Author: Sarah A. Hoyt

Sometimes I think our time is drunk on perfection, high on it, or perhaps demanding it, like a two year old in the candy isle at the grocery store.  Which is weird because perfection is a myth. It is in fact impossible.

At one time I had a friend who is in real life involved in editing scientific publications (real ones, the ones people involved in research have to read, not the popular stuff.) edit my first set of reverted books.

These books had already been gone over (twice) by me, and then sent out to my regular chain of editors and proofers.  And yet, he found at least one mistake per page.

I was mortally embarrassed until he pointed out to me once he was in charge of a proofreading department with (I think) 15 proofreaders.  Because he’s a hard task master, he had each person initial each line, just to make sure they at least attempted not to skip any.  (Because a lot of it was numbers and data that must be absolutely right.)  He then told me when the pages landed on his desk, they had still the average of errors he found on my work.  And he was sure, despite his immense effort, some errors escaped him.

I’ve seen this over and over with processes that are supposed to yield perfect results.  Perfection just isn’t in us. No matter how hard we try.  Even the best whatever has a moment of distraction, a day their head hurts, a moment of confusion.  And an error, great or small slips through.

Human systems like societies and cultures are even more fallible and every dunghill cock who yells that we should excuse the massive death tolls of communism and the silent death toll and death of hope and interest in the future of socialism because “capitalism kills through” and people slip through the cracks should be hanged by the neck till dead and then buried in his dunghill.  If there were a way to make him suffer for eternity whatever the ghosts of those killed by the arranged children of Marx wanted to inflict on him (or her. It’s so often a her) I’d vote for that too.

There is a difference between not being able to guarantee perfect outcomes for everyone in a system that nonetheless has lifted most of the world out of poverty, a system that is not even a system but what humans will do when allowed (and even when not allowed. Look at the black markets that prevented people starving to death in communist “paradises”) and a system that promises perfection and from each according to his ability and to each according to his need (spits) and which then proceeds to treat people as widgets, most of them having the same need to live in squalor and misery so the chosen “enlightened” (Dare we say woke) few at the top get to have all of the best and a dacha too.

And hell and thank be to anyone who is cranking, communist systems weren’t “perfect” too.  Had they been their already stupendous death toll would have been multiplied ten times.

Trying to tear down the pretty good in the name of the perfect is delusional.  It is delusional because Marxism’s central conceit has been proven wrong over and over and over again.

What was the central conceit? That freed from the Rousseaunian fall from grace constituted by commerce, work and hierarchical society, humans would be perfected into something lacking individual needs or individual defects. That Homos Sovieticus would emerge, infused only of the need to work for the whole and — of course — perfect.

It’s not just that this didn’t happen (can’t happen) but that humans subjected to the system that was supposed to give it birth became more corrupt, more venal, more willing to die or kill for their own benefit (and that own benefit often no more than a sausage stuffed with sawdust.)

This should surprise no one that hasn’t lived a life of perfect ease and comfort (which I suspect is why most communist adherents come from the ranks of the very comfortable.  Most of its shock troops, meanwhile, come from the ranks of the deranged who long ago traded in their humanity for a hunk of burning hatred and don’t even care if it consumes and hurts them more than the objects of it. And no, their hatred is not proof of injustice. The hateful shall always be with us. It’s an all-too-human failing.)  Humans who are reduced to living like animals and struggling for everything become feral and lose all contact with a higher ideal of humanity.  The only “perfect” thing at the bottom of the communist program for perfection is hatred and blindness.

Which brings us to feral humans.  Yeah, I know, it only took me 800 words to get to the point. You must surely deal. I’m also not perfect, and had an awful night for various reasons mostly not internal.

I was thinking — I’ve been thinking of stuff like this a lot, as I try to chart a course for the future, partly because 2018 scoured my attachments as clean as possible (except for my marriage and family. I’m not giving 2019 ideas.)  Even my friends are, for various reasons, very busy and while I still love them and I presume they love me, no one has any time. Last time this happened was 2002 — about legacies. About what I want to do and say with this megaphone I accidentally picked up, and of which the biggest part MIGHT well be the fiction.  What do you say? What do you do?

And then I thought of Terry Pratchett.  Terry Pratchett could be said to have brought me to fantasy.  I read fantasy before him.  Fantasy was just never a favored mode of story for me.  Partly because when I first encountered it in Portugal I had no place to put it.  Parts of it were just “how life is” (i.e. a lot of the old legends are assumed to be true) and part of it was “do they really believe that cr*p.”  Also by virtue of being where I was D & D passed me entirely by (I have a strong feeling if someone had shipped me a manual, my little friends and I would have carved our own D20s from potatoes and played like fiends.  Sometimes I think much of what we did was struggle blindly towards D & D but we never got there.) so the whole trolls, elves, etc. was more than a little bewildering. At times still is, I’ll be honest.

But Pratchett, found in 92 because SOMEONE in Colorado Springs bought all the English editions and then sold them used (I swear it must have been in trips to England, as I had to spawncamp at the used bookstore to grab them when they — irregularly — came in.) made me like fantasy and sold me on his world.

He’ll never be one of my formative writers. One doesn’t meet formative writers in our thirties.

But part of the reason he appealed to me was the long buried British strain of my upbringing.  As Foxfier noted, I often SOUND like Agatha Christie. Which is nothing short of amazing since I was i my late twenties by the time I read her in English.  But I read her in Portuguese before my teens. And before her, I read Enid Blyton who went a long way to forming who and what I am (more on that later.)

Before I met Heinlein, (in books. I never met him in real life) that substratum was there.

What I never thought — never occurred to me — was that Pratchett would have the same influence on my kids (or at least one of them. The engineer embryo prefers hard sf which he found on his own, thank you so much.) that Heinlein had on me.

Older son lives and breathes Pratchett.  Like me with Heinlein, it’s where he retreats when too wounded to face the real world.

When Pratchett died it blew his world apart as much as Heinlein’s death blew mine.  And because he’s his mother’s son, he wrote an elegy to him. Because we deal with unbearable grief by leaking out words like a broken vessel.  Until the cracks plug.  And heal. Or at least scar over.

I happen to think this is one of the most beautiful pieces of writing I’ve ever read, and possibly the most beautiful send off ever.

But the pixels were barely dry before the *ssholes came out to say Pratchett didn’t deserve a send off because he’d believed in suicide for his incurable early onset Alzheimers. And that his stand encouraged others to do this awful thing, and blah blah blah.

Let’s suppose that what Pratchett had was not a defect of the thinking meat.  And lets please, since we are perfect, stand in judgement of a man facing a predicament none of us has faced (or pardon me, I don’t know who’s reading this:few of us have faced) and facing it AS HIM, with his upbringing and background.

And then, yeah, because we’re perfect and shiny and chrome, let’s condemn a man whose books for all their flaws (mostly flaws of viewing systems through late twentieth century European eyes) managed often to distill a scintilla of truth and more — far more — than an ounce of beauty, and managed to make his characters human and admirable.

You mean he wasn’t perfect? And he believed things we don’t? Into the ash heap of history with him, the damnable blot on the face of humanity.

It occurred to me this piece of crazy from the right was exactly the same as the crazy from the left.

“You have to be perfect according to our standards, or we’ll make it as though you’d never been.”

At least the right hasn’t tried to do that to living people yet.  While the left screams “shut up, she explained” the right says “Sweet mind, speak thyself.” Though that might be because it’s the most cruel thing we can do.

But they often do the same “he’s not perfect, I won’t listen” that the left does to living people too.  Eh. It’s a free world.  You’re not forced to enjoy someone.

I’ve read a lot of people who were far from perfect, and derived what I could from each of them.  In a discussion with friends, recently, on the writer whose wife makes poems to suicide bombers, I said I don’t read them because his thoughts “taste wrong” to me, and often make me want to shower inside my skin.  Not as badly as others. But still.  I don’t read him because “it tastes bad” to me, personally.  I know it’s a personal thing.  Heck, there are authors with whom I agree in almost every respect that I can’t read because something about their writing puts me off.  And sometimes that’s only in a portion of my life, and I get over it as I age. I certainly would never deny this writer’s talent (he’s stuffed with it) or say people shouldn’t read him.  De gustibus dictates that he’s not for me. BUT as much as some of his public posturing annoys me, I’m sure people find valuable things in his writing. Or he wouldn’t be as successful as he is.

I certainly don’t demand writers be perfect in their personal lives, or their personal beliefs. I particularly don’t demand they be perfectly congruent with mine.

I was in my thirties — mostly because Portugal is in many ways a remote place where bio and critical writing don’t arrive except by mule, smuggled under a load of fish (or at least the Portugal of my childhood) — before I encountered a screed calling Enid Blyton elitist and racist and pointing out she hated gypsies.

Frankly, I’ve never tracked the racist and gypsy thing down. I never cared enough to, because it doesn’t matter. If anything from her books (Circus of Adventure) I’d think she loved gypsies, even if what she did with them was fairly stereotypical (but then it’s a YA) and I don’t actually remember anyone of other races, in books mostly written about British children in the early 20th century FOR British children in the early 20th century.

Oh, she was elitist. But in a way that our self-proclaimed elites can’t decode. Something that’s impossible for them to comprehend, as though it were written in Martian.  She was elitist from the other side.  Not “My status gives me the right to” but noblesse oblige “we don’t do that because people like us don’t do that.”

And since what she communicated we wouldn’t do included things like be mean to those weaker than us, or make fun of the impaired, she was an amazingly good influence on me.

So I don’t care what flaws she had in her personal life, or her beliefs. Why should I?  I treasure the legacy she gave me, and move on.

Agatha Christie, too, was in many ways a conventional thinker of the early 20th century, and sometimes it comes through her work. But what I loved about it was the profoundly human characters (even the communists) and the fact that she set her face resolutely against the evil of envy and greed and murder.  Oh, and the whole “We weren’t put on this Earth to be safe/comfortable/merely happy” which fit in very well with what I’d got from Blyton.

And as for Heinlein… well, he did believe a lot of things I don’t. Particularly about relationships between humans. Understandable for someone of his place and time who believed the “scientific” papers of the time.  And?

He taught me competence. He taught me to not kowtow to evil. And mostly, he taught me the importance of the human spirit and not squashing that.

I should hate him because I disagree with him on some things? Because he wasn’t perfect?

WHY?

We take from the past that made us the best of their legacy, and we let the evil (or merely the things we disagree with) that men do be interred with their bones. That’s the way to destroy civilization.

Demanding of the past a perfection that no human ever achieved; demanding the past be perfectly in tune with future prejudices and illusions or even new found truths (those are often indistinguishable in the rear view mirror); demanding that people only be remembered if they were flawless does not in fact build a better future. It doesn’t build any future. It tears down civilization to its roots by removing the one thing that makes humans better than animals: the ability to learn from the experiences, heroism, and yes, errors and horrors of the past.

For all we know, after all, the man who invented fire was a slaver who killed little children, hated the next tribe over and beat his wives every night and twice on the not-yet invented Sunday.

But if we extinguish his legacy all we’ll achieve is perfect darkness.

There are voices in my head.  This is a good thing.  It’s a good thing in two ways:

First, as I found out when I became a grownup writer and got to meet others of my species, I’m very lucky the voices are in my head and not outside, as full on, vivid hallucinations.  The number of my colleagues who get that or outright visions is perhaps the most disturbing thing I’ve learned about this profession.  Sure, it sounds cool like something out of movies or stories, but if you’ve ever lived so close inside your own head (like when I was a teen. More on that later) that something a character says startles you, and you send a tray of beverages flying all over several people at the pool, you are grateful you’re not also dodging people who are invisible to other people, and/or having their arguments interfere with your enjoyment of music.

After a con in which he listened to some of my colleagues older son was convinced this type of writing that we call “gateway writing” where you get the characters and much of the story for free was a form of schizophrenia.  He was relieved when I told him no, it’s just a seductive narrative strain of thoughts in my head, I’m fairly sure it’s part of being ADHD and my brain trying to entertain me.  So he says clinically speaking my case of writing isn’t as bad as many of my colleagues cases. I’m still — he says — a graphomaniac. You can’t get away from that. He’s young. I have so many ways of getting away from that.

Second: It’s much easier to remember who you are, to remain grounded in reality, to know which voices aren’t yours when they don’t also show you things or shout at you.

All of which is important because — I don’t know if this is a temptation to everyone else or just writer larvae — it was really easy to go inside and live in the stories in my head as a kid.

Does everyone do this? Or is it something that only hits those of us who are story-creative (there are other forms of creative) AND peculiarly broken?

I don’t know.  I know from age oh, five or six till eighteen I lived inside my head in a series of stories.  Sure, I also went to school and did the things that humans do. But the amazing thing is that I learned anything and did anything, since maybe 75% of my attention was inside.

At almost eighteen I made a conscious decision to give it up and start living in the world outside.  It was difficult. It hurt like hell.  It broke me places.  And then it healed and made me stronger.  I also started to actually grow and understand things, because I was no longer beguiled by the world within and using the world without only as a sort of inspiration mine.

Sure, I know, people who aren’t tempted by the words find other means of escape.  A lot of compulsive behavior, like counting or washing seems to be dulling the contact with the real world. So are other things which is why we have an “opiate crisis.”

Now it’s possible some of us are peculiarly more in danger of this. When we had younger son IQ tested (for reasons having nothing to do with wanting to brag, or whatever, but because he had sensory issues which apparently are organically linked to IQ one of two ways, either very high or very low and each of them calls for different handling) the psychologist surprised me by telling me some of us FEEL more than others.  I.e. some kids feel things that happen to them more strongly than others, which in turn means … they’re probably more susceptible to find ways to escape it.

But the thing is our society provides so many ways to escape it.  Sure, I probably had ancestors and ancestresses who had the same temptation I did (I suspect story telling runs in dad’s family) and some of them might even have managed to be as involved with the inner narrative as I was as a kid, but the truth is, probably not many.  It would require a certain level of comfort and “not having to handle dangerous things” that would probably be impossible until my generation unless of course very wealthy.

What do I mean? Well, when you cook mostly with wood or charcoal or — argh — spirit lamps, or you have to use sharp implements in your work, or wash clothes in a place where you can fall in and die and furthermore when your day is packed with hard work, it’s hard to go fully inside.  Or if you manage it, you’ll probably die. And if you don’t die you won’t get everything accomplished you need to and you and your family might die.

For instance yesterday as I was ripping up carpet in the dining room and killzeeing the floor, a task both grosser and more violent than you can imagine, my mind kept trying to tempt me away with a really strong narrative voice that goes to a story that’s been waiting maybe 30 years.

Which is why I listen to audio books while doing that stuff.  Particularly audio books I’ve listened to before. They’re just enough distraction not to allow the inner voice to take hold, and not to bring me to a stand still in the middle of the room, daydreaming and not doing what needed to be done.

It’s worse, of course, for other forms of addiction and escape.  I understand in many countries its always been normal, as far as we know to go through the world half-stoned.  Leaves and hashish and stuff.  And most of those parts of the world pay the price of such addiction and dulling in that they’ve stagnated for a long time. (Yeah, I am for drug legalization. Doesn’t mean I approve of drug use, particularly society wide.)

It is fashionable right now to talk about the opiate crisis, and also how it’s the result of several societal ills.

That’s Marxism talking.

No, seriously. I don’t care who you are, that’s Marxism talking.  The belief that some “societal ills” cause you to mitigate it with drugs, the belief that the “opiate of the masses” be it physical or mental is necessary to deal with the inequities of the capitalist system is a Marxist thought.

It is no such thing. Drugs or escape fantasies (I don’t think religion has anything to do with it, not for seriously religious people, though it’s possible that people of a narrative frame of mind who don’t have the concept of being storytellers might use religion as a framework for their escape.) or the myriad ways humans find to escape real life aren’t a result of the capitalist system (which is a way of saying Free Market which is a way of saying a byproduct of being human.)  They are a result of being human.

As the movie says: “Life is pain highness, anyone telling you different is trying to sell you something”

Even those people who are coddled and surrounded by everything they need — perhaps particularly those — live in pain.  Because to the extent that the world is not inside our heads and we don’t order it, things don’t always go according to what we want.  And weirdly for those who never have been denied being told no on very minor things is as much pain as oh, actual physical torture.  Which, yes, is why a particular brand of largely very privileged and coddled human beings think that you disagreeing with them is “actual aggression. Like violence.” And we need to stop disagreeing with them, or they’ll make us.  With physical attacks.

There is hope though. If instead of going inside, or taking drugs or trying to silence those whose thoughts/words/denial hurts you and feels like violence, you come out and engage with it, think about it, analyze it, eventually it gets better.

Oh, it hurts like hell, don’t get me wrong. In a way you have to die.  You have to move out of your current, comfortable state and break, and then rebuild again.

Imagine you had an exoskeleton (go with it.)  It keeps you safe. It’s comfortable inside. But what you don’t know is that it inhibits your growth and if you stay inside you will die early and unformed.  If you choose to break it, to grow past its limits, it hurts like hell. I mean, it’s part of you. But then it heals on the fractures and is stronger than before. And you’re bigger.

Does life stop being pain?  Oh, hell no. Life is pain. Big pain, small pain, or just the pain of sheer boredom.

And the temptations will always be there.  Opiates, coddling ideologies or even just vivid dreams.  And sometimes you can indulge, if you can control it. (No clue about the opiates. I don’t even like taking ibuprofen. But the day dreams? Well… I channel them into writing which is not the same at all as the vivid dream immersion, but sort of is. Or at least hits a bit of that spark.) But you always have to fight to control it.

And life is going to throw things that you that make you want to run and hide.

Don’t.

The escape is sweet and nice and easy. But outside in the harsh world of reality is the only way to grow and change and to truly experience life.  Accept no substitutes.

Oh, and that strong narrative voice that attacked me while cleaning? I probably should get the first two pages in so it doesn’t escape again. So I can finally write that novel that’s been waiting.

And then the house needs cleaning (the carpet thing took much longer than I expected so THAT didn’t happen) and … and I need to give another coat of KILLZ to the dining room floor (it’s not even our cats. It’s the people who lived here before and their cats.)  And then…. and then I can indulge in some narrative and writing.

Go forth. Live in the real world. It’s the breaking and the scars that lead to… bigger breaking and scars.  But without them you won’t actually live. You’ll leave no mark in the world.  It will be as though you’d never existed.

And what’s the point of that?

Sunday Book Promo

FROM AMIE GIBBONS:  Psychic Eclipse (of the Heart) (The SDF Paranormal Mysteries Book 6)

Love your enemies…

Ariana Ryder’s a free agent now, and her psychic PI business is taking off. She even put together a huge conference for those involved in paranormal investigations and treatments.

She’s a success!

When Ariana’s conference is taken hostage by a desperate Fae who needs her help, how can she say no? But when the job requires fetching a fugitive from Fairy, she’ll have to work with her ex boss and crush Grant to have any hope of survival.

And when it comes to the Fae, things are never as they seem.

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: horn

Weirdly, this is not a political post, though seriously, we need to stop asking Him to make our enemies ridiculous. Enough is enough and we’re approaching dumpster fire in a sewer with a clown car driving through.  Past that lies something unimaginable and arcane, and I’d rather not find out what it is.  Possibly like a glimpse of Cthulhu it renders you mad.  Not worth risking…

Okay, so one thing the stupendous paper book sale did (yeah, I have a couple to send out on Monday, money having arrived at last) is make me realize how bad my early covers were.

Now, let’s be honest here, they weren’t bad-bad.  Not for indie books without dedicated artists and an art designer.

Seven (almost) years ago, I was doing my art on paper, and probably stuck “two years from cover-worthy” which is what my then teacher classified me as.  BUT she was assuming of two years of concentrated practice (I’m probably a bit worse right now) which I couldn’t give it, because ce n’est pas mon metier.  Or not my main one.

So I was doing things with photoshop and stock photos.  Which is difficult for any historical since finding people in costume that is actually accurate, let alone where people (guys are particularly prone to this, particularly when holding a sword.  It’s like the brain snaps and they go “I have a sword”) aren’t grinning like idiots, or ugly as sin is a problem.  Do yourself a favor and do not EVER look for handsome man in stock photos.  Obviously my standards of “handsome” which include “must not look like a rat” or “Must not weigh more than triggly puff” are too demanding.

Now the original cover of Witchfinder (still up on Amazon.  I need to do the paper cover for this, then I will go in and do it all at one swoop.  This is part of my new, revised, stupendous way of spending my weekends and doing something useful with them) was NOT the best that could be achieved even under those circumstances.

I tried hiring an artist, in fact, and paid more than the proverbial “$400 cover” (but not by much) but what was delivered was actually worse than what I could do at the time.  So I fell into the stock photos and filter forge and achieved something that was not utterly disgraceful, even if not wonderful.  Say it was about 15% of what a decent midlist cover should be.   Probably 90% of what I could ACTUALLY have achieved. But 90% was all the time and attention I had to give it.  Beyond that lay the land of spending days tinkering with shadows and it might bring it to 98% of what I could achieve, and about 15% of one to perfect.

I’m not going to claim to be perfect now. All I’m looking for is “midlist by most big houses.” Which I think I’m probably 98% on. Beyond that lies either genius, inspiration, or greatly diminishing returns. MIND YOU if I keep doing this and getting better, they will eventually all so far outclass this that I’ll have the same reaction to this I had to those earlier covers.

Which is part of what I wanted to say: this is what life is.  Not just art.  Not just writing. Not just your profession or your job, or whatever. Life.

We start out pretty sucky at it.  Heck, I remember one of my persistent fears in early childhood (probably under five) was of forgetting to chew something and actually choking to death.  It came close enough a couple of times that it lent this fear credence.  But if I had that fear as an adult, it would be outright crazy.  I mean, what kind of idiot is afraid of FORGETTING TO CHEW?

An idiot pretty new to her body.  I have obviously practiced having this body for ten times longer now, and while I can still choke (usually when my sons make me laugh or something equally stupid) putting chewy food in my mouth is no longer an occasion for neurotic terror (yay!)

In the same way until I was about fourteen, my knees were permanently scarred from falling.  I couldn’t seem to figure out how to stop doing it. I was extremely clumsy, yes. This phase lasted long enough to interfere with my wish to look sexy in nylons. I don’t know how much of it was due to the fact I spent a vast portion of the year in bed with various illnesses till I was 12. But obviously a lot of it came from that.  I simply had only about half (or less) the practice at walking of a 14 year old.  Yes, I also had — and have — a tendency to get lost in my own head and forget I’m walking.  When I lived in downtown Colorado Springs, in the North end, with its plethora of cracked and root-uplifted sidewalks, I tripped a lot.  But note I never fell.  (Well, once, but that involved a patch of black ice and my wearing my clogs outside. Because I’m an idiot.)  I never fell because I had a ton more practice.  I hadn’t suddenly become way more acrobatic, or better at balancing (snort, giggle) or for that matter started paying more attention to where my feet were and what they were up to.  No. It’s just that I’d been walking for 30 years longer, and could now catch myself before I face planted or knee planted, for that matter.

Now at 14 wishing to walk without scarring my knees, seemed impossible and I had no clue how to get there.  If I’d aimed for perfect I’d have stayed in bed, waiting for the perfect to come.

I guess it’s kind of like my realization that what I was doing wrong with Alien Curse was … trying to make it The One Book. The Perfect Book. (Not even the perfect book of its kind, just the perfect book.  Which is impossible. But even the perfect book of its kind is fairly unlikely.)  The best thing to do is to “make it as perfect as you can, given who you are and the tools you have RIGHT NOW.”

Because if you do that; if you start where you are and with what you can do right now, instead of wishing for perfection, and do it a lot, you’ll get better.

And like me (I’m sure) in five years, looking at this (I have bought courses on lighting, on backgrounds, on…  That’s also for the weekends this year.  Yes, that and floor installing.  That’s life. Yes, the year is going to purely suck in terms of workload.) in five years of doing the best you can with what you have right then, you’ll look at today’s work and go “Oh, dear Lord, what WAS I THINKING?”  But what you were thinking is that you were doing the best you can, right now.

We don’t have magical abilities, to reach into the future and make us as good as we can be.  And yeah, study (see I bought a load of courses) and thinking and learning from our betters (in covers I have a lot of betters) helps.  BUT in the end? Practice. Practice makes the biggest difference. Practice will allow you to do what right now seems impossible.

Yes, that means you’ll produce a lot of imperfect stuff.  Humans are imperfect. A lot of it will probably be good enough, be it in art, or life, or whatever.

And honestly, even when you’re really really good you might choose to be at 98% of achievable, unless you’re getting paid in the millions.  Most people don’t notice the top 2% of perfection.  And the effort is another 50% at least.  You’re better off producing more, practicing more.  And then your next ten pieces will get you to the 100% of what you can achieve now anyway.  And they too will sell.  And you’ll get better at things you didn’t even realize needed improvement.

Go and practice. Because that way lies “as good as it can get.”

The constant discovering of flaws in what you thought was great before, the constant dissatisfaction with yourself is just the price you pay.

It’s worth it.

To be satisfied is to stop improving.

Happy New Year! Sort-of, ish. – by Alma Boykin

The sun is shifting farther and farther south, shortening the days and lengthening the nights. The geese are flocking south, with a few Sandhill cranes following. Athena T. Cat has moved from the front couch to the master bedroom and now reposes on my bed, toasting her toes in the afternoon sun that spills under the deep eves. The year turns, the sun moves, plants and animals respond, and time passes.

Happy New Year! Right?

When does the year end, anyway? When does it start? What defines a season?

If you use the Western Christian liturgical calendar, New Year’s Day fell on December 2 this year. The previous Sunday was Christ the King Sunday, when the church looks to the time when Jesus will return as king of the world, to judge the quick and the dead, or as a different part of the liturgy says, “When Christ shall come in final victory and we feast at His heavenly banquet table.” Except we don’t throw wild parties or wear lampshades on our heads to all those things people are alleged to do on New Year’s Eve. Instead we sigh about “where has time gone” and wonder if this year the music director will make good on her threats that Christmas carols will only be sung during Christmastide, that being the period between December 24 and January 6. And everyone grumbles about how long HallowThanksMas lasts.

How many calendars do we live by? There’s the January 1 to December 31 cycle that most of the world uses, or at least adds to their own particular calendar when needed. There are religious calendars, some of which impinge or overflow onto the secular world (Easter, Christmas, Ramadan, Passover and Yom Kippur, the legal holiday of Corpus Christi*.) Personal calendars with anniversaries, birthdays, death days, years in remission, years sober or clean. Academic calendars that count down the days until breaks and summer, often watched more closely by teachers than by students and their parents. Tax calendars that go by quarter or by year and that culminate on April 15, or the first or last days of the fiscal quarters, and that bump into the federal fiscal year.

There are also ghosts of calendars past, like the Thermadorian Reaction, April Fools Day, and the October Revolution that happened in what is now November. Halloween, once Samhain, the end of the year for pagan Irish and others, when the hard times of the year began to draw near as the sun disappeared and took heat and light with it.

Usaians have High Holy Days centering on July Fourth.

For me, the year starts in autumn because the days grow short, planting has started along with planning for the next farming year, and school is in session. This is my favorite time of year, with cooler days, longer nights that give me more time to be out and about, winter music, and the mystery of Christmas. DadRed really dreads autumn and winter, for equally good reasons. I don’t care for spring and summer. The world slows down from the heat, I’m trapped indoors or forced to be up by 0500 in order to do outdoor things before the sun rises, and it’s when storms roll through.

Humans mark the year through different ways and with different start and end points. Some calendars work better than others, at least in the world as it currently is. Some have been adapted to the dominate sun-based fixed calendar that dominates the western world, others remain free-floating and lunar and proudly refuse to adapt. Into the 20th Century (and probably still in some pockets and hollers), some Western Christians maintained that Christmas was not December 25 but January 6, the “Old Christmas” from before the Gregorian to Julian switch. Some calendars are deeply personal, based on when a family came into being, or when life began again after chemo or another life-shattering and rebuilding event. “Only 245 and a quarter days to LibertyCon, not that anyone’s counting.” “Summer doesn’t begin until we reach the lake-house.” “I don’t care what the calendar says, it is winter already.”

Regency London had “the Season.” A lot of Europe still does, focusing on the wild weeks between New Year and Ash Wednesday, the time when the rules are a little looser and satire a little fiercer, when the Fools point out the emperor’s nakedness and people attend the great society balls and parties to see and be seen.

I suspect that deep down, there are as many ways of marking time’s passing as there are people. Wet and dry seasons. Times of flowers and the moon of falling leaves. Religious feasts and secular feasts, the fasting and weeping and wailing leading up to April 15. We watch for migrations and the succession of plants as the sun moves north and south. People in Canada giggle at Santa on water-skies in Australia, while Australians snort at declarations of “Hurricane Season is upon us” from the ‘States. “Hottest year on record,” pronouncements while crops droop under snow in South Africa or South America generate more than chuckles. My new year is somewhen in August, because my life is tied to the academic calendar, then the liturgical one, and the secular one. Half the world’s population marks the new year by the moon, but doesn’t object to parties on December 31 (unless their government is cracking down that year.)

I suspect humans will take our various calendars into space with us, and layer them onto newer systems. In the background to part of Fountains of Mercy, rabbis are (once more) trying to decide how to calculate the High Holy Days and other things for Jews living away from Earth. And people trying to adapt Earth systems to planets with different year lengths. The characters on Shikhari focus on the dry and the wet, and base their social year on those seasons, while trying to sort out what the government on Home meant by “four weeks after receiving this memo, the local Commander is enjoined to…” Whose week?

*I giggled a little too much when the government of France announced that it would cut back on the number of paid federal holidays, and the Communists and trades unions vehemently insisted that Corpus Christi remain on the list.

Recently here, one of those times that the comments get more interesting than the post itself, we came up with the idea that we are in fact elves.  That either time traveling or some weird time-glitch bring us — or our descendants a few hundred years hence — in contact with people in the past and allows them a glimpse into our world.

There isn’t a story there — at least not for me — though there might be a throw away side character or three in future novels.

But, you know, when you think about it we match a lot of the stories about elves.  We are almost impossibly long-lived, obviously supernaturally healthy.  We can turn on light or cook or do any of the things that were near impossible if not impossible even a hundred, much less five hundred years ago, with the flick of a button.  We see at a distance through magic devices (no? explain it to a medieval man. Use small words) and talk at a distance to each other.  We can fly to the air to visit each other, and if we don’t mention details, I’ll bet you good money that a medieval person would imagine us tucking in arms and flying, perhaps in a spangle of sparkles.

Fairy horses? I’ve got nothing, though it wouldn’t surprise me if in another 100 years or so we didn’t have some kind of super horses, bio-engineered for performance and more carnivorous than not.  Perhaps even, too, unearthly beautiful, because why not?

We can even heal bizarrely and startlingly for someone in the middle ages.  I mean, if we come across a guy lost in the middle of nowhere, running a fever and we’re doctors or otherwise equipped for the emergency, a salve, an ointment, or even a shot can bring him back from the brink through the magic an anti-biotics.

Elf shot? Forget the whole thing about stone arrow heads.  We can kill at a distance with startling accuracy.

The fairy midwife stories? Well, if these things are either isolated colonists into the past (something like Simak’s world where they’re running from certain extinction in the future) or sometimes the times contact at random and it’s a farmhouse (or something) that finds itself isolated in the past?  Well!  You know, I’d prefer modern delivery services, too, but if those aren’t available, I bet you those medieval-village midwives (once you disinfect them from head to toe twice) were pretty good at what they did, because they faced — with no modern knowledge or last-minute saves — the problems of childbirth, which are complex and varied.  And enough kids survived that we’re here now.

Then there’s the whole “elves have few children.”  Compared to the historical average, you guys might not even realize how little time a modern woman spends pregnant.  Sure, they might end up rearing only two or three children at most, but rare was the pre-modern woman who didn’t have seven to ten children.  And a lot of them died in childbirth, because the more you walk in the rain, the more you get wet.

This idea has been with me a long time, long before the discussion here.  There was a germ of it last year when we went to the Denver botanic gardens illumination and I thought someone of Shakespeare’s England tripping through a time portal into this fairly mundane Holiday display would be dazzled.  Hell, I always channel my inner 6 year old, who thought the church being illuminated for Christmas (white lights outlining the building and the turret) was an amazing miracle.  And she thinks that the illuminated botanic gardens (or zoo) are a miracle.

Imagine the wonder.  We’re profligate with light and getting more so, as it becomes cheaper and cheaper to illuminate the outside of our houses with twinkling fairy lights.  (I’ve had no luck with solar.  I think Colorado is too dusty. But they work places.)

Some of my neighbors illuminate with lights summer and winter, as do a lot of commercial areas.  The colors are just different.

When this arose in the comments, Margaret Ball said “What about being unearthly beautiful?”

And though I know how beautiful we are — yes, all of us — in terms of not being deformed of pockmarked or even — and that was so common even 25 years ago — acne scarred, I confess that made me laugh a little.

And then over new years Dan and I went to the Rembrandt exhibition.  We were looking through the prints and again and again came across drawings of people who were supposed to be young.  Like sixteen to eighteen.  They all looked forty.  And then there were people who were supposed to be forty… I’d take them for eighty.

Sure there are renaissance paintings, say, the Venus on the half-shell, who look young and heart-breakingly beautiful.  And probably were, even if the painter might have idealized her a bit.  But the age thing keeps hitting us in the face.  The men and women of the renaissance were far more in tune than us with the idea that the virgin was supposed to be 14 — by church legend — and the audience of paintings would know that.  Aware of that go look at medieval and renaissance nativity paintings.  Oh, keep in mind Joseph is supposed to be in his thirties.

Now by the time you get to the 18th or 19th century and are looking at the paintings of the upper class, you don’t see that effect much.  They were halfway to being elves.  They still aged faster and harder than us, and do not ask about their dentistry if you prize untroubled sleep.

But if you looked at the people on the street in those days, or if you find paintings of the common folk, you’ll know exactly how we’re “unearthly beautiful” throughout our blessed long lives.

I remember reading, and now I don’t remember which painter or where, though I have an idea it was in the quattrocento (note that wordpress spell checker doesn’t know quattrocento and tries to make it afrocentric. Measure by that our mental decline compared to our material improvement) saying that he’d picked a model because she was so “beautiful” with unscarred skin and straight limbs.

Now do I really believe we’re time travelers?  Um…. no.  I always find it funny when someone comes here to argue with me and tries to claim my reasoning is faulty because “you write fantasy. You don’t know the difference between reality and imagination.”  (Rolls eyes.)  Sure, if you’re a psychotic locked up in a rubber padded room, that might be true.  But I’ll argue you’re then not writing much fiction, and certainly not much that’s commercial enough to be enjoyed by others.

People tend to underestimate the amount of conscious work that goes into crafting a story, particularly something the size of a novel.  They want to imagine it’s all a flash of passion and suddenly the story is all there.

Sure, that can happen, after you’ve written twenty novels or so, but that’s because your subconscious has been trained to do the heavy pulling by then.  Even then you’ll recraft scenes or recast characters, because your subconscious knows what you like but not what other people will buy (your conscious doesn’t know that either, but it can make better guesses.)

Anyway, to write saleable fiction you need to be fully in control.  Sometimes you let the imagination out to play, and then you pull it back in.  And when you let it to play you know d*mn well you’re confabulating.

Sure. It’s possible that some time phenomenon makes us into literal elves sometime in the next few hundred years.  I.e. that we’ll go back in time and meet our ancestors and give them their legends.  Not that I can think of any mechanism right now, but then time is still very much a mystery in many ways.

What is more possible is that these things that were attributed to elves are the long-time dreams of mankind.  Light.  Living with minimal effort. Health. Long life. Not consuming your life in endless pregnancy.

Do we still aspire to a lot of other things, including longer life? Of course we do.

But to our ancestors? We live in an age of magic and miracles, and we live long and blessedly healthy lives.

Shakespeare made his mark on the world by living 2 years more than I’ve lived by now.  And Kit Marlowe was cut down at 29.

We have so much more time.  What are we doing with it?  How much of it do we spend moaning and bitching that it’s all going down the drain and we can’t stop it?

Sure, we have challenges (I’m not sure humans could survive without them) and sure there are some pretty awful people trying to put their boots on our neck. (The wars in fairyland were always terrible.)

BUT we have all this time, all this health, all this light, all this ease.

Let’s be worthy of them and do something, even if the something is fight for freedom and pass the torch one more generation.

There might come a time to be curled up in the fetal position on the floor.  That time is not now.

Up and doing.

In the end, we win, they lose.

Be not afraid.

Yeah, I know it’s not too early in the morning.  Today is also my day at Mad Genius Club and I did the post there before this one.  Not that it was early, anyway.  I kind of slept 12 hours and couldn’t figure out why, until I realized that since Dec. 19 I’ve not had a single day without serious physical work.  Apparently after 50 this is not sustainable. So I have flu-like symptoms (despite having the vaccine) and feel like I need to sleep rather a lot.

This is not… great, but I think I’ll be up at normal work rate with a little bit of taking it easy.

So, this is me taking it easy… I guess…

Anyway, when I was little I loved getting up too early in the morning and surprising people/places I loved with their hair down, so to put it.

Like, as a little kid I tended to stay up till forever (my kids too seem to be natural night people, so we let them go to bed whenever, which meant they/) and then I slept till like 10 or 11 am.  Obviously this stopped when I entered school, though the village school was used to my family and quite forgiving of my showing up at 10 am, hastily dressed and still half asleep. (My kids’ school less so, which is why I often delivered Marshall to them at starting time still… what’s the technical term? Oh, yeah, asleep.  Though he’d let me spoon breakfast into his face, dress him and walk him to school in that state.)

But there were a few days I remember (bet you my parents do too!) when I woke up at six or seven am for some reason…. and found out mom and dad had a whole life before Sarah-wake-up-time.

I remember one particular morning waking up to mom singing with the radio and making coffee, and dad joining in and joking.  It was like a whole new world.  It seemed to me the colors were more vivid and these strangers wearing my parents’ appearance far more alive and joyful and… well… young than the people I knew when I woke up at the normal time.

Later on, as a teen, when I went to school in the big city (Porto) I loved it when I dragged my ass out of bed early enough to get to town before the shops opened up.  You’d find shopkeepers whom you knew out in front of their shops washing or sweeping the sidewalk, and looking a little surprised, like you caught them too early in the morning.  It humanized the city and made it less intimidating.

This morning I woke up feeling like I caught THE YEAR that way.  Like, you know, it wasn’t quite expecting me this early, particularly since I have nothing planned, and so I am seeing it early morning, singing with the corny radio music with its makeup off.

This is good, as this is a very scary year.  This indie thing consists of a lot of mind-shifts I’m probably not fully prepared for.

But I am awake and the year is here already.  And it’s time to begin.

So, flu-like symptoms or not, I’m going to drag my half-caffeinated behind into the shower and begin.

There’s a lot of learning to do, but fortunately I think other people are as unprepared as I am, so I might have a fighting chance.

Cue “We have only just began” on the player.

The music is about to start.

Yesterday mom called.  She usually does on Sundays.  This means if we’re at a con, and I suddenly grab my phone and start speaking Portuguese, it’s mom.  I’ve found she tends not to remember “am at conference” and tends to be very worried if I can’t talk right then.

She wished me a happy new year in advance and she said “At least no worse than 2018.”

It’s an interesting perspective, and I realize that it’s perhaps related to her being 84.  All the same….

2018 was in many ways — emotional and financial, mostly — the year from hell.  As most such things do — I have a million superstitions around the turning of the year. Yes, I know it’s stupid. But it’s also human. I’ve stopped fighting it — it announced itself around November 2017 with the school pulling funny things with younger kid’s tuition, so that we entered the year in a panic over money.

Then in February/March/April, there was a long protracted issue with a family member that had me, for real, suicidal for the first time since my teens, both because it was horrible, and because I could do nothing about it.

And it ended just a couple of weeks ago with a real gut-punch that left us financially worried, again.  And it was also emotionally wrenching.

On the other hand…  On the other hand, just as the gut punch at end of year last year was a warning that things in the new year would be awful, the gut punch (or at least half of it) a couple of weeks ago was a sword I’ve been waiting to fall since February, when rumors first reached me.  In a way it was the clearing out of debris of something that had been dead a long time.  (And no, guys, not my marriage.  That’s fine, thank you.)  And after the punch hit and I was physically ill for twenty four hours, it started feeling oddly freeing.  As well the e-sale I’ve been running on Amazon these last two weeks of the year was “oddly profitable,” making me, if not sure — who can be sure — at least reasonably assured that I can make it on my own from indie, with a very small assist from non fic at pjmedia, which — having been cut back through no fault of my own — will now probably only cost me a day a week instead of eating all my writing time.

If I can put out something new every month (not as difficult as it sounds as I have many, many half finished things from “when the wheels came off.”  I.e. when I got very ill 5 years ago.  Some of them are three days from completion, like musketeer vampires and the sequels to Witchfinder (I swear I had an almost finished Musketeer mystery and I can’t even find the OUTLINE for it.  I think it might have gone with the computer that caught fire five years ago.  But I’ll do some more searching before giving up)) I should be not only fine, but thrive.

And the family member issue resolved itself by May, in the happiest possible way: in fact happier than I would have thought possible.

Oh, yeah, and we managed to pay younger son’s bills (with some assist from him with a summer job and now a typesetting business) without going under, even if our savings looks like it’s been on a diet (if you need typesetting, e or paper, ping me, I’ll give you his email.  He has a list of services.)  Ah, well.  That can be put right.  Hard work never killed anyone.  It’s work where you pour out your heart and soul into it and know that people stand by to kill it dead and blame you for the death that guts you.

The health stuff is way better.  WAY better compared to even last year at this time.

Is it “Okay”?  Um…. not yet. But that’s also work for this year.

Older son found the perfect woman (well, they’d been dating for about a year) and proposed this spring.  Even better, she accepted him and became Lovely Fiance.  Even better, we like her too, and she’s rapidly become the daughter we wish we’d had.  They’ll be getting married early next year, and if they don’t give me a firm date, I’m going to roofie them both and drive them down to the civil registry.  (To be fair, he’s waiting for his school to firm up schedule for the year, still… hard on my poor nerves, in Mrs. Bennet’s best style.)  So, yeah, more work for the next year.  Roofying people is SO EXHAUSTING.

I lost 45lbs and I’m back to the weight I was around 4 years ago before the thyroid went seriously to the bad.  More work waiting there too, but it will happen.  It’s amazing how much energy stress eats up, and the sword falling cut down on a lot of that stress.

Oh, asthma seems to be in remission, and despite a late flare these last two weeks, the eczema largely is too.  (The flare is only on my hands, not all over my body as it has been these last two years.)

We found reasonably priced wood, have refloored one of the worst trouble spots in the house, and are ready to do the rest, probably at a weekend a month.  Again, a lot of work, but when we’re done we’ll not only be less allergenic, but more ready to cope with the spate of geriatric issues our cats will have in the next six years.  (The youngest is 10.)

Best of all the stories are stirring again.

And Dan — thank you guys who took him up on his free book for xmas offer — is again interested in writing.

It’s been over a year since we had an away-writing-weekend.

Because I DO have this superstition that the last day of the year and the first day of the new year foretell how you’ll spend the year, we are going away in a couple of hours for a “writing weekend.”  Okay.  It’s only overnight, though let me tell you if we weren’t still kind of tight, and more importantly if Dan weren’t convinced Havelock Cat will die without him (No. Havey is not one of the elderly ones.  No. He’s not ill.  It’s just that if you look in the dictionary under “needy” there’s a picture of his fluffy butt, and he has daddy rolled. “But the other cats will just eat him.  He’s so chubby!”) I’d make it two nights.

So, right now I’m washing and sorting clothes, in preparation to being outahere for new years.

I probably won’t blog tomorrow, as we’ll be making our way back from the hotel (the hotel where we used to have writing weekends, and which — because these weekends are also oddly relaxing and bonding — we’ve nicknamed Hotel L’Amour) sometime around noon.

Though I hope that 2019 will be the best year in decades, both for me and for all of you, I’m going to above all hold on to mom’s wish “Let it be no worse than last year.”

Even though 2018 probably ate ten years of my life with worry and stress, it could be worse.  There could be snakes in here with us. (Arguably, metaphorically, there was.)

Make 2019 better.  But if nothing else, make it a year where all the problems end up well solved, where the solutions are under our control, or we can, at least, mitigate the suffering.

Give us work we can do and which is satisfying, give us challenges we can overcome, give us health and at least enough wealth not to hurt.

Let’s go forth into 2019 and BUILD.

The rest will take care of itself.

FROM BLAKE SMITH:  The Secret of Seavale

A cottage by the sea, nestled in a respectable neighborhood. It should be a safe haven…

Elizabeth Markham has run away from school and seeks the house of her godmother, six miles outside of Portsmouth. Seavale Cottage is a place of peace, and Elizabeth will be safe under Mrs. Brownhurst’s care.

But she arrives at Seavale only to discover that Mrs. Brownhurst has gone away, leaving Elizabeth to fend for herself. She finds assistance in her servants and in her very obliging neighbor, Captain Randall, and all is well until Seavale is beset by strange nighttime happenings. Elizabeth is about to discover that her place of refuge holds more danger than she ever dreamed, and she must gather all of her courage and resources if she and her friends are to survive the secret of Seavale.

FROM JL CURTIS: Rimworld- Militia Up.

It was supposed to be a simple contract for a couple of months of security services off world, but the devil’s in the details.

Tight Bridge Technologies hired Ethan Fargo and his militia to guard their power stations on the planet Endine against mob unrest and sabotage. When they arrive, they find the planetary authorities don’t want outsiders around to uncover their dirty secrets, and the Galactic Patrol’s not interested in providing backup. They all but order him to stop making waves, kicking asses, and taking names. The harder Fargo works to keep his people safe, the more troubles he finds. Dragoons and pirates are stalking the outer system, while the planet itself is a snakepit of treachery, tyranny, rebellion, and corruption. Everyone wants him to fail, while taking the blame.

They made one mistake: they underestimated Ethan Fargo. After the locals kills two of his Ghorkas, and kidnap his lady, he’s out for blood, and to hell with anything in his way…

AND STILL ON SALE:

Oh, yeah, and also my most recent collection is on sale for 99c till the 31st.

So Little And So Light, containing, I THINK my most libertarian short story EVER.

From a parallel world where we have all the dreams of pulp writers, to a future where bioengineering kindles new hates and new heroes, to a different Tudor England, to the intricacies of time wars, this science fiction collection provides a glimpse of things undreamed… some from which we’ll gladly waken, and some we’d very much like to be true.
Contains the short stories: Wait Until The War Is Over, Only The Lonely, Lost, Neptune’s Orphans, After the Sabines, The Serpent’s Tail, Spinning Away, The Private Wound, Super Lamb Banana, To Learn To Forget, Things Remembered, The Bombs Bursting in Air, On A Far Distant Shore, So Little And So Light.

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: consist

Very odd.  For the end of the year.

Yes, this is very late.  Mostly because we were picking son up from airport, and apparently today is the most popular day of the year to pick someone up at the airport.  It was crawling SLOWLY towards arrivals.  Also, son didn’t wear a banana costume (family joke) so it took us a while to figure out where he was standing. And here we thought we’d taught them to always wear banana costumes while traveling.  Not only does it make it easier to fine you, no kind of crazy rando is going to mess with a man (or woman, should I be the one traveling) in banana costume.

Anyway, for lack of a banana costume, we did three passes before we found him, at which point we had to take him and lovely fiance to Pete’s Kitchen (what? you know I told you that’s the most likely place to find us on any random day of the week) to celebrate another victory against the demons of the air.  (Trips usually start and end with a visit to Pete’s. Yes, that does mean if you want to join us in the morning (usually) when we travel to Liberty con, you should go to Pete’s at unholy hours.)

So, it’s late and we’re now home, and I’m trying to render some covers… which is when it occurred to me I hadn’t posted (better late than never!)

So I thought I’d give you a running update and also remind those who bespoke books by email and said they’d send a check that they can’t actually BUY THEM unless they send the check (and it clears.)  Five (I think) of you said check was on the way, but we’ve so far got one, for 2 Dyce books.

It’s not a big deal, but I have the books set aside and other people waiting.  And I’d like to get done with this.

Oh, yeah, and also my most recent collection is on sale for 99c till the 31st.

So Little And So Light, containing, I THINK my most libertarian short story EVER.

From a parallel world where we have all the dreams of pulp writers, to a future where bioengineering kindles new hates and new heroes, to a different Tudor England, to the intricacies of time wars, this science fiction collection provides a glimpse of things undreamed… some from which we’ll gladly waken, and some we’d very much like to be true.
Contains the short stories: Wait Until The War Is Over, Only The Lonely, Lost, Neptune’s Orphans, After the Sabines, The Serpent’s Tail, Spinning Away, The Private Wound, Super Lamb Banana, To Learn To Forget, Things Remembered, The Bombs Bursting in Air, On A Far Distant Shore, So Little And So Light.