

Since I left all publishers save the one I like and can deal with, I tend to keep from drama in my life.  The sad truth about me is that you can completely annoy me one day and I’ll forgive you in a week – not because I’m good natured but because I have a rotten memory for names. You can be a total asshat, and unless I really know you, in a week I won’t remember.

What this means is that I can be fulminatingly furious at someone in the field, but it won’t keep.  Look, I’m far more interested in what’s going on inside my head.  I can write an entire article talking about how wrong, wrong, wrong you are – not, mind you, calling YOU names, unless you have really stepped in it, which usually means you attacked me or one of mine in a personal way – but this doesn’t mean that when I meet you at Worldcon (in the once every five years I go) I’m going to cut you dead.  Chances are even if I think your politics or your favorite movie are repulsive, I find things about you to admire and even like.

Look I have friends – though they might feel otherwise about me – even among the glittery hoo-has of SFWA.  If we don’t talk about their particular issues, they can be pleasant and even interesting people.

One doesn’t condemn an entire person or forfeit an entire friendship just because our friend has one or two really stupid ideas.  If we did that, there would be no friendship and no person who passed muster – particularly among us opinionated lot.

What I mean is that I tend not to get in conflicts, and not to get involved in emotional drama, not because I’m particularly good, but because I’m really busy.  I’ve got barely enough strength for my daily life, my commitments, and my writing.  I do not have time to wonder if some friend is mad at me because I didn’t compliment her on her new sneakers, and I certainly don’t have time to be mad at you forever because you said my hair was funny.  Even when sneakers and hair are stories, or careers.

Unfortunately I’ve discovered, either because people are scared of what is happening in the field and trying to find emotional relief, or because publishers are not all consuming targets of their anger anymore, that some people have had feuds with me for years – that I was TOTALLY unaware of.

Usually the first I hear of it is when a friend of a friend says something like “I don’t want to get in the middle of your quarrel.”  Which leaves me blinking and going “Our what?” since I haven’t given this person half a thought in months.

This can be very flattering, of course.  It’s almost as good as having someone in love with you, when someone cares so much they carry on an entire quarrel without your even knowing.

But it’s a little bit crazy too.  Now, if you are in this field – or even if you aren’t, I understand this sort of thing happens in other careers too (though of course, I know as much about honest work as a duck knows about prospecting for gold) – and even in normal social life (about which I also know… yeah.  Ducks.  Gold.) – seriously, do try not to get involved in too many feuds.

I’ll admit the thing with SFWA got under my nose, like mustard, mostly because honestly, when they start going after older men for being older men, they’ve crossed lines that sheer decency would leave uncrossed.  I was mad, but it wasn’t personal.  I still am mad.  It still isn’t personal.

What I mean is, the people on the other side range from a handful of self-willed villains (or at least self-righteous harm-inflicting people) to a myriad of people who are just going along, just heard something, want to be on the side of angels.  Even when they act like loons, it doesn’t mean some of them aren’t quite decent, the sort of people I’d let catsit.

No, none of them have gone out of their way to pursue a feud with me – at least not that I’ve heard.  (Though granted, I haven’t heard much, more or less on purpose.)  I was just talking about that situation was an example, because of how insane it got and how fast, fueled by everyone’s imagination and wish to be offended.

I’m seeing that happen more and more, and the thing is, I think the reason it’s happening is that it doesn’t matter.  Someone said that disputes are hotter when the stakes are very, very small.

Right now, there is no proof that good standing in fandom, or with your professional equals means anything anymore.  A lot of the people who are buying books have never attended a con.  The local fandom can no longer affect the laydown of a book.  The author of Wool was second only to George R.R. Martin in sales, but when he attended a big con he had no one at his autograph session – because he was selling to people who don’t go to cons.

From personal experience cons have been losing importance.  Organized fandom has been losing the ability to influence sales… at the same time that not a week goes by I don’t hear of some new feud.  (Not usually involving me.)

I think it’s because, like thinking your publisher hated you was better than thinking you’d been THAT unlucky three times, thinking that people in the field are destroying you is better than thinking that you just haven’t figured out how to deal with the new conditions yet.

The problem is that when your creativity is going towards interpersonal drama, it’s not going to writing, or whatever you do for a living.  Also, it makes people outside the field think we’re nuts.  (Which might or might not matter ;) )

Do other professions experience this too?  Does it matter if someone is fighting with you if you’re not even aware of it?  What do you do about it in saner fields than SF/F?  Am I hurting myself by being unaware that some people might/might not have it in for me?  Where do people find the energy for al this?  Am I broken because my attitude is, “hate me all you want, so long as you’re not actively coming over to argue with me?”

I remember in the village women mostly spent their lives in interpersonal feuds over things like “she cut in front of me in the fish queue, so I’m going to cut in on her at the green grocers.”  Even back then, I couldn’t muster enough interest to remember who was mad at whom, and shocked people who were feuding with my family by talking to them – not out of good nature, but because I couldn’t remember.

Am I the only one with a wretched memory?  Or is it just that I channel so much inside, I couldn’t bother to remember who I was mad at?

Perhaps it costs me in sales, or friends, or something – but if I have to put that much drama into something, I want to sell it.

(Grumbles off, convinced there’s something seriously wrong with her.)

 

When I was little, my favorite folk hero wasn’t even from my culture — the one my region had that was somewhat similar was an out and out villain, who might have robbed from the rich to suborn the poor, but didn’t have the same streak of nobility — it was Robin Hood.

And no, I didn’t love him for the same reason the left does. They seem to think he’s some kind of Bernie Sanders in tights (pauses to try to make image go away) deciding who has earned too much (Oh, sorry, as Mr. Obama said, “made enough money”) and equalizing it with those who weren’t willing to not make that.  Or perhaps a male Occasional Cortex giving money to those unwilling to work.

What they don’t know about the middle ages…

Anyway, mostly what Robin Hood did was keep the boot of the powerful — which isn’t the same as rich, even if they often coincide — from the neck of the people barely struggling to survive. And he did it with elan and aplomb and — in the serials I read — a good deal of pulpy trickery which is the equivalent of magic.  I liked him the way I later liked the Saint (the Leslie Charteris one. Though the movie was very well done, it was not the same person.)

The reason Robin Hood needed to do that is that the king had gone on the crusades and not come back, and with him had gone the law, since in those pre-magna carta days the king was the law.

Yes, in real history there was a lot more going on there, and Richard himself was an almighty pain in the neck, as kings tend to be.

But it wasn’t who the king was in theory. In theory the king was supposed to be in charge of making sure the hereditary noblemen didn’t exploit the poor.  Sometimes it even worked in the sense that the king didn’t really want the noblemen to become so big they challenged him and that meant making side-pacts with the peasants, to keep the noblemen in check.  This De Haute en Bas strategy was used more often by the French kings, who frankly had “vassals” who had more power than them until they managed to concentrate the power in the Sun King. (Though Henri IV, with his concession that Paris was worth a mass, had started that concentration.)  There are some historians who think it was the attempt at using that strategy by the admittedly inept Louis XVI that misfired and blew up into the French Revolution.

At any rate, at least in the serials of Robin Hood, the king was the law, and the regent or the governor of Nottingham were not the law, and allowed the noblemen to run rough shod over the peasants and take their last groat for unspecified purposes.  It wasn’t so much a matter of giving people what they hadn’t earned as of giving them what they’d earned that had been expropriated by the powerful.

In real life, of course, the unjust taxes of John Lackland were to save Richard’s skanky ass from prison in the land of one of his nominal allies. Never mind that, though. This far back, it’s the symbology that matters.

As we all know Robin Hood — or at least I know, because I fell down that rabbit hole for a month and a half at one time, in all my spare time — is mostly mythical and conflating him with the time of King Richard is nonsense, as he seems to go much further back, perhaps to some mostly-forgotten Celtic myth.

Which is a great pity because I’m starting to think we need a figure like that.

Because Judges have gone insane and think they can overthrow the very law under which they were sworn.

It started to become really obvious when that moron Judge Posner decided to diss the Constitution of the United States, but now it’s gotten truly ridiculous.

Do these idiots think they’re kings by Divine right and that the law is what they say it is, so they can chop away at the very law that gave them their position?

Do they imagine by destroying the rule of law it will be the rule of them?

They wouldn’t be the first nor the last to think so. And usually the result of this is that they end up dead. Unfortunately, usually, so does their land.

Because laws are what we have instead of the word of a king and of a king protecting the less powerful from the more powerful. You chop away at that, and you leave it to the supposed, self-proclaimed elites to try to “rule” over those they presume have no power.

Oh, they think it will be all lovely and the way they wish. To the extent they already ignore the laws and engage in crony capitalism, and deplatform those they disagree with and — if you please — brag about it in the public sphere, it’s no wonder they think so.

But they could benefit from reading some history. They won’t. The truth is like Louis XVI they understand very little about people.  At least pour Louis was born to it and was trying to be the best he could, not a rapacious little know-nothing trying to grasp power he wasn’t prepared for.  And yet their fate will his his.  Oh, and the fate of many of the revolutionaries that toppled him.

The genius of the American system is that we can dispense with a king only so long as the Constitution is supreme.  As long as its respected and its rule inflexible, we have no need of a king applying some De Haute en Bas strategy just to allow us to breathe when that boot is lifted from our necks a little. In fact, the law allows high and low to cooperate, mingle and prosper together.

Which is altogether too bad, as it’s been subverted, ignored or outright prostituted for more than a hundred years. And now the idiots are trying to call it outdated.  When they aren’t outright trying to use it in the service of their unlawful intents.

Idiots? But it gives them so much power!

Sure it does. Except it never stays that way. Without a really wily king — say Louis XIV — the whole thing tends to explode, as it did in the French revolution.  And even Louis XIV, it could be said sowed the most distant seeds of that.

The only way for men to work and live together without boots on necks or, eventually, the owners of the boots adorning lampposts (and it wouldn’t be only that. Why, we can do even more high tech than the guillotine. More satisfying too.) is for the law to apply to everyone, and to be inviolate and respected.

Once there is a law for the “high” (and boy, are they. That Oxacan ditchweed must be a special crop.) and one for the low, the time when high and low grapple and the cries of aristo, aristo a la lanterne are heard throughout the land are as inevitable as Fall following summer.

Only a moron or someone blinded by utter greed to the point of foolishness would forget that.

But they’ve been forgetting.  And there’s more of them every day.

And if we don’t fight back for the law now, we’ll all be wading through blood later.

Be not afraid. Keep your principles, and your ideals in mind.  The sea is about to get rough.

But in the the end we win they lose. Because no matter how many times it sinks, civilization always rises again.

And equality before the law IS civilization.