I am a novelist with work published in science fiction, fantasy, mystery and historical "novelized biography". I've won the Prometheus award and the Dragon award. I also write under the names Elise Hyatt and Sarah D'Almeida. http://sarahahoyt.com/
If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo,please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months(unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, by clicking through and buying (anything, actually) through one of the links below, you will at no cost to you be giving a portion of your purchase to support ATH through our associates number. A COMMISSION IS EARNED FROM EACH PURCHASE.*Note that I haven’t read most of these books (my reading is eclectic and “craving led”,) and apply the usual cautions to buying.– SAH
Surviving the sudden shift to a parallel Earth, Nic finds a refuge in the not-quite-Ancient China she finds herself in, the fortress of Shanmen – and a new identity as the idiot water-carrier Niu. But when Nic defends the fortress against an enemy attack in the night and nearly dies, the general in charge uncovers her disguise.
Will he welcome this uncanny foreign woman, or join the others calling her a demon? And will the forces involved in the river massacre track her down and threaten them all?
Ray thought magic only existed in books and movies–not in real life!
On the first day of seventh grade, twelve-year-old Ray Sebastian discovers his home town, Centerville, is the most dangerous place on Earth. Buried in caves underneath the town is a treasure-trove of ancient and powerful artifacts that were kept secret–until now.
Ray and Clancy Jones, the fearless new girl at school, uncover a magical stone turtle that gives them amazing power over others. Together with Clancy’s eccentric grandfather, the three join forces to prevent the turtle from falling into the hands of a deadly sorcerer who wants the ultimate power for himself.
From the streets of Centerville to the dangerous caves beneath, can Ray and his friends protect the magical artifacts and defeat the villains before it’s too late?
The anthology has 25 original legal science-fiction stories: 3 short-short stories, 18 short stories, 2 novelettes, and 2 novellas. Plus 1 original preface, 1 original essay, and 1 original Post Scriptum.“Science fiction” intends a recital, the foundation of which is a yet-to-be technology. Usual yet-to-be technologies are space travel, time travel, and terraforming. “Legal” intends that a substantive law matter is central to a recital. The target audiences are lawyers and sci-fi readers. To that end, excellent writing prevails. There is not a single blasphemous, scatological, or reproductive word in the anthology. An aficionado or aficionada of quality legal fiction and of first-rate science fiction will be happy with the anthology.
Steve Train, gambler, adventurer, clever rogue, didn’t care much for work. But then he was offered a job with no work, but plenty of danger. The job: track down outlaw Jim Nair — and hand him a pile of money!
This iktaPOP Media edition includes a new introduction by indie author D. Jason Fleming giving historical and genre context to the novel.
A tween boy’s Christmas gift opens a world of wonder and brings joy to a whole town fallen on hard times. A young New Englander in the early Twentieth Century discovers that some parts of human history don’t bear too close examination. A literary critic in the old Soviet Union must confront his own moral cowardice.
These stories, along with a multitude of bite-sized works of flash fiction, carry you from the most prosaic of events to the moments of awe that offer glimpses of matters larger than ourselves.
Near-future Earth suddenly finds itself in a different version of the solar system, one where human civilizations trade and war between planets. Lurking behind those humans: the long-vanished non-human “Builders,” who colonized the solar system long ago, seeding it with Earth life. Ward Parke, astronomy enthusiast and presidential advisor, wants to explore this new solar system, but the planets here are on the verge of a genocidal, civilization-ending interplanetary war. Our Earth is caught in the middle of that looming war, with technology hundreds of years behind the other powers. Its only advantage is an ancient stone library preserved by a now-vanished human civilization from Venus and a mysterious woman called Pandora who may be that civilization’s only survivor.Near-future Earth suddenly finds itself in a different version of the solar system, one where human civilizations trade and war between planets. Lurking behind those humans: the long-vanished non-human “Builders,” who colonized the solar system long ago, seeding it with Earth life. Ward Parke, astronomy enthusiast and presidential advisor, wants to explore this new solar system, but the planets here are on the verge of a genocidal, civilization-ending interplanetary war. Our Earth is caught in the middle of that looming war, with technology hundreds of years behind the other powers. Its only advantage is an ancient stone library preserved by a now-vanished human civilization from Venus and a mysterious woman called Pandora who may be that civilization’s only survivor.
Never wanted see the eerie glow of the Powerpods. Never wanted to visit Circum Terra. She never had any interest in finding out the truth about the Darkships. You always get what you don’t ask for. Which must have been why she woke up in the dark of shipnight, within the greater night of space in her father’s space cruiser, knowing that there was a stranger in her room. In a short time, after taking out the stranger—who turned out to be one of her father’s bodyguards up to no good, she was hurtling away from the ship in a lifeboat to get help. But what she got instead would be the adventure of a lifetime and perhaps a whole new world—if she managed to survive…. A Prometheus Award Winning Novel, written by a USA Today Bestseller.
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.
Bring Back That Wonder Feeling- A Blast From The Past From March 2012
Over the last few years I’ve taken part in more than a dozen panels in science fiction conventions where the question came up “Why is there no sense of wonder in science fiction?” Or “Where have all the young people gone? Why aren’t they reading science fiction?”
The excuses are always the same. The foremost and most favorite is “The age of wonder in SF is between 12 and 14.” The second is “They’re living in a science fiction world. They don’t need to read it.”
On this I’m going to call bullsheep and oh, yeah, bullsheep again.
If the age of wonder is between 12 and 14, then YA SF should be healthy and thriving, right? Instead of non-existent in comparison to YA fantasy. And while there’s something to say for that, psychologically – I remember reading sf as a young kid and being filled with a sense of amazement, but actually my most fervent reading age for SF was between fourteen and about twenty five or so. Partly because at 22 I came to the states, and I found a whole plethora of work that had never been translated.
As for the “they’re living in science fiction.” Oh, PLEASE. This is the part of the blog in which we say “your age is showing,” and also “Get over yourself.” Admittedly the age at which sf/f was most popular was around the forties and fifties. Not respectable, but popular. Well, it could be far more accurate to say that they lived in science fiction, at least by their lights. Most twenty year olds then, probably remembered a world where cars were very few, and where oil lamps and candles still had a place in many houses, but they were living in a world with an interstate system and electrical lighting and indoor plumbing, and the beginnings of computers. Compared to that jump, the one from the seventies to today is nothing. Oh, yeah, the computer is starting to make it different, but it’s not the thing that people DREAM of. In fact, it’s so unromantic, and came on so slowly that most of us have trouble realizing how fundamentally transformational it is.
Recently two more excuses have been brought in. One is “the boys don’t read. They’re watching TV and playing games.” We’ll go into this again later. And one that is almost right (almost) which is “We had all these great things, but we didn’t pay up. There are no flying cars, or moon rockets.”
They’re almost right on that one, but not quite. The people saying this are ten to twenty years older than I, and they’re right that there’s a generation that is disgusted at this – but that’s my generation. And those of us who still read sf tend to read off beat stuff, or older stuff, not the stuff that’s “pushed” or considered “high quality” by most of the houses. (Baen, as usual is its own little world and therefore exempt from these discussions.)
The kids alive today don’t know about those broken promises. Though I’m here to tell you they still get excited about going to space and the future. It’s just that this is no longer what SF is about. And (see what I did here) this means that they go play games, which do have mega fighting robots, and space colonies, and the other things that once made them read SF. This is not even particularly important, except insofar as there are things you can learn from written stories that are harder to come by in games. I think empathy is one. And good reading skills is another. Both of these are useful in life, and we’re shutting a generation out of them. Beyond that, science fiction has the chance to make kids THINK about the future before it gets here, and also to have them try on new ideas.
So, who killed the sense of wonder?
You’ll forgive me, since I know a lot of my readers belong to this generation, but it was boomers moving into the publishing houses.
I understand WHY it happened. I just don’t have to like it. Boomers came of age at a time when population was supposed to keep expanding indefinitely (note to the brainless bunnies who commented on my war is Hell post, no it’s no longer doing that. It might actually be contracting. We only have highly dubious counts, from countries who get aid per capita to believe it is still expanding. We also thought the USSR was expanding, until it collapsed. There’s lies, damn lies and statistics.) Youth was the way of the future. You only have to re-read the Heinlein of the sixties and seventies to get this feeling. The older people were kowtowing because they expected to be vastly out-numbered. So between that and a bunch of other cultural things, that one generation grew up thinking they were something special and that they should make everything different.
Also for some reason and I honestly can’t think why, unless it is a combination of their parents’ experiences in WWII AND Soviet Agit Prop (yeah, I know. I blame a lot of things on it. But they were GOOD), the boomers thought that they could create a perfect world.
Unfortunately this meant that when they moved into SF, right after Heinlein had exploded out of the ghetto of crudely colored magazines, they decided it was their mission in life to make SF accurate, respectable and, above all RELEVANT.
This is when the problems came in. They came in because every generation’s idea of “relevant” freezes at around the time they come of age. The burning issues of the day get resolved and gotten over, but they’re still the ones that formed them. And some of those issues weren’t even, really, issues by the time they came of age, but they were part of what was being struggled with while they were growing up.
When the boomers swept away the old order of SF and brought their stuff in, suddenly SF became obsessed with gender issues (mostly defined as a rather pat feminism), race issues (the burning issue of their day), and misunderstood economics (that to be honest is still relevant. their kids fail to grasp economics in exactly the same way.) The idea of being “cool” made them worship “literary” only since most of them wouldn’t know literary if it bit them in the fleshy part of the arse, “incoherent” “hallucinatory” and “pointless” had to do the turn.
Then came my generation who, btw, are not boomers, though we often get aggregated onto the end of it. We’re also not gen xers, sorry. Some people call us the lost generation, though we were mostly found – at work, trying to claw a space for ourselves while being told we weren’t cool or “socially conscious.” We’re the band of kids born somewhere between 59 and 68 or so, though these things are fluid, and I’ve met “us” stretching all the way back to 51 and them stretching all the way up to 70. A lot of this had to do with how old your parents were when you were born. Our current president, for instance, despite being only a year older than I is very much fully integrated in boomer culture, being the child of a very young mother and raised mostly by her parents, and therefore more as her little brother than her son. Also, for some of us on the cusp, we CHOSE.
I’m not saying all the boomers did was bad. Largely I’d rather praise them than bury them. But in SF they’ve been an unmitigated disaster.
Not as readers, as such. Readers still wanted the same thing – fun. Not as writers, so much. Some of the still readable writers – Dave Drake, possibly Weber (I don’t know his age) and many others in the Baen stable ARE boomers. Connie Willis is also a boomer. I think so is F. Paul Wilson (though he looks about my age.) – are boomers, but as editors and critics and the people who set the culture. Maybe it has something to do with the liberal arts culture of the time.
I didn’t notice, because my exposure to SF was limited by what was translated into Portuguese, what was going on until about five years after coming to the US – five years spent catching up on favorites’ books that hadn’t been translated.
And then after a while, I started realizing that these books were… odd. The new stuff coming out, in the ever-shrinking SF shelf at the local bookstore in Charlotte NC, was… strange. Not the SF/F I remembered at all. Well, the fantasy was mostly quest, this being the mid eighties. I can take or leave quest. It doesn’t do a thing for me. A lot of the SF was cyber punk which bored me. The more serious works were… uh…
And by “Uh” I mean, I’d get to the end and either not remember the book at all or throw it against the wall.
And please understand that while in Portugal, in despair I had resorted to reading NOT JUST typical seventies SF of the “We all have tons of odd sex and then we die” or French SF (check out Pierre Barbet sometime.) Or even French SF Romance (which was very funny, as it was written by people who’d never read SF. the one thing I remember, for whatever reason, was the woman being showered by a floating ball-robot that sprayed her with water. I’m still trying to figure out WHY. World building was always funnier than heck, as tech made no sense.) I even got hold of a mag called Panspermia which was French SF and I THOUGHT was devoted to the theories of Fred Hoyle. Turns out I was wrong. Who knew? The fact it came in a plain brown wrapper should have given me a clue, but I was innocent.
So, my tolerance for bad is very high.
But these books were POINTLESS. They either had meandering non-plots, or they had an endless repetition, of the hit-over-the-head type with … not even social controversy but social markers of that time and class. You know “Women are better than men.” “Every culture is better than Western” (or what I call Ashram anthropology… or more likely hashram anthropology.) These were soon joined by newer and stranger talking points as boomers realized that the world was more difficult to make perfect than they thought, “The human species is a blight upon the Earth.” and “We should go back to eighteenth century tech and die out.”
Sometimes, rarely, you came across a book that bowled you over all the way to the end when, I guess in an effort to stay relevant or interesting, the author killed every character.
Like Amanda who talks about his over at MGC today, I thought that people simply weren’t writing the good stuff, anymore. And then I wrote it. And I sent it out. Do you know the MOST common rejection for DST, back thirteen years ago, was that I had “illogical world building.” No one could ever explain to me WHY this was so, but mumbled explanations ranged from the fact that “In five hundred years we won’t even be human anymore, and we’ll have all sorts of computer augmentation.” (Rolls eyes. Why if we get better at bio?) And “it’s too cheerful” or “It ends well” or “The state will be far more efficient and everyone will be happy” or… I SWEAR I’m NOT MAKING THIS UP, from my agent at the time, “Perhaps you can make it believable if instead of the Good Men, you have the Catholic Church rule the world.” (WHAT? No, seriously, WHAT? I’d never talked about any religion to this man, so I can only assume that the Catholic Church was his own personal bete noir. Who knows why?) And yes, most of the time my sf was rejected by agent and never sent out because “no one wants to read that” and “you lack a big idea.”
At that point I did what everyone else seemed to have been doing since the seventies, and moved over to fantasy. Only fantasy was even then falling victim to the same nonsense. It seemed, for instance, that having heroic males was out. And you had to have a certain amount of allotted whine per page about the evils of patriarchy or praise of the great goddess.
So I took refuge in the past and wrote historical stuff – fantasy and mystery. I’ll note at this time both time travel and alternate history were getting very popular, I think for the same reasons. But there’s only so much you can do in the past, and most people don’t want to work that hard (Regencies, arguably the most successful historical subgenre – of romance – aren’t really. They have a few historical details, but, by and large, are modern people in costumes and following outdated rules.) Also, well… going into the past might be a sense of wonder of a sort, but not the kind likely to appeal to young people. Particularly since, with few exceptions (Frankowski, S.M. Sterling, Flint) people didn’t do Connecticut Yankee things in the past, making it modern. Instead, they just struggled along there, and more likely than not died in the end. (I’m not casting aspersions on Doomsday Book where the death is natural and makes sense and it’s NOT the main character.)
And Fantasy went the same way, till it became “unbearably long feminist screed on the evils of men.” Look, I’ll take some of this. Mercedes Lackey and a bevy of other fantasy writers of the eighties did a bit of this. The father was always wicked (eh. I have that too Which is weird since I’m very close to my dad.) There were some evil guys. BUT most of the men were still decent, and even if the main character was female (and that wasn’t always) she would find either love or decent male friends. But then that changed. I actually had a book rejected for being “insufficiently female centric” despite the fact the main character is female AND she’s a take charge female (a police woman) AND she rescues her man (Think Athena’s little sister in urban fantasy.) Why? Well the explanation had something to do with her falling in love with a MAN. (The horrors! Shudder.)
And that’s when I started realizing what was wrong – though it took Amanda to solidify the thought into words – the thoughts we were getting for lack of a better word “pushed at us from the over culture.” This was the way they wanted us to think, the way that not only were news stories slanted, and narratives framed, (the Duke Lacrosse case) BUT the stuff they were teaching our kids in school.
Was my biggest problem with it, then, that it was blantantly a-historical and counter-factual. Well, no. I lie for a living. My morals are weak.
My problem with it was IN FACT that it was boring. If I wanted to get these points pounded into me until I got sick, I’d read the newspaper, the advice columns, the fashion mags or watched sitcoms. There was nothing new THERE.
Meanwhile, btw, TV and movie sf continued doing very well by bringing in much of the feel of the pulp era to the screen. For instance, you couldn’t SELL Stargate (though I wrote a short story which even called them stargates back a year before it came out. It’s okay, it’s a very bad story) as a book or a story. Why not? Not plausible. We know humans evolved on Earth. You can’t violate what we know in science.
Between the bands of political correctness, the bands of “relevance” and the bands of “we want to be literary” science fiction was strangled in the crib by people who didn’t care if sales numbers kept falling because, well “kids aren’t reading. They live in science fiction.” And their bosses believed them.
But this is neither a dirge nor a despairing article. And I MIGHT write dystopian societies now and then, but my characters still manage, by and large, to fight through.
This is to tell you it doesn’t have to be that way. Ric Locke’s book is full of the sense of wonder. I haven’t read much else recently, because I’m busy trying to finish contracts so I can put some stuff up myself, but I have a feeling if there aren’t other books like his out yet, there will be. I’m looking forward to being delighted, shocked and titillated (get mind out of gutter. You’re leaving me no space) by heretical notions of human history, strange thoughts on human future, and fun rides along the way.
The readers now have control, and I think they want their sense of wonder back. Do you have a space opera you wrote years ago, which got rejected everywhere? Dust it off, look it over, unmuzzle it if you tried to make it acceptable to the establishment.
And then put it up. The future is free.*
(*With the purchase of another future. Said purchase, as all purchases of liberty might entail the pledge or actual payment of your life your fortune and your sacred honor. You will only keep the liberty you’re willing to fight for. The establishment is always the enemy of the future. You have been warned.)
While Heinlein was correct that those who don’t know history have no past and no future, knowing history is not enough. In some cases, it might be worse.
While travel is generally believed to broaden the mind, travel by itself is not sufficient, or even particularly helpful, depending on what you’re doing.
Both of the recommendations are designed to give you patterns of what could happen that you haven’t lived through; and patterns of how people live who aren’t you.
The problem is that humans are very, very — did I mention very — resistant to breaking out of the space behind their eyes and see that other people might actually be different.
I see it time and time again, for good and ill: very good people falling prey to very bad ones because they assume everyone is like them, just “misinformed” or “needs help”; very bad people doing horrific things to others because “obviously they would do it to me first if they could.” And everything in between.
I also see every country, regardless of their history making the assumption that the modus operandi and motives of other cultures and organizations is exactly the same as theirs. I’ve now mentioned about a million times the idiots who went over as Human Shields to Iraq because “they can’t even provide drinking water for their people, how would they have missiles” thereby completely missing the fact that other countries — dictatorships at that — have different priorities than say the US or England, even. In the same way, Portugal assumes that every country is as fraught as corruption as they are. Which works fine for other Latin countries, but fails them when it comes to other places, because as corrupt as we are… yeah. It’s nowhere near there yet. Russia assumes everyone moves, breathes and thinks only about them, and that everyone’s intention is to threaten them or conquer them, because they are obsessed with their dreams of national glory, and they think they should rule the world. And the US by and large goes around like a large vaguely autistic child who really, really, really doesn’t understand how different it is from other nations, or if it does assumes it’s worse.
Look, it’s part of the reason our intelligence services are so sucky. To completely understand what other countries are doing and why, you have to know they have very different cultures. They’re not you. Most countries can sort of extrapolate other countries, but America is so different we suck at it. This is why we tend to think places like the USSR (Russia’s party mask) were totes super powers. Because for America to do and say the things they did and said, we’d have to be very sure of our power. But other countries aren’t America. So we go through the world acting like gullible giants.
In fact Americans have one of the weirder cultures in the world. It’s just not in your face weird as China (whose history reads like they should be extra-terrestrials.) It’s subtle and more in the mental furniture.
Because of this, and because we’re a continent-sized nation, born and bred Americans (as opposed to imports like me) read not just the rest of the world but history hilariously wrong. (The history part is because at least when I went through school here — one year — American schools suck at teaching history. It’s all names and dates, not “Why did France do that?” Yeah, probably not worse than the rest of the world, now that all the books have just-so Marxist explanations, but still stupid.)
I had friends in my writers’ group back when who were writing, say, ancient Egyptian families and couldn’t understand in most of them the teens wouldn’t be/act the same as American teens now. Heck, my dad’s generation in Portugal, less than 100 years ago weren’t “teens” really. Their equivalent was under ten. Because by 12 most of the boys in the village were apprenticed in the job they’d have for life. (And dad was in school, yes, but it was way tougher than even I had.) They didn’t have time. And even I — and you guys know my basic disposition — didn’t sass my parents as American teens do, because there was a deep “fund” of “respect the elders” in the culture. I still have trouble calling people older than I — even colleagues — by their first name.
And then there’s the hilarious — or sad — misunderstandings like the Human Shields mentioned above. It’s sad, because they will buy other countries at face value, but are willing to entertain their own country might be evil. Which is why we have a large contingent of open-mouth guppies who think that the US invented slavery. Even though places around the world still have slavery. Including China, where everyone is a slave, it’s the degree that varies, of course.
The problem is made worse — not better — by idiotic travel abroad.
To understand the differences in a country, you need to live with them, as one of them, for a while. You need to speak the language well enough you understand overheard conversations. Etc.
My experience coming over as an exchange student for 12th grade was about ideal. I lived with an American family, as one of their kids, and attended a school nowhere USA (okay, a suburb of Akron, Ohio) and yeah, I had slight celebrity status in the school — being one of three foreign exchange students — but not that much. So I got to experience the normal life of normal people in normal circumstances, which was an eye-opener.
I always wanted my kids to follow me in this experience, but you know, things got complicated around the time they were of age to do it. So they didn’t. They still have experienced life as an every day foreigner when we visit my parents. In fact the issue there is that they never get past the irritation “What do you mean we can’t do that” and towards “oh, it’s just different. Still sucky, but different.”
Going over for two weeks, with or without the guided tour, staying in nice hotels and associating only with people at your social level and not past the level of polite interaction does not enlarge the mind. Instead, it gives a false sense of knowing what the world is like. This is where we get the “socialists” who know it’s good, because look at all the magnificent buildings in Europe, and the fact everyone has time to sit in the coffee shop and socialize with friends. And look at all the amazing public transportation. And and and. If you lived there, or knew history, you’d know most of the buildings created by socialists in the 20th and 21st century are already crumbling. (Some start before being finished.) You’d know people sit around in coffee shops either because they are unemployed, they pretend to work and their boss pretends to pay them, or all of the above. And all of it is paid for in a significant reduction in lifestyle and just the general comfort of life. (Take it from me. Their lifestyle is two social economic levels down from us, for the same relative “income level.” So, you know, upper class is middle-middle class here.) And you’d know the frustration of waiting for the bus on a rainy, windy day, getting soaked, but the bus is late because all the bus drivers went out for a pint together. And suddenly there’s five of them in a row, but you’re already soaked and starting to cough. More importantly you’d know the public transport only works because everyone works in the city and lives in crowded suburbs, in stack a prol apartments, while the countryside is relatively empty. And the people who live there need to buy gas at ridiculous prices, so they can barely afford it.
And sometimes customs that seem cruel just mean you didn’t understand any of it. Like, I was joking recently, with friends that I suck as a mother in law and would be shunned in Portugal. I rather love the girls my sons picked; have no intention of conducting low-level psychological warfare on them, and see no point in keeping them under my thumb. Which is the normal thing in Portugal, still.
BUT you see, there is a reason. When mom came to the village, grandma had to more or less make sure she fit in and didn’t disgrace the family. (It was indifferently successful.) Because villages were TIGHT communities, and the way to be helped, not hurt by them is to fit in completely. Which most people had trouble learning.
Normally integration took two to three generations. UNLESS you were a woman coming in, in which case it was your mother in law’s job to do to you what bootcamp instructors do to raw recruits, until you behaved like a “native.” (And yes, there was enormous variation between places even 10 miles apart, even when I was a kid in the seventies.)
So, it’s an evil custom, unless you know why it was being done. Most Americans don’t. And most American authors can’t write other cultures convincingly. Which, frankly, is one of the most amusing things about the left with their obsession with writing ‘the other.’ They’re so locked into the space behind the eyes that the only thing they understand as “other” is different languages, skin colors, or clothing. And those are the superficial, stupid differences without a distinction. Now, there’s nothing wrong with them that wouldn’t be fixed by dropping them naked in the middle of the Amazon rain forest and coming back in a year to collect them, but I understand the SPCA would be upset. And some of them might die. Or something.
Anyway, the point of this: When you naively assume everyone is like you, do try to think through it again. Because, well, most people aren’t. Even your siblings are likely to be somewhat different.
It’s difficult to believe in real difference — motivation, thought, etc — but if you manage to even approximate that belief it will save you grief and make you a better writer too, if you choose to write.
BUT more importantly, stop projecting what will happen to this country (or won’t) from both the history you learned, and the history OF OTHER COUNTRIES you learned.
The first might or might not work, depending on how much you really studied the time period, and whether you understand the differences. Like, yeah, no, the American revolution wasn’t instant upon the offenses of George III. Took forever, and up to the moment of shooting (And a little after) people you’d now stigmatize as sell outs were trying to reconcile without the need for a revolution. In that we’re not even slightly different, and we’d still have a road ahead before it came to being serious about an armed solution. (And we might not need it. That prudence, demonstrated by the funding fathers, should be emulated. Because war sucks and breaks all the things.)
The second never works. Partly because of the arithmetic. America can’t take the USSR option and keep itself going by looting other countries. We have no real empire partly because its against the fundamental nature of the country, but partly because it wouldn’t work. Given how much we consume/create/etc we just end up supporting any territories we claim. And that’s the opposite of what an empire should be. (And the idiots who think that buying and selling from someone is “imperialism” can exit the room now, on their own or under a succession of kicks from the regulars. You choose.) Even if we went full on evil, we couldn’t support ourselves that way. The other countries don’t have enough to keep us going, and would have less if we stop buying from them.
But then there is the fact we are weird. Unless you moved a lot within the country, you have no idea how different we are even inside the country. I’ve lived now in five states and eight different cities. It’s like a foreign country even moving between cities, much less states. The fact we speak one language (kind of) masks that somewhat, but it’s still a big difference in day to day life.
If you know one state/city/culture/class…. you know one of them. You don’t know America.
Most of the “problems” the left rails about might be true SOMEWHERE — we’re a country of 300 million, after all — but they’re not true everywhere, and they might not even be true in a significant majority of the country. The same is true of the problems the right rails about too. They seem more prevalent because of mass media being lefty, but really, no.
So when you’re anticipating what will happen “They put us all in jail” when you realize we are the majority of the country, and how large the country is, is laugh out loud funny to most people outside the big cities. As is the idea of “We just march on them and–” because lefties don’t all conveniently live in one place. (Nor are all of them disarmed.)
Most of the projections based on other countries will make you a doomer. Which is to say “A sleep walking enemy agent, demoralizing those who are still fighting to avoid war, but who are really on your side.” Don’t do that.
They might also — depending on where you live — make you unreasonably cocky.
We are in America. We are in uncharted land. You can’t know how it will turn out for good or ill.
All you know is the indications. And the indications are good for the side of freedom. (They don’t work at all in math terms for the totalitarians.) And more and more people are getting fed up with the left nonsense, mostly because the left can’t leave anyone or anything alone. Ever.
Oh, yeah, also despair is a sin.
Put your shoulder to the wheel. Don’t be entranced by false models.
It’s not that it can’t happen here. They’re trying very hard to make it happen here. It’s that the rest of us are working very hard so it doesn’t. And we have reality on our side.
It’s still going to suck like a hoover, for a while. Let’s make it a short while.
I’m digit-dyslexic. I’m word dyslexic, too, mind you. But words, though I can sometimes spell them very weirdly — like by phorgetting the letter f exists — I can usually figure it out the next day and sometimes spell checker can.
While with numbers, 365 is the same as 563 as 635. This means that no one should trust me to cut a piece of wood. And that when I was doing flooring in houses past, I often made paper patterns of the piece I needed, as though I were making a dress. Because that worked better. Also why I refinish furniture but rarely build it from scratch.
And therefore it is immensely funny — maybe — that I’ve always been intensely aware of “basic kitchen math.”
Like, you know, if you only have two eggs, you’re not going to make that souffle that calls for six. If you only have an onion, and you’re using half, you’ll only have half left.
And of what I call “basic economics.” Everything makes a living, from the littlest bacteria to the largest whale. You have to do things that put food in the mouth. Enough food for enough energy to “earn” the next meal.
I’ve always been aware of basic economics, because it’s just basic arithmetic. And I’ve always been aware of basic arithmetic because I used to have three or four methods of checking my work to make sure I hadn’t transposed digits. So, you know, I memorized the multiplication tables (took forever, as you’d expect) but I also became a champion of adding numbers very fast to make sure that 6×6 was indeed 36, not, by some freak 63. (Okay, I never confused that one. I knew 63 would require it to be more than 6, but you know what I mean.)
And I’ve been aware that sitting down and wishing you had a million dollars doesn’t make more than one dried up mushroom, a handful of flour and a mushroom suddenly appear in your fridge, since that’s exactly what we had left at the end of a month when we were careless as newlyweds. After that we were… more careful.
You can’t get blood from a turnip. You can’t get money from a stone. And you can’t override reality with your words.
Which is why parasitic systems like socialism and communism can only survive if there is a bigger, stronger system they can leach off of.
They can talk big. They can send balloons provocateurs over the territory of their notional enemies. They can also drive huge tubes all over the landscape and convince the superpower that they’re equals or bigger.
They can bribe, beg, cajole, blackmail a livelihood out of the productive countries.
But they’ll never survive by their wits alone.
The USSR lasted as long as it did because it was a conquering imperialistic society, on the mold of Rome. (Which is why it was hilarious they accused us of being the Roman Empire. It was pablum for their masses, the idea that we were “Rome in the decadence” and a way to explain away our greater and visible prosperity.) The first thing they did on acquiring power over a country was to steal everything not nailed down, and corrupt systems to feed them.
And even then, they were a miserable place to live, and bearable only because they were a country of serfs to begin with.
China has lasted as long as it has because they convinced the greatest consumers in the world to buy from their slave factories. Since we’ve soured on them — not even officially, just by people doing things like noping on things that announce they were made there — they’ve been facing increasing difficulty.
The socialists in America have lasted as long as they have by pretending they want to take over the country, while contenting themselves with taking over certain, deeply effed up places, and feeding off the healthy parts.
But the last oh, 12 years or so, they’ve lost all sense of proportion. Their fourth generation inheritors, who are idiots chosen solely for their politics, and with not a shred of competency or real world knowledge, think they can wish paradise into being, and that their total victory depends only on destroying everything that works.
Look, it’s no wonder that these are the people assuring us that math is racist and that 2+2=4 is white supremacy.
Because the only way their arithmetic works is if they can somehow come up with an extra five or six or ten out of wishing for it really hard.
And honestly they aren’t wrong. Because the problem is they’re running the schemes that have taken states down — subverting the voting, destroying the economy, graft and theft and total destruction — without realizing that it can’t work long term on the national scale.
It can’t work because the US has no one we can bribe or threaten to feed us. Because no one can. If we go down, the world starves. (And we won’t be all that comfortable, but we probably won’t starve.)
They’re not aware of this. They suck at kitchen math. (Also, frankly, at history. I’ve heard them attribute the great buildings of Europe to “socialism” because they have no concept of European history being longer than ours. But that’s a rant for another day.)
And this is why we have already won. Because all they can do is run around taking hammers to the knees of the economy, under the bizarre assumption that we’re the USSR or maybe Cuba or even China, and if they break everything we will suddenly become communist “forever.”
They might also have been counting on the help of those great states, Russia and China, who have in fact been bribing/buying much of the left. (Oh, Russia isn’t communist? Sure, but Putin pointed out they’re “social democrats” which is a polite term for socialists. They and China are fascist, ultimately. Which isn’t as much difference as the idiots on the left think from communism.)
They might have thought those “great powers” could come in and “pacify” us. In fact, the left’s China-worship is almost embarrassing and has been for 30 years.
Seeing Russia take an arrow to the knee on the public stage has to have scared them. And China’s latest gyrations must have put some fear in them as well, which honestly might be the real explanation for the Potemkin balloon. Which in the end just showed their puppets are their puppets and made the rest of us lose a little bit more patience with them. (And isn’t this the Junta to the ground? A plot to make them seem bigger would reveal how stupid and small they are.)
And so here we are.
I’m not telling you the times ahead will be easy or simple. They’re still taking hammers to the knees of our economy. Though people are ignoring them/tuning them off in a lot of ways. They’re still frauding their way to power, under the belief that solves everything.
As Bill Whittle — my fellow chronic depressive — said a while back “We’ve already won. It’s just that you usually take most of your casualties during the mop up.”
Things are going to get bad. But stop imagining a civil war rank on serried rank. None of that works the way you think it does.
Things are going to get hot and sportive in some times and places. They already have. But their shock troops are useless anywhere where those in power don’t feed them/encourage them. They can’t even take the suburbs, much less rural areas.
They have a vague intuition America is not like other places they’ve taken over — they understand, or think they understand, psychological factors, but not arithmetic — which is why they’re importing what they think will be willing serfs.
Except there’s something weird with that picture. I think mostly they’re importing criminals and transients, because honestly? serfs don’t stay if there’s no work. And their criminals and transients are no match for Americans, outside of compliant cities. Obama caused la grande salida. And I suspect as people lose patience and welfare loses the ability to feed them/encourage them, this salida will dwarf all salidas. I’ve wondered if the flying of “refugees” all over (before it was done by sending them to sanctuary cities) was not a scheme to destroy voting integrity (they can do that with made up people!) but to take people away from the border, so they can’t simply get back out. It reminded me of Kenya’s attempt to shove Maasai in model villages, which they abandoned at the earliest possible moment.
And at any rate, the serfs are not going to have an easy time as the economy disintegrates, they’re only going to disintegrate the economy and get hurt when things fall. (Not that the left cares.)
Thing is “We’ve already won.” And no, I don’t think we are going to end up in a dictatorship. Look, again, dictatorships are a way to go poor fast. And in this country, if you’re broke, you ain’t going to control much. Heck, even if you aren’t.
I’m not going to say it’s not going to get bad. In some places it’s going to get really bad. Any place with intense antifa activity, if you’re there, please leave. You’ve been warned.
And we might even fall apart. For a little while. Maybe.
But it won’t last.
The left is so mad they keep reviling the Constitution and the Independence and the Founders. And frankly people are looking around and saying “I don’t know much about those, but if you *ssclowns hate them, they have to be good.”
So, in the end, we will be okay. The economy might crash, but in fundamentals we’re okay. Even manufacturing is reviving, even if it’s doing so in American fashion: fewer workers needed, less expense, more production, more profit.
We will be okay. Might “crash” in externals and structure for a while, before coming back, though. Same with the rest of our symptoms.
We don’t have access to the paths of power, the official support, the institutions, the easy money, the wealthy supporters.
That’s the bad news. The other bad news is that those things are all corrupt and extensively corroded. This is bad news for society as a whole, even if we’re locked outside it.
Look, one thing is for the hand that has money and power to tilt slightly in favor of the still more or less good performers but ideologically balanced to the left. That I understand is what was going on in the forties, fifties, etc.
Oh, the president — FDR (ritual spit) for instance — could be a loon and choose winners and losers according to the color of their socks or whether he liked their accent. Or you know, because he had a pash for commies. But in the tiers and ranks below, even in the most biased fields — writing, television, movies, newspapers — you would get a leg up and be expedited on your way to success if you were known to be red, but still quite decent.
Sure, perhaps not the best one could find, but competent, and at least with a marginal spark of talent. (But Sarah, red scare. People were against communists. Yeah. Right. Pull the other one. It plays jingle bells. Some people were publicly and obviously ostracized by the other communists in the field, but those businesses were already thoroughly left by then, and everyone was in on it. McCarthy wasn’t wrong. He was profoundly late. (Alas, Trump might have been too.)
Still, they produced watchable stories, wrote watchable stories, threw their money behind projects that might cement most hierarchies as lefty controlled but were also massively successful, thereby creating more money. And more disciples. To an extent. The amount of soft lefties who are so because of all the “of course” leftism implied in the world building of old shows and books became their unexamined premise. It’s just that the soft sell takes a long, long time. And mostly creates decent people who are reflexively left but still able to be shocked of it, and use their damaged thinking processes to think themselves away from the poison. (A lot of us.)
However perhaps the slowness rankled them. Or perhaps it is simply the decline of any hierarchy that relies on ANY OTHER REASON THAN COMPETENCE for hiring and promoting.
It doesn’t matter if that hierarchy is skin color (any) or likes my kind of music or is a communist or is one-legged or is related to me. Over time any hierarchy, any field, any arts, any crafts and most definitely any science where hiring happens due to reasons not related to competence, dedication and devotion to the field/thing itself, becomes a clown world of idiots, virtue signalers and slackers.
We’re well into that now. We have entertainment that doesn’t entertain, military that can’t defend us, a Junta that is in the pay of our enemies, fiction writers who sound like the most boring of Elizabethan preachers (apparently under the belief people will be fined for not filling the pews) and “scientists” who bring in non-reproducible results. And that is not counting the “scientists” and people who “f*cking love science” who rage, rage that math is racist.
ALL THE HIERARCHIES ARE CORRUPT AND BROKEN AND FALTERING.
And most of our politicians and a lot of our universities are being paid by China, apparently not having realized Chinese money is basically monopoly money backed by the “faith and credit” or totalitarians. They could print it in their basement and achieve the same effect.
So, everything is broken, things are going occasionally and bizarrely sideways in ways even I would find unbelievable ten years ago, and we — the bad kids — are locked outside the whole thing.
Well, there’s good and bad in being the outsiders.
The bad is of course that normal career paths of growth are closed to us. Hearing a soft-left friend not nearly as published/with as many fans as I have talk about movie deals, and money to hold properties for possible movies, and how he’s talked to so and so about a TV series made me want to cry. I knew I was giving that path up when I came out of the closet. It’s still disheartening to know it’s as closed to me as if there were a concrete wall at the very beginning. Unless a cataclysmic event occurs, and Hollywood turns upside down, I’m out of that game.
The good… I’m going to sound like a hippie, so forgive me, but the good is that we have each other.
As times become more unstable… more people need help. But it doesn’t take a huge benefactor. It takes a hundred (or a thousand) little ones. And we have that, because we have the numbers. (Which is why we need to budget what we do in that area, so we don’t bankrupt ourselves.) It’s not easy, it’s not flashy, it’s not easily visible, but it works and often flies below the radar.
I have been telling you for 12 years, give or take, that it’s all going to fall down. It’s rotten through and through. And we have to take the weight when it falls, when it blows. We have to be ready to step in and take the weight of civilization, and keep our people alive, and make sure what comes after is sane.
Honestly, if I didn’t know you bunch of weirdos, as it becomes obvious the rot is larger and worse than I thought, I’d be worried.
But I know you. I know us.
My directive to you is “find a way.” I don’t care what the community you’re involved in is or what project: find a way. If possible, find a way to make whoever needs money more “solid” (training, redirection, direct employment) so they don’t need help again. And help them in the direction of making them more what they want to be (not what you want them to be. Alas, neither son married/is marrying a web designer.)
As you’re building over, building under, building around, do try to be creative. Sometimes the extra mile between “I helped my buddy survive” and “I helped my buddy find a new sideline that he can do or needs just a little instruction for and which will be the beginning of a new career” is very fine, and not a lot of money. Sometimes of course, it’s more than that.
Consider too your time. That two hours you spend watching cat videos? There’s a lot of learning videos on you tube.
I’m not telling you what you should be interested in, mind you. Not my job. I’ll just say I don’t think civilization will fall all the way to pre-industrial or medieval, let alone primitive. Venezuela and Cuba still have electricity (ish. Most of the time.) But if what makes your heart pound is forging metal armor, go for it, maybe there will be something it’s needed for in the future.
However, more likely? Oh, soap making. Candle making. Bread making. Clothes alterations. Car repair. Dishwasher repair. making stuff out of scrap wood. Things that will pay out right now, but will really pay out in a disrupted society. Making natural cat food (Buy taurine to drip on it.) Whatever.
I’m a very useless person and conscious of being so, so what I’m noodling on is “ways to sell my books if Amazon falls.” And writing ever more compelling stories. I haven’t however lost sight of ‘teaching writing, because I’ve learned a few things and might give someone a leg up. I’ve just been slowed/hampered by years of well…. apparently of being high altitude, but I didn’t know that.
There is a wealth of information out there. Things that the scholars of the past would have killed themselves to get. You can learn anything. If you can try to make it useful, but don’t underestimate the chances things will be unexpectedly useful.
Just stay alert and be creative.
What can you do today to support one of us who are excluded from the structure? What can you do to build or solidify a network? What can you do to help someone go a step further? (Ye, I hear you “yelling at Sarah to finish books. I’m working on it.)
Think about it, stay active about it. Because we really really really are going to need all of us and all we have to survive this and to survive the collapse of the structures.
As I said, looking at you bunch of weirdos I’m not even worried. A little confused of how it will work out, but sure it will.
If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo,please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months(unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, by clicking through and buying (anything, actually) through one of the links below, you will at no cost to you be giving a portion of your purchase to support ATH through our associates number. A COMMISSION IS EARNED FROM EACH PURCHASE.*Note that I haven’t read most of these books (my reading is eclectic and “craving led”,) and apply the usual cautions to buying.– SAH
Spring is just around the corner when the town of Refuge is at last asked to confront the Trial’s true challenge, an event that kicks off a furor in its population. But for Haley Landry, level 9 Questgiver, the challenge is more personal. After nine months of working with the alien system and overseeing the growth of her tiny town, a questline brings her to a crossroads, not only for herself, but for Refuge as well.
It’s the hardest decision Haley has had to make, and no one can make it for her. But her choice will shape the future, inside her heart, and out of it.
Join Haley, Nana, and the residents of Refuge for one final adventure in this cozy LitRPG apocalypse. There’s a brownie recipe in the back, because no matter how heavy the material, that’s still the kind of series this is.
Ancient and wise, the grandfather Koi knows at first sight that this human bears a hidden wound. But how can a mere fish, even one as old as himself, be of any aid to a human?
Astronaut Tyler Lanham had come to Grissom City, first and oldest lunar settlement, in search of the medical expertise he couldn’t find on the far side of the Moon. When he sees the scar on the ancient koi’s side, he knows he’s found a kindred spirit.
But an enemy is stalking these lovely gardens. A danger that will change both man and fish.
In a brutal cross-dimensional Empire where everything is about ownership and control, and the strongest mentalists rule . . . Karl Traeger has a problem.
His elderly father has died, and sixteen-year-old Karl is going to be at the mercy of very unsavory relatives. And since he’s the oldest of his generation—ahead of his cousins in the line of inheritance—he knows his uncle will never Present him: never allow him to demonstrate his fitness for the title of Lord. No, he’ll be one more brain-chipped servant. But maybe if he moves quickly, before anyone knows his father is dead . . . he can save himself, then get to work saving the people he cares about—maybe even save his budding antiques business.
Once he had belonged to the stark and brutal days, days of manhunts and sudden violence. Now Owen Toller had a farm and a family, and not even the slightest interest in enforcing the law, especially since the citizens of Reunion had voted him out as Marshal five years ago.
Until the Brunner brothers came down from the hills — to murder and plunder, to write bloodier, more savage history than even the James and the Dalton gangs.
Suddenly, Reunion remembered that Marshals sometimes had to do more than sit in an office and cozy up to bankers.
This iktaPOP Media edition includes a new introduction giving genre and historical context to the novel.
An enchanting heroine. A layered plot. Mystery, romance, intrigue. I had to prevent myself from looking at the end to see how it all turned out. You must buy this book. I want her to write many more in this strange and alluring world. – Sarah A. Hoyt.
Bookish and shy, Sabira has a perfect marriage of convenience to the elderly Lord Steinnland and his library, marred only by her family’s urging to trick her husband into releasing his claim to their island fastness. But time and tide bring the irritating, if handsome, Viscount Iveroth, and on his heels, scheming visitors who kill her elderly Lord and release a plague of sea monsters.
Now Sabira must travel to the city of Din Eidyn and fight to save her home and her people, with Iveroth as her only ally. But as they battle black magicians and drawing room politics, the hardest fight of all is hiding her growing feelings for the Viscount… and the fact that she’s not human…
DISTURBING THE FAMILY SECRETS COULD BRING RUIN TO EVERYTHING HE’S WORKED SO HARD TO BUILD.
George Talbot Traherne, the human huntsman for the Wild Hunt, is preparing for the birth of his child by exploring the family papers about his parents and their deaths. When his improved relationship with his patron, the antlered god Cernunnos, is jeopardized by an unexpected opposition, he finds he must choose between loyalty to family and loyalty to a god.
He discovers he doesn’t know either of them as well as he thought he did. His search for answers takes him to the human world with unsuitable companions.
How will he keep a rock-wight safe from detection, or even teach her the rules of the road? And what will he awaken in the process, bringing disaster back to his family on his own doorstep? What if his loyalty is misplaced? What will be the price of his mistakes?
In the very near future a seastead offers consumers a choice in governing systems. Navy Capt. Adam Tenney’s daughter takes that offer, but what can he do for her when pirates threaten the seastead, the U.S. refuses to recognize it, and he is trapped in a desk job on land?
It is said that war is hell. But what of the Prisoners of War, or the war orphans who grow up amidst the chaos, and what of those who escape their enemy’s prisons?
In Halcyon, meet a man who has been abused in a prison camp for so long that he has forgotten his own name – but not the desire to survive. Follow the adult orphans Warlock Ruthers produced in his campaign for power as they protect two children whom he seeks to murder to defeat a prophecy of his downfall in American Mage.
Meanwhile, Allan Kearney and Michio Oshika work on removing the demon tattoos from the former’s back at the same time they seek the means to end the persecution of Allan’s fellow prisoners. But demons do not release their prey without a fight, as the young Torránese soldier knows all too well. If he is to survive, let alone help rescue his comrades, first he will have to face the monsters clawing for his soul. It will be a battle that will require all his strength – and more…
I always knew my real parents had to be complete assholes; why else would they name me something horrible like Vladimira Darkness. Now that I am in college, I go by the nickname, Mira.
Then a bunch of these heavily armed men-in-black types showed up and made me come with them. First in a Humvee, then in a Blackhawk helicopter, and then in a fricking spacecraft.
Apparently, my real mother didn’t die when I was a child; she only died a few days ago. I was told I needed to be there for the reading of her will.
Wearing all black for the reading of the will almost made sense. That it was heavy leather armor was a bit unexpected. Then I was given the traditional family sidearm pistol to wear.
Only this was a very special weapon made just for me. I was apparently the product of hundreds of generations of bioengineering to be someone that could use the weapon. It had a dial with settings from 1.0 to 3.0, and 2.0 was described as “explode dinosaurs.”
Why in hell would I need what was almost a handheld nuclear weapon? It seems that mother’s official title was “The Lord of Darkness” and that the succession would be the first, and possibly the last time I get to meet some of my siblings.
I had only one day to learn to survive what the future would bring. A future in a galaxy ruled by the fear of one being, me…
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.
The problem with the struggles of our day: minimum wage; universal health; the perfect family; the perfect marriage; the perfect career is that people have forgotten that nothing is always an option.
No, seriously. Let’s take minimum wage for a spin on this.
People keep gabbing on about the “minimum wage” and “a living wage” as if the only reason people aren’t paid whatever it is they hanker for is the infinite greed of infinitely evil “capitalists.” I mean, I’ve seen them rage on line about how “capitalism” is the worst possible system. Because so much greed and materialism and no one is giving them i-phones for free. Or something.
BUT here’s the thing: I actually have run a business for well nigh on thirty years. And I have friends who are business owners and business managers.
I think I’m not paying enough to my assistant, my copyeditor, and I d*mn well know I’m not paying enough to my editor.
Is it my evil capitalist greed? Put a sock in it. Until I did the blog fundraiser (still figuring out delivery of rewards, and if I can’t I’ll put them out in public which defeats the principle, yes, but also makes sure they are DELIVERED. Except for mentoring and tuckerizing, because there are few of those, and they’re personal. I don’t like owing and not delivering. For next time I have…. ideas. Since I can’t use Paypal, anyway.) I couldn’t afford to pay them, at all. Every time I paid, it was money taken from the ability to pay for something else that I sorely needed. That was, if you remember, the whole reason of the fundraiser. And now I’m using that money (and will use this year’s however much it turns out to be) to push the fiction writing to earning its living. So I can pay my people “a living wage.”
TL/DR most business owners are very conscious of the debt they owe their people, up to and including having tabs in their back brain for “must give x a bonus when I’m making y level”. We know that our people, if they’re worth spit (and small businesses are very careful to only RETAIN the ones who are) are worth whatever we can pay them. And we’re competing with everyone else out there, including bigger and badder people who can take our people and pay them more. There are bonds of loyalty both ways that help, but I don’t expect them to hurt themselves for my sake. I really don’t.
We pay what we pay because it’s what we can pay.
For the longest time, I told people “Yes, I’d love to have an assistant. I need one. I just can’t AFFORD one.” Same for cleaning lady, whatever.
I still can’t afford a cleaner. What I can pay isn’t enough. So I don’t pay.
I’d have been willing, back in the day, to hire someone with a kid. They could bring the kid. They could help. They could get food or instruction in writing, or whatever alongside pay.
My mom always had a young woman who came and did dishes, in exchange for mom making them clothes. Not the same young woman. they tended to get married.
If mom had had to pay minimum wage, we’d have had unwashed dishes pile up. And the girl would have had fewer clothes of less quality and never have attracted eye of future husband, maybe.
So, you know, the person I maybe could have hired and contributed a bit towards that person’s family budget and a lot for his/her learning to write or whatever, in exchange for her/him coming over and dusting, vacuuming, doing the cat boxes, making sure bathrooms were less than gross, maybe starting dinner (though unlikely, as I usually do that early morning) never got that money/help. And I never got help and produced less. And got sick when I tried to shoulder house and writing and everything, because there are limits to the flesh.
But I couldn’t afford minimum wage, or contributions to social security. So we got nothing. Nothing is always an option.
In the same way, if your jobs at McDonald’s are mandated to pay $20 an hour? Mickey D’s will automate. And the would be cashiers will be unemployed. They get nothing.
I know that some special kind of idiot is out there rubbing his hands and saying “Good. Minimum wage stops exploitation. These people are better off on welfare. At least they have their dignity.”
Uh, do they? They also have no resume, no way to prove they’re worthy/able to hold a job. Which means it’s not just this first, low paying job they can’t get. It means when a bigger job comes along they also can’t get that, because they never learned.
But let’s game it beyond the individual: Minimum wage is decreed at whatever you need not to starve in NYC or LA. Let’s say $20. There, you showed those evil capitalist pigs.
This doesn’t mean that everyone who is working at the entry level now gets $20. It means half of them get laid off and get nothing.
No, not because of greed. Because the alternative is the business closes.
But even with laying off half, most businesses do need the work force. I think half the restaurants are using “labor shortage” as an excuse. They just can’t afford to pay for what they need. And as we’re seeing… well, it’s a spiral. fewer workers, longer waits less “fun” experience for clients, who start eating out less, because what’s the point, and then– It spirals.
So even with businesses doing what they can to stay in business, and a lot of people getting nothing, all commerce structures spiral down. Businesses close. Farms close. Restaurants close. A whole lot of people get nothing, and we all get less: Fewer options, less enjoyment, fewer opportunities, less wealth.
“Good,” says the twit. “Welfare will provide for all, and when everything crashes, we get socialism, and then it’s utopia.”
Uh uh. First, it is already socialism. The government is already controlling the means of production that are theoretically owned by someone else. The means of distribution too, though Marx never got it. And that’s not utopia. It’s what’s strangling everything and ensuring we get nothing. Second, at the end of this lies NOTHING. Welfare might give you a check for a hundred million Somollians. Where are you going to spend it? The stores are closed, the shelves are bare. The farms have killed the cattle and shut down because they can’t afford the electricity and water let alone labor.
What are you going to do? Try to convince people barely cultivating enough for subsistence to give you their stuff? You’re going to need tanks. How are you going to get there? There’s no gas stations open.
But Sarah, you say: We already have minimum wage, and things haven’t collapsed. Why not raise it.
Yeah, we have minimum wage. And an illegal workers problem, because people can’t pay it. Also a growing and increasingly less capable welfare class. And we’re sort of tottering along. And money is coming from somewhere.
Specifically money is coming from thin air, spun by the Federal government. Which sooner or later crashes. We’re being protected by being the World’s reserve currency. Or IOW we’re being protected from our own folly because others are worse. That can’t go on forever. And if I understand correctly, the whole world is tottering on the edge of the abyss.
But we are getting poorer. We’ve seen it these last two years with all sorts of benevolent mandates and hand outs. The wealth ultimately comes from all of us. We lose discretionary spending. We lose what we need to do more than subsist.
We’re already on the path to getting nothing.
But the idiot-ignorants keep pushing. “Free universal health care” they say. Only like food, or an apartment, that requires others’ labor.
Yes, our doctors are paid more than in Europe. That’s because their training is twice as long and twice as expensive. So they kind of need the money. They have enormous debt and are starting careers in their thirties. Tell them they have to work for “X” and they leave the profession in droves. They already have over Obamacare and its senseless mandates. More will if they can’t pay their debt anyway. Better work at something with less stress. And then we import…. well, seems to be mostly Chinese (but also a lot of third world) doctors, who aren’t trained the same. Yeah, they’ll work for less. But you know, then we get nothing. Because we don’t get the medicine we are used to/what’s needed to keep living/be well.
NOTHING is always an option.
Women holding out for the perfect career, whether or not the have the training because they’re women, hear them roar. (Oh, men too, but–) In the end what they get is nothing. Nothing is always an option. Because getting where you want to go requires a lot of compromise, of trades, and of clawing onward on bleeding fingernails.
You demand the thing you want? Well, the world has no reason to give it to you. And even if the government mandates you get it it’s likely to turn to dust and ashes, because you haven’t learned, fought and worked to be ready to do it. (Look at the Naval Observatory and the world’s most visible diversity hire.) In the end, you get nothing.
Same, btw, with holding out for the perfect marriage mate, which is germane to this because some clever fools are agitating for the government to arrange marriages. (That makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? Because there are things the bureaucrats haven’t f*cked up still.) So, you know, beauty and competence aren’t hoarded.
Now these people are mostly spitting in the wind, and trying to wishcast, but then — looks at last two years — are you saying these idiots won’t seize on it as a benevolent thing they can do?
It’s important to remember, when we agitate for mandates, or more likely the young and stupid do, that yeah, people might be getting a raw deal. But the alternative to raw deal isn’t perfection. The alternative to raw deal is often nothing.
Sure, sure, there are actual greedy businessmen. They don’t partake of the nature of angels. There are greedy everything.
But here’s the thing: Most people aren’t “greedy”. Sure they want more than they have, but they’re willing to work for it. (And if you think running a business isn’t work, you’ve never done it.) And they’re willing to pay others to work for them, because at some point all businesses hit grow-or-die.
You break that, you tell them “you must pay x now” and most businesses die.
And if there’s one thing we know is that “government” isn’t even competent to wipe its own arse. Its two core areas of competence seem to be taking people’s money and hurting people. (Yes, I know, it also has prescribed functions, and I have no problem with them under the Constitution. But that requires taking a lot less money and hurting a lot less people. And I’m not saying they’ll do those things WELL just that sometimes it’s better than doing nothing.) So, no, the government is not going to look after all you stray lambkins when you get nothing.
NOTHING IS ALWAYS AN OPTION.
And nothing will break everything. Not just capitalism, but socialist dreams and civilization itself, eventually.
So tell all the idiots pushing for “living wage” and “free healthcare”: Nothing is always an option.
And in the end, you’re hastening the day of nothing.
According To Hoyt 