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/
*For the previous chapters, please go here. These are posted first draft, as the brain dictates to the fingers which are remarkably stupid. Also there will be inconsistencies because until September or so, the timing on these is wonky, and I’ll forget stuff between posts. Eventually it will be cleaned up and fixed just before page is made secret/taken down and the book is published. At that time I will take lists of typos or volunteers to proof read. For now, it’s written in a hurry, usually an hour before it goes up. And, let me remind you, it’s free – SAH*
Al didn’t remember ever being so scared, although the time that Aaron had hidden the other-world-captured baby dragon in her embroidery box, and it had come exploding out, blowing fire and setting the curtains in Mama’s drawing room on fire had come close. But that had been okay, because Al had cast an illusion of curtains, and by the time Mama found out it was just an illusion, the boys had already disappeared.
No illusion was going to save her now.
She ducked behind Lord Michael stuttering like Geoff on a bad day, “W-W-What is that?”
Lord Michael pushed her back, even as he stood in front of her. “It’s an automated barber-hair cutter. I built it. It didn’t work. Or it worked very well. I ran from it. My footman took it down with a shot to the magic-box.”
Al had a second to wonder at the confusion. If the machine had been destroyed, why was it here? And also, what kind of a crazy person built this machine — bristling with knives, scissors, and indeterminate pokey things — and think that it would be a good idea to give it one’s head — or face — for trimming?
The next second she realized several things. The first was that Lord Michael’s entire plan seemed to consist of standing in front of her. As though those huge scissors couldn’t cut their way through him and into her. Second, they really didn’t have any firearms. And third… She stood back and let fly with a fireball at the thing’s magic box, or as it was known, its head.
For just a second, she had hope, as the magic ball hit and sizzled, but then it disappeared.
Lord Michael spread his arms, as though to protect her better, and also possibly to stop her doing something stupid. “Don’t do that,” he screamed. “It eats magic and gets stronger. I tried it before.”
“Well, anything you didn’t try?” she said, stepping back as he pushed her, and retreated. She could only retreat so far, though, or she’d be in the place where they had come through, which was now solidly closed with a huge boulder.
“Shotgun.”
Helpful. She remembered what she’d done with the dragonette. She’d taken the coat tree and bonked it over the head, to Aaron’s screams that she had killed the poor wee beast. She hadn’t. It had been knocked unconscious, though, long enough for Aaron to take it to the cellar, which was made of stone and had nothing it could flame, until it had learned better manners. Which it had. It had disappeared when the boys did, and even as Al looked around for any stray coat trees that might have appeared in the magical path for her convenience, she hoped the poor brute was all right. It wasn’t a bad sort, even if Aaron called him Fifi.
As expected there were no coat trees. And then, after what seemed like a frantic eternity, Al realized she didn’t need a coat tree. She needed a tree. Or at any rate, a very large tree branch. And behold, there were fallen tree branches just off the path.
She lay down on the road, so she could stretch her arms, and get hold of the biggest one.
Michael seemed to only realize what she was doing as she grabbed hold of the branch and pulled it back. “What are you doing?” He said, as she managed to bring the branch up — staggering around as the weight was almost too much for her — and then “Oh,” as he understood.
At least he got out of her way, which meant she could stagger towards the now very near machine, and let the branch drop.
There was a sound like whirring and leaves and pieces of tree flew, as it whittled its way up the branch towards her, and then Michael dropped a branch even bigger than hers atop the creature.
Knives and blades whirled, and then it stopped, suddenly. The magic flashed around the magic box. Al realized with a shock that it was trying to cut through both branches and had stuck. “Let’s drop them and run!” she yelled, her voice coming out squeaky and strained.
“No,” Michael said, as if she’d suggested he kill his pet. “You do it, and run ahead. Go. I will follow.”
“No, you….”
“GO.”
She dropped the branch and lifted the bag she’d dropped, and ran, giving the machine as wide a berth as she could. not that she was in the slightest bit afraid — no, she was massively afraid — but because she knew there was absolutely no point arguing with a boy when he got that kind of tone in his voice. It reminded her of when William was trying to compose the music that would enthrall wolves. He couldn’t do it. No one could. But there was no point telling him that until he’d spent a year trying and failing.
She turned once she was past it, to see what Michael was doing. And was actually shocked by what he did. He got behind the thing, when all its scissors and blades were pointing the other way, and reached for something. The glow of magic died around the magic box, and the blades dropped, causing the branches to bounce off the road.
“A bottle or container, quickly!” he said.
And that too was like a boy all over. Being thrifty and careful, Al drank the water from one of the bottles, before bringing it over. Michael was taking something like a long glowing string from inside the machine’s magic box. He spooled it into the bottle.
“I thought you said the machine you built had been destroyed?”
“It was. One thing I remember reading… well, in a novel,” he finished spooling the glowing thread into the bottle and corked it, then asked, “Do we have a bag?”
“Sure, but it’s full of of food. And no, I’m not dumping all the food.”
He made a sound of exasperation, but then removed his jacket and tied it in a way to form a rough sack. He put the bottle into it, and then started putting pieces of the machine into it. “Anyway, in that novel it showed someone walking a magical path, and their mistakes would come back to haunt them. This was one of my mistakes.”
“But you think it exists? I mean you’re keeping the pieces.”
“I think they’ll remain as long as we’re on the path. And I can use them to make things and get us out of trouble. I wont’ take the shell, because it’s really large and heavy, but we might want to choose the blades and take them.”
It took a long time, but when they were done, Michael had a jacket full of pieces and each of them had a sword-length knife strapped by their side with strips that Al cut from her skirt.
She was trying to think of mistakes she had made that might come back to haunt her when ahead she saw a flash of green and then a flash of yellow.
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Korr has watched as the young, exiled King Darvos is coming into his own, but he still has much to learn. That education is interrupted by a threat to the Bohgan lands they have called home.
Meanwhile, Duke Orlandis continues to seek Darvos, the last real threat to his claim on the Altrian throne. To find him, he’s enlisted the most despicable allies possible.
When these forces make a mistake that could threaten a budding alliance, Princess Lauranna and Darvos find themselves knee deep in a fight of their own.
FROM SARAH D’ALMEIDA: Death of a Musketeer(Mostly because I FINALLY put new covers on this series!)
When D’Artagnan, Athos, Porthos and Aramis discover the corpse of a beautiful woman who looks like the Queen of France, they vow to see that justice is done. They do not know that their investigation will widen from murder to intrigue to conspiracy, bring them the renewed enmity of Cardinal Richelieu and shake their fate in humanity. Through duels and doubts, they pursue the truth, even when their search brings them to the sphere of King Louis XIII himself and makes them confront secrets best forgotten.
(Someone said, having read The Glass Shoe, that he could tell I had improved a lot since I wrote Darkship Renegades. Actually, I suspect if anything I’ve regressed a bunch since then, because there was illness and not writing much for years. It’s just that some styles are more to people’s tastes than others, and of course fantasy and short story is very different from space opera and novel. However it occurs to me most people might have no idea that I write in half a dozen different styles, depending on the genre. So I thought I’d start pushing some of my older collections. And yes, truly, the novels ARE getting finished. 2020 has just been brutal.)
From the trenches of WWI where the Red Baron just can’t help turning into a dragon, to the desert sands of a future world where humans have become something else, from a coffee shop between worlds where magicians gather, to a place where your worst nightmare can love you, let Dragon Blood take you on a series of fantastic adventures.
With an introduction by Pam Uphoff
This collection contains the stories: Rising Above, From Out The Fire, Yellow Tide Foam, Hot, The Blood Like Wine,The Least Of These Little Ones, Scraps Of Fog,Something Worse Hereafter,The Littlest Nightmare,Dragon Blood
Alice Ladybird learns that her stepsister learned it.
And is using it without shame or pity.What she has not learned is how to stop her.
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.
Sorry, sorry, sorry. I am alive. We woke up insanely late (as in after 10 am, which hasn’t happened to me since I was a teen, unless I was on an international flight the night before) were updating Daz 3-d content and stuff on my computer most of the afternoon (We hadn’t touched it since we set up the computer in March) and then we went out to dinner….
And then I found I was too out of the adderal effect to write. I’ve spent the last three hours bouncing all over the net, instead of writing.
So, I will do a chapter tomorrow. Probably go to bed in the next few minutes, so maybe I won’t wake up insanely late tomorrow.
This is the biggest waste of a day in months. but hey, Daz is updated and I did a render to test the new textures….
I have heard it said that if you look carefully and take the correct action before an accident you can sometimes be all right. It will still hurt. It will hurt like hell. But it will be all right.
I have had friends save their brains from injury because they “knew how to fall.” I have had other friends who, just before a car crash turned their cars just so, so that it wouldn’t kill them. Heck, we did in fact pay through the nose (2k per kid) to send our sons to a driving program (Master Drive, in Colorado Springs, if anyone is interested) that teaches that kind of technique and others, like how to avoid a crash at all. We went on payments for both kids, so that we could do it (we did not have 2k extra laying around, no.) and in at least one case it proved worth it, when son went spinning out on an iced major street, and managed to right the car and himself without hitting anyone. He didn’t even think about it. They train you on a skid pad.
I hate to tell you this, but metaphorically speaking most of you don’t have training on a skid pad. I do — sort of — but not on a street that has been deliberately and thoroughly iced and when someone cut the brakelines and possibly unscrewed the wheel. We’re going to need an amazing amount of luck to get out of this. At this point I hold about a 10% chance the Democrats/Socialists/Communists (interchangeable now that the masks are off) don’t fraud their way into full power, pack the court and rip our system apart, to install (yet again) a form of communism. This is complicated by the fact that a lot of them are in China’s pockets. Or rather, China has been filling their pockets for a long while. We might find ourselves working for racist, hegemonic overlords, besides suffering all the ills of a descent into communism. (By the way, they’ve already been doing this to some extent to the less fortunate countries, including most African countries. The left in the US and Europe believes this is benevolence. And that Chinese aren’t racist. I wouldn’t believe it, if it hadn’t been said to me over and over.)
There is maybe another 25% of chance we’ll find ourselves in CW II, now with even more foreign interference. What comes out of that, G-d only knows, and I’m not Him. Which is good, because I have trouble enough being me.
And there is a very strong chance that even if Trump wins the White House, besides continuing to have to drive a car where the wheel is disconnected (the extent of which I wasn’t even fully sure of until this month) he won’t do more than delay the crash.
Sometimes here, and particularly at insty, because I tend to do that really late at night when I’m exhausted and less able to control my moods, you’ll catch a hint of how hopeless I feel our situation to be.
In fact since the lockdown, I’ve been feeling we were screwed. That the lockdown was imposed all over the world on such flimsy evidence, that countries and churches, and every cultural institution not only submitted to it but kept telling the people how much it was needed sent me into a deep depression from which I haven’t fully recovered. (Again, the evidence that this virus was MAYBE as bad as the flu has been before our eyes since the beginning. You don’t need special equipment to see it. The homeless were congregating and not dying in droves. The people in slums in the third world weren’t dying at a higher rate than usual. And there were the numbers from the Diamond Princess. Which some idiot here tried to justify with “but they got the best treatment.” In a floating petri dish. With no special equipment. May G-d have mercy on the soul of every idiot who bought that bullshit.).
This last week, on the other hand, I’ve been feeling like I’m at the end of a Bond movie, and the villain is telling me his big master plan and how Western Civilization is tied to the train tracks and can’t escape.
Oh, not the massive corruption of the Biden crime family. I mean seriously. Any of you who didn’t know already that Crackhead McStripperbang wasn’t being paid for foreign countries for his services must have been living under a rock.
Not even the ridiculous, immediate coordination with which our tech overlords moved to clamp down on that information and preventing it from reaching the virgin ears of most of our willfully and willingly ignorant countrymen.
No, what discouraged me most was the “sexual preference” suddenly becoming a slur and Webster dictionary falling in line. (Seriously, guys, sexual preference goes way beyond orientation. For instance, my sexual preference is monogamous and with someone I love. If you think that there’s no preference involved, you must think people have absolutely no control over their impulses.) Because that bullshit couldn’t happen, even in the most totalitarian of conspiracies.
And that’s the terrifying thought. These people are no more conspiring than your breaklines being cut are a conspiracy not to stop the car.
They are a result of deep inlaid propaganda and misseducation which cause a lot of people to try to fall into line with the “word from above” and be “right” with those they view as the smart people and the masters of society.
I’ve lately started considering whether the decadence and nihilism we associate with the Weimar Republic was as we’ve been propagandized, the result of “capitalism” and a weak government, or the result of this sort of corruption, deep-inlaid. I don’t know enough of German history pre-world-war-one to tell you. Because I suspect the process would have started then.
But– And this is important– I haven’t fallen fully into despair. I haven’t for two reasons: first because in the back of my mind, Jerry Pournelle keeps saying “Despair is a sin.” (Some people just don’t know how to quit. Death seems to make no difference. I keep expecting to open email and have him yell at me to buck up and grow a spine, only more politely, because he has finally figured out how to hack heavens email.)
The other side of it is that I have watched a lot of Bond movies, and read a lot of mysteries. When the villain goes into his soliloquy, and shows us the extent of his plot, he usually is two pages away from being stopped. And sure, the situation seems hopeless, but the seeds of the villain’s own destruction have already been laid, and also, let’s be real, when you start showing your hand and dropping the mask, you’re no longer a sane or in any way competent villain.
Look, they’ve been working on this a looooooooong time. It started I’d guess right after WWI, with inroads into the institutions, which they more or less fully captured after the sixties, due to credentialism. Outlawing competency tests for jobs was really a bad thing. Yes, some people might have used them to enforce racism and discrimination. But market forces would have prevented its being general. It would have worked itself through. Instead we handed control over giving people the piece of paper they needed to get hired to the already deeply compromised universities. It was a single point of failure, a small and claustrophobic culture which has always existed mostly on prestige and where people think disproportionately well of their own intellect. In other words, it was ripe for being taken over by Marxists, even if it hadn’t been already. (If you don’t believe me, read the early Heinlein depictions of college professors in the juveniles.) Since then people have been going through “training” at least half of which is indoctrination. The softer the science the more intense the indoctrination, but — much as I hate to tell you — even the hard sciences get hit with this.
More importantly, because the “learned people” are the ones society admires, everyone who makes it big, even in a tech field — Bill Gates, I’m glaring at you — immediately starts signaling and acting more left than left, so as to be perceived as high class.
Which is why not only all our institutions, but our organs of government are deeply infiltrated and corrupt. Everyone in the FBI, CIA, etc has learned, in their education (some in the best possible American colleges) that America must be reined in, that communism/socialism/etc. had some good points. BUT more importantly, they’ve learned to respect the POV of the “learned” people which are all, uniformly hard Marxists and corruptocrats.
This is before you drop China and its money in. It’s play money, sure. It’s money by fiat from a country that has no control over whatever the government wishes to proclaim. But we accept it as real, and this allowed them to corrupt us.
EVERYONE who complains of Trump’s hiring should be aware he’s hiring from the set that have the credentials and knows how to get along with the other people needed to do the job. The shit show you’re looking at is what credentialism has created.
So…. So, I don’t know. We have maybe a chance in a million. And maybe Pratchett was right about those. We have to hope.
But before we crash, hard or soft (and please keep in mind given the amount of money printed for the various stimulus and to keep people from starving after the government destroyed them and society, we’re going to crash, or at least enter an inflationary free-fall.) there are some things to keep in mind:
We got here because of credentialism. There is a good chance your kids don’t actually know how to do what the establishment ostensibly taught them to do. In fact, if they do know, because they’re the fighting kind and studied on their own they’ll probably be resented by the entire credential system and might have trouble getting through it.
And most kids are in debt. Bad debt. The trap Obama ran them into, making student loans federal and non-dischargeable in bankruptcy? Yeah.
Years ago, a young woman came to a Huns dinner. This was at a time when I was very afraid she’d come for quotable quotes, so I gave her the cold shoulder. But she has been proven right. She told me antifa, and everyone young writing for lefty sites, etc? Young people were broke and desperate for money. They’re in it for the money. And they feel robbed. Partly because they were.
Of course, they were robbed by the machinations of deeply-inlaid socialists, but the rest of us cooperated with it.
Coming out of college with crushing debt and with no prospects for a job, a lot of them went back in for more education, thereby forging thicker shackles.
A lot of you — and me, in principle — oppose forgiving student loans. Look, guys, yeah, I get it. These people willingly fell for the snow job. But how could they not, when all of society cooperated in it? And when frankly, they did need those credentials, because our “free” national education is no longer a guarantee that they can read and write? (I’m here to tell you, having taught college as well as tutored high school students, that most of them can’t. They know a few words, but the effort of writing those is so immense that none is left over for making sense. People who are extremely fluent verbally can’t write or read their way out of a paper bag. This is because the “free” education mostly followed fads designed to be useful for teachers, not kids. If you have kids in school, at any level, the most important thing you can do is make sure they read well enough to read for fun, and then feed the elephant child. And trust me, phonics work. I’ve used them with both kids.)
And yeah, I read the parents indignantly saying they paid for their kids’ educations, and why should other people be given free money.
Look, you’re either going to have to forgive those loans, or — frankly — you’ll be stampeded into communism by a generation shackled to poverty — and the left — by their indebtedness. Sure, maybe they should get some punishment for being stupid. But their whole lives?
After thinking about it a long time, the only way we heal long term, supposing Trump wins, is to forgive student loans and set the kids free to become productive citizens. Mind you, if anyone near the president is reading this: I’d make forgiving the loans contingent on their proving they have an “employable skill” which might take allowing them to take more loans for training programs (as in for instance, to learn to code, or repair cars, or even construction work) which are then forgiven when they become good at it and work at it for a year. I would also make it a condition that they show they can read and write proficiently. Not just enough to piece some sentences together, but enough to be as coherent on paper as they are orally, and to be able to read and interpret text and subtext with no difficulty.
So if we don’t crash right way, I suggest you put your indignation away at the idea of student loan forgiveness. Seriously, it has to come if we are to have a future. No, I don’t like it. Yes, we paid half the undergrad for each of our kids, stripping ourselves of savings in the process. BUT the alternative is not “we don’t forgive loans, and everyone is happy.” The alternative is “the young people remain resentful, willing to do anything even support communism because they’re in an untenable position.” We all pay. One way or another. And hey, if we forgive them now, the government can recoup a great part of the funds by suing the useless universities out of their endowment. Before they lose it completely, because frankly the covidiocy they enthusiastically embraced was the death blow for them.
The other part of this is say goodbye to any guarantees of a comfortable old age. Say it now. Explain to other people why it’s not going to happen. It’s not going to happen because there’s no money. Because the money was squandered on stupid lockdowns and grand schemes by half-mad statist (Marxist) villains. Look, I’m four years from technical retirement age. Of course, being a writer, I expect to work till I drop with my hands on the keyboard. But of course, my husband has a conventional career…. and he too expects to drop with his hands on the keyboard.
If you expect a broke government to keep paying out benefits, all you’ll do is take the value from the savings of those who sacrificed and saved.
Oh, yeah, that’s the other part. Those of us who sacrificed and saved, fixed houses and sold them at a higher price, and invested, and —
Yeah we’re screwed too. Best case scenario, we’re still going to lose most of it.
The crash is going to happen. Damage will be extensive. We’re going to hurt. Badly.
The best we can do is protect the essential, and prepare to survive. As a society. (If the left wins this November I don’t expect to be around for the survival. As you guys know, Denver democrats endorse shooting the opposition.)
Partly this means, stop fighting the inevitable, hang loose, make the best you can out of what you can. And don’t fight the driver trying to take us in to a less damaging crash.
The other part means, accept that the evil villain lecturing us has corrupted most things. But while he’s talking, test the cord with which they tied our hands. There’s usually some give.
I.e. our greatest weakness is communications. People smarter than I need to start working on it now. Yes, it’s late. We’re going to hurt. BUT you must do everything you can to remedy that, including peer-to-peer of some sort.
The other part is we need a drop failsafe for Amazon. Well, that’s disproportionately important to me, because in the unlikely event I survive, that’s my bread and butter.
We also need other systems of “social media” where we can talk. (Be leery of parler. I have it on good authority China has whole knuckles in it. And their terms of service are hideous.) Herb, or someone, we need to talk about systems to sell things. (My big issue is figuring out taxes.)
The villain thinks he has us tied down. It’s time to fight back. And start rebuilding while they’re gloating, and while they think there’s no chance ever of us escaping.
We’re the last hope of mankind. If America falls, civilization falls.
Yes, we’ll have to eat live frogs and work our butts off and there’s no certainty of success. What, you thought it would be easy?
But if we manage it, we win the future. Even if most of us won’t live long enough to see it.
The house looked familiar and reassuring. It was six years since Aimee had last been here, and yet it looked exactly the same as when she used to stop by to see grandma right after grandad died. When she was fourteen. And then less often though highschool.
It was a blue Victorian, set back from the street. There was a tall birch in the front yard, and a bench on the front porch. Reaching back to memories, before grandad got sick, she remembered them sitting on that bench on Sundays, reading.
She remembered it so hard that she could almost see it: both of them sitting there, smiling at her as she approached.
When she was very little grandma’s house had meant cookies, and malted milk, and being indulged in a way her parents would never do.
*Uh Uh. Well. You know, reading this I thought “oh, honey child. You didn’t know what a crazy year even WAS. – SAH*
It’s become a thing among Heinlein fans, writers and readers alike. We get together for a good talk, and a glass of wine, and one of us will mention something nuts and the others will go “Well, these are the crazy years.”
Things like the girl who had to remove a decoration from her purse before boarding a plane because the decoration was in the shape of a revolver, though about finger sized and evidently cut in half lengthwise. The TSA thought the ban on guns applied to this too. (Of course, she’d flown with it before, so it was just this TSA station, but nonetheless its rulings were absolute.)
Things like the little deaf boy who can’t sign his name because one of the letters looks like a gun.
Things like kids getting in trouble because of a fictional story they wrote. Things like my younger son – it’s a theme, yes. The boy is lightening rod on his mother’s side. More on that later – getting sent to the school psychiatrist because he used the following sentence in an essay “Some people think I’m crazy.”
Then there is the shooting in the Aurora theater, which doesn’t even make any sense, except in a culture where it’s better to be famous for killing people than to be obscure.
There’s half (half?) of our literature and movies, which glorify behaviors that in real life get you killed or make you a bum. There’s the fact that being thrifty, hard working and honoring your contracts makes you “uncool.” There the fact our women are taught to hate all men and men are finally learning to avoid women. There’s…
You say it in groups of Heinlein fans, and people go “Well, these ARE the crazy years.” And you move on.
I’m here to tell you these are not the crazy years, these are the fracking insane years. Yesterday I went for a long walk and because I didn’t have my son – he was volunteering at the hospital – and therefore had to stay off the more interesting parts of downtown, I took an audio book to keep me company. The book, because I’m writing space opera and trying to internalize his rhythms (and also because I really am trying to avoid using his terminology, etc, by reminding myself what it is. I grew up with it, and to me it just means “science fiction” but of course it’s more than that), was Methuselah’s Children by Robert A. Heinlein.
When he hits the description of the Crazy years – you know, kids striking for less homework, more pay (for going to school) and eating clay sandwiches and such, I thought “Brother, you didn’t know from crazy.”
Part of his explanation – built into his world building – was that the crazy years were brought on by population pressures. One must give the man one strike, and that’s a big one, but it’s one he shared with every scientist of his time.
At least he seemed to have a clue what really was at the bottom of it. “Semantic confusion.” Semantic confusion is a big big issue, and it is what is at the bottom of our own insanity.
Heinlein believed that semantics would become an exact science. Since he based his beliefs on the scientific magazines of his time, I’m going to assume there was research into this. But it seems to have come to nothing. Or did it?
Was this one of those sciences that was never published? One of those things that were considered too dangerous for people to know?
Let me put it this way, if I say “Women should sleep around with every guy possible, because guys want to have women available to them with no strings attached” most women figure out that’s bad, right? But if I say “Women should sleep around with every guy possible so no man will hold strings on them and they can be free” this is liberating, right? Semantics. Not looking beyond the significant for the signified.
But the emotions know, if the head doesn’t. Pretty words can beguile women, and tv shows can show the wonderful joys of the slutty lifestyle, but every one of a us knows a woman who is turning forty and fifty, still raising the fist of liberation but finding fewer and fewer takers and, let’s face it, sinking into a pit of quiet despair.
Because men and women are different, and studies prove this. You shouldn’t need studies. It’s evolutionary. It benefitted men to sleep around and so those who did it with no issues were the ones who left most off spring. It did not benefit women to sleep around. It benefited them to have a guy know (or think) the kids were his, and therefore bring her the best hunk of mammoth from his hunt. Her kids survived.
Studies have shown that though in both cases sex creates attachment, the effect is much stronger among women.
There’s other stuff. We won’t talk about the human papilloma virus, now endemic in populations, which apparently causes interesting forms of vaginal, penile and mouth cancers. The widespread dissemination of it requires that most people have MANY partners.
BUT at the heart of it, guys enjoy the hooking up culture, women don’t. I’m not saying there weren’t always women who enjoyed it – of course there were – but statistically speaking, women favor attachment over hooking up.
How in hell did “liberating women” turn into “make them available for men’s fun with no pressures and no commitments?” How can we believe “Men and women are exactly the same, despite different evolutionary pressures, despite the fact we can see and hear they aren’t?”
Semantic confusion. We confuse equality before the law with equality.
How did not teaching your kids to read – whole word, making the classroom fun, “new methods” of learning for something that has been done in a mass setting and successfully since at least the Roman Empire – become “pedagogy”? and “Desirable”? Semantic confusion. We think “new” is better and trust “new discoveries” to make learning “less boring.” (Almost all basic learning is mind bogglingly boring. But it opens your wings to the sky.)
How did “Question Authority” become “Question all authority except your hippie teacher?” Semantic confusion. The teacher is after all cool and still behaves like an adolescent and assays your fears of growing old and unhip. And he says the authority are those other people. You know, the unhip ones, like your parents. And you don’t think that the teacher has power over the classroom. That he has his own authority. And that he’s using it to manipulate you.
How did “Speaking Truth to Power” become saying platitudes that are already enforced from the top down in our laws and in our societal assumptions. You know, things like “Anyone could be homeless. They just need compassion.” (Actually this is true, but for the long time homeless compassion should come in the form of making sure they take their meds and at least moderate their behavior enough to live in society.) Things like “Women are exactly the same as men and any differences are cultural.” (Actually women are driven by different hormones which shape thought, which shape – oh, never mind. Yes, some women are more masculine then men, but not the vast majority.) Things like “You should be able to make a living at whatever you want to, whether it’s something other people want or need or not.” Things like “What’s wrong with capitalism is that it doesn’t distribute money equally.”
This is “Brave and courageous” I suppose because they can give you your very own TV show, for parroting what the authorities want people to believe.
But the thing about semantic insanity is that words aren’t the truth. Words are just words. Our lying eyes still insist on telling us where reality differs from the words, and things start cracking up.
The first symptom is an amping up of insanity. Do women feel used and treated like dirt? Do they get upset because younger women (DUH) attract more men?
Well, you get screams of “harassment” at mere words said in passing; and you get “lookism” and its being considered a bad thing to note someone is in fact female.
They could step back and think that perhaps sex for its own sake is bad, and perhaps there is a reason for mating for life and having support in your middle or old age. But that would require real talking truth to power. And that they can’t do. Because everyone knows married people are unhip.
Is your kid failing to learn to read by the new spanking shiny methods? Well, then he must have a disability and it must be the fault of something that’s tragically unhip, like irradiated food.
… But insanity can only be amped so much. After a while even the crazies know it’s crazy. And then, there’s the fact that semantic insanity encourages the sort of behavior that makes things worse and takes society apart faster.
And then the crash comes. The normal result of the crash is a strong man regime, and maybe that’s where we’ll end up. Only not the current strong men, because they’re semantically insane. The very people trying to speed up the crash are the ones least likely to survive it.
Because most of them are third generation indoctrinated and unable to think of the signified beneath the significant.
I’m an odd duck. I’d prefer no enforcement of even the old morals. It makes most of us Odds distinctly uncomfortable, when any societal normal is rigidly enforced. And it makes it difficult for creativity and invention to flourish.
But that’s where we’re headed if we don’t rein in this semantic insanity, because a strong-man regime that’s closer aligned with the majority of people is better than what we have now, which is only aligned with the reality inside people’s heads. (Or at least the kakistocracy’s heads.) It will allow people to survive better.
Or we can turn back now, and try to think clearly and believe our lying eyes and not the pretty stuff we want to believe.
It’s two weeks and change to the election. And we’re all worried.
I’ll confess to you I’d not be the least bit worried if it weren’t for the fact that I know there will be fraud.
We saw enough of that in 18 when polls were kept open much later than they should be, until “the right people won.”
And to those of you who are shrugging and saying “both side cheat.” Yes, I AM sure some Republican somewhere cheated. In fact there seems to have been vote fraud some years ago by some guy running for the equivalent of dog catcher in some backwater place. I know, because it is the instance brought out every time we say the left has committed fraud.
I will just say this: if you want to look for where the fraud is, look for those who facilitated it. Go no further than Motor Voter. “But it was a way to encourage people to vote” you say. “It removed a barrier to registration.”
It removed many barriers to registration. I have an accent you can cut with a knife, and never once, when registering to vote after moves have I been asked if I am in fact a citizen, whose fate is inextricably bound up with this land and these people, and not a casual, passing visitor. (Note that yes, Francis is a friend. I might in fact have asked him to link this because the other ones I read about — all very similar, including a Japanese journalist here on a brief visa, who had to fight not to be enrolled to vote — were in the paper, in the two or three years after the passage of the motor voter law, and all of them are now out of reach.
“But the voter is supposed to know he can’t vote” you’ll say (if you’re not so crazy as to think everyone should be able to vote who lives here however briefly.) Perhaps they should, but they don’t. I would say that our schools no longer teach the rights and duties of citizenship, but if they did it would be overwhelmed by TV shows who show it as “you’re in the US, you’re American now.” I actually heard some idiot saying we can’t put barriers in the way of people becoming citizens as soon as they land here, because “it used to be you came off the boat in NYC and voted the next day.” Maybe so, because the NYC machine politics (weirdly even then not Republican) were always corrupt, but they shouldn’t have voted and were not legally entitled to vote.
I don’t know when the knowledge was lost, but my own MIL, the year I got here asked me if I’d registered to vote, since “you’re an American now.”
That’s not how any of that works, and not informing people that you need to be bound up with the destiny of the US, you need to have skin in the game, you need to know that what you vote for you will most surely experience. Otherwise you’re voting for things with the interests of other countries, or your family abroad, or whatever in the mix. (I confess to the extent that the US holds up civilization and prevents it from being under the boot of China and communism/fascism (the two have blended in China and most of the modern left) I will fight for the US not just for my family here, but for my family abroad.) I only became a citizen when I was at the point that I had acculturated enough that my home was here (I took two years beyond the point at which I was eligible, because I took it seriously) and my loyalties were here. And even though Portugal allows dual citizenship, the US doesn’t. And I had become American and had no divided loyalties, so I mailed the passport back.
The point being, I’m not even sure people with dual citizenship should vote, much less visitors or people passing through. But the Motor Voter facilitates that. How many non-citizens vote? I don’t know. What I can tell you is that if that hurt the Democratic party, Clinton wouldn’t have rammed it through.
And really, there’s no excuse for it. NONE. I wouldn’t be offended if people asked me for proof of citizenship. I KNOW I HAVE AN ACCENT. Anyone so fragile as to refuse to sign up to vote because they might be embarrassed by a question, shouldn’t do it. “But Sarah, people who are racist” (Do you want to add sexist and homophobic too) “Might use it to make people who are darker jump through hoops.” Sure. People are dicks. They might also, in areas that are predominantly black make blonds show proof of citizenship. AND? The solution to that is not to ask NO ONE to prove citizenship and thereby at best clutter our rolls with thousands upon thousands of people who never vote, and thereby give us thousands (millions?) of harvestable ballots. At worst, it’s giving people who don’t understand us and have nothing to do with us, and who get their news of the US through the peculiar game of telephone that is the MSM a say in how our country is run. The solution is to ask EVERYONE to show proof of citizenship.
NOTE NO OTHER COUNTRY LETS ONE REGISTER TO VOTE WITHOUT BIRTH CERTIFICATE OR PROOF OF NATURALIZATION. Not a single one. Because they are not stupid, and not infiltrated to the degree we are.
Other things that facilitate voter fraud, like mail ballots…. Note which party is pushing for that. No other country does this either. Given the convenience — hello Colorado — of registering on line, without seeing anyone/proving you exist, and then getting a ballot automatically mailed to you, I wonder how many imaginary people vote. And I kind of am ashamed of myself that I haven’t registered Havelock and Valeria Hoyt to vote. I mean, seriously, at least they exist.
How do we know this was intended for fraud or that it helps the left? Well, after Coloradan voters soundly defeated the idea of all-vote-by-mail the barely majority Democrats used it to make it a thing. Over our heads. And since then — strangely — no Republicans win.
Kind of like, have you noticed, when forgotten ballots are found in the trunk of someone’s car, it’s always for the left.
This was all fun and games while it was restricted to Chicago and other hell holes, but now they’re playing for all the cookie chips.
And if you bother — and those of you on the left won’t, I know. You like to be “smart” by taking all your opinions from your betters — to read the program on Joe Biden’s campaign website, you’ll find that yes, he’s all on board for the Green New Deal. And if you read the Green New Deal and you’re mildly sentient (say like my cats) you’ll find that the Green New Deal amounts to the government controlling everything you do, from how you heat your house, to how far and when you can travel, and what you can eat. Worse, if you read Joe Biden’s history, his family has received millions of dollars from China (Yes, Ukraine too. If you allow yourself to read the truth) and China has hegemon ambitions. You know, China, the place ethnically cleansing minorities and starving their own people. Did you know why Wuhan was so vulnerable to the flu? No, do you want to know? Then read this.
And read or ask people who have relatives in Africa what China has done to Africa. If you think being a Chinese colony under the boot of communism is a good idea, you might be insane. For the young who’ve been sold an idea of communism, you’ve been lied to. I’ve seen communism close enough (though it never kept a hold in Portugal) and its cousin hard-international-socialism which is only degrees away from it. You don’t want either. You might not starve, but there are good chances you wish you would. Let’s say I have family in Venezuela.
Yes, I know, but Orange Man Bad and he’s “packing the court.” Get your head out of AP’s ass. They are running their game for their international overlords. Choosing judges of the president’s own ideological stripe is not packing the court. There is no obligation to actually “balance opinions”on the court. If thee were, we’d vote for judges every four years, and/or the court wouldn’t have been PREDOMINANTLY leftist and at times crushingly so for many decades in our past. Packing the court is adding judges of the president’s own strip to it in such numbers that we become an effective one-party state. What FDR that great fascist the left reveres (no? Look into his philosophy) tried to do and Biden has said you don’t deserve to know whether he wants to do. (Oh, but they’re selling it already.)
Speaking of packing courts, that’s exactly what Chavez did in Venezuela, thereby ensuring only fraudulent elections in the future. I have family in Venezuela. Not many now. Most have run. Some even with more than the clothes on their back.
What I want to ask you is this: if you think Orange Man Bad is “trampling the constitution” (Mostly by doing exactly what it prescribes. Yes, he sent federal troops to the cities, but ONLY to defend federal property. Note that any other president would have had pacification troops in the horrible flare outs. But of course that was the trap laid for him. And yes, he nominated a judge. Well, so did Obama. No, the Republicans didn’t vote on it, because they could not vote on it. Also, because a self-declared communist can’t fulfill the roll of adjudicating on the US constitution. Thank heavens you escaped that bullet, and move on.) and that things are so bad evil, horrible (note that the lockdowns were imposed mostly by democrat governors, and if you think that your RINO governor is a bad person for joining in, you have no idea what you’re talking about. None. I traveled across the country. The worst GOP governor is more lax than te best democrat. Possibly because the PURPOSE of the lockdown was to destroy our economy and defeat orange man bad) you have no idea how much worse than can be. So, when you have electricity two hours a day, when cancel culture becomes “the law” and you can be arrested for speaking out of turn, when the court is packed and you can’t vote yourself out of hell…. where are you going to go? Where will you run to?
Spare me fantasies of France or Sweden, or wherever your fervid brain thinks paradise is. Without the US to defend them, those countries are done for, and will fall under the same boot we fall. Besides “climate change” is a global crisis. You wouldn’t want to use electricity and risk setting the Earth on fire, would you? (Brought to you by the same people who said COVID would kill millions of Americans.) So no traveling. You want to drive to the next county? Well, first of all, why do you still own a private car, and second, show us your papers determining you have a necessity.
And if you think I’m exaggerating, consider the Covid lockdowns as a dress rehearsal. And consider what they already did: Airlines, deprived of the ability to fly anywhere have already started scraping airplanes. When/if air travel comes back, if the crisis is ever allowed to end, it will be as expensive as when I was a kid, when only the rich dreamed of traveling abroad. In an increasingly isolated world, the state will OWN you. And you won’t even be able to complain about it.
All of this is promised AND PREMISED in the Biden/Harris program. They have taken in Bernie and Occasio Cortez as advisors. Those are openly communist. They want the state to control your every breath.
Sure, Trump is Trump. His style doesn’t bother me, probably because I’m old enough to remember men like him who weren’t bad people, just brash and uncouth males with chest hair and leers in the seventies. Note that for all his faults, the most they could find on him that wasn’t obviously money-seeking was his saying “women are hypergamic” in a blunt and uncouth way. For a man who’s been married three times? that’s amazing.
As for his twitter, has it ever occurred to you he needs that as a distraction, so he gets to do some actual work?
However this election we’re not voting for men. We’re voting for systems. If you like the Western world and civilization, vote for the Orange one. We don’t even have room for third party votes — and I say this as someone who was a registered Libertarian for 20 years — because the clash is fundamentally this: Do you want to save the Western world and everything we have (And yea “unjust” comparing to what, tovarish? Because compared to any other system in history it has the most opportunities and gives even the poor the best life ever) or are you going to go chase the mirage of communism, which like some infernal creature will not let you go, no matter how much you want to escape?
When I say this is no election to vote third party, even in “safe” states, it’s because, listen up: the fraud is going to be massive, huge, unimaginable.
Take it as read that the people who were willing to lock us down for months and destroy the economy, the people who say that we don’t need electricity all the time, the people who say you don’t deserve to know if they’ll pack the court will stop AT NOTHING to take power. That’s what they’re in this for. Communism/Socialism/Authoritarianism has two classes: the rulers, who own everything and live very well indeed, and the rest of the populace, who don’t even own their own thoughts.
But here’s the thing, our congressmen fill their pockets enough (look at their worth sometime) and the leaders in communism live worse than our city mayors. So why do they do it?
Because they want power. They want power more than anything. Most of them are mediocrities and know they are. But they need constant adulation and power to convince themselves they’re worth something. AND they need other people to be totally in their control.
And if you don’t give them control? Well, they’ll cheat and break their way into it.
The left has already told us that there will be a “red mirage” in which Trump seems to win, but then mail in voting will “reverse it.” Question. How do they know mail in voting will reverse it? Well, because they plan to reverse it with mail in voting. I mean, it’s not that their partisans are too stupid to get the vote there in time. No, it’s a matter of knowing exactly how many votes they need, and then mailing more than that in. As every time the left is allowed to get away with this.
And if they still can’t win they’ve promised to burn, look and murder their way into power. “No justice, no peace” is not a demand for justice. It’s a hostage situation. Because justice has two sides. But if you don’t decide things their way, they’re not going to give you peace.
Are these the people you want in charge? No?
Then secure your vote. Because we’ve never been in so much danger. If 2016 was the Flight 93 Election, this is the aftermath. We’re in the cockpit, but the terrorists who seized control of our bureaucracy and machinery of state are still clinging to the controls and trying to fly us into the ground.
If we can win this election by a RESOUNDING MARGIN above the fraud, perhaps we can take those controls back and even — with immense luck because after 2020 it will take that — maybe save us and our beloved country, the beacon of Liberty to the world.
They want to extinguish the beacon, because then it will just be a boot stamping on the human face forever, all over the world.
I wrote how to secure your vote. Note I’m reversing myself on something: Vote as soon as you can. I presume the Trump campaign is prepared to stop endless recounts and forever-mail-in-vote. But it’s really hard to prove your vote was stolen and even if they let you vote again, the other vote will already be in the system, diluting or canceling yours.
From the article, the essentials:
VOTE AS SOON AS YOU RECEIVE YOUR BALLOT. I know I’ve encouraged you to vote on Election Day, in person, but considering how many arrive there only to find out they already voted and that Trump’s campaign – who probably knows better than I – is advising “as soon as possible voting,” do that. At least it obviates someone voting in your place. And maybe the campaign is prepared to fight the “red mirage” scenario. Maybe.
Find out your precinct’s voting rules. If they issued you a mail-in ballot, and you can vote in person, destroy it and vote in person ASAP. If they issued you a mail-in ballot and you can’t vote in person, drop it off ASAP. If they close all polling locations, drop it off in a mailbox in an affluent liberal precinct (to avoid the post office trashing ones from R districts wholesale).
Ensure you have been removed from the voting rolls at previous addresses. You don’t want to find you voted twice! Do the same thing with loved ones who have recently died– it’s painful, but we’re dealing with people who will happily take advantage of the dead.
Also, check with your county registrar and ensure you don’t have any cats or dogs registered to vote– I keep hearing people complain about it, and while it might be rare, we need to plug that leak.
Find your loved ones who have dementia or are very old in general Find out how they’re getting their ballot and how the place they live usually fills them out. If you don’t like the answer, put yourself in the middle. Make sure YOU are the one who helps them fill it out. If your batty aunt wants to vote for Biden, just ensure she’s doing it under her own recognizance, not because someone is guiding her hand.
Whatever you do, if you choose communism, choose it with your eyes open. Don’t virtue-signal and bullshit yourself into it, only to end up finding that yeah, it’s really communism, and it’s not what you wanted.
Because if we fall now, it will be our children or grandchildren attempting to fight back, barefoot, by candlelight and starving. And if there is an afterlife, you have all of eternity to blame yourself.
As most of y7ou know — yes? . — I read at Ace of Spades HQ.
My opinions aren’t always the same as theirs — duh. Their opinions don’t always agree internally either. Because free people rarely agree. Heck, I’ve been known to disagree with myself hour by hour.
The only thing that made me genuinely angry though was their post about how if you’re “in a blue city” leave!
Cities aren’t just the places where we live. And if we’re anything but minimum wage workers, leaving is not as easy as that. Even today, in the “work from home” job marketplace, people have ties to places: homes, property, various organizations they belong to, friend groups they’re part of. All these things, you can slowly disentangle yourself from, at least if your job doesn’t require physical presence. (Dan and I have gone round and round on this, and we think full-telecommute positions are probably no more than 20 to 25% of the workforce.) Obviously if you’re in some training programs, you’ll have to stay with them.
This is before you get into other things, like the fact that we can’t keep moving from state to state and giving ever-increasing swaths of the country to the left, even when they took it through fraud (Hi, I’m from Colorado! But I understand California has similar problems) and consolidated it by moving in massive numbers of homeless (turning our convention center into a homeless shelter is next level though. Polis is something else. Not sure what, but definitely something else) or illegal immigrants to vote them in again and again (Because I guess vote by fraud wasn’t enough.)
If they can take Colorado, which at one time was considered the place for Libertarians to move to, let me assure you they can take any refuge you find, including TX. In fact, they are going to try really hard to take TX, if they don’t manage to take the whole country (vote by fraud!) this November.
So, are you willing to give them the ability to do what the Arabs want to do to the Jews in the Middle East? Just push us into the sea?
Every election they say that the GOP will become a regional party, and they intend to do it by hook or crook. Mostly crook, honestly, because they have no scruples. You see, this is religious for them. The arrow of history demands that they win. And once we kulaks are pushed into the sea, utopia will reign.
Except of course, that’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works. Every time they take over a place they destroy it, and send people fleeing.
The other part of the problem is that places aren’t just places. They’re part of who we are, our views of ourselves. From the earliest stories of mankind, humans were FROM somewhere. Going somewhere. Defending somewhere.
Remove the places from the Iliad…. And none of it makes sense.
This is part of the reason the internationalist dream was always nonsense (besides varying cultures, different languages, and the fact that no one can govern the whole Earth. They can’t even know enough to govern a moderately large place with slightly varying cultures, which is why we’re supposed to be governed first by states. Never mind.) People and places are part of each other. (Though it’s more like people places and times. We own a place for a certain time, and the span of our lives is far too short.)
I’ve loved three places in my life. The first was the village. I loved everything about it, including the smell in the air, when spring had just burst forth and every wall was covered in flowering roses.
Then I loved Porto, which was twenty minutes away by train, but might as well be another planet. It was basically a big, dirty, and in the mid-seventies, mildly dangerous Atlantic Port city. I loved it in the morning, before the shops opened. You’d catch people sweeping the sidewalk in front of their shops, and it was like catching a beautiful woman without makeup. I loved the coffee shops, some with pictures of 19th century poets who used to hang out there. I loved the bookstores, particularly the old ones, with unsold books up in the attic, still marked at old prices. I loved the little art supply shop hidden in an alleyway.
Both of those places I left before they changed: the village into what is essentially a sleeper-suburb for the city, filled with stack-a-prol apartments, and Porto into what my sons call “euro-disney”, kind of a “not so rich” pleasure town. I tried to take them to all the mildly seedy coffee shops and student hangouts, and they’d all been sanitized “for Englishmen to see” and all served the same rather bland food “that tourists like.”
Now, though both those places are gone, and I can only walk them in my dreams, I will freely admit both places are better for the people who stayed behind. I mean, I loved the village, but dear Lord, there was a set of public showers built outside the elementary school, for all the people who didn’t have running water, or at least running hot water, and that was a majority of the village. People used to line up outside the showers early morning on the weekend, for their weekly shower. And well… I’ve mentioned the main form of entertainment was sitting on the stoop and gossiping.
As for Porto, though it’s now somewhat bland, it’s also much much safer than it was. To put this in perspective, the habits of staying safe on the street in Porto saw me through a visit to NYC on my own, with two other girls in the very early eighties. And it’s CLEAN. And you can actually visit the medieval part of town without having chamber pots emptied on your head. So.
Then there was Denver. My history with Denver is weird. At eight I knew that when I grew up I was going to be a writer and live in Denver. Why Denver? I don’t know.
What I know is that in 92, when Dan and I lived in Columbia South Carolina, in a VERY bad situation (he worked for a programing sweat shop, and I was stuck in an unairconditioned house all day (we only had one car) with a toddler. And I knew no one.) we realized we couldn’t go on that way, and we were dead broke, and there were no other jobs.
So, he said, “We have to move.” And I said “Let’s move to Denver.” (Though he might have mentioned it first, because I’d talked about it before.) So we did. Well, we moved to Colorado Springs, which was close enough sort of.
The thing is the minute we drove into Colorado, both of us knew we’d found home, and though we lived in the Springs for over 20 years, we came to Denver often enough that we got to know every little street, every place to hangout, and we were regulars at Pete’s Kitchen on Colfax long before we moved up.
Most of my memories of spending time with the kids growing up are bound up in Denver: from trips to the Natural History Museum and the zoo, to spur of the moment trips to the Art museum, or to a restaurant, to late-night-drives to Pete’s to discuss plotting over coffee.
Some very difficult times were bridged over by Dan and I driving up to Denver and going for a walk in City Park, around the lake. In summer, they illuminated the fountains red white and blue, and we’d sit on a park bench as it got dark, and watched the fountains and talked, before going home.
In summer, also, we took the kids to Lakeside amusement park. Because I have a middle ear issue that makes most rides torture, to me this involved following the kids from ride to ride, reading a book (Dan sometimes went with them, sometimes not) and people watching, until we were ready to leave, when we’d take the train ride around the lake. One time the kids started singing “When the Saints go Marching in” and the rest of the train joined in, only they were singing in Spanish.
Six years ago, when the kids were both in college and not spending a lot of time with us, we realized that we had nothing to do in the Springs on weekends, which partly led to us moving up to Denver (there were other reasons.) We are not, thank heavens, anywhere near our favorite haunts, because we couldn’t afford a house there, but in a fairly peaceful suburb.
Which I used to think was bad, because we had to drive (even though much less) mostly city streets to get to our favorite places….
Then came 2020 and the lock down. And Polis’ order that homeless get to camp on sidewalks and public lands.
I didn’t actually drive downtown till last weekend….
Let’s put it this way, there’s streets we’ve run across at midnight on the way from a favorite restaurant (because we couldn’t park nearer) that I wouldn’t NOW walk at noon, with two policemen on either side. Downtown looks like Detroit, between the boarded/burned shops, and the threatening “unhoused” addicts clustering in every corner. And please, don’t tell me that I shouldn’t complain they’re unsightly. I’m complaining they’re there at all. These aren’t people from Denver, or people who lived here before they went feral. They just came to Denver because they can do as they please, and it’s the productive citizens who are restricted.
Polis can pull this shit and does because vote by mail allows him to know he can fraud himself in again and again and again.
He’s destroying the state. And Denver is probably hardest hit.
It quite literally is breaking my heart. It’s like seeing someone you love plunge into addiction.
I would like to fight back. I can’t. I don’t even know how one fights back from this. Yes, it would start with cleaning up voting, but at this point we’ve attracted so much scum, from crazy commies to feral homeless, that I’m not even sure that would help. It probably would, but how does one do it. All “vote by mail” was passed by the legislature after being soundly defeated as a referendum.
At any rate, the last month and the trip to low altitude showed that we have to leave. We have to, because the altitude is spinning up my auto-immune. It’s been a slow rev-up, so slow I didn’t realize it, but I’m now more or less always in auto-immune crisis. Except… when we went down from the mountain. Long before sea level, the auto immune clears up as if by magic.
So eventually we’ll have to leave. Not before two years, though. And heaven knows if we have two years.
At any rate, if we move, I know I’m leaving behind not the Denver I loved, but a grotesque, hideous corpse that is losing all the things and destroying all the places I love.
And unlike the village, or Porto, it won’t be good for anyone.
Would I stay and fight if it weren’t for the altitude thing? Possibly. Even though I have no idea how to fight back. But I know we can’t continue losing territory. They don’t even do anything with it, except turn it into a diorama of a war zone. They seem incapable of actually administering or doing anything with what they take. Possibly because they’re at odds with reality.
So, I don’t tell everyone behind the lines to “move already”. It’s not that simple. And if we keep running from place to place, we’re going to run out of land. And long before that, they’ll have destroyed every place we left. I do right now have friends in all of the worst zones, including yes Hollywood and New York City. And they’re all caught between grief and anger, same as I am.
What is the solution? I don’t know. But leaving behind every place we love, which the locusts took by hook or crook (and mostly by crook) is a lot like selling grandma down to Rio. It kills grandma, and it doesn’t leave us feeling very good either.
So, to quote one of their heroes…. what’s to be done?
*Note these are books sent to us by readers/frequenters of this blog. Our bringing them to your attention does not imply that we’ve read them and/or endorse them, unless we specifically say so. As with all such purchases, we recommend you download a sample and make sure it’s to your taste. 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. I ALSO WISH TO REMIND OUR READERS THAT IF THEY WANT TO TIP THE BLOGGER WITHOUT SPENDING EXTRA MONEY, CLICKING TO AMAZON THROUGH ONE OF THE BOOK LINKS ON THE RIGHT, WILL GIVE US SOME AMOUNT OF MONEY FOR PURCHASES MADE IN THE NEXT 24HOURS, OR UNTIL YOU CLICK ANOTHER ASSOCIATE’S LINK. PLEASE CONSIDER CLICKING THROUGH ONE OF THOSE LINKS BEFORE SEARCHING FOR THAT SHED, BIG SCREEN TV, GAMING COMPUTER OR CONSERVATORY YOU WISH TO BUY. That helps defray my time cost of about 2 hours a day on the blog, time probably better spent on fiction. ;)*
A coloring and activity book full of dragons, with room for you to create alongside the enchanting fantasy creatures you can color in. Inktail is a little dragon with no particular size, and in this book, he has many adventures! Poetry, silliness, and no less than 45 full-page coloring plates will keep you busy. The pages are laid out to allow only one side for primary coloring, the other side can then be safely hidden if you are using markers that bleed or want to hang your creation up to admire. The coloring activity book is designed to appeal to young and old alike, and is sweetest as a shared experience.
A collection of short stories by Prometheus Award Winner Sarah A. Hoyt. The first edition of this collection was published by Dark Regions Press in paper, only. This updated edition contains two bonus short stories: High Stakes and Sweet Alice. It also contains the stories: Elvis Died for Your Sins; Like Dreams Of Waking; Ariadne’s Skein;Thirst;Dear John;Trafalgar Square;The Green Bay Tree; Another George; Songs;Thy Vain Worlds;Crawling Between Heaven and Earth
Despite his rich-kid roots, Tommy Reilly is struggling to make it as a freighter captain. Despite a universe of possibilities, he finds himself running afoul of both pirates and corrupt bureaucrats who seem determined to get in his way at every point. It’s like karma for his bullying past is smacking him in the back of the head.
All of that changes when a figure from his past asks for his help.
Now he’s finding himself at odds with a greedy and overly ambitious business owner who has government backing who happens to be the same man who impounded the very load he needs on his ship. The fact that the load is only the first step in securing information that could bring down the status quo might have something to do with that, however.
Tommy and his crew of misfit rejects have to use skills most of them would rather forget to secure their load, all with eyes watching them everywhere.
Have the Good Folk made her baby look differently than he had before?
Or had they snatched him entirely, and left a changeling in his place?
And what can she do against Sir David’s sly comments on how he can help her?
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.
*For the previous chapters, please go here. These are posted first draft, as the brain dictates to the fingers which are remarkably stupid. Also there will be inconsistencies because until September or so, the timing on these is wonky, and I’ll forget stuff between posts. Eventually it will be cleaned up and fixed just before page is made secret/taken down and the book is published. At that time I will take lists of typos or volunteers to proof read. For now, it’s written in a hurry, usually an hour before it goes up. And, let me remind you, it’s free – SAH*
Illusion and Fear
Well, he had the measure of Albinia Blackley. Or at least he thought he did.
Michael knew she’d dropped out of a window without knowing that someone had used magic, so it landed in another universe, and to far up to be survivable. She’d dropped into his boat in fine and combative mood. She’d also leapt up to save him from a smog fetch. And she’d stood up to her formidable father.
Not counting the fact he found her quite distractingly pretty, while realizing she was probably not pretty by most other people’s perspective, and certainly not pretty as other people he’d heard referred to as “pretty” at parties, and by Caroline, his twin, when she was telling him about other girls, he knew she was going to be a handful. Impulsive, decided, brave, but a little too foolhardy.
He had not realized she also had a heart soft as butter. But whoever had set this distracting path knew. Oh, they knew. If he remembered — and he had the haziest of memories, magical paths not having figured large in his education, since he’d always thought himself too sensible to walk one — the magical path latched onto whoever the walker was. It felt out the walker’s strength’s and weaknesses. And it–
He barely grabbed Albinia’s ankle, before she stepped off the dark path towards the sound of the crying baby. And she fought him, but he pulled her up by main force, and held her against him, while she fought like a trapped cat.
His brother had once said that Caroline was fine in a fight because was used to fighting with her brothers. Much less a girl with so many brothers. “No,” he shouted. “I beg you, only listen to me. And then if you still think it’s a good idea, I’ll let you go.”
This was another way in which she was unusual. At his words, she stopped completely, and sullenly stepped back, pulling his arms from her and glaring. Then she crossed her arms, tapped her foot and said, “Very well. Tell me.”
“I don’t think that’s a real baby.”
“Oh, and why not?”
“Because Ive read somewhere that haunts that imitate a crying baby are some of the most evil yet.”
“But what if it is a real baby?” she asked. “And what if it is in peril?”
He thought on it. We were supposed to save those who needed saving, or at least help those who needed helping, after all, and the fact was that ignoring a baby was probably pretty awful. Good people protected babies after all.
“I don’t know. Let’s think on it. But please, do not step off the path. I have an idea once we do, we’ll never find it again.”
She smiled. It wasn’t a nice smile. “So, we’re supposed to help whomever we find without ever leaving the path? I must beg your pardon, Milord, but you must be daft.”
“Michael,” he said. “Not Milord.” It was almost a reflex. “No one calls me milord, or lord, except the servants. Please stop it. And stop glowering. It is distracting. You are right that staying on te path always must be impossible. However, when we go from the path, we must make sure we can come back somehow. I’ll think about it. Meanwhile, on this baby–“
The crying had grown more desperate. “The poor thing is going to die before we get to him, if we’re waiting for you to think about things, milord. I know how it is. When my brothers thought about things, they never happened.”
“The other thing you should know,” he said, noting the Milord and deciding not to fight that battle right then. “Is that the path will adapt and change in order to …. To present a unique challenge to the people walking it. It will target people’s weaknesses.”
“Like your tendency to overthink.”
“Or your tendency to jump into things without thinking.”
She glared at him, and he didn’t glare back. Instead, he put his hand on her harm. “Bickering doesn’t help. But both of us are surely trained in scrying. Maybe it won’t work here, but there’s a chance it will too. I suggest we far see what that baby is, and decide what to do after, shall we?”
“We don’t have anything reflexive to scry upon,” she said, as though reluctant to concede
“We will.” He was already on his knees, feeling around for a smooth rock of likely size. He found one, set it right in front of him, and said, “Now, Miss Blackley, if you’ll give me some of the water we brought. A very little will do.”
She passed him a flask, and a very little did. A mere film of water on the rock. He handed the bottle back, and said the right incantation, then aimed the vision at where the screams came from.
It was the most beautiful baby he’d ever beheld. Something out of a fairytale. And fairytale was appropriate, since the child — rosy pink, with huge blue eyes, and pretty blond hair– had pointy teeth and pointy ears.
“It is a baby,” Albinia said.
“It is a baby placed carefully on a tree stump which is covered in something downy, yes. He doesn’t appear to be in any danger, and despite the crying sounds, he’s smiling and kicking his legs. He’s also an elf, and judging from the teeth, not all that young.” He aimed the vision around the stump.
All around the front, where Albinia would have run through, there was a pit dug, and beneath sharpened stakes. He heard her gasp.
Then he aimed the vision behind the stump, where he saw several pairs of eyes. Not animal or human eyes.
“It is a trap,” she said abashed.
“Indeed, Miss Blackley,” he said, as the crying cut off suddenly, and the scrying rock showed only a smattering of lights, and a sound of laughter and scurrying feet echoed off the path.
“But if it had been a baby,” she said.
“We should have found a way to rescue him, yes,” he sighed. “However, for now, I suggest one of us make a magelight, if we can, and we proceed down the path.”
Albinia, strangely subdued, made a magelight, and they walked a while in silence.
“I think,” he said. “That if we stray off the path we must make a way to come back to it after. But not bread crumbs. Those have a very bad history of not working.”
She didn’t say anything. Except, “What is that?” As she pointed a finger ahead.
And there, glowing in the light of their magelight, trundling down towards them at speed, was something that froze his blood in his veins. It was large, brass-colored, had multiple arms, and had almost killed him last time: It was nothing other than the hair cutter and shaver he had invented and which had had to be destroyed with a shotgun.
He had no shotgun, and the thing didn’t appear destroyed, as it approached at a rapid pace.
He did the only thing he could think of, and stepped in front of Albinia. Not that it made any difference, as the machine had knives and scissors enough for both of them.
According To Hoyt 