*ANNOUNCEMENT: I forgot to put this in yesterday evening’s post: If you have a blog and occasionally do reviews, or if you review for a professional venue, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com and I’ll send you the link to download the e-arc. Needless to say no obligation of a review. Also, for the record, soliciting reviews and help promoting, because frankly I suck at the marketing thing.)
My finally getting the books up for pre-order yesterday is not an isolated event in terms of writers who have been silent or nearly so suddenly having new properties. Mostly authors to the right of Lenin, mind.
I’ll confess this makes me a little uncomfortable. It brings to mind all my lefty colleagues in the early oughts claiming they couldn’t write, because they were so busy purging and tearing out their hair over the horrible reich wing dictatorship of…. W.
Yes, I’m fairly sure they are engaged in similar antics now over Trump. I don’t know for a fact, because I haven’t been part of their circles and email lists since oh 2015. I’ll be honest, I still belong to a few of their groups — those that haven’t imploded — under the principle that I lurk and am very quiet, so they probably don’t remember I’m there. The other side of this is that I don’t remember I’m there. I mean, guys, why should I, precisely? I can watch their histrionics in real time on twitter and facebook. And… I don’t. I stumble on them periodically and go “Oh, no. Not that again.” Because the principal emotion evoked through all this is “It’s all so tiresome.”
Which I think is more to the point than our purging and tearing out our hair over losing an election. No. The last four — arguably twelve — years have been silence-inducing for completely different reasons.
And it took me a while to figure out why, and a while longer to conceptualize it, but I think I should share the thoughts — still half formed — in my head as I grapple with this, because I think a lot of you who are not writers might be facing the same issue… with modifications.
The other day, in a small(ish) discord group I belong to, a friend mentioned something about the newest Strange New Worlds having a character fall on knees and pray and how unimaginable this would have been 5 years ago. She meant it as a “taking the temperature of the culture” thing. Which is correct, but it’s more than that. Put a pin in it; we’ll come back.
Her mentioning this made me realize how profoundly I’ve — personally — changed in 5 years. I haven’t become someone else. All the principal impulses were there five years ago. But the unthinkable happened, and I tumbled with it. And like rocks in a tumbler, it changed me in significant ways, making things obvious that were occluded and in a way making me possibly harder and smoother.
And what five years it has been. Guys, if in 2018 you’d told me that — I’m sorry, I still think this was the reason — as a ploy to make us all dependent on government and scared and tank the economy to “win” the 2020 election, the democrats would lock the entire country down for a bad flu and run a scam on how this was the next black plague that would cause Europe to also lock down and be terrified? I’d have told you that while weed was legal in Colorado, you should definitely put the bong down and go breathe some fresh air.
And if you’d told me that after all this they would still need to fraud the election at the last minute, visibly, in front of G-d and everybody? I’d have been hitting that speed dial for the men in white coats which no longer exist in our society.
And yet… And yet it happened. And yet, we were locked down, and people were terrified, despite the fact that numbers like the Diamond Princess were out and clearly demonstrated this wasn’t even an existential threat for the over 80 set, unless truly horrific treatment protocols were engaged. (And they were. Most of that group died of respirator setting.)
Because it was unthinkable, (both in here and in Europe, TBH) and yet it happened and kept happening, it broke things in our brains. And the fracture lines are still shaking up inside each of us, and in society as well.
On that pin: yes, a lot of people — self included — have become more religious. Note, I am still me. I think I have more atheist friends than religious friends. And I don’t engage in battles, anyway. Particularly not in what I call “beating over the head with Bible verses.” If they don’t believe, that will just make them puzzled or upset. I know, because my own particular branch of Christianity is often beaten over the head with Bible verses by people who think they’re “owning” us, while we have our own interpretations of those verses, so at best our reply is “First of all, rude.”
Which is what argumentum ad Bibliorum (Yes, that is in fact son of bitch Latin) is at the best of times.
But my tolerance for religion in my entertainment has gone up. Oh, you can still drive me bonkers with the average “Christian novel” because the characters stopping every fifty pages to pray, or wondering if G-d wants them to kill the bad guy feels phony and tacked on. However, a character, in an extremity of feeling falling to knees and praying? Yeah, I can see that. 2020, man. 2020.
To be fair, I always had a high tolerance for religious characters, whatever their religion, even if it was a fictional one. Sincerely religious people exist and their beliefs is part of how they process events. It’s just that few people write them/wrote them convincingly.
Will that change? I don’t know. I would suspect so, from internal changes and also how I see people around me changing.
But the change is not all, or even primarily religious. Though it is ideological, personality, enormous.
First there is the sudden doubt of everything experts say, but more importantly everything they’ve said over the last oh 100 years.
While this is good — “scientific government” has been a disaster for the world at large and filled over a hundred million graves — it is also bad, because some things are actually true, established, and can be scientifically proven (Say the germ theory of disease) but now face a much bigger cliff to convince people.
There is also high skepticism of institutions and elected — and even more non-elected — leaders. Look, you’re not going to get me to admit there is a downside here. I’m still a libertarian. An OWL (Older, Wiser Libertarian) sure, but still a libertarian (And I miss L. Neil Smith something fierce.)
Our institutions by an large have been so corrupted by Marxists and Marxism-light that we really need to topple them and replace them. The problem is that second. We really need to make with the replacing, because we still need their functions to work. Take higher education — please? I don’t want it — it desperately needs a complete overall, not in style but in substance. Yes, yes, the founding fathers, in a society that moved by ox cart, thought well of universities which were logical successors of monastic learning.
But in the 21st century? 99% or more of the learning done at universities could and arguably should be accomplished either long distance or by formal apprenticeships, with perhaps a year (tops) in localized learning and communal discussion. TOPS.
Replacing that properly (not just changing the ideological sign which will accomplish nothing) will require breaking our heads out of the mold of centuries. It might be achievable now, after the shocks of the last few years, but it will still take time and (arguably) hurt like a mother.
In the meantime, in upper education as well as everything else, frankly, everything is going to be adrift.
And each country in its own way is clinging like mad to its fundamentals. In the US that’s fairly decent but — looks sideways at Europe — guys, you know what Europe gets up to when we’re not smacking it on the nose…
The point being, though, everything is tumbling. Or to quote the great Leonard Cohen:
Things are going to slide, slide in all directions
Won’t be nothing
Nothing you can measure anymore
The blizzard, the blizzard of the world
Has crossed the threshold and it has overturned the order of the soul
In the middle of this, those of us who write feel sucker punched, unable to hold onto a coherent vision of society long enough to actually write books.
Look, until last year I felt iffy about the shifter books because they take place in a diner and I didn’t know how to deal with the lockdowns. I still don’t, except mentioning them in the rearview mirror, honestly. And how do I deal with the fact that all night open diners now seem to be a thing of the past everywhere? (Something I will never forgive the bastards who locked us down for. There was nothing like coffee at two am in an urban greasy spoon (okay, fine, Pete’s Kitchen on Colfax) to plot and clear one’s head.) I still don’t know!
But I’d guess, because outside the books I still feel a bit punch drunk, that the rest of you are going through a version of this, that this is universal and contributing to strange events with strange outcomes that keep the feeling of everything tumbling going.
In a way we’re like someone married for 50 years who is suddenly served divorce papers and then finds their spouse has had two other relationships going the whole time. Finding out what was true, what was a lie, and reestablishing our sense of self is difficult and mind-breaking.
And yet, here we are.
I’m glad I’m writing again. For those still stuck, let me advise you might have to force it in the beginning — I did stating around February last year — and find a support group to cheer you on (thank you to the terrible triplets of twitter — all different ages and looks — who kept me going. And their auxiliary corps like Fuzzy.) And if you can, if your writing field allows it, go as strange and far flung as you can. Another world, for choice.
If you’re not a writer, my advice is what I said before, but still useful.
1- Be kind to yourself. I know it’s five years, but five years is not too long to get used to the impossible happening. Give yourself grace. Give yourself time. Do something for yourself at least once a week. Carve some place and time to breathe and relax if you can. And forgive yourself for stumbles. You’re punch drunk in a world of punch drunks. Slips will happen.
2- Start figuring out how to replace compromised institutions, processes, ways of doing things. I don’t know your field, so I can’t tell you what needs changing. But I seriously encourage you to approach it from a “Do we even need the way this has been done for centuries? What if I turn it on its head?” Yes, some of the things are still needed/valid. But the processes have all changed. So examine each of the precursors first.
That’s it. Most of all, truly, give yourself grace.
No, you shouldn’t have known how to cope when the world broke. No one expected the world to break.
Now that it has, glue yourself together as you best can, and keep going.
Secure your oxygen mask before assisting those near you.
According To Hoyt 