Author: Sarah A. Hoyt

While he works, in the office next to mine, my husband listens to podcasts. This is slightly surreal because it reminds me of Portuguese men doing their work to the continuous murmur of soccer reporting coming from a portable radio near them.

Yesterday he came to me, alarmed. He was listening to Mike Rowe, who had a guest on, who did the numbers beyond the official unemployment rate, the numbers as they used to be done, without the begs and the buts.

Apparently the real unemployment rate, in terms of people simply not working (And not looking for work) among young men — young, able bodied men, 18 to 55 — is eighty percent. [CORRECTION: Cranberry makes a good point that it’s 80% of men not working. I.e. that for every man looking for work, another 4 aren’t. However, it might be worse than they think, because the original rang right to me, and I have acquaintance in the younger age groups. Though honestly, I admit I was including “not working at anything beyond the minimum to barely survive with help” to this count, subconsciously. As well as in “interminable academic training that never ends or provides a job”]

I will bet you the number of women not pre and not menopausal not having children is the same. Yesterday too I saw two recent videocasts of people with their heads on fire about the population crash. Oh, my dear and fluffy Lord. They’re many many moons after the fair. And all of them believe too that the population is as large as the lying statistics say. I would think the population crash is well underway.

Yes, what allows them to do so is — relative — abundance and technological advances. Without enough money/food that these young men (apparently as many as 50% of them receive some form of disability) can live without working, waste away their lives on puerile entertainment, is that we as a society are incredibly wealthy.

The reason these young women can go without children is that same wealth, plus safe and effective contraception and abortion.

But that’s not new, either of those conditions. They both were present in the early twentieth century. Stop looking at me like that. I should know. I grew up in late-19th, early 20th century conditions.

Yes, even in a country with “illegal” abortion, everyone knew who performed them. And they were safe enough that women could have multiple of them and survive. Everyone knew that too. (They were really safe, because if a women died and it could be traced to the provider, the full force of law would fall on them.)

And in a very poor country — again, I remind you that stealing clothes from the line was a thing, because people couldn’t afford underwear. The big thefts were clothes and chickens — there was still enough that a lot of middle class families had the man who never married, never moved out, and just puttered around the house being some form of disabled.

Now, it wasn’t eighty percent. But I’m not sure it couldn’t have been. It would have made the entire society a little poorer, but as poor as we were we were already at the point of abundance I doubt it would be impossible. Since the eighteenth century or so, humans have been living in amazing (historically speaking) abundance.

So, why is it so bad now? Why not before.

Because metaphorically speaking, the world is cracked like an egg. Pieces that should go together have been violently separated, and no, I’m not talking in dirty metaphors, but I could be.

Men and women need each other. And people need something to live for.

Without women, with women gone crazy, with the link between effort and reward broken, unable to trust the women they do find, men have no reason to do anything.

Without family and men and a reliable structure to their lives, being told they’re exploited and downtrodden and that success is what men used to have and do, women have no reason to invest the considerable time and effort — not to mention blood, sweat and tears — into producing the new generation.

It goes deeper than that. Every day in every way our mass-industrial culture tells young men they are not only not needed but terrible. They are historical oppressors. They are also dumb and any woman is smarter, stronger, more agile than any man.

This absurd message comes through every possible means, from commercials to action movies to school lessons. If you have a little boy in school right now, he’s being blamed for everything that’s wrong in the world. And he’s internalizing it.

If you have a girl in school right now, she’s being told success is to be a company executive. Strength consists in insulting men and hitting them.

The shock is not that young men are giving up on life, or that young women are pursuing their happiness everywhere but in marriage and motherhood.

The big surprise is that some couples are still finding each other. That some babies are still born. That some young men are still working, some of them doing immense amounts of skilled work, thanklessly, in a world gone mad. That some women are marrying and having children, and not intending to destroy their partners in the courts.

Yes, I see you. Well done. You’re towering giants of purpose and motivation and doing the right thing, and I see you, and G-d bless you for it.

But the people who’ve climbed the pyramid of success, many of them by horribly crooked means — no, I’m still not convinced it’s even possible to vote our way out of this. The fraud is larger than you imagine and baked in already in most places — are insane. They got to the top by believing all sorts of things that just ain’t so, like humans are a plague on the Earth; men are evil; women are perfect; babies are unneeded.

And what they are and what they’re doing is impoverishing society at a fast clip. I think in my lifetime — and I have somewhere, G-d willing — between ten and thirty years left, that’s it, we’re going to be poorer than we were in Portugal when I was little. I fully expect hunger in the rest of the world this winter, famine in the third world. Here we’ll be uncomfortable and pinched, and I’m already seeing people worried about Christmas. But it’s coming for us. Certainly if we can’t beat the tsunami of fraud. As I told one of you recently, the longer the crazy goes on the more things are broken, perhaps irretrievably.

We can’t do anything about that. But we can do something about the people. The men who don’t know how to man. The women who don’t know how to human. The people who are living now as though if they don’t do anything the present will be forever the same.

They look at the trouble — working is trouble, and toil and stress and so is motherhood — and they don’t see the reward.

What they see is an unending train of effort and abuse and nothing to show for it.

Society used to reward men who worked and were good fathers with respect. The same for women who had children and were good mothers. We don’t do that anymore. We treat them like chumps.

And let’s be honest, both paths are a trail of toils and tears. I’m not denying that, to any of you reading this. Yes, if you embark on a job, and decide to do the best you can, you will work a lot and sometimes feel the reward too little. You will wear yourself in it, like a horse in harness, and the reward for work is more work.

If you have children, you will have to deny yourself many times, you will have to protect and teach, and guide them in a world gone mad. And they grow up to be themselves, not what you dream for them. And you’ll always love them, no matter what. A part of your heart will live in them no matter who they are and what they do. And there too, the reward for effort and tears is more effort and tears.

But then there’s that other thing. The thing that is almost impossible to explain because you won’t understand until you’ve been through it. I know that sounds stupid, and I was highly suspicious myself when I heard it, when I was young.

You transform. You grow. You change. The reward for work is more work, and it is a real reward, because as each level of work comes, you’re more ready to face it, and you start meeting it halfway, joyously. You can because you have done. You do because you can. And you grow. You become someone who has this, who can do this, who can face the storm with a calm mind and a song in your heart.

I won’t claim I’m the most neurotic person ever born. There are probably more neurotic ones. Maybe.

But as much of a worry wart as I’m now, I’m nothing to the shivering quivering mess of fears I was when I embarked on this journey. Heck, it was nothing to the timid, conflict avoidant mess I was even ten years ago. Or five.

You grow into the work by doing the work. When I had children I was terrified. I had no idea how I would change and come to face the task with joy, enjoy it even (in the middle of tearing my hair out, and running to catch up) and emerge on the other side as… no, not someone else, but a better me, a stronger me. A me with a purpose.

In the same way when I came out of the political closet and undertook to tell the truth the best I’m able, I didn’t understand how it would change me. But it did. I went from someone who ran posts by her friends — what in retrospect are very innocuous, almost appeasing posts — to have the courage to put them up, to someone who knows it needs to be said, doesn’t ask permission, and shrugs off attacks.

It would never have happened without doing the work, first, when I was unprepared and saw no reward.

Society used to enshrine the right actions in praise and myth. We used to have rites of passage. Not because people changed in the rite, but because the right made the change visible.

We have none of that. We — as a society — revile and jeer those who try.

But humans aren’t built to stand still. We’re not made for comfort and enjoyment. Not uniform comfort and enjoyment.

Man — by which in less stupid times we understood women too without needing to be told — is made to strive.

Without trying things we’re not (quite) ready to do, without making ourselves uncomfortable doing what seems impossible from where we are, we don’t stand still, we decay.

In the times that are coming the men who are captains of their sofa, pilots of their playstation will have nothing with which to meet the challenge. Not even the ability to become reivers, because they’ve never put in even enough work for effective violence and they certainly aren’t in the shape for it (Fifty percent on disability.)

And the women who have chosen careers — or the perception of careers — over children, will see those careers fail, and be tossed into the world with no idea what to do. Most women by training and inclination are communicators, facilitators, human resources people. Even when they’re in other positions. In a world of concrete needs, those abilities are less than useful. Most of them come from the broken families my generation created.They’ll have no tribe, no people, no children, no future.

Humans are creatures of story. Our lifetime is very short compared to what our mind can encompass. Even in the good times, humans need to know how their short life fits in the greater story. “My work will take humans to the stars.” “My children will live on other worlds.” “This church/enterprise/city/state will live after me.”

Those cords have been cut by people who, let’s face it, hate all of humanity. The generations after mine (and mine already to a great extent) are cast adrift in a sea of loneliness, with nothing but their own brains to justify their existence.

No wonder they quit. It’s amazing more don’t commit suicide.

And for those who will say “How come you say that men should have jobs and women should have children? Isn’t that awfully sexist?”

This is the measure of our brokenness and the irreparable harm done to the structure of humanity. Yes, it’s sexist. But nature is sexist. Yes, I realize the work of men is lesser. They don’t get to make and shape the next generation. But that’s because it’s how nature made them. (And no, men can’t get pregnant. Not biological men. And there’s no science that can give you this.) But they can have children, biological and not. They can work, and support and protect and teach their children. In fact, women can’t do it without them, and I don’t mean (just) in the biological sense.

Shakespeare was right, and bawdy. Women grow by men. But men grow by women too. And both grow by creating the future, be it the structures that support children, or the children themselves.

Because you can’t choose to stop. Stopping is to die, to lose strengths, to lose ability and to lose your mind, in the end.

…. so, years ago, when I was working my way through coming out of the political closet, I had a series of dreams where it felt like I was being given orders. I hate woo woo stuff, so it only reaches me when I’m asleep or terribly sick. (Maybe there is a reason in the grand scheme of things for the auto-immune, eh?)

One dream I remember is when I was standing at the edge of a great conflagration, and over and over again, the words were given to me “Snatch brands from the fire.” Then I realized that the things burning were children. Well, teens, and I started pulling them out with my bare hands.

It seemed silly. It is silly. And yet, it makes perfect sense.

Our children are being lost. And by children, I mean extending to the thirties.

Look, the kids, despite everything that’s been done to them, try to figure out their way. I’ve met a lot these last ten years. Young men and women trying to figure out how to get married, how to start a family, how to find someone, how to find work they can do that they can do well, that can grow them.

I’ve also seen our generation kick them in the face, and call them slackers and shiftless, and slobs and selfish.

Yeah, some of them are that. But mostly they’re lost. They haven’t been shown anything worth living for, and they don’t have tried strength to do anything. They don’t even know how to start. And they don’t believe in the rewards, because, let’s face it, the last two generations, mine and the one before, never fully embraced the work and the rewards, never fully admitted there was a good to not being young and crazy anymore.

It’s time — barely time. The hour is late and the storm is howling down towards us — to reach out a hand to the kids. All the kids. Dear Lord, anyone forty and younger who is lost. If you see a glimmer of an attempt at something, extend a hand. Give them tasks they can do. Give them other tasks. Build pathways to sanity and productivity they can see. Give them a hand up and a story, not a kick in the face and insults.

Write and tell stories for them, stories in which they see themselves as part of humanity’s story. Reach out. Reach out with money if that’s what it takes and you can do it. Reach out with story if that’s your — mine — specialty.

Kindle a light in the stormy seas, so they know where to land.

START BUILDING A PATH TO THE FUTURE. OR THE FUTURE WON’T EXIST.

We need a thousand Mike Rowes and we need them right now. And we need the female equivalent too, saying “Go ahead, have that baby.” Saying “I’ll watch your baby and be honorary grandmother to him while you work, because you can’t make it without two jobs.” Saying “Don’t abort that baby. I have a good twenty years left in me. I’ve done that before.”

Because humans are not a liability, they’re an asset. They’re the ultimate asset. Without them, nothing works. There is nothing.

The world is cracked in pieces, and the storm is howling through the cracks. The young are out there, drowning in a sea of lies and confusion that breed apathy and death.

Kindle a light for them. Extend a hand to pull them from the raging waters.

Be not afraid. The task is immense and terrifying, but you grow in the doing it.

Go and do.

*It’s interesting. I’ve gone on becoming more and more myself, to the point the person who wrote this post feels like a stranger. I guess this makes a good “How it Begun.” – SAH*

Whole a blast from the past from November 2013

So I thought I’d give a report, only it’s not a report on the current state of my writing so much as on the current state of my psyche – and no, it’s not whining.  In fact, it’s surprisingly not whining.

It’s almost exactly a year since I decided to throw caution and social manner to the winds and be myself as hard as I could on this blog, as well as everywhere else.

I’m not even absolutely sure how to characterize this “coming out” since I find being called “conservative” almost puzzling when my ideal state is almost a complete overturn of the current crony capitalism and also has bloody nothing to do with “conservative” in Europe which implies a belief in classes, etc.  But I knew that when I decided to start talking about what I believe the “establishment” would characterize me as “conservative” and also, therefore, as “a bad person.”

Look, first, I’m going to point out that having to hide your opinions, political or otherwise, is likely the normal state of the human race.  I’m not whining (or not much) except in comparison perhaps with an ideal state, where every man shall sit beneath his vine and his olive tree and no man shall make him afraid – something that has yet to happen in human life.

One of the unspoken conditions of getting a job is to pretend to be the sort of person that your employer would like to employ.  This can mean something innocuous, like you’re the sort of person who is clean and polite and show up on time, but because humans are humans you pick people like you (or like what you want to be like) to associate with, so you’re likely to pick people on less tangible characteristics.  It is not a slander to say that religious people might prefer someone of their religion.  Throughout history, immigrant communities have preferred to hire someone of their own ethnicity.  And people who’ve gone to the “correct” colleges and hold the “correct” opinions are likely to hire the same.  Which is what we’re faced with in the writing community.

It only seems strange because it’s so uniform, and there used to be almost no refuge.  That is a side effect of both the concentration of publishing into a very few houses and of the “long march” that the extreme left has engaged in in this country.  (Very long – if we’re to believe Heinlein, and I do, then they were in a fair way to taking over one of the major parties in the thirties.)

To me, too, hiding my opinions was perfectly normal.  Look, guys, if I hadn’t learned the fine art of double think, there’s a good chance I wouldn’t have survived my high school years, let alone emerged from college with a degree in the liberal arts.  I just pretended, when answering the questions that they were set in a separate universe, where Marxism works.

So when I started trying to break into writing, I didn’t consciously think of hiding my opinions, but I also didn’t go out of my way to rub anyone’s nose in them.  And then, after I’d broken in and talked to some editors – including the surreal conversation with the one who thought libertarians wanted to ban the internal combustion engine (and also were close kin to Satan) – I started not only purposely hiding my politics but laying in a trail of confusion and razzle dazzle both in my works and out of it.

Mind you, my opinions are “diverse” enough.  As most of you know I have no issues with gay marriage, but I do have an issue with forcing churches to perform it.  I can see euthanasia being legalized as a personal decision (none of my business, even if I’d try to talk a friend out of it) but hate the idea of the creep (people who are allowed to euthanize while depressed/mentally ill) and also of the state (or even the establishment) convincing people to do this “for the good of others.”  I won’t say I don’t have an issue with abortion – in terms of “war on women” the health issues that attend it, the SOCIETAL issues that attend it, and the almost universal pressure to sanctify it are pretty icky.  I’ve talked about it on this blog, and I don’t intend to go there again.  I think the whole “you’re a human if mommy says so” corrodes our civil liberties.  I also think it’s almost impossible to stop before ten weeks, and the whole idea of a regulatory apparatus to stop it completely makes me queasy. In my more annoyed moments I wonder if the regulatory apparatus to stop the murder of ADULTS is worth is.

Beyond that, it’s a gut thing.  I was raised “pro choice” – no other option since I grew up in Europe and all the bien pensant were “pro choice” – but I haven’t called myself that since the first time I got pregnant.  Personal. Internal.  Intense.  Let it go.

However, the way the establishment works, it doesn’t matter how many things you agree with them on, if you don’t agree with them on something, then you are Satan.  It is, I think, the result of being a small, insular society, no different from a tiny village in an isolated region.  They are afraid of the stranger and those who are different.

So I learned to play on the opinions I shared with them and not mention the ones I didn’t.  The fact that they tend to assume “all smart people agree with me” helped me greatly.  As did the fact they believe “conservatives” froze sometime between the nineteenth century and the fifties.  The fact I think women have minds, the fact I believe melanin has nothing to do with capacity to perform intellectual tasks.  If I touted those, I was immediately assumed to be “one of the good people.”

Not enough, mind.  I was never willing to parrot the whole party line enough to become one of the precious darlings.  That’s fine.  But it was enough to keep publishing in a broad spectrum of houses.  And I didn’t go so far, I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror.

I thought…

I confess I didn’t realize how much pressure I’d been under.  I used a nom de blog to comment on political blogs (and cause mischief.)  I was in the background of several discussions as the Dan Rather thing unraveled for instance.  But in the daylight world, I pretended never to read anything outside Main Stream media.

Then Toni Weisskopf, who had been talking to me ABOUT Puppet Masters asked if I wanted to write the afterword to the re-edition of the book.

There’s no way I could pass that up, even if it meant outing myself.  In fact, at the time I remember thinking “Should I?”  then I thought “Come on, how many of them will read Heinlein?”

As it turns out surprisingly few.  In fact, each step in this “coming out” was attended with a few more whispers, but nothing overt, until a year ago when I finally started seeing doors overtly shut in my face. Which is fine.  I knew what I was doing.

It still comes as a LONG journey.  Four years ago, I practically spit coffee on my monitor when I saw my name mentioned on Instapundit (turned out to be about one of my books.)  The last year I’ve now and then helped out when Glenn is on vacation…  And yet it was only when I decided not to stay away from politics on this blog that people got upset.  And frankly the posts they get REALLY upset about are the anti-Marxist ones.  (All the while assuring me they are NOT Marxist and that Marxism is dead.  Guys, historians are going to have a field day with our time.  If enough civilization survives that there are historians.)

Have doors shut off?  Well, yes.  Though nothing overtly enough that I could tell you “this is because I came out.”  — I think in the modern day, discrimination, whether from the left or right, is more subtle than that, which is why people feel the need to fake overt discriminatory episodes.  They know it’s there, and they can’t prove it, and they go unhinged – and frankly, with the advent of indie at the same time, the couple of doors that shut off were a blessing in disguise – it meant I had SOME time to go indie in, in addition to my work for Baen.

So – a year in, what has my final throwing open of the ideological closet doors meant?

Externally, not much.  Indie gave me the ability to do what a friend had advised and I couldn’t do YEARS ago: a) never work for people I don’t respect.  B) don’t write something just because you can sell it and you need the money.

Even if I hadn’t come out politically, my external demeanor would be the same, because… indie.

Internally…

Internally… it’s a whole other matter.  I didn’t realize, honestly, I didn’t, how much effort it took just to hold up the false front.  Imagine that you have to go through an entire day holding up one of those Greek theater masks in front of your face with your right hand.  Everything you do is with your left, and you can’t shift your arm, you don’t have flexibility to rest that hand, you don’t—

Like that.  But over years and years.  The brain space devoted to playing chess with potential would-be guessers of my real opinion, and more importantly, the brain space required to not say something I couldn’t live with while not openly dissenting, were driving me batty, and I didn’t even know it.

Mind you, I wasn’t even any good at dissembling. I’ve since found that everything I think shows on my face (which explains so much.)

BUT just keeping this side of open opposition was taking so much nervous energy that it’s a miracle I could write at all.

A year later?  A year after being able to admit to my own thoughts in public?  How does it feel?

Well, it feels very strange – you have to remember I grew up in an environment where most of my beliefs are beyond heretical.  It’s the habit of a life time. – Sometimes I put up posts, and this will be one of them (note I’m putting it up the day before Thanksgiving with blog traffic in the tank.  I’m brave, but not crazy.) – and wait for the blow to fall and cringe at the screaming that will surely start.

But it also feels… well… the way to describe it is that I have more room to be myself in.  It’s like I grew up in a little box and now for the first time I can stretch out.

I feel – whole.  That would be the best way to describe it.  Just whole.

So – is that worth it?  I mean, I don’t go out of my way to yell my politics at the hairdressers, in the grocery store, on the street (okay, I do shout at certain bumper stickers, but I always did!  And it’s in the privacy of my own car) or in social occasions.  BUT when I’m having a discussion with someone, I can let my reason go where it will and not be afraid it will endanger my livelihood.

And when I’m writing, I don’t have to think “How does this belief sound if I were a NYC liberal?”  I can let the writing flow, and be what it needs to be.

That alone – that alone is worth it. A thousand times yes.  It’s not a luxury most human beings have been able to have throughout history.

The great artists of the past, and the great writers too, were all hemmed in on politics and had to step carefully.

But we’ve come to a point I couldn’t keep quiet any longer.  We might be playing for all the civilizational chips.  And it feels very good not to be on the sidelines.  And mostly – from a personal point of view – it feels good to be whole and to be myself as hard as I can.

Wrecking what’s there is not necessarily bad. It just depends on what you’re wrecking or how.

I remember when I was fifteen or so, going by a house that was being demolished and being a bit sad, because the room exposed was a nursery, with a beautiful forest scene painted on it, with all sorts of cute animals. It was something that was sad to destroy, but I realized that the structure of the house was probably no longer really habitable. I mean, Portugal is littered with these: beautiful little urban palaces, which CAN work, if you have an army of servants but really don’t anymore. And which don’t have a bathroom, or what we’d consider a kitchen.

I still want to take them all, and fix them all.

This morning, in the Huns group, we got in a discussion that made me a wee bit uncomfortable, because it was “this has to go.” And “this has to be destroyed.”

It made me think of the left who thinks if they wrecking ball everything, then paradise happens. And that’s not the way it is. That’s not the way any of that works.

However…. However… part of what we were talking about were the deeply dysfunctional beliefs that have crept in over the last 100 years. Like “Smart women don’t raise their own kids” and “smart women don’t have kids” and…..

How do you wrecking ball assumptions?

Well, not by destroying the people or the institutions (though a lot of institutions need to be changed, yes.)

We destroy these assumptions and the institutions they are built on, by creating new and functional ones.

Leave the indiscriminate wrecking ball to them. Go and live our contrary assumptions.

Go and build.

Let them be the destroyers. Destroying never wins, particularly when it’s based on fantasy, not reality.

Go and build.

In the end we win, they lose.

You’re not going to ask why, are you?

I’ve been waking in the night not with the horrors, but with a dull, tired resignation, half wanting the worst to happen, so that we can move on… which will only matter if I survive.

This has been going on for two weeks, after a dream so bad, so dreary that I will not describe it for fear that will seal it into truth. I’ve told it to three of you. But I don’t know if I conveyed the sheer sense of resigned dread in it. The sense of something horrible after which life will never be the same.

This winter approaches rapidly and with a clarifying sense. I pray it will be just tight enough to wake people up, but not so tight we become…. something else. And I pray for my family in Europe. I think things will be harder there. Not as bad as in poorer countries, though. And I’m forever grateful that Portugal — though not warm in the North — is a Mediterranean climate, and not as cold as say Germany.

And I wait. And I feel dread, as though something dark and cold is moving in the world, something that doesn’t like humans or — truth be told — life at all. It has invaded people’s minds, the minds of a self proclaimed elite who’d rather destroy all of humanity than allow us to be free of their plans.

Northern Europeans are in the face of a cold winter and possible hunger trying to turn off their remaining sources of energy and stop farmers producing.

Our idiotic governing Junta is studying plans to dim the sun’s light. Because computer models show them the Earth has a fever. This despite the fact that warmth has never hurt humans, and cold always does. Despite the fact that their computer models haven’t proven right, ever, and are in fact as reliable as those that showed the Wu-flu decimating humanity. (I speak advisedly.)

And our idiotic titular “president”, the FICUS (Fraud In Chief of the US) has tried to bait four nations now into nuking us. He’s now reduced to baiting 2nd line nuclear powers, to wit Pakistan. Bets are open on who will be next. Israel I suspect, knowing the minds of these idiots, but India is a contender, and hey, England has a chance.

Why?

I don’t know. Because ruling over a decimated land appeals more than having his carefully constructed public image destroyed in public? Because what they’ve done is so heinous that humanity will rightly recoil from them, if they find out? Because enough consciousness of their sins and failings remains that they’d rather kill everyone than admit it?

Or of course because they hate us. They hate us for being us, for being individuals, for refusing to be manipulated like widgets.

It is a bright and clear day where I live. But it might well be one of those spectacular Colorado sunsets I miss just a little, where it looked like the world had been dipped in blood, and you heard thunder rumble just over the horizon.

The waiting is unnerving. And I don’t know if anything I do, if anything any of us does has any lasting meaning.

But I believe it does. I believe it will find echoes if not now, not far off.

I also don’t believe we will be nuked. Or if we are, it won’t be where the idiots think. I saw them bandy a map from the eighties, showing all the now closed/vacated silos in the heartland, as though trying to bait the enemy into nuking flyover. But I know how foreign minds work, and even they know we’ve decommissioned most silos. They also know — from knowing their own countries — the way to utterly cripple us: Hit the five or six biggest cities. Our centers of government.

It would lead very neatly to that dream I had. That vivid, grey, evil nightmare.

… it is not what I want. But it might not be mine to prevent. Just as the slow grinding of scarcity and anger and some precipitating incident that would lead to the same moment is not mine to prevent.

So… So I’ll do what I can do. And I’ll enjoin you to do the same.

Go forth, and seed doubt and discord. Oh, no. Not among our own, not doubt in America, and who we are.

Look, we live surrounded by people who not only believe things that aren’t so, but believe impossible things that lead them to commit horrible acts.

No, I’m not saying to confront them. I’m saying to be smart. Assume the superior sneer, the sarcasm. Strike when safe, and do it with a light hand.

That’s how they’ve been taking apart Western civilization. With stupid, but assured, and superior-sounding sarcasm. “Oh, Washington and the cherry tree? Don’t tell me you believe that.” Sarcastic voice “I cannot tell a lie” Snort.

Would it surprise you to know the only thing they have against that story is that it cannot be proven? No? Well, it did me, but it shouldn’t have.

So you know, when they say that the Earth will boil in twenty years… assume the superior smile, roll eyes. “That late? I thought it was supposed to be like 20 years ago. And we weren’t supposed to have any snow by now.” Shrug of shoulder, grin. “And wouldn’t that make my life easier in Winter.”

“Inequality of income is bad? Only if the poor can’t eat. Other than that, honestly why would you care?” Giggle. “Envy, right? Yeah. I wish I had my own jetplane too. But what the heck.”

“Overpopulation? Yeah. You’re right. We’re totally running out of space in the land. Quick, go tell all the small cities offering people money for someone to move there.” (No, really, look it up.)

And go forth and teach too.

We live in a time of profound ignorance. In some ways times are always of profound ignorance, but now the apparatus that should be devoted to education teaches only lies and made up nonsense, while resolutely keeping people from learning anything that might help.

Teach. Teach in small ways if you can.

One of you got nicknamed Anime at Fencon because she couldn’t convey her name’s spelling at registration. I now want her to do the eyes. (Grin.)

This reminded me that years ago in a Media… d*mn it, can’t remember the name of the store. It has closed now… the cashier wore a name tag saying Genesis.

Being a geek, I enthused, “Oooh, what a lovely and unusual name. Like the book in the Bible.”

“It’s a book in the Bible? I thought it was a band.”

So I explained. That the band was named for the book of beginnings. Quickly, and with a smile.

Do that. Don’t act horrified, don’t browbeat.

Slavery? Well, it is horrible we had it, given our creed, but the whole world had it, till the industrial revolution. We weren’t the last to abolish it in the west. It persists in Africa and the middle East. (Don’t argue, just inform. Shrug if they argue and say “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion. Not his own facts.”)

Colonization? Every species colonizes. Otherwise our ancestors would still be fish.

Indigenous people were noble savages? There are no noble savages. All humans are imperfect.

Say it. When it’s safe, when you’ll not be physically attacked or fired or– Just say it. Interject some truth in the fog of lies.

Truth and reality are coming back to the world.

I pray it not be in fire and blood. But I wake up with the dull certainty I don’t get what I want.

And what I — and you — can do might not be much. But we’d better do what we can to minimize the hurt and the loss.

Be not afraid. Fear solves nothing and makes everything worse.

This too shall pass. And the light at the end of the tunnel is not a train. Don’t be ridiculous. Where would we get fuel for a train.

If we’re lucky, it won’t be all consuming fire either.

Go work towards a better outcome. Maybe it counts for nothing. Or maybe we get lucky. In either case nothing is lost and something might be helped.

Go.

Book promo

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*

FROM ROBERT A. HOYT: Almost Curable

Almost Curable’s fourteen short stories take you on a journey to equal few others. There are fantasies, like a long-dormant guardian waking to save a lost boy; or a luckless medieval princess finding her destiny; or even an angel helping a tech nerd fight off the devil, and then there are nightmares, from a steampunk adventure in which the characters have to face a literal dragon, and where dark elf ancestry can brand you for life. Or a land of living sugar slowly losing its fight with evil.
There are cautionary tales, like the one of the fully automated bio grocery store, or the one about AI watching your children.
And then then there are stories we don’t know what to do with — and doubt you will either — such as the one about the zombie dinosaur who is too cute to put down.
Enjoy a journey of adventure and wonder through these amazing stories.

FROM FIONA GREY: Glitter: A Professor Porter Short Story (Professor Porter Paranormals)

Professor June Porter is worried. Her daughter Medina has shown no signs of magic, leaving her defenseless and isolated among magicians. Unless, of course, everyone’s about to discover just how special Medina is.

FROM RICHARD F. WEYAND: Hecate (Pantheon Book 1)

Recently widowed engineer Timothy Conner would always remember it as the day his life changed forever. The day he went to the estate sale.

Timothy Conner bought an ancient book and got a cat into the bargain. But the cat and the book concealed a centuries-old secret. Conner probes that secret and releases an ancient being of unimaginable power.

Life for Timothy Conner would never be the same. The world would never be the same.

Because the world had never been what he had always thought it was.

FROM J. M. NEY GRIMM: Eurydice Otherwise (The Hades Cycle Book 1

She’s not Eurydice, but she’s caught the eye of hell’s king…

Phoebe, a nature spirit of ancient Greece, loves her mountain birthplace and intends never to leave it. But the Olympian Artemis’ dazzling glamor lures her away to join the goddess’ retinue of handmaidens.

Initially the handmaidens welcome Phoebe warmly, but their friendship turns to bullying once Artemis turns her back. Phoebe’s inexperience makes her no match for the mean girls, who win every verbal battle.

And when Phoebe chooses a protector other than the often-absent Artemis, she courts a danger far worse than cruel taunts or stinging slaps. Unless she learns to value herself for herself—rather than depending on the regard of others—she will perish in Hades’ depths.

Eurydice Otherwise is the intense first tale in The Hades Cycle. If you enjoy ancient mythology brought to vivid life, you’ll love the entrancing characters, inventive world building, and startling twists in J.M. Ney-Grimm’s gripping short story of the old gods.

FROM C. V. WALTER: Healed by His Alien Nurse (Alien Brides Book 7)

Coming soon…..

FROM LAURA MONTGOMERY: Fractional Ownership

When his company demands either a move to Mars or the loss of his job,perpetual plaintiff Lewis Ostrow finds he can’t even get a ticket to the world without lawyers.A short story.

FROM ALMA T. C. BOYKIN: Noble, Priest, and Empire: Merchant and Empire Book Seven

Valdher of the Wilds, Lady of the Forest

Unwanted survivor, failure, Halwende cost his father money and should never have become heir. When Valdher chooses him as priest, no one is prepared for what follows, least of all Halwende.

Sneelah of the Snows, Lady of the Ice

Young in his power, Aglak Rothbard settles long-simmering disputes. With force. Icy-cold force, just like the goddess he serves.

One man seeks to open the raw, new lands in the north for settlement, as his Lady commands. The other seeks to balance rapid change and the desires of a deity reluctant to release her hold on the north. When long-forbidden magic is brought back to light and used for ill purposes, both men and their deities must work together for the good of the Northern Empire. Two men and their patrons, strong in power and stronger in will. Who will be master of the northern lands?

FROM SARAH A. HOYT: Darkship Thieves

Athena Hera Sinistra never wanted to go to space. 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.

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: WILD

*Sorry. It’s the sleep thing. I’d almost not slept the night before, so I slept like 11 hours before I could get moving this morning. So, I got up very late, and I NEED to clean the house, because husband has the day off and plans for late afternoon. I know I’ve been playing hooky a lot this week. Bear with me. I’ll try to make it better. – SAH*

The Masks Are Coming Off- A Blast From the Past From August 2018

For years, being a conservative or — in my case — a libertarian (no step on snek) in the arts, in writing, in publishing, in any cultural enterprise was an exercise in going insane.

You knew what was going on in private, you knew how hard they could hit on what absolutely minor and ridiculous points, but the public in general was not aware of any bias, and if you complained, they thought you were paranoid.

This was particularly the case when you were small potatoes, or  when what they were doing was rejecting short stories or asking you to change your books.

Sure, I could sense the principles behind it, and how changing my books would make them say something I didn’t want to, but at the same time there was the weird feeling “um… is this true?  Or am I imagining it?  I’m a small-time writer, writing in a tiny-small-time field.  How could they possibly micromanage it to this extent?”

It was particularly hard for me because I grew up under socialist (national then international) regimes, with occasional outbreaks of outright Ocasio-Cortez er… I mean Communism.  This both allowed me to see the holes in it (no, truly, even at 13 or so, studying Marxism in five high school courses will cause you to see the holes) and, once I’d decided I was against it (I was actually fairly left, in the US meaning until my mid-twenties.  Couldn’t help being.  Young, stupid, and raised in a soup of leftists “facts”) I started seeing all the little ways the establishment — educational, cultural, arts — pushed people towards the idea of for lack of a better term “the inevitable certainty of Marxist victory.” The inevitability and echo chamber are essential, because Marxism is not particularly convincing if you look at it.  If you’re sure it will triumph, though you’ll pick up a vast majority of “the scared” (which are way more than the “convinced”)who want to be eaten last or not at all by adopting the philosophy now and being strident.

So, coming from that background, my “feelers” detected all sorts of things.

In my entire — 34? well, if you count hidden pen names and work for hire more like 40 novels, but never mind — I had very few edits.  Mostly the books get copy edited, not edited.

About 3 books were “edited” which amounted to “remove this scene, move that one” “I don’t think this sentence says what you think it does” and “this will heighten tension.”  Those were as far as I could tell very innocuous.

Only two books had rewrite requests, and both of those, had I followed through on the rewrite would have changed the books completely, in one case yeah, to fit with feminist and “race” narrative (they wanted the Masai woman from the first book to accompany the two white guys to India on the adventure because “she’s as good as they are” — which no one was disputing, though perhaps less equipped for yet another culture change — and when I objected that if we took her to India we would get into issues of Indian racism, I was told that only whites were racist), and in another case to have my character LEAD rather than oppose the future analog of the French revolution.  My refusal to do those re-writes, because then the books would say what I didn’t want them to say severely damaged, if not broke, my relationship with the respective publishing houses. (Yes, and I know some of you will recognize the book and go, “but that was… it can’t be.”  What you don’t get is that I don’t have that big a name, and that the house isn’t MAJORITY libertarian/conservative.  It just allows it and it depends on who you’re actually dealing with.)

But this was all done covertly, behind the scenes, and of course none of us could talk.  First because we’d seem like paranoid loons.  I mean, we’re complaining about things no one saw.

Second, because we would never work in that town again.

As this started to change, so did the pressure on writers become more open and more obvious.

This case is… well, let’s say I’ve known more like this than not.  Houses are actually willing to lose money as long as they can micro-manage the message.

And boy, do they micro manage.  Yep, at that level.  None of their “intended” bright future can be questioned, not even the incidental bits, like “a female president wold be the best thing ever.” or “Leftists are always wonderful.”

And no, of course they’re not doing it on purpose, in the sense that they’re not trying to consciously push every little detail of the message.  That would be exhausting, and also require them to be super-geniuses (they aren’t.) I’ve known and been friends with a lot of lefties before the current frothing times.  Haven’t dropped them, though some of them have dropped me.  It’s not that they consciously police every detail.  It’s that they are immersed in this “vision” that includes every little detail of the socialist paradise and its coming, and they absorb the latest directive from the echo chamber. So when they see something against that, they flinch and want the painful part removed.  Like, in the French Revolution book, I suspect someone looked at how I was denying that equality of outcomes was a good thing, and got very upset “no, no, she’s supposed to be supporting these.” probably even considering what I had done an error, not an intended thing.

But that’s traditional, and look, guys, I have friends in journalism and in education, and I know they get the same exact pressures.  “No, no no.  You can’t teach that.  You must teach this.”  “No, you don’t want to report that.  Or at least remove this word.  Otherwise it gives people the wrong idea.”

Heck, sometimes headlines get changed and strange assemblies to discuss some current events get caught (so much of these when kids were in school.)

So here’s the bad news: our culture has been immersed for almost a 100 years in a cohesive, monolithic narrative.  A narrative that moved steadily left, with no relenting.  This is why those of us who are older than about 35 grew up in a world where voicing a dissenting — conservative or libertarian — opinion got you labeled “crazy”and “uneducated”.  If you were denying what everyone knew, confirmed multiply from unrelated fields like news, research (oh, so easily manipulated, particularly in the soft sciences) and entertainment, then obviously you were either crazy or uneducated or, yah, stupid.  This is how leftism became a positional good.

The good news?  The barriers are coming down, the doors are blowing open, and now we know we’re not alone, we know we’ve been lied to and manipulated.  Sometimes we don’t realize the magnitude of the manipulation which, yeah, can be staggering.

And yeah, I know, some people on the right are convinced indie channels like Amazon are out to get them.  We know facebook and twitter and yeah Google are.

I contend Amazon isn’t — yet.  None of the cases I’ve seen are convincing.  Also, when it comes to indie publishing, they can hit a few, mostly on covers and titles, but they can’t do this kind of micromanagement that trad pub does.  Why?  Because they can’t.  Because they’re not dealing with 10 or even twenty books a quarter.  To police every indie novel, every story that goes up?  I would take a massive work force, and not the third-world-country-uncertain-in-English one that Amazon hires.

Won’t happen.  Not saying that we don’t need alternatives, and yeah, we’re working on that.

But that’s exactly the thing.  PRECISELY.  In exact detail.  There are alternatives. Or there will be, once things become untenable.  And as the masks come off, as each corrupt medium and source goes full turnip, people shy away from it.  Not just us, mind you, but the Muddled Middle.  How many people think CNN is reliable anymore?  The crazier they go, the more they make their agenda obvious, the shakier they get.

And when they reach a certain point, alternatives become viable.  Even when we think they can’t.  Look at journalism, which we thought was immovable.  But it’s not.

The USSR had to regulate typewriters, because they were dangerous to its stability of uniform message.  So were copiers and mimeographs.  Mimeographs, which in the west caused only a ripple of really bad fanfic could bring the ability to control information down.  Then fax machines came in and it was goodbye.

The current technology has issues, but one thing it’s doing is making it difficult for the left to maintain the unified narrative and view of the world without which it CANNOT survive.

Sure, I won’t guarantee they won’t win some elections.  Given their amazing fraud machine, they might even win most of them.  And yes, I know how dangerous that is, because it can take us into actual blood on the streets and much much worse, a reaction-regime which is not America in any recognizable way.

But in the end, regardless of how rocky it gets, we win, they lose.  Because they can only survive where every voice repeats the same and logic never intrudes.  And that’s not the world our technology is shaping.

Be not afraid!

Yes, I’ve still been having nightmares. And I’m obviously low on coffee. Which is why it’s so good I got a shipment of king Harv, to wit Hurricane blend.

Yes, they’re funny.

And because I’m fighting the urge to crawl back into bed, and I have a Barbarella script to finish, I’m going to link their funny page/homage to the late King Harv, himself.

King Harv, a man for all coffees seasons

You are not your brain. Or perhaps I should say “you’re not your intellect.” Your body is not just a meat suit. And your brain is not just a wet lump in your skull.

If you internalize this, really internalize it, it will solve a lot of the problems moderns (Post-moderns?_ have interfacing with life. It might even allow you to forgive yourself for what seem like unforgivable slips from what you believe and want to be.

First, I’ll confess I suffer from a serious case of forgetting I have a body. Not wishing my body were different. Not thinking of it as a conveyance, but purely forgetting I am a physical being.

The apex of this was a panel at which I was the moderator, and the rest of the panelists were women and I said they were all women but me. (Perhaps that’s why idiots got the idea I was “really” a white Mormon male?) Understand I wasn’t thinking of myself as male. I’d just forgotten I had a body and therefore a sex. And if my husband — who knows me better than should be legal and knew exactly what had happened — hadn’t shouted with laughter from the first row, I’d never have realized I’d said anything wrong. Even while the other panelists blinked at me in horror.

This is caused, of course, by the fact that I live too much in my own head. Look, there are entire worlds in there, and more fascinating toys than I can explain, and I don’t mean just the fictional stuff. I like exploring ideas or lines of scientific inquiry and running them to ground.

When the kids were little and I could afford very few books, I got the fiction from the library and used what little money I had to build my biology, paleontology, history library.

But — I want to make this clear — I’m not just a mind. The mind is housed in a brain, which in turn is subjected to whatever is going on with the body — turning into a gnome at a speed that dismays me. Or perhaps a dwarf, given the hair on chin — that houses it, be it chronic pain or hormone imbalances, lack of sleep or improper nutrition, or the fact that I was kept locked in the house for two fricking years, with few ways out.

This was brought home to me starkly when editing Darkship Renegades. Semi-spoiler — is it possible to have spoilers for a book that’s been out for almost ten years? — one of the central subplots of the book is a horror one, though it’s achieved by theoretically (my research person tells me now validated with some research from Scotland; curiously while I was finishing editing the book for re-issue) scientific means: one of my characters has his brain damaged and taken over by another personality, one which is also brain damaged.

My first contact with this book when I started re-editing was to be annoyed at myself back then, because structurally it’s not really a novel. It’s two novels intertwined and enmeshed. If I were writing it today it would be two completely separate books. But then the book within the book, the possession plot would have come across as complete horror.

Would it surprise you to know that this subplot was not there at all in the outline? Or that as I read it again, to do a re-edit, I got the horrible feeling I was reading an SOS?

You see, when I wrote the novel, I felt as if my brain were… well, being taken by someone else was a description, though what I actually felt like was that it was dissolving.

That I managed to keep the blog going and write novels in that state was the astonishing thing. I now know that Alzheimers probably won’t stop me writing novels. It will just make it harder.

Oh, before you flood me with diagnosis: I know exactly what caused it — I was suffering from untreated (and fairly weird) hypothyroidism. The fairly weird part meant that every doctor who looked at me went “Oh, you’re hypothyroidal” (the mask is fairly obvious to anyone who’s seen it) and then testing and going “No. It’s normal.” and stopping there. Until one didn’t… three years after that novel. (It got worse before it got better.)

The damage was extensive enough, I’ve been recovering ever since.

What it felt like, inside, was like driving a car on an icy road. If you’ve found yourself ever doing that, you know exactly what I mean. You find yourself sliding, you correct, you slide in the other direction. Only the car was a thought, and the icy road was a mind that JUST didn’t work and had patches of “white matter abnormalities.” Which amounts to holes in the brain network, basically.

What it involved in practical fact, while writing, was keeping a notebook beside me, in which I had names and descriptions of characters and the place I’d left them (and doing that) the last time they were seen. Because five pages later, I’d have forgotten.

Yes, I’m all better now. Not well, as recovery is loooong. I only recently stopped having to keep a pad with the names and descriptions of secondary characters, because otherwise in chapter eighteen John would be very surprised because the last time we saw him, in chapter 13, his name was Jim. But now that’s not a problem either, so that’s good.

But it is amazing how many of my novels back then involved a character’s brain being taken over by something else or being unable to coordinate thoughts. Which was a feat in mystery, where I had a character get serious concussion for that effect.

Now re-reading, it’s obvious that my body was desperately trying to communicate “not well. Please, do something about it.”

Kind of like when I was sinking into the pneumonia that almost killed me at 33 I kept having dreams of being buried alive. But I had no clue that meant “I’m suffocating out here, please help.” So it was another week before I collapsed in the hallway and we got help.

Of course, with hypothyroidism, I was trying to get help, and being told I needed an anti-depressant, or it was all in my head, even though the florid symptoms were written on my face.

Took me a while, while re-editing to accept that Darkship Renegades isn’t flawed, per-se. It is not the book I meant to write. And it has the imprint of when things were very wrong with my brain. But it is not a bad book.

There are other books from writers suffering from brain issues, where I can see the marks of the issues, but I still love the books completely. And wouldn’t mind another six of each.

So, what is the point of all this?

The point of all this is that I’ve known for however long — 11? I don’t remember the year I wrote it — that at the time I was very ill, and things weren’t working right to an almost terminal degree.

But I’ve always felt guilty that book deviated in…. tone from what I intended. I wanted it simpler and more cheerful. And I keep telling myself it would have sold better if it had been so, and why didn’t I do it that way?

Well…. I didn’t do it that way because my brain was trying to signal how ill it was. And because I’m not a creature of pure spirit. And heck, the book — and the series — might be better for it, even if it deviated from what I intended.

In the same way, I’ve always blamed myself because around that time my other duties went by the way side. (Okay, that was also, I think, the year I wrote 6 books, but still.)

My son was explaining to his wife how he grew up was not how she met us and he said “until I was like 16 mom cooked every night, and she was a great housekeeper.” And I realized the wheels came off that when I was having issues keeping thoughts on track. Makes sense. Hard to plan the day so you can write AND keep house, and then it became impossible.

But the thing is, knowing that, I’ve blamed myself for being unable to finish long works for a while, or for having trouble “closing” novels, or for making absurd errors of fact in novels, or … for becoming a terrible housekeeper and costing us money going out to eat, because the evening came as a total surprise.

Because I keep forgetting the physical brain influences how I function. I’m not a detached spirit.

I don’t think I’m alone in this, particularly among people who work with their minds.

So, this morning, the dime finally dropped and I’m trying not only to forgive myself for being who I am, but to admit that the books influenced by the body not being quite right are probably better than if they were books of “pure spirit.”

Dave Freer at some point had an off comment about how science fiction declined when it stopped being written by engineers.

I think his larger point was “people who do things.”

Our books are not creations of the thinking mind. Oh, they are that. I’m not advocating they be thoughtless or that we write them after taking leave of our senses (though that happens accidentally, now and then.)

What I’m saying is our books are the sum of us. Body and brain and (hopefully rational) thought. And your body and brain bear the mark of what you’ve lived to.

It occurred to me recently all the deep study I’ve done on culture is really affecting the current book. As has the two years of house arrest affected the conception of the series. The sheer sense of helplessness while confronting mass insanity has left a mark.

So… when I look in the mirror at my increasingly gnome-like self, I don’t need to love who I am, but to accept that’s me, and this body is what I’ve made of it, plus whatever inscrutable genetic legacy my ancestors left me. (Couldn’t it be a tendency to excessive thinness, oh, nameless ancestors? (shakes fist)). I am in fact starting to look much like my paternal grandmother, and she was beautiful to my childish eyes.

And when I look at how things weren’t quite “me” in some novels, well, that’s where I was, and what my brain was doing. And I should just accept that. Because it’s part of the author, and therefore part of the book. And readers who don’t know what was going on will take other things out of it, as I did out of Diana Wynne Jones’ books when she had a brain tumor and wrote some of my favorite books of hers.

Your books, your art is not, nor should it, a detached, bloodless story. We have plenty of those from people who go to school to learn to be writers, and then regurgitate their professors’ “Wisdom” all over the pages of cardboardish novels.

For years now I’ve told all beginners to for the love of heaven not take a degree in writing. Take a degree in anything else. Even basket weaving will give you experience of something outside your head, and not “teach” you a lot of idiocy you then have to unlearn. (Trust me. Literary analysis has nothing to do with how people read actual books.)

I’m also telling you not to wait till you have perfect experience, or perfect knowledge, or perfect craft.

Write now. Your work will be flawed because you’re flawed.

But if you wrote a piece of work that wasn’t flawed, it also wouldn’t be human.

And stop holding yourself to blame for not reading to the kids EVERY NIGHT, for not keeping a spotless house, for not adhering to your diet perfectly, for not climbing the corporate ladder ahead of people you know are dumber than you, for not sewing your own clothes, for whatever it is you hold against yourself–

Stop. Whatever your flaws, it doesn’t mean you willfully failed to perform. Most of the time you know when you’re being willful, and honestly I know very few people who sabotage themselves without other causes. Usually organic causes.

And if you think about it, you usually know what they are.

I don’t want to hear “Yeah, I was very ill, but I should have baked a birthday cake.”

No, you shouldn’t. You should have gone to bed and taken medicine and forgiven yourself.

And understand this is not St. Sarah preaching to the fish. This is a fish saying to other fish “Hey, guys, really, this water stuff all around us does shape our lives. Stop blaming yourselves for not being able to live on dry land.”

In retrospect, that I managed to write at all, and to keep this blog going, and to function only slightly hampered is a minor miracle. (On admission to hospital after weird almost-death in shower in late 16, about 3 years into treatment, they told me my brain looked like the brain of an 85 year old. Yes, that is better. Last follow up in 2020 just before lockdowns, the “white matter abnormalities” had disappeared or been so reduced it didn’t matter. The brain recovers. It’s just slow.)

We’re heading into very hard times for a little while. I feel/hope/sense no more than two to five years, though if we’re very unlucky and the rest of the world more messed up than I expect, it might be ten. (Which might, perhaps, be the rest of my life.)

Don’t make it hard on yourself by holding yourself to blame for being human and imperfect. Don’t blame yourself if your preparation isn’t perfect. Yes, most of what’s coming we can see coming. But that doesn’t mean we can anticipate every possible circumstance.

Be kind to yourself, as you’d be kind to someone else you love who falls short of perfect. Trust me, it doesn’t increase the risk you’ll be too soft.

Be human, with all that entails. In the end it works better than if you could be that flawless machine of spirit you sometimes envy.

And forgive your own faults, even as you work to remedy them.

Yes, things will go very badly at times. But it’s not your responsibility nor your ability to avoid all harm to you or those you love.

Now go prepare, and do the best you can.

Years ago I wrote a post, I think at PJM — or at least I can’t find it here — about the process of “roll left and die” that magazines and book companies went through before utter collapse.

Over the years this became synonymous with Get Woke, Go Broke, but it was not actually in any way the same thing. Though sometimes, one might look like the other in end stages, which is the intention.

Confused? Don’t be. Let me describe the process of roll over and die, first in metaphor, then in a magazine.

Imagine that you have a fatal disease. It’s not a question of whether you’ll die, it’s when. And it’s not a matter of months or years, but days and weeks. Your affairs are kind of a mess. But if in your dying days, you convert, or make a profession of faith, or talk about how you’ve seen the light, or whatever your particular community values, your widow and orphans will fall in the soft and be taken care of in the best style. What do you do? Well, obviously you do the thing that will see your people to a good place when you’re gone.

Magazines — and other companies — aren’t people. Which means that they are both more and less subjected to this rule. The magazine, of itself, has no feelings of course. But the people running it are the windows and orphans, and they surely want to be taken care of.

So, a magazine that’s about to fail, no way to save itself, will often go extreme, hard all zonker left. And when it dies, the industry, which is generally left but usually more reserved (used to be more or less under cover) will go “Well, they failed, because they went left too hard too far, but what heroes of socialism” and the editor/publisher/etc. will find positions almost immediately.

This used to so reliable that from 1990 to 2010 I watched some people kill magazine after magazine, and be handed a new one (financing for a new one) to kill.

Of course the reason the magazine had died wasn’t that final spasm of socialism. It was that more enjoyment could be derived by reading mattress tags than by reading the magazine. But that last final spasm made it look to people who believed in the same fallen godling that the reason the magazine had failed was because the public wasn’t ready to accept their superior socialist wisdom. They made it look like go woke go broke, in order to cover the fact they sucked as editors and possibly money managers. And so, the survivors fell in the soft.

The strategy started failing in the nineties, because all of them were doing the roll left to die, then floating belly up waiting for rescue, but there weren’t enough people to rescue them. A lot of editors with a long kill list retired early 2ks to spend more time with the family they don’t have.

But they still try it. I still see it. I suspect half of the trad publishers are doing it now.

Because it’s an ingrained instinct by now, and because their creed doesn’t allow them to realize they’re all failing.

I never thought I would see this with “real companies” meaning not publishing or entertainment.

But I’ve started seeing it too. Companies’ stock gets wobbly and suddenly they’re doing ads with pregnant men or something. Because then when they die, they die as heroes of the revolution. (Insert disgusting commie fist.)

I’m 90% percent sure that’s what paypal has done. There were… danger signs before and there are some weird indications in their records, though it would take an expert to analyze them and I’m not that.

But the only “isn’t eating meth with a candy scoop” explanation I have for them initiating a bank run on themselves, and making themselves thoroughly untrustworthy forever is that they knew something was very wrong and likely to take them down, and did what they did to go out as heroes of the socialist revolution, or pure innocent victims of “right wing fanatics.”

Perhaps they’re afraid a changing of the guard will lead to people investigating how money was transferred for pallets of bricks in the middle of targeted streets, or paying for antifa street theater, or worse, for “vote aggregators” in 2020. If that’s what triggered it, we’re going to see a lot of crazy barreling towards us in the next month, and more if the guard does change and fraud doesn’t win.

Alternately, of course, they’re doing meth by the bucket load. Which is possible.

But since I suspect there’s at least some people there who aren’t as stoned as Jack Dorsey looks, I expect it’s Roll Left And Die.

And like the publishers in the nineties and oughts they haven’t realized that no matter how they signal, the rest of their community is also in deep trouble, and there will be no one standing by with blankets and hot chocolate, to comfort them after their fall “for the revolution.”

So, that’s going to be interesting. Even more interesting, if a bunch of the other “internet” companies follow suit. And by interesting, I mean in the sense of a Chinese curse.

It’s jut the hammer we need smashing into the economy at this time, innit?

Which…. now I think about it. Oh, h*ll. Is the Junta doing the “roll left and die” as well? Are a bunch of the western governments?

…. That’s it. I’m not going to sleep for the next year or so.

At least I’ll write a lot of books in all that time.

… They might be hallucinatory.