*”Why the return of the Free Novel In Installments?” you ask.  Mostly for the same reason I wrote Witchfinder in installments on this blog: because it’s Saturday and I don’t want to think of a topic to write. Also because I want to be able to write my posts for PJ on the weekend, which means I don’t want to have to write non fic for myself as well on the same days. This has the great advantage that once I’m done with a novel, I can publish it and get money.
This novel is a sequel to Witchfinder between it and Rogue Magic (which will get finished in installments after Witch’s daughter is finished.) I started it in 2015 and was having trouble because well…. because I was losing my mind to a combined effect of hypothyroidism and sleep apnea. Which had the side effect of not being able to remember names which is a problem when you have a lot of characters in a novel.
Some of you might remember this beginning. Or not.  Some of you might not have read Witchfinder.  It’s fine, because this stands on its on. Like all my series novels.
Meanwhile if one or more of you finds him/herself with time on his/her hands, I really need a “bible” for Witchfinder.  And before you set about rewriting the KJV to include a magical world, what I mean is that I need a compiled, itemized list of: Characters (both the ones in it and the ones mentioned, and like a paragraph description, both physical and what they do/did and their relationships to other characters), Places (brief description/history), Historical events (brief description,) objects (books, etc. that are part of the world building) and brief description. If I’m going to be working in about eight series (and I am) I need this for every series, and I don’t want to take a month just to do that.  Of course, if no one else has the time, I’ll go ahead and do it. Okay. Now, to recap what I have on this, and then next week a new chapter – SAH*

Witch’s Daughter

Sarah A. Hoyt

The Letter

It has often been said that dead men don’t talk.  In Avalon, this wasn’t necessarily true.  Dead men could talk if a reasonably talented necromancer were willing to risk the death penalty for reanimating a corpse.

But Michael had never heard of a dead man who wrote letters.

The letter lay on the breakfast table, next to the only setting on it, on a silver salve between the spoon and the porcelain creamer.

Michael Ainsling, youngest son of the late Duke of Darkwater and brother of the current titular, eyed it suspiciously, while he took his seat.  His eyes widened slightly at the name of the sender, then he frowned at his own name in the space reserved for the recipient.

He hadn’t slept well, and dark rings marked the pale skin beneath the dark green eyes he shared with all his male relatives.

A well grown boy at the age when one resented being called such, he had that look boys have when they’ve achieved adult height but not yet had time to fill in. He’d been the quiet half of fraternal twins, his sister Caroline being the garrulous and outgoing half until six months ago.  Then Caroline had been sent to an academy for young ladies, where she was presumably still garrulous but far away from Michael, so that Michael had to do his own talking and endure social interaction.

It had been thought – then – that Michael’s recent experiences had left him too frail to attend Cambridge.  Michael frowned with distaste at the thought, as he folded and refolded his napkin.  He did not understand why it had been thought better to leave him here on the deserted estate.  With Caroline gone, Seraphim — now the tenth Duke of Darkwater and the prince consort of the Princess Royal — spending most of his time in London and Mama having left no one knew very well where, Michael’s was the only place setting at the table designed to accommodate seventeen.

Most of the days he swallowed tea and toast and rushed off to work in his workshop.  Today…  He glared at the letter by his cup.

And realized that the footman who’d discreetly followed him into the dining room hovered near his chair.  “You may go, Burket,” he said, without taking his eyes off the letter.

“Will you need anything else, Lord Michael?” the man asked and made a broad gesture as though sweeping the breakfast spread clustered around Michael’s place setting: fried kidneys and some sort of pie, and toast and butter and something else that looked suspiciously like fish cakes.

Michael didn’t sigh.  “No, thank you, Burket.  I have everything I need.”

Truly he wanted the man gone so he could look at the letter at leisure.  The sender’s name was Tristram Blackley, and surely there couldn’t be more than one of those.  The writing and the paper both looked fresh, as though someone had dashed off the note just this morning.

But Tristram Blackley had been dead for sixteen years.  Michael had studied him among the great inventors of his time, the man who had created the carpetship liners that crossed the air between Britain and the Americas and took the upper classes of Avalon on pleasure cruises the world over. He remembered mama telling him, once, that she’d known Tristram in youth, that he was a lot like Michael himself, always dreaming up new magical machines, but how he’d died young and how sad it was.

“Beg your pardon, Milord,” Burket said, which was when Michael realized the man had leaned over to pour him tea, and had almost poured it on Michael’s lap as Michael lifted his head.

“Thank you,” Michael said.  “But you don’t have to pour my tea.”

Only now the man was buttering Michael’s toast and setting it on a plate, and smiling enticingly at Michael while nodding at the toast as though, for all the world, Michael were a toddler in need of being tempted to his food.  “I know, milord, but you haven’t been eating, and what are we to tell his grace, should he ask?  And he does ask, you know?”

Michael picked up the toast, with what he knew was ill-grace, and took a bite, while still frowning at the letter.  He could well believe that Seraphim worried about his eating and his health and everything else.  And that was nothing to what Gabriel, his older half-brother, once Seraphim’s valet and now the king of fairyland would do.  Those two had always mistook themselves for parents of Michael and Caroline.  Michael was sure someone in the household was in Gabriel’s pay, too, and sent him regular reports.

When you have two older brothers who are far more powerful than you, and determined to protect, cosset and annoy you within an inch of your life, sometimes all you can do is play along.  But Michael wished they’d let him read his letter in peace.

He took another bite, gulped down the tea, which was still hot and made his tongue sting, and then took another bite of toast, doing his best to simulate appetite he didn’t feel.

He had spent a restless and turmoil filled night, dreaming of fairyland and his recent captivity in it, and it was all he could do not to allow a long shudder to go through him at the confused and patchy memory of that dream. That was the problem, too.  In dream and memory fairyland was never anything clear and solid, anything you could rebel against and resent.  It was a foggy, threatening recollection, in which places and people changed shape and essence, and in which pain and worse happened to you without warning.

“That is better,” Milord, Burket said, in the sort of kind, patronizing tone that made Michael wish they hadn’t forbidden duels and that it weren’t frowned upon to duel one’s social inferiors.

“Would you fancy a kidney?  Perhaps a fish cake?”  At Michael’s headshake, Burket stepped back, but didn’t leave, as Michael expected.  Instead, he cleared his throat and looked towards the entrance door to the room, set next to the window that looked out over the gardens.

There was movement, and then two women and a man came in, all of them smiling widely, but all of them looking just the slightest bit embarrassed, as though they were doing something they shouldn’t be doing. The women were Mrs. Hooper, the housekeeper, starched and stiff in her black dress with its immaculate white collar, Mrs. Aiken, the cook, and the man was Dyer, the Butler.

What on Earth could be the matter?

Before Michael could even think to ask, Mrs. Hooper advanced, curtseyed, advanced again, curtseyed again, then beamed at him, again, as if he were an infant in the nursery, and spoke, “Lord Michael, since today is your seventeenth birthday, we thought it only fair…”  She stopped and sniffled, as though she were fighting strong emotion, though Michael had no idea what that could possibly be.  “That is, last summer, Milord, we thought you lost, and we wish you to believe we all hold you in the greatest affection, and therefore…”  She blushed, which gave Michael all he could not to let his jaw drop in astonishment.  Mrs. Hooper had never seemed fully human, much less capable of embarrassment.  “Therefore we got you this gift, from everyone on the estate, to commemorate your seventeenth birthday Milord.”

She dropped a parcel wrapped in silver paper, and neatly tied with a silk ribbon upon the table, just north of the letter from the dead man, then beat a hasty retreat.

Michael’s turn to blush, and to fumble with the paper.  And then he had the devil’s own time concealing the expression of astonishment on his face, and overlaying it with gratification.  “Oh, thank you,” he said, staring at the tiny gold box with the miniature scene of Zeus in judgment worked painted upon the porcelain lid.  A snuff box?  Why in heaven’s name did they think he’d take snuff?  Even Seraphim didn’t.

But he also understood, immediately, how expensive such a thing was, and how much of a sacrifice it had been to the servants to contribute to it.  That colored his voice and his expression, as he stood and said, “I am not good at flowery speeches, but—” He lifted the box and looked it over, “I am most gratified at your kind thought.  Thank you. I thank you most heartily.”

The four of them curtseyed of bowed according to their different sexes, looking gratified, and left.

Which is when Michael opened the letter from the dead man.

Escaping The Tower

The problem with a wicked stepmother, Miss Albinia Blackley thought, as she stood in front of the mirror, wearing Geoffrey’s clothes, and tucking her abundance of red hair into a hat rakishly set on her red curls was when the wicked stepmother was in fact your real mama.

It was all very well, after all, for Miss Albinia’s brothers – who always called her Al – because Mama was just the woman who had married papa when Geoffrey, the youngest, was seven, and was in fact no blood relation to them.  So they had nothing to be either sorry or worried for.  It wasn’t their mama who mistreated them so.

Oh, it had been terrible for them, from what they’d said, to find that their kind and absent-minded father had married a forbidding and interfering woman who was a powerful witch to boot.

But at least all of them, even Geoffrey, remembered papa.  Albinia didn’t.  She didn’t remember anyone but Mama, the sole authority and arbiter in her fifteen years of life.  Albinia locked the door to her room as she thought this, and sighed, because now she was on limited time.

Mama didn’t like her to lock her door, ever, and there was no point at all imagining that mama didn’t spell that lock, so that she knew the moment Al locked it.  Mama spelled everything and kept track of everything Al did, which is what made this so devilishly difficult.

But spell or not, Albinia must lock the door, to at least delay mama and give her a chance to escape.

Because the thing was, Mama or no Mama, Al must leave and go find the boys.

She didn’t know if the boys had felt this way when papa left shortly after marrying mama. She didn’t know because they never spoke to her of that time, before Al was born.

What she knew was that papa had disappeared shortly after marrying Mama, and had never returned and was presumed dead.

And now the boys had disappeared.  Al didn’t know where, but she knew two things.  One, that mama had made them leave against their will.  And two that wherever they were they needed Al. And at any rate, Al needed them.  Even if Mama was her real mama, Al was not going to stick around and have the full benefit of mama’s attention for the duration. Whatever the duration was.

She scrunched under the bed to find the old sheets she had torn and tied together.  They had to be old and discarded, because that was the only way to make sure they were no longer bespelled.  It had taken her six months to find some and to braid them into a passable rope, in the few minutes a day mama left her alone.

Tying the sheet to the foot of the bed and throwing it out the window was the work of a moment.  Al’s mind ticked where mama would be now.

Even if she were close by, say in her room, as she would be at this time, she had to come up the North staircase, down the hallway and up to the door.  Right now, she would be on the top step.

Al got the magical kit, likewise assembled painstakingly over a year, of discarded bits and ends, so that she could be sure no one had bespelled or could track any part of it.  The hard part of it had been buying the herbs, because she’d had to spend her allowance on them, in a shop at the other end of Wulffen Downs, so that mama wouldn’t hear about her purchases.  And she’d had to wrap them so they looked like candy.

It had earned her a sermon from mama about spending her money on tooth-rotting sweets.  But she had got the herbs necessary for enchantments.   She tied the pouch to a cord under her jacket, and then slipped the few silver coins left of her allowance into her sleeve.

She could now hear Mama’s step in the hallway outside.  Mama was clearing her throat, preparing to call her name.

Albinia pushed the window fully open, knelt on the parapet, and held on to the rope with both hands.  She had remembered to put knots on the rope, and she set her feet on the first one, carefully, otherwise it would be like when she tried coming down from the cliff when she’d been bird watching with Edmund, and had got her hands burned, with the speed of sliding down the rope.

She clambered down the rope as, from above, came the sound of knocks and mama calling “Open up.  Open up immediately young lady.”

She felt the little puff of magic as mama opened the door with a spell, and she moved faster down the rope, because she had to be on the ground, and running by the time mama got to the window.  She had to go to her brothers. Geoffrey needed someone to help him make himself understood when he started stuttering and Edmund was likely to lose everything, including his paints, and Aaron, Jeremy and Joshua would argue about everything, and William was likely to disappear into his music, and Samuel would just go all extremely disappointed…

Albinia looked down to see how far the ground was.  She had measured the tower where her room was situated.  She’d calculated the height to the window five different ways.

But as her stomach sank to her feet, she realized none of that mattered now.  Because she was not suspended from her own home’s window, but from a window open on a façade of glass. In fact, it looked like she was hanging from a giant glass rectangle.  Except that as she looked forward, she could see these were windows and that oddly dressed people were pointing at her and a woman was covering her mouth, but looked like she was screaming something.

Gone was the tower of the manor house on the cliff, overlooking the ocean and the familiar marshes.  Mama.  Mama and mama’s magic!

She could feel as though an abrasion upon her magic, as if something, in this strange place were trying to get through her shields.

Beneath her, there were flashes of moving things that she couldn’t understand and the sound of klaxons superimposed on a low roar as of a million voices.

She had no idea where she was, dangling here, between Earth and sky, on her fragile ladder of sheets.

All she knew was that the ladder ended far short of the ground. More than the height of Al’s tower.

Far above, Mama leaned out the open window, and Mama’s voice called, “Albinia Blackley, you little idiot.  Hang on.  I shall pull you in.”

And Al let go of the ladder.

She let go before she could think. She let go, knowing only she couldn’t stand to go back in and explain herself to Mama.  She let go knowing that she must get to her brothers, somehow, but not knowing how, except that she must get away from Mama and Mama’s magic, first.

She tumbled downwards, head over heels, wondering how it felt to hit the ground so far behind.

Would it hurt?  Would she even feel it?  She hoped she didn’t land on some innocent and kill them, even as air escaped her lungs.

Rescuing the Dead

Michael frowned at the letter.  It was undoubtedly addressed to him, by a man who couldn’t possibly have known of his existence, unless he had read the announcement of Michael’s birth in some society newspaper.

Swallowing tea and toast as fast as he could, Michael put the snuff box in his pocket and retreated to his workshop.

Properly speaking, he had two workshops: one in the house proper, a room that had taken his father a substantial portion of the family fortune to build and the other far deep in the garden, where Michael assembled and tested those experiments that might explode or other otherwise cause damage to the family.

The workshop in the depths of the garden, he’d all but abandoned.  Even if a changeling had been left in the inside workshop, it was from the outside workshop he’d been abducted with a cunning spell from the now fortunately dead king of fairyland.  And though Michael was quite sure the present king of fairyland, his brother Gabriel, had no intention of kidnapping him, yet he felt alone and vulnerable in that building.  It had been violated once, and could be violated again.

The inner workshop would be harder to breach.  For one, when it had been claimed from its previous use as a ballroom, it had been lined in leather between two layers of copper, the whole bespelled, forming an impassable barrier to both organic-affecting and inorganic-affecting spells.

In the ballroom, a sort of platform had been built, and up on it, Michael had his sky-observing apparatus, which observations came in handy when calculating what form of spell to use.

The rest of the workshop was machines of Michael’s own invention, many of which now seemed impractical and childish to him.  Take for instance his careful replica of the planet Earth, in brass, rotating in proportional time around a miniature sun.  It had been fun to build, but what practical use was it?

Since Seraphim had visited the strange planet without magic where the Princess Royal had been raised, and brought back ideas for useful machines, like shavers and mixers and clothes and dish washers, Michael had been working hard on magical replicas for such wonders.

The clothes washer was a success, except that the housekeeper had banned its use saying it was an abomination and would run laundresses off their jobs by the score.  However, Seraphim had arranged to have it tested in the royal palace and it was well on the way to becoming accepted in other, less hidebound households than the Darkwaters’.  Seraphim said it would make Michael a fortune.

The automated barber, though…  Michael frowned at his creation standing by the workbench near the far wall of the room.  It was not a little portable thing, as Seraphim had described, because Michael had believed by making it large and capable of giving haircuts as well as shaves, it would be more popular.  Particularly if it could also dress the hair of young ladies.

But all the thing had done, in actual fact, was chase Michael through the house, trying to cut… not his hair.  The bits of his jacket it had got had been enough.  Michael was not sure what had gone wrong with the animating spell, because when a cylindrical, man-high thing is wheeling after you brandishing knives, razors and scissors in its many arms, the only possible thing to do was to run as fast as possible.

Which he’d done, until Dyer had shot the mechanical barber through the head with a fowling piece.  Michael stared at the creature with multiple holes through the space where its directing magic had been.  Well, never mind that.  This was not a good time to attempt to reproduce that… experiment.

Michael perched on a high stool and tore into the letter, breaking the seal which showed – he’d swear to it – a lamb eating a wolf.

The letter started formally enough, “Dear Lord Michael Ainsling, You’ll forgive my addressing this letter to you, though we’ve never been formally introduced, or, indeed, introduced at all.”

And it proceeded strangely, “You might have heard of me, and have some idea that I am dead, but do not let that concern you, as rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated.”

Michael chewed the corner of his lip, perceiving that the person who’d written this letter, in strong angular letters, was what Mama would have called an original.  And by original she normally meant that they needed help finding their way across a street, and were none too certain where they might have placed their head that day.  She had been known to describe Michael himself in such a way.

“I suppose it will be a matter of some concern to you how you come to be receiving a letter from me, whether you think me dead or alive, and also possibly some curiosity as to what you can do to help me, or hinder me, or indeed do anything in my case.

“I’ll tell you the truth.  I do not know.  I have cast and recast these runes, and all I can tell is that there is only one person in the world capable of understanding my work – and you must understand what keeps me prisoner here is my own work – and disabling it, so I might perhaps be set free.

“I have never had the pleasure of meeting you and the last thing I’d expect would be the Ainslings to throw any kind of magical genius in the normal way.  I mean, you’ll pardon me for saying so, but your father was one of the accredited adventurers of my time, in more ways than one, meaning he was rather more adept at using other men’s magic all too often in order to use their wives likewise.  And while your Mama was one of the beauties of her day, and indeed a diamond of the first water, I never found that she had an inquisitive and mathematical turn of mind.  But then, of course, sometimes every breed throws a sport, and my runes assure me that you are that.  A magical genius, I mean, not a sport, though I suppose that also.”

By this time Michael’s head was whirling and he felt he should have had rather more than one cup of tea to fortify himself to deal with this very strange missive.  Or brandy for a choice, except that none of the servants would let him have it, or at least not without telling Seraphim. And maybe Gabriel.

“However, before I can request that you rescue me, though I do, of course, request that, I must ask you to find my sons.  You see, the woman I married, in what I’m sure now seems to me like a fit of madness, has applied some sort of spell to them, so I can no longer track them nor communicate with them.

“I’m afraid she means to do away with them and use the lands of my ancestors to form a dowry for her whelp.  And while I have nothing against the mite, who was not born by the time I got confined to this place, and whom my sons inform me is a pretty good sort, in the way young females sometimes are, and not at all like her mother, I do not wish for my legacy to pass wholly into her hands and those of whichever rogue Augusta chooses to marry her to.

“I presume you have a row boat of some sort on your property, as I vaguely remember there was a lake there, in which much boating was done in the summer.  I remember the lady your mother looking very fine in a lace dress upon a boat, in fact.  At any rate, if you apply the formula I enclose onto a rowboat, it should bring you where you need be to start unravelling this knot.

“Since the full extent of the knot laid by the one I must call my lady wife is not known or understood even by me, I must trust in the formula and in the kindness of a total stranger to do what must be done.  And my scrying assures me you’re the only stranger who can do so.

“In full hope, if not trust, of your doing what is needful, I subscribe myself your most grateful and devoted servant, Tristram Blackley.”

Having laid the letter down on his workbench, Michael stared at it, fully wondering whether the person who’d written was the – presumed dead – author of magical carpet travel on a grand scale, or simply a madman possessed of illusions of being such a parsonage.

It was not till he turned the page and looked through the formula, written in a hand that gave the impression of impatience with writing, that Michael blinked, whistled under his breath, and realized that this was indeed the work of Tristram Blackley.

No one else, barring an equal genius, could have come up with such a strange mix of magical formulae, turning a simple rowboat into a vehicle of both magical transport AND divination.

And Michael knew, as he knew his own name, that he would have to try it out.  It was like climbing the tallest tree or exploring the dangerous path of the woods.  He’d like to believe he was doing it for the sake of the unknown Mr. Blackley who seemed to be in a terrible position, but in his heart of hearts, he knew he was doing it for the thrill of it and to prove that he could.

Enough of nights hemmed in with nightmares of fairyland, and of moping the otherwise deserted estate.  Michael wanted to be doing.

The Kindness of Strangers

Miss Albinia Blackley didn’t scream.  Or at least she tried, but as she turned over, her hair falling out and her cap being lost in the street below, it seemed to her that the air robbed both her ability to breathe and her ability to make a sound.  From above she heard her mother scream, but not what her mother said.  From below other screams joined, together with some sort of strange musical instrument that sounded like a crazed goose.

She caught glimpses of the street below, the glint of something like metal but in many colors.  She tried to use her magic to slow the fall, but of course it didn’t work, when she couldn’t even think clearly.

And then from somewhere she heard a male voice.  It said a jumble of words. Or at least the words sounded like a jumble in her, though of course, right then anything would.

Her fall arrested.  Not suddenly, but first slowing down, like a leaf falling gently from a tree onto the welcoming ground.

Only she didn’t fall on the ground.  Or get a chance to straighten up.  Instead, she fell face first onto something hard and wooden.  As she recovered breath, she realized that the something she’d fallen on was moving, gliding rapidly through the air.  Or perhaps not gliding, because…  She blinked as she picked herself up to sitting on the floor of a small rowboat and looked at the boy who was rowing it.  He was tall and dark, and scowling, and plying the oars with a will.  And they were charging through the air, weaving and twisting, while mama screamed above, ever more distantly, and below the screams had changed from a horrified to a strangely excited tone.

“What?” Albinia heard herself squeak.  “How?  Who—”

“Not now,” the boy said, between panting breaths.  “We must get out of here, before the location affects the spell.”

Like that, they seemed to push through… something, and there was the brief cold of what Albinia had learned to call In Betweener.

It’s Friday and I don’t feel like doing a post.

The good news — knocks on head — is that I seem to finally be getting over “whatever the heck this was.”  The bad news is that I’m ridiculously late on everything, including promised covers.

So, I’ll get to those and finishing a few stories, and….  well, I suppose the house needs dusting, really.

So, today, for your amusement “Covers you can get from Pixabay, which are basically covers and ready to go.” And hopefully spotlighting a few artists. Who knows? maybe one of you guys will even decide to hire one of them.

So first, this artist:

I don’t know if the artist s rendering stuff, or using pieces of what other people post, and it’s obvious some of this stuff isn’t cover-quality, but a lot of it IS. And honestly even the so so, depending on genre, would be covers anyone would be proud to have 10 years ago.  Things have changed, a lot. And for the best. It’s easier and cheaper to to get decent art than ever before.

This artist, I linked before. He’s notable because ALMOST EVERY ONE OF the IMAGES IS COVER WORTHY.  There just aren’t many.

And THIS one is unusual because this stuff is done with filters. Good filter use is not always easy to find. Honestly, if I were doing fairytales, I’d be looking at this portfolio a lot.  Of course not every image is right for that genre, but a lot are.

Another portfolio, pretty much all cover-worthy. Just not many there. But I’m sure you can contact the artist, if needed.

This next one I’m going to spotlight because these are handdrawn, and at least in the picture, the artist seems pretty young.

Again, good for fairytales and YA (mostly because of the type of drawing, not because there’s anything wrong with it.)

Anyway, stuff for you guys to play with, while I go do stuff that resembles work….

I had no idea what to call this post.  Calling it “if you go to the past take wipes” seemed a little over the top. Also didn’t fit on that line.

Mind you, I’d advise the same if you go traveling, even not in a time of Kung-flu. But that’s because I grew up elsewhere, and I’ve traveled.

In a previous post, I mentioned that when the American left started screaming that the right was accusing Chinese of the “stereotype” of being dirty, I was flabbergasted.  I often don’t get American stereotypes at all, often leading to really weird situations, where someone assumes I’m judging them by stereotype, while I have no clue what I’m talking about, not even a little bit.

I think certain stereotypes and taboos you have to be a toddler in the country to imbibe.  Or at least live with someone who isn’t a mathematician and whom — sometimes — you have to inform of the assumptions built into his own culture, because he was too busy daydreaming about numbers to notice something as silly as people.

But the dirty thing? We actually asked all our friends, and they all looked back at us wide-eyed and said something like “WHAT?”

Turns out, apparently, that yep, Chinese culture isn’t up there on the personal cleanliness scale. Which shocked me, since Japanese and Koreans are. (One of my closest friends as an exchange student was Japanese, and we had friends from Korea at one time.) And the Chinese family we knew very well when we lived in Manitou was as clean as anyone else.  Of course, they were from Hong Kong.

The insanity, on the part of the left, of course, is not that they “fight the stereotype” (see above, not all Chinese have issues with cleanliness and individuals should be judged as individuals) but that they demand we not speak about it, because it’s cultural. And if you say anything bad about a culture, you’re “racist.”

These later-day heirs of Hitler seem incapable of understanding that culture isn’t born with the person, it’s something acquired. Which means to change a culture you don’t need to kill everyone who carries the same genes, you just need to make enough impact on two or three generations.

I was going to say it was one of the mysteries of the left that they could believe this, while at the same insisting on social engineering to change us into the perfect, communist race. Then I realized, no. That belief has been bought into coherency.

You see, for four generations, they’ve controlled the education system, and more importantly the arts, entertainment and reporting system, and yet they haven’t managed to make us all into ardent communists, and their perfect subjects.  Which is why they hate us, with a burning a passion. And why they’ve gone on their deranged, racist campaign to eradicate “whiteness” which they blame for their defeat.

Dear Lord, in the 21st century, with history and anthropology proving this insane, these arrant idiots believe that cultural characteristics are inborn in people. Of course, they also believe that “capitalism” is kind of an evil curse that descended on civilization along with its twin “patriarchy” instead of getting that TRADING is natural in humans (maybe some apes, too. We’ve had indications) and that patriarchy is just what happens in the wild, when one sex is much larger than the other. Because someone has to protect the pregnant women and the children from the wild animals, and barring moral precepts to curb it, force is addictive.

If one of you invents a time machine, go back in the past and strangle Rousseau with his swaddling clothes.  But if you go, take wipes. Because the past is filthy. Not by their lights, but by ours.

Which brings us back to China, cleanliness, culture.  None of which have nothing to do with race, because I don’t care where your ancestors came from, the past is filthy.

You see, you can influence a culture, but usually not the way you mean to — hence the left’s increasingly enraged frustration at their ability to “engineer” society — and it takes a long time. The other thing it takes is the “benefits” of the change you’re trying to make showing up, and making the new generation SURE that something is worth it.

This is where the left has failed, btw. The erroneous model of society as a mechanism that the industrial age brought us, made them think that it was best to have a “central manager” and also that they could change the machine, replacing “pieces” at will. And elementary schools when they went universal (where I came from that was the forties. I think it was earlier here) gave them the illusion it could work.

There are certain things you can teach kids: ways of talking, of presenting themselves, of counting change, of memorizing train schedules (well, we DID. It was required to pass fourth grade. I invite you to imagine what kind of hell that was for the dyslexic kid who inverts numbers) that work, in the very short term for that person. They also give the kid a sense of superiority over his/her parents, those backward fools.  This is btw, how first-generation communist take overs get the very small kids to tattle-tale on their parents, those backwards enemies of the state.

But the thing is, those are small things, and mostly things you do in public, okay? And they pay off for the person immediately. It often, however, doesn’t pay in the long run, and when the kids grow up, if they see what they were taught was a lie, they will turn. Boy, will they turn. Which is how the left keeps losing generations.

Anyway, let’s suppose it’s something real you’re trying to teach the kids.  In my mom’s childhood, Portugal had undertaken a massive campaign to curb rampant TB.  So, people could get arrested for being barefoot in public.  This is because everyone SPIT in public. Just on the street.

It didn’t work, because like most laws it didn’t take in account that what it was legislating might be impossible. You see, most people couldn’t afford shoes. Not as often as they’d wear out from being worn anywhere. So workers would carry their shoes and put them on when they saw the police or — the more sophisticated — wear a shoe at a time, carry the other one, and claim the other one hurt their foot.

By the time mom told me these stories, they were weird, because in my generation everyone wore shoes.  You see, if you had money for shoes you wore them, because you’d seen the benefits, to wit: you got sick less.  Mind you, I think all of us lived in rubber flip flops in summer.  ( I spent a ton of time trying to fix ones that broke, too, and I wasn’t unusual.)

The change, a minor one, “wear shoes in public” (the North of Portugal has a climate reminiscent of London) took hold as long as there was a reason and it was feasible. It only took two generations.

Other changes had clearly taken/have taken longer. Look, Portugal is not cut off from mainstream Western knowledge. We knew the germ theory of illness. It’s just that it’s not something you can SEE. By definition, bacteria aren’t visible.

So when I was a kid, my family which took a bath once a week (look, we had no running hot water. It was an endeavor) and washed hands, face, neck, arms and undercarriage every day were considered freakishly clean.  The clothes we changed once a week (except for underthings that got changed every day) were considered “almost too clean to wash” by our washerwoman.  TRUST ME, by our standards here and now, they were filthy.

People there, now, as far as I can tell, have American-style hygiene.  And yes, I know what you’re going to say, we might be too clean, hence all the immune and auto-immune issues. And maybe. But that’s not the point.

The point is that Portugal had known how disease was transmitted since the late nineteenth century, but it took internalizing the change — repeated generations of seeing the benefit — and far more affluence than our ancestors ever had to penetrate.

Because culture is a hive-mind, composed of the docile, the stubborn, and the medium.  And because a hive-mind, resistant to change UNLESS IT SEES THE BENEFITS. If you think of it as an autistic 2 year old, who wants to do things exactly the same way everyday, you won’t be far wrong.

And honestly, if it sees NO benefits? It won’t do it. No way, no how.

Now, my mom’s childhood friends died in droves from TB, from typhus, from other epidemic and endemic diseases that can be solved with scrupulous hygiene. But where and when she lived, they didn’t have the means to change the way they lived, even if they wanted to. You can legislate economic facts, just like you can legislate rain. What you can’t do is make the laws of nature obey you.

So, they lived as they always had and attributed illness to other things because…. what are you going to do?

I suspect to an extent that’s what is going on in China, btw. They are much wealthier than they were, but like all communist societies wealth is unequally distributed. Most peasants might be better off than when they were starving under the lash of Mao’s deranged rule, but they’re still desperately poor by Western standards.

Grandmother used to say “you don’t have to be rich to be clean.” It pains me to say it, but she was wrong. You either have to have a modicum of wealth, or spend your whole day battling grime. For instance, our house is decently clean and I work at it far less than she did. Usually a day a week will do it, because I don’t have to do it with brooms and brushes, I have a vacuum, which means I have electricity to support it (I don’t think grandma’s house electrical system could have taken it.) And I’ve long since learned the equation: trade money for time.  As in, I can buy effective cleaners, and make the cleaning really quick, or I can use cheap stuff, or make my own, and take…. forever. Which eats my life.

But for many people in China the trade is simply not available. Period. They don’t have enough money to do that.

So they live in an environment that makes them more tolerant of every day dirt, which means they don’t notice it. That’s the part where dirt enters the culture.  And they’re vast enough, they don’t see that other countries are cleaner or the benefits from it “they live longer and healthier lives.”

I’ve seen all these at close quarters as my generation (and possibly only my circles for all I know) was the first where the dime dropped in Portugal. Even though they’d known of bacteria since the late nineteenth century.

Heck, even here, the dime hasn’t fully dropped.  Don’t believe me? Lurk in a public restroom for a few hours sometimes. Many people do not wash their hands after using the bathroom. And, mind you, they’ve been told this since what…. birth?

Culture changes slowly. It doesn’t mean it’s genetic. It just means that new habits/ideas/ways of behaving take time to percolate through society, one collective neuron at a time. And that benefits must be obvious for it too work.

Also that culture — like a recalcitrant toddler — sometimes learns what you don’t want it to.  Lie to it enough — by forcing it to say things that contradict its lying eyes, for instance — and you’re going to hit a point where they simply will not believe you. Nor, for a while, anyone else trying to command them.  Which might be the point western culture has reached, honestly. It’s ten seconds from starting to run around screaming “I’ll never go to bed again.”  And considering the bed the left has been trying to put it to bed with a shovel, that’s actually a good sign, I think.

But this means even “good” changes dictated from above will have a higher barrier to cultural penetration. Which sometimes isn’t good.

To what extent did Mao’s madness (and the not so sanity of his successors) make it so the Chinese people don’t really care if they hear that “hygiene is essential” or — knowing the style of the PCR — You must cause a thousand flowers of cleanliness to bloom?

As for our left: the very fact they assume cleanliness or lack thereof is RACIAL means they’re completely off whatever rocker they ever had. It also makes them repulsive and mad eugenicists.  And it makes us less likely to listen to them — as a culture — or really to anyone, should we need to in the future.

Which is of course a problem, because cultures aren’t the most rational things around.

How do you counter it?  I don’t know. Ignore the left. Wash your hands. And don’t panic.  If you follow the prescriptions of the left and ignore the different cultures, you’ll panic, because, well “the kung flu will kill us all.”

It won’t. Our herd immunity is way higher. The kung flu might make us sick as dogs and cost us productivity as we drag around with a fever for six to eight weeks.

But this too shall pass.  Including the crazy, anti-human and racist ideas of the left.

Because like a not completely insane toddler, the culture might run around eating dead bugs, but will stop if they make it sick. And if its nanny keeps instructing it to eat dead bugs, sooner or later its’ going to stop listening to the nanny.

And that too is a good thing.

The Poor Starving, Burglaring Father And Other Fantasy Tales – a blast from the past from May 2013

So, yesterday Glenn Reynolds linked to this story at Hot Air about a home invader (IN TEXAS!) who was so unfortunate (as well as stupid) as to lock the son of the homeowner in the gun closet…  Hilarity ensued.

Only, as I was getting ready to go out and unable to work in those ten minutes or so, I thought it would be a good idea to read the comments.  Which was fine too, except…

Except that I came across something that made me sit down and think.  In fact, I thought all the way in the car to Denver (business) and all the way back, and decided this must be written about.

For those of you not inclined to click on that link, let me summarize.  Story goes something like this: a house in Texas was broken into by three home invaders (a completely different thing from burglars.  Growing up I was always told that the real danger from burglars was to interrupt them in the commission of the crime – please keep in mind that I grew up in a country where gun ownership is not allowed – and so was instructed that, if coming home and suspecting the house was being burgled, I should run next door the neighbors and call the police.  Home invaders are burglars who PURPOSELY go into occupied houses, which is a completely different ball of wax.  In fact, often – from what I read, though I confess I didn’t look at statistics – they’re there for a bit of bizarre sexual assault or other acts of random sadism, as well as property.)

After wrestling with the occupant of the house in residence, i.e. the son of the homeowner, they locked him in the closet.  He got his gun, broke out of the closet, exchanged fire with one of the invaders, the other two fled.  The one who was shot (shoulder and leg.  Cut the homeowner’s kid some slack.  He was probably agitated.  I would be) tried to run, collapsed, was captured.

So far so good and a fairly straight forward story.  And then I hit the comments.

Before I report on this comment I want to point out that from the replies other people made him, he might be a “regular troll” on the blog.  (AFAICT we’re the only blog with active commenters without a resident troll.  This is probably because I’m testy and an overheated Latina.  Deal.  I know it would give us great cache and also that I never let you guys have any fun, but you can MOST ASSUREDLY deal.)

However, the comment bears mentioning because a) if you tell this type of a story at a party, this is almost sure to come back as a talking point.  b) because when I was in college – or high school – while I would PROBABLY not have made this point myself, I would have bought it, hook like and sinker.  c) because not only it’s not a valid “counterpoint” but it’s not even a sane one.  d) because nine times out of ten someone not politically involved will buy it sight unseen.  e) the reason people will buy it.

So, now that you are ready – the comment was made by someone named “nonpartisan” and while I can’t find the comment itself (you can search!) it was quoted enough for me to get the gist of it.  Apparently this critter opened with a gambit that he didn’t think burglars deserve death.  And either in this comment, or in another, he identified himself as a Harvard Law graduate.  The commenters make much fun of this last.  They shouldn’t.  Having received an excellent liberal (!) education in Europe, this seems perfectly plausible to me.

But here’s the part of the comment I could find:

what if you know for a fact that the burglar is unarmed, would you kill him?

a burglar could be a father who is unemployed and at his wits end at finding options to provide for his starving family. Not every burglar is a violent, armed psychotic rapist.

nonpartisan on May 18, 2013 at 9:01 AM

This is exactly the type of story my text books, from middle school on were full of.  The criminal was a misunderstood soul, an exploited worker, down on his last dime.  We were hammered with comparisons to medieval people stealing a loaf of bread and being hanged for it.  (Suburbanshee will know better than I, but I’ve come to doubt those stories too.  The Arab world might punish first-time thieves, but I sort of doubt western civilization did.)

When someone brings up a story like that, I’ve been conditioned to feel a pang and go “well, what if…”

Why have I been conditioned to do this?  Well, because that’s a plot for a Hollywood movie, and, beyond my text books, it’s been tossed at us a thousand times in movies and mysteries.  (Did any of you watch Boogie Nights?  Might be one of the worst movies ever made.  We watched it for the same reason we watched a lot of cr*p.  It was in the dollar theater.  Unfortunately once we paid for it, we had to sit and watch it, because Dan feels wasteful otherwise.  No, don’t ask.  It’s a thing.  Anyway, from what I dimly remember, Boogie Nights has that type of thing, where they decide to rob a store, because they’re desperate and stuff.  More on that later.)

We all know about the honest-but-desperate father who goes and robs someone for money to feed his starving brood.

We all know of him – but does he exist?  I’ll remind you that we all also know of Santa Claus.

Right now, off the top of my head, I’m going to say that not only doesn’t he exist, but that if he ever existed, in history, it was probably before the eighteenth century.

Look, in normal human beings there’s  a huge stop before “commit crime to solve my problems.”  There just is.  It might “simply” be fear of retribution, but it’s there.  And when one thinks of “committing crime” and is desperate enough to break that taboo, there are a bunch of things a normal human being would do LONG before burglary, let alone home invasion (which as we said, is a different animal.)  There’s swindling someone.  If you don’t have the brains for that, there’s credit card number theft.  There’s even, up the scale, mugging.  (You get your loot in money.)  Further, burglary, let alone home invasion, is a fairly sophisticated crime.  You have to know how to break and enter.  This might have been easy in a medieval hovel, but these days it’s not so much (Okay, I can break into a house in five minutes.  I never claimed to be nice.  What?  Mostly to not be grounded for coming home late.  “But mom, I was in bed all along.  Maybe I was in the bathroom and you missed me?”)

Second, once you break into a house, your chances of walking off with a bundle of untraceable bank notes are slim.  Most people simply don’t sew money into the mattress.  So, if you’re breaking in for money to feed your children (snort) you’re going to have to convert whatever you find into cash.  (I’ll note that I have never heard of ANYONE breaking into a house and making off with the contents of the freezer, so if it’s food they want, they’re going about it the wrong way.)  This means you need to know fences, or you’re going to be a one-time burglar.

But before that let’s look at how an otherwise law-abiding person could get desperate enough  to become a burglar in order to feed his chil’uns.

Kids, I’ve been broke.  I’ve been so broke that merely being broke would be a relief.  At one point twenty years ago we spent six months paying our Visa with our Mastercard and vice versa.  Twice, we parked in front of soup kitchens, then decided we were NOT desperate enough to go in and went home hungry.

The idea of robbing another person NEVER EVEN OCCURRED TO ME.  In that situation, the hierarchy would go something like this: charities/soup kitchens.  This by itself, might be enough to hold us, until we could get back on our feet.  (who was that guy who moved to a town with his girlfriend and found he couldn’t starve even if he tried to?)  Friends and relatives.  No, I don’t care how broke your friends are, you can usually sleep on the sofa.  Unemployment/Federal/State assistance. (This might come first for most people.  Even for us, unemployment would.)  If you exhaust all of these, if you lose your home, there’s still the charity of strangers.  Look, our city supports a large (!) and colorful (dirt is a color!) population of homeless which I GUARANTEE haven’t done a lick of work in years.  NONE OF THEM IS STARVING.  (And most of them are also not burglars or even muggers.)  There’s soup kitchens.  There’s informal soup kitchens (college students host a dinner for the homeless near my house every weekend.  No. Don’t get me started.)  There’s begging on the street.

And if you’re not going “but all of those are demeaning.”  Yes, they are, but they’re not VIOLENT crime.  And which would you rather be?  A beggar or a burglar?

Neither, right? But begging is at least honest, and I’d bet you most NORMAL people would do that.

It turns out, weirdly enough, that a small percentage of the population commits 90% of the violent (or potentially violent) crime.  It’s not need.  It’s something broken in them.

A lot of these people are heavy drug users or mentally ill.

That said, I’m the first to say our mental health system is broken.

IOW you’re unlikely to find a starving father of four in your home unless he’s also mentally ill and POSSIBLY also an acid dropper.

The problem is that someone with that combination and willing to commit a violent crime has no breaks.  (A lot of mentally ill drug users just want to sit in a corner and talk to the lizards because they’re awesome and stuff.  The ones who get violent are inherently very dangerous.)

So, should you shoot someone who breaks into your house?  Yep.  What are the chances of your killing an otherwise innocent man?  Next to none.  What are the chances of you getting killed otherwise?  VERY high.

So, how come that comment, or the gist of it would have got even me to hesitate when I was much younger?

Because in a million stories, movies, novels, we’ve been sold the story of a creature that if he ever existed is vanishingly rare – so rare that his sightings are more scarce than those of Bigfoot.  – the “poor but honest, desperate father, driven to crime to feed his brood.”

And people tend to think of stories as things they’ve lived.  They “experienced” it.  So, of course, it’s true.

It’s a great story, of course, but I bet you it was much rarer in Victorian times.  (And if you read the bios of Victorian criminals, the being it depicts was almost as rare.  People would go to the workhouse, horrible as it was, rather than commit crimes.  Unless they were one of the few who PREFERRED crime over anything else.)  And it was even rarer before that.

What it comes down to is people have to be told these stories, and be told them over and over again, before they will be scared of defending themselves lest they hurt others.

Civilizations don’t commit suicide unless they’re brainwashed into it.  And destroying a civilization starts with corrupting its story tellers.

Go you, look closely at the stories you tell and make sure you do no harm.

Oh, yeah, and be not afraid.

You know the left side of the isle loves to talk about the eyes of the future and the judgement of history.  And in almost every case in my lifetime in which they’ve invoked such imaginary opinions, they’ve been completely wrong.

Mostly, you know, because they think history comes with an arrow, and that the future will be exactly like them, only more so. And to an extent some parts of society have been like that. For the most part the parts of society that do not “root, hog or die.”

BUT mostly, what they do is that when they turn out to be completely and utterly wrong, they revise the past. To be fair, that’s a trick their ideological compatriots in the USSR had already perfected decades ago, which is why we got the saying that “In the USSR you always know the future. It’s the past that keeps changing.”  This is why they attempt to shame us with the spirit of Reagan, the man they not only said would destroy the world, but the man they still hate (Remember that Obama’s goal was to be the anti-Reagan, and to the extent he succeeded our economy died.)

The thing is though I refuse to say we’ve reached (and possibly passed) peak stupidity/disconnect from reality/insanity, or if you prefer “peak long march through the institutions” if we haven’t, we’re pretty darn close.

They’re now so desperate to virtue signal ANYTHING at all, and to present as the peak of civilization that they’ll tear down statues of… well, anyone really who doesn’t fit woke standards of the day.  Because the kids educated in an educational system wholly possessed by the left are so completely incompetent — and tragically aware of their incompetence and ignorance, even if it’s masked by their “self esteem” — that they feel the need to tear down ANYTHING that came before, so they can claim to be the best thing ever.  (This is also seen in most fields, where they rename things named after great men (and some women) of the past because they might have had bad opinions, and/or SOUND like someone who had bad ideas. Of course my field is overachieving in that respect, as they’re trying to erase any woman or minority who achieved anything before — what is is now? 2010? It’s a moving thing, so I don’t remember — so that their barely-read, completely incompetent dahlings can claim to be the very first.)

So if this isn’t peak incompetence and insanity I don’t precisely know what comes after. What I do know is that if there’s more to come, society will come apart at the seams. And I don’t mean slowly, as it has been doing for at least 50 years, I mean suddenly and explosively.

Consider one of their “moderates” and certainly — heaven help us — less crazy than the two front runners thinks farming is easy, and people who machine parts have an easy job, and really, anything that is results based is “easy” and “a moron could do it.”

Any society, under that kind of government, will fall apart rapidly.  Their most moderate of the remaining candidates is the kind of guy who would order wheat sown in winter in Siberia or create the horrors of Mao’s war on sparrows, backyard furnaces, or really…. the cultural revolution. The horrifying part here is that the incompetence, malice and sheer insanity of the remaining field BY FAR exceeds his.

And if there’s one law of nature we know of is that if you’re at war with reality, you eventually lose.

So if there are any future generations to look back on us and judge us they will not follow the arrow of progressivism. Because down that path lies nothing but the destruction of humanity. (Which to fair, they’re now more or less admitting they want, something that makes my jaw drop and my brain start doing loop-de-loops.  Because, seriously.  We knew they were traitors to their homelands, traitors to their culture and more often than not (except in the case of read diaper babies) traitors to their families, but … traitors to their species? How does that even work? If you hate humanity so much, cupcake, and think we should all go extinct, start by solving your immediate problem, and then if the rest of us exist or not, it is no longer your problem.  There are many, many ways to achieve this goal, and it is sheer cowardice to demand that we solve the problem for you by dying FIRST.  You want humanity to go away?  Sure, sweetheart. You first.)

The problem is when I think of the eyes of the future on us, I can’t decide? Will they laugh? Will they cry? Will they cry till they laugh? Will they laugh till they cry?

Look, every society has vast reserves of insanity and wrong belief. Even the most functional ones.

One of the things people on the left — or just maleducated people — bring up when they want to feel superior to their ancestors is that their ancestors thought the earth was flat.

Er…. ish. No, seriously. The theory that the Earth was a globe has been around since at least the Greeks who calculated the curvature.  Sure, there were other theories, mostly in really old religions.  And yep, I bet that the average peasant on the field, or practically anyone who didn’t have a reason to know better thought it was flat. Doesn’t mean learned people did.

I remember feeling very superior to the rest of the village when they said things like Catholicism was the first religion (note not the first CHRISTIAN religion), just the first religion, and I would get on my high horse and lecture them on all the old religions and of course Judaism.  It’s a cheap thrill. And it meant nothing. Sure, that was the consensus of people who didn’t read much, and who were preoccupied with more important matters, such as how to get the team of oxen to live one more winter, so they might be able to buy a new team in the Spring/Fall with fresh-acquired profits (I do NOT remember seeing a tractor before I was about 10, and even then, most plowing was done with oxen.)  And my “knowledge” was useless to them, and they probably forgot it two seconds after I lectured (if they listened at all, which I doubt.) BECAUSE to them it didn’t matter. In the normal operation of their days it made no difference whatsoever.

So, every society has vast reservoirs of wrong, and vast groups of people who are wrong about something.

We might however be the first society (not explicitly totalitarian) to educate people to know all the wrong things, and then reward them with credentials and power when they learn to ignore reality well enough.  We’re almost certainly the only non-totalitarian religion to FORCE people to spout reality-denying nonsense from the lips out, to keep their jobs/have an income, as we do in a bunch of fields including education and the arts (and some science.)

For instance if you page down on this article — though the previous news is … uh…. interesting too — you’ll find what anyone who works in the arts knows. Have certain opinions, and you might as well start readying your begging board. Thank heavens for indie. Though the truly hilarious part is the left accusing everyone who actually comes out as having a dissenting opinion as “selling out.”  Among their many charming delusions is threatening to end the career of any dissenter while simultaneously claiming they’re not the gatekeepers/establishment. Believing in a flat Earth is nothing in comparison, particularly for medieval peasants.  What I don’t think the people who wrote about that realize is that our science too, from hard to soft is subject to the same pressures.  (Mostly because most of our science is financed by the government, which, no matter which side is in power is run by a perpetual bureaucracy, educated in the “best” schools, etc. That’s a subject for a whole article, but I need to find my Zen place first, otherwise I’ll just start hitting my head on the keyboard.)

So… What will the future laugh at us about?

How about the obsession with statistical groups all performing alike, and if they don’t that’s a sign of discrimination?  So, you know, the fact that there are fewer women/minorities/purple people eaters in engineering/the arts/race car driving than there should be by number of people in the population means that these people are discriminated against, and we must ignore everything, including competency/interest/ability/interest in OTHER THINGS/personality, etc. etc. ad nauseum to force the right numbers to show up.

To believe that, you have to ignore everything about how humanity actually works, including the fact that you can’t define everyone by their “groups” no matter how many groups you put in.  The only person that fits ALL my groups is me. Humans are above all individuals. So if a group is denying entry to the otherwise qualified, sure, come down on them like a ton of bricks. BUT be very careful you have proof of transgression. Statistics aren’t that. Because you can’t even put in all the factors, when it comes to humans. Statistics are Procrustes bed for society.

I mean, look, I have absolutely no clue what the number of middle aged Portuguese women immigrants there are in the population of the US, but I guarandamntee that we’re under represented in science fiction writers (and likely readers. Though I don’t even want to say that, or they’ll hunt these women down and try to shame them into reading sf/f.)  I guarantee it, because I doubt many of them, prior to immigrating to the US spent time in those long lines outside bookstores on the day a Heinlein or Asimov or Anderson or Simak was released. I mean, in the second largest city in the country, I don’t remember seeing any other female standing in line, much less another female my age.  And even if there had been a few more, (I couldn’t after all be in EVERY bookstore line, though I guarantee I’d have tried if I could have done it) how many also happened to wish to write?  And how many would hang tough through getting to even near-native proficiency in English? How many worked hard enough and fought hard enough to break in?

I bet statistically “We”‘re way underrepresented as sf/f writers.  Because most of them are saner than even trying this, to be fair.

But, oh, the US is distorting entire sectors of economy and culture to fit that Procrustes bed of of statistics (though I’m happy to say not on behalf of Portuguese immigrants. Yes, yes, I know. DON’T give them ideas.)  With the predictable results.

Then there’s the “both sexes are exactly alike.” Don’t get me started. Just don’t. Instead find the nearest person with an education in biology and tell them that males and females are exactly the same after puberty.  Then stand back. No, further back.

And in an amazing twist of left insanity, they also believe that while men and women are exactly alike, if you have sexual dysphoria and believe that you were born in the wrong body, you should immediately get hormones/surgery to correct it. Though to be fair to them, they also believe it’s perfectly okay if you JUST DRESS in the clothes of the other sex (for those of us who live in jeans and ts or sweats this is a  bit of puzzler, to be fair. Are we neuter?) which of course fits better with “both sexes are exactly alike” but doesn’t fit at all with medical treatments for transsexuals.  Oh, and I bet you money I’m going to be called transphobic for this paragraph. Which is insane. I do believe there are people whose miss match is so profound they need surgical/medical intervention. BUT I don’t believe that men and women are exactly life, otherwise, what WOULD BE THE POINT.  I am 100% Epistemological-confusion-phobic.  But that’s a mouth full.

AND because note that after puberty thing, they absolutely believe that children should be allowed to “transition” before puberty. Because though men and women are exactly alike, we need to get those kids changed before puberty, or they’ll never be right. Again, what? Kudos for perceiving the reality that male and female bodies are fundamentally different after puberty. BUT the fact that most of you never had kids — and that the ones who have are functionally too insane to perceive kids as they are — is showing. Your kid saying he wants to be a girl, or she wants to be a yellow wingless dragon is not a sign of some deep maladjustment, and short of puberty there is no real way to tell if it’s real or not. Hell, short of finishing growing there’s no way to tell. Kids think they’re all kinds of things.  Ours spent an entire summer being “The Alien” and “The Evil twin (but not the alien’s evil twin.)”  At different times in their lives one of them believed he was Moses (don’t ask, please. Just don’t.), another believed he was an elephant in a human body, the most unwieldy one believed he was a gymnast, the other believed his job when he grew up was going to be sharpening pencils. By definition, kids have no clue what adult life is like, and that includes gender/sex-roles. To believe that your kid saying she wants to be a boy is any more valid than him telling you he wants to be a fire engine, you need to not only not remember being a kid, but also completely ignoring what your kid IS, and also completely ignoring that kids aren’t adults.  On the other hand you have an entire establishment of mental health professionals too crazy or scared to pull the reins back on the insanity. Will the future laugh or weep? I don’t know.

And though this is not an exhaustive list (I’d be here the rest of my life) we are finding through the slow debacle of the Wu-flu that globalism and free trade with totalitarian regimes is also raging insanity. I mean we can’t even tell if it is already here and has been for months (let’s keep in mind that there is a 30 day lag on symptoms, and many people are asymptomatic, and that it took at least thirty days before China admitted it had a problem, which means the closing of that barn door came at least 2 months after the horse had fled. And no one COULD do it sooner) in which case quarantines and containment are beside the point and we should concentrate on being ready to treat the most vulnerable OR whether it’s mostly been slowed/kept out except for some foci. We can’t tell, because we can’t test enough random people to know on account of not having enough tests. Oh, we also can’t tell if this is a deadly plague or a minor/inconvenient cold/flu which most people shrug off. Because we know China lied/lies, but we don’t know in what.  And we don’t know what the cultural factors are. Which can make a big difference, if you look here, and here. To be fair, I was fairly sure China must be FILTHY because all the left started screaming at us for the “stereotype” of dirty Chinese. I will confess this is not a stereotype I had, since I assumed like the Asians I was close to — mostly Japanese — they were VERY germophobic.  But I should have guessed when the screaming started. And also, communist countries, in general, are public health disasters.  The second one, OTOH I’d never have guessed. Yes, I should have, because, you know, I grew up in a country where the germ theory of disease was still a new and strange thing, and where a lot of diseases (cancer) were attributed to curses and/or lack of faith.

Which brings us not just to the insanity of “let’s have free trade with totalitarians” but also the insanity of “All cultures are the same.” The only persons who can believe that only know other cultures through expensive vacations where they met ONLY with their own rich/globally connected counterparts in other countries, in utterly de-personalized big hotels in big cities. And even then it requires WILLFUL ignorance and denial of reality.

Which of course in the current climate means you’ll go far in the arts, in academia, in writing, in the news and in most scientific pursuits.

Will the future laugh or cry looking back at us?

I don’t know. I know if we manage to get out of this delusional state enough for there to BE a future, they might do both. But they might very well be tears — or laughter — of rage.

Henrietta Ford was not the sort of woman who had hallucinations.

In fact, hallucinations—which she didn’t have!—were some of the many things that seemed to make life far more interesting for other women. For instance, take her mother.  Her mother had dreams. Prophetic dreams.  She’d come to Henrietta in the morning, from the time Henrietta — Rietta to her friends — had turned fourteen and say “Henry” — which of course was what mother called her — “I dreamed you had married a prince.”

This story is now published as part of this collection:  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09W3WBJYJ

Book Promo

*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. ;)*

FROM MARY CATTELI: Dragon Slayer.

The dragon must die. It haunts the land and strikes with fire and death without warning.

Prince Baudouin knows the perils, and how other knights have perish. Still, he is confident that he can slay the dragon. All he has to do is forge through the burnt wasteland about its mountain, and slay it.

All.

STEPHEN KELLAT:  Space Force: An Alternative Origin

The United States Space Force was birthed in December 2019 after a long debate in Congress. What if its creation took another path? This novella spins the dials on the multiverse viewer and looks at a world where things started in a slightly different fashion.

A SHORT STORY COLLECTION FEATURING BRENA BROCK AND CEDAR SANDERSON AND OTHERS:  The Hearts’ Enchantment.

Hearts’ Enchantment brings together 12 fantasy and romance authors to spin stories of love and romance set in medieval worlds. From retired warriors to spies and nobles, romance and love finds a way.

Authors include Cedar Sanderson, Misha Burnett, Mel Todd, Nico Murray, and more!

From sweet to spicy, there’s something to satisfy any fan of fantasy, romance, or both!

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL:  Beach House on the Moon.

The Moon is a dead world, airless and desolate. Emmaline Waite has known this fact since childhood, when she watched the Apollo landings.

But here she sits on the shores of the Sea of Tranquillity, looking up at the gibbous Earth as the waves roll in. What madness can this be?

She gets no time to contemplate that question, for she is not alone. She is about to enter a realm of love and fear, of mindbending secrets that change her understanding of human history, and of self-sacrifice.

Her life will never be the same.

FROM J. L. CURTIS:  Burnt Ends: The Collection.

JL Curtis’ short stories, novelettes, and novellas. Curtis’ novels are known for their accuracy in weapons, vivid characterization, and realistic worldbuilding. Now, Curtis has collected them into one volume for his readers. The stories include-Rocking C, Stranded, A Matter of Honor, The Morning the Earth Shook, Jace, To the End of the Trail (new story from the Western series coming in 2020), The Grey Man- Down South, The Grey Man- Generations

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: TYPE.

Announcement:  there will soon be a link on the right side bar, beneath the paypal link, which will lead you to Amazon, which — in turn — will give you a chance to tip me without tipping me from your pocket. (I.e. it won’t cost you any extra.)  Since you guys are ALWAYS chiding me about not rattling the cup enough, please — as I said above — consider the ATH associates link for all your Amazon purchases, as a few coins will be dropped in my cup.  I particularly wish to enjoin you to go through my portal when your company is buying three thousand of the latest laptops available.  That would be very nice indeed.

Until the widget is HERE: Amazon Store

The fight with the forces of evil is going badly this year. No, seriously. This ever-returning virus keeps messing with my ability to actually write.  And on the days I feel well, something else hits.

But I must get off this rut and actually write.

On the good side, I’ve signed a new contract with PJM Media and will be doing both “open” and “membership only” articles for them.  On that second one, I should — haven’t yet — get a code to give you a discount if you get membership.

I also have a couple of actually paying cover commissions.

All of that should help with present crunch.  And the Mathematician and I will go hand in hand and skipping all the way to fight the forces of evil in the forthcoming week so I’ll hopefully FINALLY get Other Rhodes to first readers, and set about finishing Winter Prince only three months late..

Oh, on the ever-returning virus — it really seems mostly gone right now. I’m just exhausted. More on that later* — and the effects of even a mild cold when it persists that long and makes you feel extremely tired: this cost us $20k, as we had to replace our long-suffering car.  All of us knew it was losing oil (slowly) and to keep an eye on the dial and anyway, add oil every week just in case. But we were TIRED and not tracking very well. So….. So. Yeah.

Sure, we’d have had to replace it in a year, but in a year, everything else working out (it should, it really should) we would have had a little more room in the budget. Ah, well.

Speaking of budget, it’s February 29th, Blogger Tipping Day!

I don’t normally rattle the cup, but I do allow myself to do it on Blogger Tipping Day.

If you regularly read According To Hoyt, consider throwing a few bucks at the “paypalme” donation button on the upper right corner, or, if it’s been a good year for you and you enjoy ATH, consider a monthly subscription.  It helps more than I wish to tell you right now.

*As always when I am finally over a recurring virus, I did mega house cleaning yesterday.  Which would be fine, except in a maneuver too complex to explain, Valeria-cat dumped a whole box of litter into a bucket of water on the floor of the laundry room. Which led to….. and hour of clean up, as soaked litter exploded all over the laundry room.  By the time I was done I also had to clean the kitchen (again) the living room (again, and this time with carpet cleaner, the stairs, etc. as I couldn’t fully rid my shoes of litter. Oh, also I was shedding soaked litter from my jeans, which were soaked in it from the knee down.
I’ve never in my entire life come as close to killing a cat. She had no reason to go on top of the washer, much less to perch on the edge of another cat’s box. (I’d put it on top of the washer (on top of a trash bag) while I cleaned Euclid’s confinement-cage, otherwise known as “sick cat kitty pokey.” There are THREE BOXES ON THE FLOOR ACCESSIBLE TO HER, but she had to jump on top of the washer, where I put it to be out of the cats reach (she’s the ONLY one who can jump that high.)

Anyway, this made house-cleaning extreme mode. REALLY extreme mode.  I went to bed at 8:30 and got up at 7:30 this morning.  My sleeping so long must have worried Greebo, because he bit my arm at about six.
Meanwhile I can’t remember if I took my morning thyroid. Normally I take it when the alarm goes. I swallow the tablet, and turn off the alarm, in that order.

I don’t remember taking the tablet, but I also don’t remember turning off the alarm. And someone did. I’m going to take it semi-easy today so I don’t suffer a relapse.

I confess I’ve been afraid of the Wu-flu. Oh, not the disease itself. Look, I’m at SLIGHTLY more risk than the rest of you, simply because I catch everything that passes within a block of me.

However, the REALLY important thing to remember is that we really don’t have any idea — yet — how this will play in the US, but we don’t really have that much of a reason to panic either.

Even in Italy, the mortality is mostly among Chinese transplants. And before you tell me I’m racist (rolls eyes), no, I’m not. Leaving aside the protein in the lungs this thing might or might not bind to, there are co-morbidity factors for Chinese (and to an extent for Italians. Definitely for Iranians, particularly Iranian males.) One of them is smoking like a chimney. The other is that China (where the mortality seems to be way higher, honestly) is more polluted than you can imagine.  Iran might be too. You know dictatorships don’t really much care for the environment, and I remember Portugal in the early sixties, when going out early in the morning during rush hour was like putting your face fully in the exhaust of a car. I have no clue as to Italy air quality, and I have a full schedule ahead, so I refuse to fall down that rabbit hole.

Right now we know it’s spreading like wild fire. It’s known as a “virgin field” epidemic.  What it doesn’t seem to be is all that deadly. NOT among countries which actually give a f*ck about their citizens.  For the others, everything is deadly. Remember North Korea telling their citizens that pine needle soup was nutritious?

What I’m trying to say is there is absolutely zero reason to panic over how many people are getting infected.  Though if you have co-morbidities you should go see a doctor.
Look, I’ll be blunt: San Fran going on quarantine? Theater. Look, if they were at any REAL risk, their homeless would be dropping like flies. Think of the conditions they live under.  In Denver? We’ll know this is a real thing when our pot heads who are somewhat lung impaired (though not like the Chinese) start dying, or at least clogging the hospitals with pneumonia. I haven’t heard of any of that happening, so I’m going to say “Nah, brah. It’s a bad bad cold.”

Honestly, I’m not absolutely sure it’s not what my family has merrily been passing back and forth for two months, but which at this point is re-infecting at the level I’m not actually that ill.  It just cost me two months off my schedule, d*mn it. (I’ll pick up on this point later.)  “But Sarah, it couldn’t be!”  Really? REALLY?  Were you tested when you were ill this winter? Because I wasn’t. And apparently the kids distributed by the CDC give false negatives, anyway.  And this thing behaved EXACTLY like when I get a “virgin field epidemic virus.”  It comes back over and over, weaker each time till I stop catching it.

I know what these are like, because Colorado Springs is not only a military town, but a place a lot of contractors came from during the early push of the war in Iraq.  Those of you who were involved in it probably know this, but for the rest of the people: So, what happens is that the Middle East (like China) is full of criss crossing, unbelievably nasty diseases. Same factors. People are poor, live unbelievably close to their animals, and honestly the Muslim hygiene rules, while they might be great compared to what came before are not effective against viruses and bacteria. In fact, in scarce-water desert environments it might help spread disease.

Anyway, it was the practice of our military and/or contractors to send back to the States any case that they weren’t treating well in theater.

One of our neighbors a block down was a contractor. He brought home SOMETHING that got into the schools.  I don’t remember the year, but the schools and the churches closed for at least a couple of weeks (I don’t remember. I was really ill), and we were down with something that was like what we’ve been passing around for two months, but worse. Seriously, that was one of the times I have been so ill I couldn’t function enough to clean my kitchen for like three months. And mostly I SLEPT.  However like this one, it came back weaker and weaker and weaker, until it was all gone.

Anyway, it’s possible it’s already all over the US, in which case, when they get the good kits, you’re going to see hundreds of thousands “infected” show up overnight. Don’t panic if that happens. Chances are you already had it.

If you’re unusually susceptible (more than I) take extra precautions, but honestly? You should be fine. For most people this seems to be asymptomatic. For some it’s a bad cold. AND more importantly, our homeless, addled and addicts, who are not in the best health ever (but probably still better than communist subjects) are still with us. If they’re not the canary in the coal mine, who is?

But I’ve been worried for three reasons: The situation lends itself REALLY well to panic. See above. If we test with effective tests and test everyone who is coughing, there is the potential for hundreds of thousands of cases overnight. And this has been so hyped people will go insane.
As is, I’m not thrilled at the idea of air travel (but who is?) and we’ve been avoiding restaurants (though, honestly? More because we’re broke just now. I NEED to write. We’ll be having huns dinner at Pete’s Kitchen as usual the first Saturday at 5:30 or so [we’re usually late.]) BUT even a light avoidance of that can wreck sectors of the economy.
OTOH I’ll note flights to Portugal have not come down at all (We really should go over this Spring for various reasons.) Which they would if the airlines were being hit with the cancellation stick, instead of people just angsting over flying. (I’ll also note everyone I know is angsting BUT flying.)

Second, my friend Rebecca Lickiss wrote about a bio-engineered virus (no, I don’t think this is, but) which instead of killing you made you incapable of functioning properly for two weeks. No one would buy the story because they didn’t see a problem.  I DO. Particularly if it’s more like 2 or 3 months.  If the entire country is stumbling around feeling like they haven’t slept in months, walking into walls and not working very well for 3 months, it will affect the economy. Trust me on this. My total productivity this month has been this blog and SOMETIMES cleaning the house. And I haven’t done much else either. Just sort of sat and stared.

But third and most important, we depend on some things that are made in China.  Not as much as Europe is, as we’d started the effort of decoupling, but still dependent on a lot of them. Mostly, medicine.  Which I hasten to say SHOULD NEVER BE MADE IN A COUNTRY WE CAN’T TRUST.  Whoever thought this was a good idea is insane.

To compound the danger to the economy the left and the media (BIRM) is doing their best to stampede our economy into a recession because that’s the only way they can beat Trump.

Weirdly, that’s also my reason to tell you not to worry and that the whole thing will fizzle out.

As you guys know, I read Agatha Christie. If you do too, you’ll find her Miss Marple often finds the murderer, etc by the principle of “Well, my dear, her first husband was a crook, so of course her second will be too.” (Though she lays out other clues.)  I used to think this was insane. But now that I’m close to Miss Marple’s age (I don’t know. She might have JUST been sixty. People aged harder.) I KNOW what she meant.

Like it or hate it, people have a tendency to either back the right or the wrong horse.  Take Obama. The man had the mierdas touch. Everything he touched turned to…. well.

And that’s part of what is going on with the left. Only it’s more like they’re the coyote in pursuit of Trump-road-runner.

If they’re throwing their whole weight behind “Wu-flu will finally tank the economy and it will kill a bazillion Americans” it will not only fizzle out, but it will SOMEHOW end up helping the economy.  Because, well…. that’s their history.

I know it seems like a stupid reason to not worry, but in the end these things tend to be right.  Oh, there will be a rough time as they scream and lock up their cities, and… But they’ll just shed a bit more credibility and we’ll be fine.

What we should take from this otherwise disgusting episode though is this: Globalism kills. We cannot, CANNOT be economically dependent on regimes that have no accountability. Open borders kill.  IF this were more deadly, we’d already all be dead, because anyone can come in, and we don’t even know WHO they are, much less if they’re sick.  And totalitarianism kills. All the factors that make life harder and people’s health weaker in China are the result of living in a totalitarian regime. For some enlightenment, and if you haven’t followed this link before, go here. And remember that there are probably situations like this all over China. We’ll just never hear of them.  Totalitarianism kills. Whenever there is an unaccountable elite in power, no one’s life, liberty or happiness is secure.  Oh, and socialism kills even at homeopathic doses.  Watch how this unfolds in Europe with their “We’ll move at our own pace” and “If you’re old, just die” health care. (And yeah, I’m worried for them.)  Consider things the left wishes on us (still) like crowded apartment buildings (with shared air ducts) and public transportation. Think of what a serious epidemic would do in those conditions.

Then just say no. Hard no. Use words, if needed.

*Yesterday, because of an hilariously stupid comment about US health care over on MGC, I went looking through the old posts for one in which a person of the same nationality as the commenter had written a chapter about HER idea of our health care. In the process I found this post by my friend Dave Freer.
It struck me because of how right he was… 9 years ago. How right he still is, and how impossible most publishing houses find it to consider even ONE of these changes, even in the face of tech change so profound their entire world is up-ended.
Humans are creatures of habit, and habit will not be broken. The images in our heads are “sacred.”  Which explains how many people think communism can now be “done right” or why traditional publishing would rather die than adapt.
This was originally posted at Mad Genius Club September 5 2011– SAH*

Publishing advice I won’t ever be asked for… – by Dave Freer

…which won’t be appreciated (but I would love it if someone listened).

I don’t, per se, hate the legacy publishing industry and wish for its extinction. I do think it’s in troubled and uncertain circumstances right now. There are, just as in the music industry A&R example here  people I like, can identify with, inside it. And there seems a sort of inverse correlation here — the smaller the company is, the more likely the editor is to be doing his or her absolute best, and getting shafted nearly as badly as the writer by the rest of the system.

I think it has blundered down an evolutionary path which it took because there were no major selective pressures to force it to go elsewhere. Like the dinosaurs, getting bigger seemed a more natural course than worrying sudden cold snaps or a shortage of food because an asteroid impact might cause mass volcanism, which might block out the sun and cause years of winter. Some creatures survived that event. Some came to flourish afterwards — with major changes. Before it happened the dinosaurs were the very top end of vertebrate life. Head honchos that got invited to all the fashionable parties… Now the distant descendants are crocodiles and chickens, and no-one knows their ancestors ruled the earth, and if they go fashionable parties it is on the buffet table.

Just so before the advent of e-books (the asteroid), the vast cold-blooded publishers ruled the earth, or at least reading. They fed like… well, dinosaurs, wastefully, destroying the plants, rather than taking the few leaves they needed, but it didn’t matter… well, it was starting to, but bigger was still better. A few nimbler little proto-mammals scampered round the edges making a better living than the behemoths thought plausible out of the scraps they were allowed to access, but still having a rough time.

Then… Amazon’s KDP (principally as a result of the large publishers forcing the agency model on Amazon – to get it back in line, upstart!) caused a major eruption – of self-publishers, some of them mid-list authors with followings, many of them complete newbies, pricing aggressively (which they could afford to do, more so than the behemoths) enough doing well to draw in more ‘Indies’. And more… and thick and fast they came…

Suddenly the behemoths started realising there wasn’t much lunch about. When the news got down to the hind-brain, the little neural knot that controlled the tail, it sure thrashed that about good! That used to work real well on other littler dinosaurs…

Legacy publishing faces some unenviable choices. It still has a substantial paper business, where it controls (almost absolutely) access to retail space (This too is being attacked by Amazon’s CreateSpace, although I don’t think this has been realized yet). But retail space is dropping year by year, and so are paper sales. At the moment paper is still big enough (maybe) to force suppliers and retailers to allow them to retain that monopoly. They have two businesses with entirely different requirements, often in direct conflict in one organisation.

Now, as my fiend Ori pointed out to me once (and I paraphrase) “If you out-source your core competencies, your company will become irrelevant.” For years legacy publishing has been out-sourcing their original competencies – often making this an extra burden for their suppliers to carry, especially the smaller suppliers. They could force the smaller suppliers to do almost anything. Of course the small suppliers often couldn’t do it well, but there were 100 wannabes, so if they failed, legacy publishers simply replaced them with someone who could do publicity, who could write cover copy. The cost of slush trawling was handed to the agents. Proof-reading, covers, even editing, got neglected or farmed out, often (for new or midlist authors) to the cheapest possible. But they retained their absolute core competency: they, and only they, could get an author’s book onto the retailer’s shelf. It actually didn’t matter if you were a best-seller or not, authors had to accept terms – just as the musos did. Between publishing and retail, they could force the author to accept minimum wage. And to thank them publicly for it, to kiss their feet, and wash their dog’s bum if they were told to. That began to change with the Internet (a truly bestselling author – Rowlings or Meyer for example- could actually threaten to print and market herself, and would be able to do so.)  With e-books, Amazon KDP and the other retail outlets (B&N for example, and a list of smaller ones) following suit, that core competency just didn’t exist any more.

The big legacy publishers won the agency battle with Amazon… and forced them into a move which lost the legacy publishers the war, and, possibly, their existence.

The problem of course is that legacy publishers have lost a great deal of the other competencies which are still of value in e-books. And they still have a valuable and powerful stake in paper publishing.

Naturally they want to stay at the top and continue to get invited to all the fashionable parties.

So what could they do, if they were determined, clever, ruthless?  Hmm. That’s a tough one. You can still buy buggy whips. But they’re something of a bespoke item in a niche market. Not dominant. Buggy whip makers almost never get invitations to the fashionable parties.

The short term best option to return to the status quo would be call Amazon and negotiate the terms for surrender. And then hope that Apple, Google, B&N etc are less mighty than Amazon plus legacy publishers. Putting the genie back into vat is going to be tricky. Probably impossible, because authors and readers have tasted the alternative, (and as I’ll explain next week, they won’t take this lying down) but it might, at the most optimistic, hold off the evil hour for five years.

At worst, instead of the big 900 pound gorilla dominating the Internet retail space, they might end up with twenty 600 pound chimpanzees who will, sooner or later, decide that whoever wins access to the prime sources, will win the war, and the possible cost (including a profit margin of 15%) of retail Internet e-books is 16%… if you leave the Legacy Publishers out.

The other option is to abandon territory they can’t defend, and move into dominating niches that they can. To specialize. To build themselves a brand trusted by an ‘assured sale’ group. Like Harlequin does for Romance, as an example. Where people buy on the PUBLISHER’S brand (of e-book), and that brand means people in the market for exactly that product. Where customers who want that product will buy an unknown or even a known author, by many multiples more than they would without the brand.

It’s quite simple: Pick your niche, identify yourself strongly and publicly with it, choose a cover that identifies ONLY your brand, stick to the formula rigidly, and it’s pretty much business as usual in that predictable market.  Authors can suck it up, or try to compete, and fail. BUT… You have come out and clearly say (pick your criteria :-)) ‘this is Shavian socialist/Chinese American/ GLBT/East coast- city-dwelling, fashion-shopping-and-sex fiction… or Democrat/ white/ hetrosexual-with-4-kids/ Flyover country farmer/ shootem-up-and-punchem-inna-mouth-fiction’ or whatever, and combinations of the above for people who are interested in most of the category. You don’t even try to sell outside your captive audience. Now, I’d be among the first to point out that legacy publishers has been publishing niche-tailored, formulaic fiction for at least thirty years now. And that it’s been an unmitigated disaster area, where reading has proportionally declined as a pastime for the literate public. And no, I’m not going to blame movies, TV, the Internet, the cheese monster or a mindwave directed by aliens from Alpha Centauri. It was choosing books which would appeal to (at most) 20% of the population and selling them (and only them) as of general appeal to the other 80%. They sure ‘educated’ those barbaric readers. Yep, educated them right out of buying.

Mostly, the above strategy would work, but cost legacy publishers about 70-95% of their present market share. It’s better than being extinct. But say they really wanted to stay in the game, and not become niche players? Well, that would mean considering BIG changes. I’m fairly certain none of these will appeal or happen…

First and foremost success would require an entire paradigm shift. Forget educating the public. Forget what you, the editor, like. That proved a complete fustercluck when you had absolute control of access to retail. Now it is deader than a fossil Ammonite that’s been dropped in liquid helium, and then boosted into the heart of the sun. You need to go to what your customers–readers (not retailers)– like, and just how you can add value to that. If you can add substantial value, beyond that which others can add, you have a core competency and you’re not going to go extinct. You might actually do far better than in the past, and still go to all the good parties (of course there will be different people there).

The answer is really easy: readers like stories by authors that appeal to them. They identify them largely by author, secondarily by sub-genre, thirdly by cover. Oh and they really don’t like feeling ripped off or exploited. In this they really are no different to anyone else. So: authors names are possibly valuable property.  Historically, the legacy publishers editors picked authors, controlled their access to readers and readers access to them, and if authors wanted to be published… they swam through any sh1t and put up with any extra demands that publishing or retail wanted. If there was a saving to be made, well, the authors could carry that cost, or if there was extra work to be done… you know who did it. If it didn’t work, it was always the author’s fault. I hate belabouring this point, but it is key to the way publishing can survive. It’s not a gatekeeper anymore, and it has to add more value than the author can get by walking through the open gate themselves. Look at what they get without you, and start that point, not the point of what you used to offer. Oh AND you have to persuade the buyer that he’s not being ripped off, especially not by the author.

They get 70% of the cover price without you. And they get quarterly settlement. They get complete sales transparency, day-to-day. They can do as a good a job of getting a book to the shelf as most publishers do right now for as little as $2500, without calling on friends or doing it themselves (when that figure drops to zero, although quality may suffer). That is what the services the legacy publishing house are worth, excluding paper sales. For a new to midlist author those are worth 3-10K advances… at the moment.

Therefore: To compete, as a legacy publisher, you need to match that, either in cash or kind or push up the volume of sales, to earn the author more. The down-side of legacy publishing is it has, well, legacy expenses. No, a publisher’s net profit isn’t very high. It’s just carrying a lot of historical overheads which are meaningless in this paradigm. It has NY premises. It has a legal department, it has an accounting department, it has a marketing department. It has an administration centre where they dealt with orders and returns. It has an HR department. In the stuffy little office with no windows has an editor who actually edits (and does the post and blurbs and…), and in a plush corner offices it has editors who acquire, edit a tiny bit (too busy) run meetings and play business and office politics, meet the CEO, talk to marketing and Accounting.  Proof-reading and actual cover layout and art are out-sourced. There are secretaries, expense accounts, and, um, a vast debt to service, to pay the really big advances to keep the best-sellers… Or the bestsellers might go elsewhere. Those costs are carried by everyone, equally. No wonder a book costs 100K or some fantastical sum to bring out.

Most of that has to go. Legacy publishing can only afford to keep the bits that add value to author for readers, for the author’s benefit. The job can be done from an office in upstate Texas. From an office the size of a postage stamp, or a mailbox, because…

1) The legal department is worthless. Hire an IP layer to draw up very simple clear contract just to avoid confusion. The author doesn’t need a contract with you any more. Why should he sign an evil one?  Yes I know. They’ve written contracts that screwed generations of authors for you. Made you millions and millions.  They’re busy writing contracts right now to bind the author and e-rights until the heat death of the universe, let alone the sun. Which is about as dumb-ass as you can get. Throw them–and the lawyers–away. Screw an author — just one, and word will get out, now that there are alternatives. And then the legacy publisher will find itself competing hard with Publish America for clients. And losing.

2) Fire the accounting department. Yes, I know, their creative accounting in the opaque morass that is royalty records has kept the chair under the acquiring editor-in-chief’s butt. He’s going too, so it doesn’t matter. The labyrinthine payments and returns system, running up 16 months after the fact is very difficult to handle. But it’s also useless.  You need to match and equal Amazon in transparency and speed. Authors want to be able to log in and see what sold ten seconds ago, not ten months -because that’s what they get, as a KDP customer.  Basically, that means you HAVE to computerise and automate. And this where you have an advantage over Newstartup e-publishers, because you have the resources to pay for the programming. [Weirdly, publishers won’t take the accounting software when it’s offered for free. Not traditional and established publishers, at least. Trust me on this. It’s been tried. It’s almost like… they don’t want to know – SAH]

3)Fire the marketing department. Try not to enjoy it too much. There is a need for marketing but it is of a type so foreign to those who promoted the product that didn’t need to be sold for readers to buy it, and ignored the product that needed help, that they’re worthless. The kid off the street has more skills and experience than they do in this new world. He understands facebook, twitter, flashmobs, the blogosphere. You need a social marketing arm, not a sell-best-sellers-that-don’t-need-any-selling-to-bookstores marketer.

4) Admin, with no returns and merely e-placement of books needs to exist… but a lot less people can do the job.  And it needs an attitude transplant.

5)A company with 10 employees instead of 500 probably doesn’t need HR. Yeah, I know. It’s easier to prise limpets off with your toes. Everybody goes before HR. But they have to.

6) The editor in the inner office can work at home, and really, their work has to add that much in value that they’re worth having. And yes, actually the new author or midlister will expect serious input. Or they’ll walk. And talk. And there goes your company.  Every crash will now be a publisher/editor crash, which brings me to the last and worst job.

7)Acquisitions. The editor in corner office probably may as well go, because this is a very different job. It means back to the slush, back to picking up jewels out of the muck. Only it needs a very special kind of jewel. Ones where a bit of polish (not too much, time is money) and facet-work by the editor, will multiply its value. And he’ll probably be reading 99 cent slush on line to find it. No corner office looking onto Central Park needed. The massive deals and the advances will be gone. And no doubt their recipients will threaten to walk. Well. They can. They won’t get much more of a deal than the new Legacy Publisher needs to offer anyway – Which- for bestsellers, will be 70% of cover price. Yes. Every cent they get from Amazon. The New Legacy Publisher will of course also sell through its own website, and that will be 30% gross.

Of course, despite all these losses the legacy publisher needs some new staff. A social media marketer, a proof reader, a good cover/layout staff, and someone to do formats and do visual checks on them. And the staff need a new ethic, where they start taking care of the cents, especially where these cents belong to the guy who’ll walk, and complain, loud and angry… because suddenly it becomes necessary for staff to listen to customers and suppliers. And these are not bookstores and agents. A couple of examples here. A popular series I co-authored… when the last hardcover came out, the previous paperback was out of print. Normally that sells around 2K So we authors lost $1200, the publisher about $7000 in turnover, and our records are weaker than need be. I’ve just discovered SLOW TRAIN (via Amazon) was reprinted about 5 months ago. No one told me, so I told no-one. So that was probably another 500 sales wasted. I usually find out when a book is released by looking it up on Amazon. It’s been years since I had copies or even cover flats in time to promote before release. Almost all of these problems are quick to fix, translate directly into money (far more for the publisher than me) and would often take about 30 seconds of e-mail time. If they’re going to survive and flourish this sort of thing is an easy start. Take care of cents and the dollars mount up.

The author who gets her work taken on will get: everything she’d get going direct, less ( depending on her sales profile) a percentage. Not a very big percentage, or she’ll walk. She’ll also get a cover, social media marketing, editing and proofs.

And one more thing. Remember that bit about the public needing to feel they’re not being ripped off?

She’ll get public transparency. When the agency model kerfluffle came up, the publishers were powerless. Their books were simply delisted from Amazon.

And their authors rode to the rescue. The public love their authors. When the authors told them that Amazon were the bad guys, the customers went ballistic. They want their books. They demanded them, threatened Amazon with boycott. Amazon caved. Publishers chortled in their glee… and put e-book prices up and Hardback prices up.

And the boards were full of “GREEDY AUTHORS!”

And not a single solitary word in their defence was said by their publishers. Not anywhere. The legacy publishers were perfectly happy, despite just having been rescued by their authors, to let them carry the can.  Which was short-sighted, greedy and outright stupid. They sold their author’s long term credibility and help for… a few more months of gouging. Why shouldn’t they do so? There are lots more authors.

The trouble is there are lots more people prepared to nick things from greedy gougers than there are from battlers. The Robin Hood syndrome lives on.  So publishers, rather than admit that, well, authors got the smallest share, and were often struggling stay afloat, let them take the blame for truly exploitative pricing… making ‘piracy’ Okay by a lot of people. Because to admit they took in excess of 90%, would make publishers and retailers look bad, and to show gratitude to those gullible readers and authors for the rescue would have meant giving more to the authors, and have meant keeping prices low.

So now… self-published authors have every incentive to keep their prices low, and to be open about what they earn and what they spend. Because if they earn well, people think they’re rewarding the good guys. If they don’t look greedy, the readers are more likely to chip in…

And the legacy publishers are in direct competition. Which leaves no space for the historical squirming, ducking, diving and secrecy and letting authors carry the can, that typified publishing.

There is still good money to be made — as publishers can and should retail directly from their own websites (offering perks, ARCs and freebies with the books) and charging perhaps as much as 15% for newbies off Amazon rates for providing services which take the hassle out of it for authors, letting the author write and not waste time on publicity or admin or covers and finding good proof-readers and editors.

It would end up leaner, and a lot more profitable. And very very different. Kind of like jacking up the radiator cap and the hood ornament, and replacing the entire rest of the vehicle, but still calling it the same make of automobile.

However, I’ll bet the legal department and HR and accounting stay… and the real editor gets the push.

Or what do you think?