Author: Sarah A. Hoyt

Not right away, but tomorrow around this time, actually.  It’s just that I have a strong feeling there won’t be time to write a post again before then.

I come back having got nothing written, but trying to convince myself that in a trip of more than 24 hours there will be time to write (we’re overnighting on the first layover. Thank heaven we secured in-airport rooms. I’m too old to sleep as I have, sitting up in a corner of the airport, really.)  And then from there we have 17 hours (with layovers) home.

There might be at that. I’m going to try very hard to do so.

I found out — somehow — a lot of things about myself and how things work here — I guess some stuff is so deeply set that it takes almost 25 years to see clearly.

Anyway, I’m integrating that knowledge and it is not a bad thing.  Perhaps I now understand more about why I had to live.  At least this trip left me no doubts that I HAD to leave.  I can’t imagine continuing to exist here, which is weird.  But I think I was always cross purposes here.

Anyway, part of the reason I didn’t write is that I can’t think of words in English (or Portuguese) while I’m talking in both languages more or less constantly. It’s like a traffic jam in my brain and both languages get the wrong stuff written/said. I also occasionally speak the wrong language to the wrong person.

My bookshelf in my childhood room — never most of my books, anyway — is verry weird.  Some of this stuff is incontrovertibly mine: a lot of Agatha Christie tpbs (That I have a vague memory I never returned to a friend after borrowing around the time she got married and went out of the country, anyway). Pearl S. Buck. Camus from my pertencious phase.  Books I abandonned in various trips.  Like, I have two Orson Scott Cards that I don’t remember reading, but I DO KNOW I went through a Card phase shortly after Robert was born.  I also have a couple of Patricia Wentworths in English, which I have no memory of leaving behind, at least not on purpose.  I have two Raymond Chandlers in Portuguese that I don’t remember ever reading, and one of those bubblegum mysteries I’m fairly sure I brought over, but don’t remember reading or abandoning.

There is some stuff here that is almost certainly my parents’: a lot of devotional books, moslty.

I have clue zero which of us had a Morris West in Portuguese, and it’s entirely possible I read it because someone gave it to me.

Weirdest is to find I had: Men and the world of tomorrow by Pro. A. M. Low, in Portuguese.  I have no memory of it.  I have a book called A Boy From Georgia I also don’t remember reading. No, the other Georgia.  Thank heavens not about Stalin, though. Then there is the book in Spanish with chosen readings in English. I was never at home in Spanish enough to read in it, and I can’t figure out how that even got on my bookshelf.

Not a surprise, but also forgotten and certainly mine because they’re in English, is a series of novels and non-fiction books about the founding of the US. I didn’t remember buying them or reading them. Walter Lord’s Dawn’s Early Light and Nathan Shachner’s Thomas Jefferson look worthy of re-reading, only I’m not taking them back becaus eof the weight.  Perhaps they are on kindle?

All this is amusing because recently a fan asked what of me was uniquely Portuguese and how Portugal had shaped my writing….

And I don’t know.  It amuses me greatly that someone, unawares, would try to piece my influences from this shelf, where my mom seems to shove books she finds around the house and THINKS are mine. Unless I’ve suffered some great break in memory these (Agatha Christie excepted) weren’t even re-reads of mine, but if read all the way through were read once and discarded.

In a way this dovetails — I think — with what happened with Portuguese culture.  I mean, I read it — mostly — I still do, in terms of knowing a street is not exactly safe or that the man wandering aimlessly down this suburban street might be casing the joint.  I simply was never plugged in enough to “get” it at a bone deep level.

Much of what I read (not reflected in this bookcase) was British or — mostly — from the US.  Even in translation, before I learned the language, most of my ideas came from the anglosphere.  There was a rightness about it, a way they fit my brain that made them less work, more effortless.

Then there was the process of acculturation and also of trying to understand how the American public would see my work (I still fail at that, at times, but no more than most writers. For my money a degree in literature did more damage to that than the foreign upbringing.)

If there was some uniquely Portuguese remnant, it disappeared in the avalanche.

There are thing in which I will always be different. One of them is the understanding of what a really deep past means.  This is not only because I grew up in Portugal, though it’s part of it, but because I read a lot of history. I thought about it and thought it would shape mostly historical particularly historical fantasy.  But I don’t think that’s true. I think it shapes my science fiction too, in that it tends not to be as neat, clean and logical as Americans make it, when they project things forward. Because I know most really old cultures are mostly built on their own ruins. Because I know what collapse and rebuild and re-collapse means.  Because…. Because history is complicated and I grew up surrounded by it.

I also wonder if that is why I’m less fascinated with fantasy of the heroic type as most Americans.

Anyway, there are other things I want to write about, one of them being the dog that didn’t bark in the night: For the first time since Reagan’s day, it’s hard to obtain dollars in this country and any dollars that appear are vacuumed off the market. Do they expect the dollar to appreciate more?  Are they afraid of a local collapse?  I don’t know, but it’s curious and not something I’d heard about ANYWHERE.

Also the same weirdness I’d noticed there, which is that as the birthrate falls, and even as population falls, people leave the countryside depopulated and crowd into the big cities.  Which, as my brother put it, “Is exactly the opposite of what Clifford Simak expected in City.”

What can I say? Making predictions is difficult, particularly about the future.  But when something behaves in an aberrant fashion, men and women of curiosity want to poke around and find out why.  Out of what the heck, if nothing else. I think we tend to follow our dogma or what we are sure is what’s coming a lot, instead of following our curiosity. Which of course, is how a lot of people on the left ended up starring in incredibly amusing crying videos election night 2016.

Other things have happened since I left, including the loss of Uncle Timmy, the founder of Liberty con and an all around wonderful man.  We’ve been afraid he was headed that way, of course, but I’d hoped to see him one more time.  I can’t do him justice on this pokey connection and in the middle of packing, so that will wait till I get home.

Because of the protracted travel back (continued fall out of the screw up with Norwegian airlines, which ALSO will get its day in the… not exactly sun) is that we only arrive LATE on the 15th instead of late on the 14th.  Which in turn means that I won’t be fully on till midday on the 16th or so.  Abide in patience.  In two nights I get to sleep in my own bed.  I’m assured the cats are well and the house is as I left it. (Unfortunately no fairies cleaned up in our absence.)

I will be back.  Keep things from collapsing till I am.  I won’t feel quite all right till I’m somewhere I can drive home if all else fails.  And I’ll try to update you then.

Yesterday, because it was the only chance for exercise, and we’re being fed like geese headed to foi gras, we took the morning to go to the beach and walk around a bit.

The beach — praia de Matosinhos, the only name I remembered because we used to go there for a month sometimes two every summer — has come on a bit.

First it’s only 15 minutes or so away.  I always tell everyone we didn’t grow up near the sea and going to the beach was a treat.  This is not precisely true, so much as it’s hard to get there via the ancient medieval network of roads, on buses that belched smoke but moved only a few inches per minute.  It took us two hours, with a change of buses, and we carried picnic baskets, so that we wouldn’t starve on the way.

Anyway, the sea was just the place we bathed, though very cold and known for very big waves, which I was terrified of having been rolled once or twice.

Now it’s all tourists in wet suits and surfing boards.

This is a little a bit like the theme of this trip.  The place I used to go and get drunk with college friends has been cleaned up and smartened up and is now the center of tourism in Porto and very historic, every house a plaque saying it’s from the 14th or the 11th century.  The place I used to go to tea with grandad — the one that’s not a MacDonald’s — is now expensive and we had to stand in line to go there and have tea in style like I used to (I suspect J. K. Rowling flapped her lips about it. It’s a beautiful belle epoque cafe, but nothing explains the line of people from all over the world.)

I live in fear of some day coming back and finding that someone has taken mom’s washing tank, because it’s very important and a rare jewel of washing tank design.

We walked on the beach and wet our feet — it was very weird for two seabirds to move to Colorado — but I kept telling Dan “But it’s just the place we used to sea-bathe.

Brewing somewhere in the back of my head is a story that for full justice should be set in Terry Pratchett’s Lancre, with tourists coming in and removing the gazunders and Nanny Ogg’s pipe because they’re rare examples of blah blah blah.  I’ll have to file serial numbers.

I’m still working on Grant in Portugal, but with us leaving Tuesday, we’re being besieged by visitors come by to either say goodbye, or get to see us while we’re here.

Meanwhile weird insight into young Sarah.  I met a young man (eh, my age) I hadn’t seen since we were both 18. We met at a conference right after I came back from the US from my exchange year.  I have no memory of him, but he remembers me.  I asked why.  He said “Because you came in, and you took charge.”

Eh. I remember myself as mouse timid.  This might not have been true.

Guys I’ve been away a long time, and I want to come home. I got homesick about a day after I landed.

See, I’m actually a homebody. I just want to have my office and my routine and work.  For a wonderful break from routine, I go to Pete’s — about 20 minutes away unless traffic intervenes — for some Greek salad. The only thing that brings me all the way out here is that I have family I can’t see any other way.

But you guys have to rein in those crazy f*ckers out there, or I’m going to stay out here and refuse to go back.  No, forget that, I can’t stay out here. I’d go nuts. I’m going to stay on the plane and refuse to let it land. We’ll just supernaturally circle about NYC forever.

No, seriously, people.  WHAT ARE YOU DOING WHILE I’M overseas?

I’m waiting my turn to shower (well, this WAS built in the late sixties!) and I turn on the net to check the news, and what’s the first thing off the gate?

The Atlantic, wondering if Shakespeare was a woman.

Of all the swinish, half baked, sexist, idiotic–

I haven’t seen anything so stupid since they decided he was Queen Elizabeth or Anne.  No, seriously.  And those were written by half-crazy idiots.

Well, I guess the Atlantic are half crazy idiots, too, but they used to be a real magazine.

Can we please just tranq them or something? Give them nice padded rooms? They’re making the rest of the country look bad.

Of course, I’d settle for locking them in the back room with books of Shakespearean scholarship, which granted since they contain logic (sometimes) might be like locking Superman with kryptonite.

I mean, what the reticulated heck is this?

Stop letting them act crazy just because I came away for a couple of weeks!

The day started with my mom knocking at our door at 6 am because “you were so quiet we thought you’d died.”  While I understand the impulse… they thought we’d died both at once? unlikely.  I think I swore at her, but fortunately she doesn’t understand English, and also I was so sleepy it probably came out as unngggghn.

I have been up about an hour and a half.  Another cold and rainy day to the point I swiped one of mom’s outdoor coats to wear inside.  Agatha Christie says Americans, used to central heating, feel the cold more than Europeans, and she’s not wrong.  It feels wrong to be freezing indoors.

The weather has been drizzly and overcast, which to be fair is normal weather for the North of Portugal. If you wondered at those descriptions of the Napoleonic wars, some of which made it sound like it was a tropical paradise and some of which made it sound like cold and rainy all the time, the answer is “yes.”  In the North it’s cold and rainy and unpleasant until July/August when it’s suddenly very hot, dry, and semi-tropical.

Even so, this year is unusually cool, it seems to me — well, it’s unusually cool at home.   It seems we left under snow the last day of April and will go back to icy rain two weeks into May — which mind you it’s a high in the fifties. It just feels colder because of the rain and the humidity.  Of course, my skin is loving it.

Curiously, looking online some time ago, I found that the region of Maia, thus named by the Romans was initially Maida i.e. “The wet and fertile place.”  As far as early Middle ages, inhabitants called themselves Maidaenses.  I only found this interesting since at least some Indian language calls parks “Maidan” (as it was what the English called it when in India.)

I decided it was a good day to iron, while mom is out shopping, but while I was ironing the electricity went out.  I don’t know if it’s the house or the region, as I can make no sense of their board.  Remember this is the board that was forced on them because it goes down with less use.  For all I know it went down with the ironing board.

One of the things I’ve been noticing here is that all the crazy sh*t Californians dream up is taken like gospel truth is.  I had to fight for table salt, EVEN THOUGH I ALWAYS HAVE LOW BLOOD PRESSURE and actually lose salt (which is how I ended up in the hospital some years ago) and Mom — damn it — knows this, because “Salt will kill you.”

It’s like cargo cult modernity and there’s nothing as “modern” as fracking Cali, so they believe everything that comes out of there as the “new great way to be.”

There is almost nothing low sugar or low carb, but by gum, it’s almost impossible to find a no no-fat yogurt.  This in a country where the ice cream isle is two isles and has stuff never dreamed of in the US.

Guys, we’re going to have to put a silencer on California.  They’re screwing up the rest of the world.

And now I’ll get off line before my computer runs out of charge.

The bridal couple left this morning at 4:00 am.  I don’t quite know what to do today.  I’d like to go do something, but we’re horribly tired.  Also, it’s a cold and rainy and disagreeable day.

I need to torture Grant, but I don’t think I’m awake enough to.

Perhaps I’ll go lie down till the interest in moving passes?

We’ve been going going going for 8 days.  Perhaps it’s time for a day of rest.

Sorry we haven’t been on much.  It’s been rather crazy.

As I expected, everything was crazy going up to the wedding, but it barely slowed down after.

Yesterday was mom’s 85th birthday, so, of course, everything came to a standstill while we celebrated that.

Around the edges, we managed to get lovely daughter in law’s family shown around downtown Porto and a castle, which was paltry, but they left today (early Monday.)  We don’t think they’re home yet.

We’re going to put the happy couple on a plane Wednesday.  And then we (Dan and I) stay another six days.

Low points so far: I forgot the tank on my apap.  Yes, even though I lost a ton of weight, I still need an apap, because my mouth conformation is weird.  Anyway, so I hadn’t slept since I left CO, and was falling asleep standing up.  Dan let me use his tank, so he’s sleep deprived today but I’m functional.  We have two more days of this, after which #1 son leaves me his tank (That mouth conformation thing. We have interchangeable ones) and get mine from the bathroom in CO when he gets there.)

Food.  Um… that should be both a high and a low point. The food is wonderful, but I’m so far off the low carb wagon it will take me a month after I get back to lose the poundage and get the inflamation to subside.  I knew how it would be, of course.  But I didn’t expect mom to try to feed us above and round the meals.  And I keep thinking I might never have this again, so…  Yeah. Not good.  I’m going on TWO walks a day when I get back.  And it’s only ten more days or so.

We’re going to need another checked bag and another carry on.  Part of this should be BOTH a high and a low point.  On the one hand, of course, we’re going to shell out for more luggage.  OTOH we’re doing so because we accomplished mission number 1: acquire student cloaks for me (mom gave mine away), my husband and the two boys, with patches for the right degrees.  Lovely DIL wanted one too and got it.  They’re really inexpensive, water resistant, tight-woven wool, and you can sew patches on.  (Hey, Larry, can I get an MHI patch?) With them on — as a friend put it — you look like a Hogwarts student who grew up and became a pirate.  The checked is because in our original booking through Norwegian we were extremely limited on carry on, and I want to take two changes of clothing on carry on.  One, because we have a 12 hour layover OVERNIGHT in Madrid.  We need to find some place to sleep, and if we do, we need clothes to change into.

One because I’m going to get a room to take a shower and change in the 5 hours in JFK, because by then I’ll be gross again. We’ll get to CO in the middle of the day and I want to look and feel like a human being.

Either from the carby carbiness, or because of the high humidity or whatever, the place where I broke my ankle is killing me.  And everything feels icky and achy. (Might be lack of sleep, too.)

The Good: The wedding went wonderfully.  Weird for a bilingual ceremony, but there were no glitches.  The kids were both radiant, and kept getting lost in each other’s eyes to the point that everyone else was deeply moved.

The banquet which my mom considered simple to the point of being unbecoming was quite good and more than sufficient. (Roman banquet like, as Dan saw it.)

The excursions we took DIL’s relatives on were fun, we mesh well and we might manage the thing that I never looked for: we might have discovered new friends in my son’s inlaws. It’s a normal, almost forced thing in Portugal, but I never expected it.  I’m glad of it though, that we can look on them as almost-relatives.

We also had a very good — if expensive, because we bought the things for the kids to take back — day today.

And we have a week or so to recover after they leave.

And best of all, dad and mom are doing better than I could have expected.

I’ll update again when I can.

Too complicated to explain, but I’m the SANE one in this family.

No, seriously.  It’s not weird I read and write science fiction…

The suitcase was found. I now need to decide which of the THREE wedding outfits I wear….

Meh.

Lots and lots of meh-itude. :D

Oh, the things I’ve seen — and done.

Started with “missing” the flight out of Denver. Only not really.  Oh, the things I’ll have to say about Norwegian airlines.

An obscene amount of money and five hours later, circa midnight on Tuesday, we got the flights we could get.  Note I’d never have come via Madrid otherwise, much less with a tight connection.  But I had to.

So we arrived here without luggage.  Because we’d paired our carry on till we had not even a change of clothes, we had to wash our travel clothes overnight.  Our bags remain MIA.  Which is a problem, since it includes not only Dan’s and my clothing to attend the weeding (Thank G-d the Bride and Groom have dress and suit) but also the converter to plug this laptop in, so I’m writing this on the dregs of battery.

We’re about to go out and try to find “clothing that looks like we should be at a wedding.”  Since my size was always outsized here, even when I was a seven, I’m going to end up dressed in the equivalent of “old fat lady” clothes.  For which we have to shop and burn half the day that Robert’s inlaws have free to see something of the country.

Calls to the lost luggage center get them to tell us they’re “endeavoring.”

ARGGGGGH.  There will be more about this when I have more battery.  And there will probably be a private sale (as in I collect them and sell them through here before/instead of putting on Amazon) of a book of essays which I’ll start rounding up as soon as I have a converter (we should try to buy one this morning.)  Because we’re over 10k down for new tickets before we start getting replacements for things, I don’t expect royalties for about a year, and the delivery payment is spoken for for younger kid’s tuition. And PJ is no longer relevant as a source of income.  Once I get indie out, we’ll be fine, but this is the worst possible year for financial hits, and the hits keep coming.

Pray/send good thoughts that the trip got the worst out ahead of time and it’s smooth from now on, because I’ve had just about enough.

It is available for buying now

The explanation from Synova in comments yesterday:

For those who don’t know what an eArc is, it is an unproofed (if that’s the right term) advance reader copy. This means that changes might be made to the final book. It also costs more. If you want the final version as well, that’s a separate purchase.

Admittedly the things I don’t believe are exponentially larger in number than the things I believe.

One of the things that always makes agnostic in me rear up is “the new, new thing for self-promotion.”  There is a herd instinct in my field, and honestly it seems worse in indie since no one knows what works.

Right now the new new hot hot thing is newsletters. I’m agnostic on these.  I know they work for a ton of people, I don’t know if they’ll work for me.  And they don’t seem to work for me as a reader.  I’m subscribed to the newsletters of about a dozen writers, whom I like well enough to wish to hear when they have a new book out.

So, do I?  No.

Why not?  Because the philosophy driving newsletters right now is to treat them as something between this blog (note not necessarily other blogs) and twitter.  You send something out every couple of days, so people feel they know you and want to buy the book when it comes out.

I don’t know. Maybe most readers’ mailboxes aren’t as busy as mine, but any given day, on skimming the emails I divide them into three categories: must answer right now; must answer by end of day, and don’t have to answer.

Honestly, these last few weeks (we fly out of the country tonight, and it will be even messier for two weeks upcoming) my “Must answer by end of day” haven’t been getting answered, for which I beg pardon, and it will get better around May 15th.  The “don’t have to answer” though are pretty much on perma don’t-answer.  At least when I go through one of these phases when life is hitting me with the busy stick.

Which means my email learns. What it learns is that these emails are spam.  Which means I then don’t hear when a book comes out.

IF I can figure out how to do emails (honestly, like putting the donation button on my blog it might be a job for husband) I will probably have two email lists.  One is for updates, snippets, what have you, and the other ONLY releases.  So, if you see it in the email, you know there’s something to buy.  I think that MIGHT work, in the sense that the author tracker in Amazon used to work (Right now my email also puts it in spam, so I can’t tell you.)

Right now the hot hot thing which is confusing a lot of readers and social media  users is to have a nice picture with an embedded quote from your book.  This is an attempt at getting around Facebook’s limiting of links. I’ll be honest, I don’t think that works most of the time.  It MIGHT work marginally, if you can then put a link for purchase in the first comment.  But if the book isn’t out yet?  Again, going on my experience as a reader, I’m going to say nuh-uh.  Why?  Because my memory sucks.  Unless I’m your most fanatic fan ever, why on earth with fishes do I want to look at this, think “Oh, that’s interesting” and not be able to buy right away?  You know as eggs is eggs I’ll have forgotten it when it comes out in a month or so.  With a link in first comment, and if you pick the hottest, bestest of your quotes?  Mayyyyyyyyybe.

And then there’s book trailers.

The Passive Guy is Agnostic on them.

I used to be downright disbelieving on them, and like him I can’t remember when I last saw one.  They were the hot hot thing of the early oughts.

But as I was writing why I didn’t believe in them, I realized things had changed.

You see, I used to say “When you’re in youtube mode, even if the trailer knocks your socks off, what are you going to do? Run out to a bookstore and buy the book?”

But things have changed. If a trailer, or something knocks my socks off, I open an amazon window and buy the book for the kindle.

It also, like the quotes and pic might make a good way fro readers who ADORED your book to share with friends that is stronger than “You must read this.”

Caveats, of course, that it must be good, it must not be crazy expensive, (I used to be able to make them from static pictures, and now that I can render…. um…) AND it must come out after the book, so people can buy right away.  But I think it might have some value.

All the vale it used to have is what I think email lists have now: they tell the publisher you’re invested.  Seriously, you used to write “Has book trailer” and the publishers thought it was teh hottest thing.  Because NY publishing is Hollywood for ugly people.

Now… well, now book trailers might be worth it.

I find the herd instinct weird, because most often what everyone is doing has no more effect than a pardon me in a hurricane.

So periodically I need to reevaluate things and at least become agnostic on some…