Author: Sarah A. Hoyt

I was not deceived by the proclamations of the end of history in the 90s, though I wished I could be.

Of course, part of the reason I wasn’t convinced was in no way rational, merely a knee jerk reaction to having been pumped chockfull of Marxism six days a week (we had school on Saturday) for most of my schooling and having learned to recognize it as not just bad cess, but bad cess that inevitably fell on its face.

In fact, my 11th grade history book was explicit about it.  The last chapter was called Socialism, the perfect society and expounded on how once you got there, history would have ended, since Heglian interpretation of history specified that all the wars and struggle came SOLELY from internal contradictions in society.  Once those contradictions were eliminated (one must understand here that they called it socialism because by that time already communism had a bad smell, but they actually meant that imaginary state of communism, where not just classes but all monetary transactions would have come to an end, there would be no property, and everything would be held in common, from each according to his ability and to each according to his need. It strikes me now on reading it that this is a weird way to treat envy, since envy by definition can never be satiated. Never mind. Government would then wither away and there would be no more force of need for force, and no one would covet what his neighbor had, forever. The end of history.  And if you’re visualizing a vast plane of mass graves covering all the Earth, you’ve come to the only state that would achieve that.)

Applying it to the end of the cold war was particularly and strangely boneheaded since though a long struggle, it wasn’t the longest in humanity’s history, and it would be like announcing the end of the French-English rivalry that took up most of pre-modern history signified that we shall not “learn war no more.”

Of course I wanted it to be true.  Not the end of history, as such — consider history is the doing of humans. The only way history ends is when humans end — but the peace. I hoped at least that we’d enter one of those halcion periods that have graced humanity now and then when there are no major struggles for a century or so.

I had small sons, and I figured it would be nice to grow old and see sons and grandchildren grow up, and if/when strife returned in a hundred years or so, it would affect my great grandkids whom I wished the best upon, but really, I’d never even meet.

Yeah… 9/11 was a rude wakening.  All the more so since that struggle has been going on for centuries, just shoved to the back and accreted by the other wars.  Heck, if a book I just read is correct all our itch in the middle East is the result of the Roman Empire falling, not to mention being sloppy about paying their mercenaries.  Because history is like that.  There are stones continually thrown forward, to disturb the clear lake of the future.

Which means we need to know history. We need to be aware of all that has gone before. People who aspire to lead the country — any country — either need to have an idea of history, or have counselors who do.

And it must not be a counterfeit, bizarre, just-so idea of history, as has been taught in our best universities for the last century at least.  Obama’s apology tour was based on Marxist just-so stories, under which the West, and particularly America, were to blame for everything wrong that ever happened in the world. (Just as humans are to blame for the extinction of the T-rex according to the Colorado Springs zoo when my kids were little — hopefully they’ve taken that piece of nonsense exhibit down with all the species that have gone extinct and a mirror so the little kids could contemplate “the only species that drives others to extinction.” (which is an appalling ignorance of natural history.) — I think in the left’s minds the west and the US are to blame for neolithic struggles, before either entity existed.) He also believed those twin devils “Capitalism” and “Colonialism” were not the basic impulses of mankind, but evils, uniquely, of the west and America.  So his conscious program to diminish us economically, to convince us to live with less (oh, yeah, he also fails to understand economics, because he was taught things that just ain’t so.) were done with the best intentions, and intended to lead to to peace and prosperity the world over.

Which of us wouldn’t live in more strained circumstances if that meant the end of famines in the world, or that people in Africa would have a little more.  Which of us would not cut back a bit, if that meant that the Middle East would feel more at ease and cease hating us.

Except of course, that the “history” he was taught was no such thing, rather a long and convoluted farrago of nonsense, strung end on end, starting with Marx’s just-so stories, already out of date in his own time (and never IN rationality) and then paved over by various historians who wanted to explain why the working classes hadn’t risen up, and why none of the vaunted predictions of their “scientific” system had come true.

And so what we got was years of strife and struggle all over the world with fractious countries seeing the US self-diminishment as weakness and taking it as an opportunity to strike, even as the US’s economic head-cold caused the rest of the world to catch financial pneumonia.

This is why knowing history, real history — which at this point necessitates going back to books published in the nineteenth century, save for a handful of authors, some of which are only trustworthy for one subject — is vital for the survival of civilization.

It didn’t much matter what they taught rulers when each kingdom could at most attack its neighbors, but for good or ill, modern technology has linked all our fates (and economies) together and someone with power to wreck or marshal an economy or an army having the utterly wrong story in his head can destroy the whole world.

When an entire generation, and several countries have undergone this kind of brainwashing…

Mind you, it is normal for human civilizations to do this. Utterly normal. But it isn’t healthy.

Part of the reason China screwed itself into a loop of never ending stagnation was the charming habit of burning history books (and at times killing all story telling grandmothers) every so often, and substituting them with doctored history books telling a just-so story.  In that way China could go on forever dreaming itself the center of the universe while once-barbarians caught up with it and then surpassed it.

Then there were the fake histories behind the iron curtains.  And let’s not start talking about the history books of the Middle East.

Thing is our progressives have learned from all this, and added refinements. (The people who dreamed the strategy — I’ve been reading Judgment in Moscow by Vladimir Bukovski, so I can say “in Moscow” and if you don’t think so it’s because you haven’t read it — were brilliant strategists.  The fact their followers are mostly incompetent baboons only makes it incoherent, but because of what it is, not ineffective.)

It starts with taking over the schools and making most people incompetent to read anything more complex than a bill (and even that.)  Actively making people uncomfortable with reading, in fact.  Then there is the indoctrination designed to catch those who somehow still manage to read for pleasure, and making them deathly afraid of reading the wrong message.  There is this concept that ideas are contagious, particularly the WRONG ideas (you know, capitalism, individual freedom, etc.)  Apparently one of our luminaries of sf has fallen for this.  (How could they not? After all they bought the so-compelling narrative of Marxism, and yet people keep fighting against it.  And they know they’re the smart ones, all their teachers/mentors/figures of authority told they so.)  This is why they’re so desperate to make sure no one hears the wrong message. It is also why they are afraid to read — really read — anyone who disagrees with them.  (Hence skim till offended, or just calling people the “exorcism words” of “racist/sexist/homophobic” no matter how out of context. I’ve seen someone arguing for the free market being called racist. Which makes about as much sense as screaming the Our Father at a watchmaker. Arguably less.) And if all else fails there is ostracism.  Think the wrong thoughts (even if they were the right thoughts last month) and we’ll shut you out and un-person you.  And look how we have already destroyed others, better than you.

This means that younger people are terrified of reading/encountering the wrong ideas, much less expressing them. And because ideas change every month, and every time and place will be judged by the concepts of this week, this means not reading anything more than a year or so old, or seeing anything more than a year or so old, or… well, walking past statues to a past they think is tainted and unclean.

This superstitious fear of knowledge of the past is going to undo us all, but on its way it’s destroying the arts.  And reinforcing the idea that there is no history.

I’ve mentioned before my shock when in my thirties we got a twenty something in our writers group (she’s now also a luminary of sf/f. Mostly f.) and her admission story was about a famous female sword fighter.  This woman had gone to the best universities, but when I — in my innocence — told her I liked the story, but was it alternate history, she informed me — primly — that no, there were always famous women fighters, men had just redacted history to hide them. At which point I thought she was uniquely stupid. (If only.)

Now it’s propagated and metastasized.  It’s much, much worse.  Because the conspiracy theory of “men hid women’s accomplishments” wasn’t stupid enough, they’ve now decided there is no history.  History and different ways of living, and different mind sets, and different beliefs, and different struggles (many of them brought about by different technology and living conditions) never happened. It’s not true. None of it is true. And because none of it is true, they’re not reading/taking an interest in any of it.

I’m not absolutely sure if this is predicated on a belief that reality itself is a lie (hey, they told that one to both my kids. Second son’s reaction was priceless, because that one is mine from his horns to the bottom of his hooves) or simply that everyone in the past lied to distress millenials sensitivities.

What I do know is that whenever these ducklings, in their 30s and 40s stray into the past in their movies and books the results are almost always hilariously bad. (Or vomitously bad.)

They seem to be unaware of the PURPOSE of setting, say, a movie in the past, with historical characters, and instead treat the past as a sort of fantasy land upon which today’s latest fads must be imposed. (And I don’t mean in the minor ways every generation does that because the past is a different country.)

Among the many ways in which the latest trip was hell, was the fact that my back of the seat screen, on the way across the Atlantic, would neither shut off, nor stop playing Mary Queen of Scots.

Look, I don’t watch history movies because I know myself, but this one seemed, just on the scenes I caught, to be particularly loony, with a black-Scotsman and a lady in waiting who was Asian. It wasn’t till I came back that I realized the director had done this on purpose and was crowing up and down the block that she (he? Don’t remember) wasn’t about to direct an all-white cast, and therefore had “remodeled” history.

The idea of history as something you remodel, by adding more fashionable ideas and perhaps a bigger bathroom was … never mind.

I have absolutely no problems with multi-race or multi-cultural casts, but if you want to do that, do a fantasy, a science fiction, or even an alternate history.  Make sure people understand that “it’s not always been like this.”  Of course, idiots think that casting the past as the present is USEFUL because honestly, they’ve probably been taught the past was always like the present and xyz lied about it.  And they want to make sure people today understand “it’s always been like this.”

But it hasn’t always been like this.  In fact, the bigotries and small-mindedness of a lot of the past are explained by the fact that travel was difficult and therefore each race and culture relatively isolated and able to indulge their tribalism to their heart content.  Making it all about “they lied” doesn’t prepare one for the tribalism resurfacing in today. It prepares one only to be a brainwashed soldier in a war of ideas for which one is woefully unarmed.

And then there is Robin Hood.  I don’t know why my husband does this, but not only does he watch these movies long after they become obviously crazy, but he watches the director’s commentary afterwards. I happened to have been cooking and the family room is right next to the kitchen.

The number of times I screamed “Because you’re an idiot, you ignorant toddler” at the self-preening idiots explaining why they’d done this or that is dwarfed by the number of snort-giggle “Oh, yeah, that’s new.”

To put this gently, the total idiots who made the latest Robin Hood movie, had actually no clue of the legend or its depth (okay, most liberals think it’s about robbing from the rich to give to the poor. Actually he robbed from the taxman, but never mind.) but they knew they had to make it “relevant” and cram into it as many up to date “issues” as they could think of.  And please, understand, by “think” in this case I mean “regurgitate half digested Marxist pap all over.”

So, you know, the crusades were dreamed up by the church for power. There was no danger from the Saracens. (This at a time when half of Europe was taken over by Moorish imperial ambitions.)  Little John is a moor. (Makes as much sense as tits on a bull) And, of course, a victim.  Maid Marian is — YAWN — a fighter and it’s very important to see her as a fighter, which completely recasts all the — YAWN — past.  And in the end it’s all about fighting these bad times in America under the most oppressive administration EVAH (which is why movies can be made criticizing the administration, just as they were in Germany under Hit–  Oh, wait.)

On top of all, their commentary oozes this assumption that war only exists because someone in the west wants power and makes their countries attack hapless and defenseless natives.

The idea that people who have dark eyes/hair or can tan also have agency, and can also form armies, or strike back in other ways is utterly alien to them, because St. Gramsci made these people the perfect victims, who are never evil.

It’s not just that the whole thing is idiotic, or that they think they’re being startlingly original while at the same time saying and doing only the approved things.

It’s more that despite both these movies having dismal performances, these ideas propagate.  I was quite startled, for instance, when marketing the Musketeer Mysteries, on being told I hadn’t done my research, because — of course — Porthos was a pirate, which I think was a creation of that execrable Disney movie.

And that a bad narration in head renders people unfit to be leaders of anything or even — solely — voters.

The hour is late, the peril grave, and we must rebuild.  Stone by stone — even if they are pebbles — we must rebuild.  While they tear down and fill new generations’ heads with mulch, we must rebuild.

Because it’s the only hope for civilization.

Fifty Shades of Marx – A Blast From The Past From October 2013

Yesterday on Facebook, someone took exception to my saying that Marxist ideas are ascendant in the world.  This shocked me so much I didn’t know how to react, and before I had time to explain – I was trying to finish the novel.  No, it’s not done yet.  Long story, but hey HVAC people this afternoon – people were in a big argument over whether or not we’re living in a police state.

I have opinions on that too (duh) but it has nothing to do with the incontrovertible fact that we’re soaked in Marxist philosophy on all sides.

It’s entirely possible, in fact, that my commenter isn’t aware of that, because fish aren’t particularly aware of water.  It takes an effort to become aware of the Marxist premises underlying everything because they’re taken for granted.  No one studies Marx himself, because we assume his theories as proven, and the stuff we live in, all over the world, is dictated by his premises.

This would be a little less damaging if the Hairy Grifter (he was once described as an angry, hairy inkspot) weren’t wrong about … everything, really.

You want to look at the decay of Western civilization?  It’s mostly the unexamined absorption of Marxist ideas.

Now, I’m one of those people who live too much in books and theories, and, as such, I can tell you why they’re absorbed and treated as gospel: it’s because they make internal sense.  This is not the same as having even a glimmer of real world application, of course, but they satisfy the minds of intellectuals by dividing everything into categories and presenting a (false but deceptively smooth) system for historical change and, in general, sounding REALLY plausible.

Take the Marxist theory of value.  It is utter nonsense of course. The idea is that what gives value to something is the labor put into it.  You can see how this would appeal to Marx, or, indeed, to any intellectual.  Laboring forever over a book that sells one copy is now a genuine, bonafide “injustice”.  The book is valuable.  Just look how much work you put into it.

The REAL theory of value, is much messier and doesn’t fit nicely within the pages of a book, even if you beat it with a hammer, because then the blood oozes out all over the theory.  The REAL theory of value goes something like this: something is worth what people are willing to pay for it.

This means if caveman Grog just was LUCKY to be near where the thunderbolt struck dry wood, the caveman could then sell the flaming branches for a year’s worth of hunt.  No work involved.  He just was there.

Our monkey brains want things to be “fair” (Dave Freer tells me fairness is wired into simians, part of being a social species that lives in small bands.  It helps survival.)

The fact that the Marxist theory of labor has buggerall to do with real life – you can spend seventy years polishing a dog turd.  It still won’t be worth a million – doesn’t matter.  It has such BEAUTIFUL internal logic.  (By which you should read no logic at all but an appeal to our back brains.)  It allows serious people behind desks to make decisions on what everything is worth.

No?

Well, let’s say that we’ve got out of mandatory prices in every day goods – the crash was that big when we tried that – but what do you think Obamacare will do but set prices for highly specialized knowledge and services.  And what do they set them based on?  Well, they set them based on how much effort they think is involved.  This is where we get that doctors should be paid like teachers.

It’s also part of the trite, ridiculous idea that professional athletes should make less than teachers, because teachers “work harder” or are “More important to society” or whatever.

It’s all bokum, but it’s penetrated through the society to such an extent that people – with a  serious air of much learning – will tell you that books will be better (of course) if they take longer to produce.  They will say the same about any art work, or discovery REGARDLESS OF WHAT HISTORY TELLS THEM ABOUT REAL BOOKS OR ART.

That last about teachers being more important to society than professional athletes?  Marx again.  We’re supposed to prioritize the good of the collective over the good of the individual.

You want to see a good basketball game or a good wrestling match and are willing to pay for it?  Why you selfish capitalist pig.  Don’t you know the children need better teachers?  We should pay more to the teachers, so they’ll be better.  It’s for the good of society.

This has penetrated everything, too, including literary criticism.  It’s now all “is this book socially relevant?”

What in living daylight this has to do with being a good book (or poem or play) is beyond me.  No, seriously. Look, Shakespeare wrote his “socially relevant” works.  They’re the historical plays and by and large we ignore them.  They’re certainly not among the most watched/read.  Those are the ones where he touched humanity on the raw and took us, despite ourselves, on an emotional ride: Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night, yes, even Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Scottish Play.

I’m fairly sure if asked about relevance, Jane Austen would think Mansfield Park, having to do with raising kids and the behavior of young women, and the division between classes was the most relevant of her works.  To us it reads turgid and infused with a totally alien morality (unless we belong to particularly strict sects.)  Pride and Prejudice, though, which, again captures humanity in a nutshell?  THAT we have read and watched and dreamed ragged.

BUT publishing is being run according to “relevant” works, which of course means agreeing with the social vision of those in power which is – largely – Marxist.

This is because it is the vision being promoted in college, where they actually DO Marxist literary analysis.  (Even if Marxism had any point of contact with reality, using a political theory to analyze why a book is good or enduring is sort of like using an ax to comb your hair.)

Then we get into sociology/politics/moral/religion, where the idea of collective guilt and collective punishment has taken hold.  And it’s insane.  (It’s particularly insane in Christianity where for the sake of ten righteous men G-d would have spared an entire corrupt city. [He probably would have gone to one, except he could tell the one to skeedadle with his family.])

It’s not just that they assign guilt to people on the basis of what group they belong to.  It’s that they throw people into groups based on characteristics that don’t mean anything.  Take White Males (not mine. Okay, the boys are technically Latin and look it.  But they’re still mine.  You can’t take them.)  I live with three of them, and they’re all very different people.  I have a multitude of male friends, gay and straight (I always got along better with men than with women.  Probably the result of growing up with an older brother and HIS friend group.  In fact, right now I have more women in my inner circle than ever before, and it startles me a little, but I still have more men.) None of them is guilty of slavery, sexism, exploitation.  If  any of them enjoys white male privilege they haven’t done it where I could see it.  Most of them work really hard and don’t get any breaks that they didn’t fight for for years.  In fact, particularly in federal jobs, women are likely to be promoted ahead of them.

Mostly what they get is blamed for the “historical oppression of women” and slavery and stuff that wasn’t happening when they were born, wasn’t happening when their fathers were born, and into which they had absolutely no say.

Now take white women.  Look, do you really think their ancestors didn’t participate in any oppression going among white men?  Why, of course they did.  Good heavens, we had white female queens.  But they’re “victims” because women are in the victim class of Marxism.  And so women now are born without sin and OWED.  No, it doesn’t matter what they’re owed.  Whatever their little heart desires, I guess.  They also always get to claim discrimination when things don’t go their way.

(Were women oppressed?  Some of them, undoubtedly.  Some still are.  Look at Islam and some of the more traditional cultures.  Mostly it has to do with the horrors of biology and the fact women couldn’t control their own reproduction until we had the pill.  But that doesn’t fit in Marxists’ pointy heads, see.)

Entire tribes in Africa subsisted from hunting other tribes and putting them on boats headed for slavery.  But these days anyone born of those slave-selling tribes is considered as much of a victim as the rest, because he’s black and he’s from Africa and therefore he’s a “victim.”  He’s a “victim” even if he was born to one of the Kleptocrats of Africa and his pampered feet never left the limo to touch the ground.

And let’s not get into social classes.  That will make your head hurt.  Is a small businessman, owner of his own business, a worker?  No? Because Marx said the workers didn’t own the means of production?  BUT what if this poor guy paints houses for a living and spends his time schlepping paint and ladder around and working REALLY HARD.  Nope, he’s still not a worker, because you see, Marx’s vision was limited to industrial revolution England and limited is the point.  He wasn’t even very up to date on his reading.

AND if that small business man hires an employee to help schlep the paint cans, he’s suddenly a guilty part and an exploiter.  Even though most small businessmen will make payroll before they pay themselves, and work into the night, while the employee keeps regular hours.

But, you say, Sarah, no one takes the Marxist theory of classes seriously anymore!

Really?  No?  That is why we have people talking about the “one percent” as though they were an homogeneous group?  That’s why we have taxes on people who “make too much.”  (Too much for what?) That’s why our entire tax system is based on redistribution.  Because for a long time it was believed that extreme redistribution was the way to stop communist revolution, which the scientific theory of history said would come otherwise.  This is how the Scandinavian countries got in the trap they’re in, and we too, just later and slower.

And that’s why people can’t be IQ tested the old way, because IQ tests are “inherently racist” – let alone that this theory is based on the idea that every race is alike within itself, and therefore is a racist claim in itself.  That’s why women are given breaks to get into STEM degrees, because even if their performance is inferior to keep them out would be sexist.  Their under performance is because their group are traditional victims!

ALL our society is run according to the theory of classes and designated historical victims.  And our churches.  Don’t get me started on our churches.

There was, circulating on Facebook, the story of this minister, hired by a mainstream congregation, who decided to try a stunt and come to his first service dirty, disheveled and looking like a homeless man.  He then “discovered” that his congregation didn’t “behave like Christians.”  They didn’t eject the man, mind you, but they gave him a seat in the back, and clearly kept an eye on him.

They didn’t ask him to sit up front and treat him as an honored guest, therefore they weren’t Christ-like, and when the minister did his big reveal, he excoriated them, and this got written about and distributed with approval.

Had I had hiring power in that congregation, I’d have called him aside after that stunt, told him that sorry, but the holy book in this church isn’t bound in red, given him his paycheck and a handshake.

But, SARAH, you’ll say. Christ got beggars and…

Yes, indeed.  And Christ’s world was very different.  It was very easy – in fact it was the norm – for hard working people to find themselves starving and destitute.  Without help, without any form of social services, MOST PEOPLE WERE POOR.  Helping the poor, and yes, even the prostitutes (I still wonder what He was up to with tax collectors. Never mind) most people starved or worse.

BUT we don’t live in Christ’s world.  There are layers of government services and private charities.  Most of our homeless are in fact mentally ill, drug addicted or both.

How many of us have NEVER seen a homeless man expose himself/been threatened by a homeless person/been pursued by a beggar yelling curses?  If you haven’t, you must either be very lucky or live in a very small place.

I’m sorry, but people go to church with their families, including small and vulnerable children.  When a dirty, disheveled homeless person shows up, you’re going to wonder what he’s going to do next.  Putting him at the back and watching him isn’t lack of charity.  It’s lack of death wish.  (Not too many years ago, a man shot himself in the bathroom of a church in town.  A homeless, mentally disturbed man.  If they’d watched him and kept an eye, perhaps that wouldn’t have happened.  Before the elections in 2008, two naked men showed up outside the church door of a church in town, supposedly to protest priestly abuse but in fact they were both mentally ill.)

These days, in the world we live in, keeping the homeless at a distance is called “self preservation instinct.”  It doesn’t mean we don’t help them, but we can’t treat any homeless person who shows up, particularly a dirty disheveled one, as an innocent victim who IS NOT going to do something awful suddenly and for no reason.  (Look, the sane homeless aren’t usually dirty and disheveled and you won’t know they’re homeless unless they tell you.  Yes, I’ve seen someone wash AND PUT ON FULL MAKE UP in a public bathroom.  People do that when they care and are trying to find help.)

A priest/minister who doesn’t see that is in fact drinking Marx by the cupful and thinks in terms of classes.  And in the world of classes the homeless are just “victims” and thus entitled to the best treatment REGARLESS of personal safety or the facts of life about most of the homeless today.

I suspect Christ might tell the man a thing or two about causing scandal, in fact.  It was, if nothing else, a piece of self-aggrandizing, showing a lack of respect and priory condemnation of his future congregation based on class.  “They’re comfortable, therefore they must be afflicted.”

SOCIAL justice was never part of the gospel or of any Western religion.  Justice, guilt and sin are individual and expiated as such.  (Yes, ancient Judaism, but it’s different when you’re in a land RULED by G-d.  And even there… ten men would spare a city.)

Only Marx thinks that on the terrible day of judgment in which he doesn’t believe, people will come before their Lord in classes and ranks of standing, and be condemned or forgiven according to things they could do nothing about.

In fact making the homeless into a Marxist victim-class precludes helping them as individuals.  You can’t say they need to be clean or moderate their behavior, even if you offer them help towards that.  Because they’re discriminated against, see?  And heaven forbid you try to help the mentally ill, because then you’re the Soviet Union, incarcerating “dissenters.”  Yay and verily, ask a college sociology professor and he’ll tell you that by standing on the corner and peeing himself, a homeless man is protesting heartless capitalism.  (The same heartless capitalism that allows him to eat at a soup kitchen and gives him clothes and sundries, no questions asked.  You got it.)

And don’t get me into the Marxist view of history.  Faced with the fact that the proletariat has not risen up as the great master predicted, they keep finding surrogates, mostly in third world countries, and treating THOSE as the international equivalent of homeless people.

You know, Somalia is starving because you’re rich, you bastard!

The fact that the aid western countries sent is pilfered or left to rot, the fact that their – Marxist, most of them educated at the Patrice Lumumba university in Moscow – are kleptocrats who line their pockets over those of their citizens, the fact that our surplus of donated goods destroy local industry has nothing to do with it.

You see, Marx thought that wealth was a finite pie.  That meant that for you to be rich someone else had to be poor.  And colleges still teach it that way.  No, seriously.

Apparently knowing that what kept a tenth of the population in bare subsistence in medieval times now keeps ten times as many beyond the dreams of medieval kings means NOTHING to them.  There’s finite wealth in the world, and if you take more than you “need” (from each according… yeah) then someone else will starve.

And those countries are by the way, always victims, because the “colonialists” took their “raw materials.”

No, I kid you not.  Seriously.  They are poor because people in the eighteenth century got gold or iron or cotton or something from them.  That makes them poor forever.  It’s the evil of Colonialism.  The kid’s college Geography book tried to sell that one.  I pointed out to the kid that Portugal was colony and colonizer and if it were a matter of stealing raw materials, then Portugal should be the richest country on Earth.  (And we won’t go into how fair trade isn’t stealing, even if fair trade for the time was something else.)

I’m sorry, Portuguese culture and the made infatuation with various forms of socialism probably has more to do with the mess the country is in then the fact that the Romans took all our gold.  (Which is why the area beneath the village looks like swiss cheese and sometimes vast portions cave after a heavy rain.)  Or is it Portugal is comfortable (relatively) for reasons having nothing to do with the fact it stole piles of gold from South America.  Which one is it?  It makes my head hurt.

None of Marx’s theories stands up to real world examination or real world scrutiny.  And yet you have people running around declaring themselves Marxist and neo-Marxist.  And, inexplicably, people don’t point and laugh.

His ideas have penetrated how things are done UNEXAMINED.  Which is the only way they could penetrate because if you examine them they crumble into incoherence.

The last time I pounded on Marx some twit informed me that it was very useful for literary analysis by which he (she? I don’t remember) meant that it’s a handy self-contained system that you can apply to books and decide what is good and what isn’t by what conforms and what doesn’t.

It makes me think of that mythical king who cut off the parts of men who didn’t fit into his box.

It might be easy to apply, but it doesn’t touch reality at ANY point.

And this is where Western civilization is.  Admitted (and a lot of is admitted on college campus) or not, we’re bound in fifty shades of Marx.

And no one has given us a safe word.

Yes, I have other posts burning a hole in my head, so this week might be post-rich.

I also figured out what’s delaying the writing. Until I recover my IP from Baen I’m not continuing my mainline novels in those universes (there might be others, but it seems kind of pointless, since it would be new characters anyway, and so, in a way, starting anew, while in the same universe, which has fans who would be upset at starting anew.  Though there might be a sub-series called USAians, starting in the 22nd century. Haven’t decided yet.)  I have two other worlds, one fantasy-sf (don’t ask) and another a vast overhanging universe that will probably consume all my other future space operas, even if they seem unrelated.

Having started a novel in each, I came to a grinding halt.  Why?  Well, that took me time to figure out.  It boils down to this (beyond weird medicine interactions that made both my ADHD and depression unmanageable, and wedding and other life stuff that I haven’t talked about here): for the last fifteen years, I’ve written in long-established worlds that I knew like the back of my hand (whether my own or others) or historic stuff which has its own worldbuilding.  So, the stutters I’ve been experiencing are when I run up against …. something.  Like “She comes from an expensive, ultra-developed world, named…. named…” And then the ADHD takes over and I go off to clean toilets.

So today, the writing will happen with a Rocket book notebook (you type in it, then take a picture and it does handwriting recognition, even for my horrible handwriting) at my elbow, for notes when I hit an unknown unknown.  It’s a self-generating world bible.  Since I’ll probably spend the rest of my life in this world (with expeditions to DST, should that ever come back to me) at least for space-opera, I might as well build the foundations right.  Yes, it’s a lot like work and I’m lazy (duh, I’m a writer.) But it has to happen.

Anyway, so that’s been the hold up (on top of everything else.)

Now to the topic on hand: how much being born and raised in Portugal influenced my writing.

My fan eventually came back with the “But I want to know what great Portuguese literary works influenced your writing.”

So let’s talk about that.  You see, the problem is not that Americans are ignorant of other countries. Every country is ignorant of other countries.  It is that Americans, born and bred, tend to not realize every country is not the US.  The concept of how foreign and bizarre things can get is not even in the compass.

As I tried to think of one, just one, Portuguese literary work that influenced my work, I came up dry.  Sure, there were some children’s books and fairy tales that influenced me, but they are few and far between compared to foreign ones even there.  I’d say when I discovered fairy tales my favorite were grandma’s editions of the Countess de Segur.  (And I only discovered fairy tales at 16 or so, realizing I had a hole in my upbringing.)  If you’re into fairy tales, google her.  Her stuff is in Guttenberg, and frankly deserves better editions.

It’s not that I didn’t read Portuguese books. I did.  If they came near me, I read them.  It’s more that I don’t remember them/didn’t read them preferentially.

I have a theory for that.

Mostly I read Enid Blyton (all of them, even the boarding school books my brother disapproved of) then graduated to Rex Stout and Agatha Christie, and eventually fell headlong into SF/F.  Other things fell in along the way, including but not limited to Sir Walter Scott and Dumas.  But in general those were my influences.

Portuguese prose writing (more on that later) tends to have a really slow tempo and a weird, kind of flat reminiscent voice.  This is not just 19th century (most of the works kicking around) it’s what allowed me to detect Portuguese writers using English names in US or UK anthologies.

The more recent Portuguese work is all message fic, and the message is very po-mo, very left, and I already got a surfeit of that at school, so literature classes became “How little can I read of this while passing the test.”  For novels, at least.  Most short stories are short-shorts, and usually also message fic, or “done for the shock or twist ending.”  Those often have a decent voice, but the genre is limiting.

The reason for the state of Portuguese literature is this: there is no money in it.

It’s not just that Portugal is TINY (Brazil is bigger, but the language can grate.)  It’s that most Portuguese aspire to write SOMETHING.  So Portuguese publishers are determined not to shell out a cent for the work.

Under such conditions, popular literature doesn’t exist.  Amusing the public is a DISTANT and remote thing.  The publishers are going to make some money off these free books, anyway, and why bother?  They try rather to publish things that schools will put on their reading program.  The results are predictable. These aren’t things (by and large, short-shorts excepted) you read for fun.  They are more for display than for reading for adventure or fun or… anything.

In this day and age, I’ll be a dog if I understand why a bunch of Portuguese would-be writers don’t band together, arrange for having their work translated into English, and start putting out dual-language anthologies.  If I had more time, I’d suggest it/run it myself.

And maybe that would change things.  But maybe like news/opinion blogs it is too weird for the European mind?

Anyway that’s Portuguese prose.  Its fate is what always comes to things that are not monetized: they become display items to the elite and ossify.

I used to be really sad — and my dad is heartbroken, particularly on the mysteries — that none of my books were translated into Portuguese.  Until I found out how few they have of Pratchett (and those only in Brazilian English) and none that I can find of Correia.

Portuguese poetry was always an exception, because the language is suited to it, and Portuguese write poetry like they breathe. So there’s always a ton of Portuguese Poetry that I like, and I own several books.  And it has influenced me to the extent I use rhetorical tricks first learned from memorized poems.  I not only think well of Fernando Pessoa: if I ever have the opportunity I’m going to make him four versions of a time traveler that got lost (those who know his poetry will appreciate that.)

Anyway, this concludes this dive into the origins of my writing.  And now I need to go do some of it. (GROAN.)  I hate the work, but it’s the price I pay to get the stories out of my head and make money to keep a roof over my head.  See you tomorrow.

……. First, coffee.

In Flanders Fields

by John McCrae, May 1915

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Europe is dying of a WWI wound. And America is suffering the contagion.

The best of Europe at the time died in Flanders (And France) fields, and all the poppies that grow upon them obscure that in their absence the weasels, the sentimentalists, and most of all the demagogues seized upon their sacrifice to tell future generations what it meant.

Not even World War II, born of new internationalist movements (even though one of them emphasized imagined national identity) convinced people that the problem was not nationalism, instead of, say, crazy prescriptive just-so philosophies, or totalitarianism, or considering humans no more than widgets.

And so the world went careening after “internationalism” and “world government.” Both of which are not just bad ideas, they’re suicidal ideas, where the West is concerned.

Race is of relatively little importance in human affairs.  (Genetics, maybe, but even then it’s iffy.) Culture, however, is of massive, overpowering importance.  And culture is markedly difficult of change.  Archeological anthropologists can trace survivals of culture in places where the normal human pattern before the 20th century prevailed, and all the men were killed by the invading tribe, and all the women impregnated by the invaders.

Words and tales survive of the old culture, because mothers sing lullabies and talk of homely things.  Patterns of behavior survive too, enough to make the new colony not a replica of the motherland.

Since — thank heavens — none of us is talking of invading the whole world and replacing it with western culture by killing everyone over the age of three — thank heavens because even when very mild and relatively successful rule by conquerors has odd effects. Witness Japan’s population crash — talking about a world government or internationalism is insane talk.  Inviting horders of unaccultured (and unacculturable because hordes) less successful (by the only measurement that counts, of decreasing human disease, hunger, misery and mortality) cultures is inviting them to influence your culture till you too can’t survive.  And letting the world tell you how to live results in rule by envy, at least if you’re as rich and powerful as the US.

It’s time to take a deep breath.  Remember the dead of world war I — sacrificed to a web of crazy international alliances and the last reverberations of the industrial revolution disturbing society — remember the dead of world war II — dead over infatuation with a crazy ideology that promised heaven on Earth and the need to stop it — remember the victims of communism, and those who died fighting it — dead over infatuation with a crazy ideology that promised heaven on Earth and the need to stop it — and here, at the eye of the storm take a deep breath and reconsider everything you were taught.

Then refuse to hate your country or your culture.  Refuse to hate the West too.  Sure, we’ve made mistakes historically, but what culture hasn’t.  And at least what resulted is the best society for humans yet, where our poor suffer from obesity and expensive addictive substances.

Square your shoulders.  Those young men, sleeping under Flanders fields, might have died in a misguided clash from the age of empires, in a misguided attempt to end all wars.  The war in which they died is best known as the War of the Two Defeated.

But they were the best of the west.

And we will not let them down.

It’s time to rebuild.

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.  One book per author per week. Amazon links only.-SAH*

J. D. BELL’S FIRST BOOK:  Selai.

 

“The first thing you do, you kill the sheriff.” This is a bit of writers’ lore that generally works, and JD Bell displays it done well. SELAI hits the ground running and doesn’t slow down. It’s not really an urban fantasy because the setting is more varied and would better be described as modern fantasy. Bell establishes his characters quickly, and leaves puzzles like fishhooks in the story. This locks the reader in as one tries to make sense of novel and totally alien concepts. Bell escapes the trap of simply reheating or rehashing the common tropes in favor of striking out in new directions and draws the reader into a world where our quotidian world is only a small part of the universe. For an action-packed read in which the rules are not, at first, clearly perceived, this book is ground-breaking.

James K Burk, author of “Taking Hope” and “The Twelve.”

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike

o 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: Order

I’m perhaps unusual — and it’s perhaps part of the uniquely Portuguese upbringing — in that my earliest memories include story-songs.

Maybe not absolutely unique. A lot of European culture included folk ballads that told stories in song.  Fairytales, mostly, but also strange otherwordly happenings.

Mine were mostly fado. And it wasn’t just being sung to sleep with them (though that was part of it, my being a sickly premature baby who often had trouble breathing through the night, I spent a lot of time being held and sung to. And both parents have operatic-grade voices, well suited to the exercise.)  It was the fact that mom worked from home, and like many women who work at manual (okay, hers was mind too, but the execution was mostly hand) work, she amused herself by singing to herself (when she wasn’t listening to radio programs, mostly on history and mythology because apples, trees, etc.)

Fado, for those of you who don’t know it — go look it up on youtube. I’ll wait — is mostly mournful songs about doomed love.  So, Country, you guys say.  Eh.  Kind of.  If you overlay the left-over-Arab-colonization bullshit about fate.  Yeah.

It’s funny, and I must have been an unusually cynical three year old because my earliest memories of mom’s songs, I dismissed all the ones about a mother’s love as “mommyist propaganda.” But the other ones?

When you’re a kid, you’re sort of a sponge, and you look around everywhere for info about what the world is actually like. EVERYWHERE. I remember looking for clues in brother’s biology books, pamphlets he brought home, books he and my cousin read which were like spaghetti westerns written ten to the day or something, Disney comics, comments dropped by grandma…  And extrapolating. Grandma would say something about how chickens acted when broody, and I would apply it to pregnant women.  (Not even joking.)

Kids are WEIRD.

And I was constantly bombarded with the idea you were born with a “star” with “fate.”

So, how much of this made it into my writing?

I don’t know.

Obviously I use prophecy and foretelling in my fantasy.  Or at least in my historical fantasy.  And sometimes in my historicals, period, since people at the time believed in these things.

And obviously, my stories — at least short stories — often get their emotional punch from a sense of tragedy and trust me, guys, there’s nothing quite so tragic as fado stories,  but… How much does it seep in, really?

I don’t know.

I know I have that issue in my life. I keep realizing I’m planning for things as though there were a fate, and I have to either help or combat it.  Which is deranged, because even if there were predestination, free men and women are honor bound to disbelieve it, because it’s evil and counters free will.  I mean, even if it really were the way the world worked, we should fight it.

Only I don’t think it is.  Except sometimes my back brain defaults to that as an assumption.  Except…  I don’t know if that’s from fados or just normal human nonsense.  We really have trouble with the idea that the future is unwritten, at a fundamental back-bone level. As a species.

Then there are the other songs and stories. A lot of what got sung are medieval ballads, and somehow my crazy family preserved the original/close to versions.  Possibly because most of our women were literate, and either wrote them down or read them in compilations.

There is the one that starts with “It was midnight when the blind man came and knocked thrice on the middle door.”  It doesn’t end well. Or at least it doesn’t end well, if you go with older son’s interpretation.  Having caught me singing it while working, and understanding just enough to get the gist he said “Would you stop singing about death?”

But you wouldn’t know it from the 17th or 18th century version in which the blind man is a king and the girl becomes a queen or whatever.

Those I can trace more directly to my writing, because certain situations in them fascinate me.  One of them being the shepherdess who suddenly becomes a princess.  “Put rings on her fingers and silk on her back” is something that gives me chills for some reason.  Perhaps the sudden change in fortunes.

For the record I’m also fascinated by the “If you like pina coladas” situation in which two cheating spouses find out they are perfect for each other.  But I l like in all sorts of other situations, like two friends conspiring for opposite sides realize they are still friends, etc.  For some reason, the situation is very common to fado. Fado “corrido” which is usually tragicomic.

Other than that?

Most Portuguese literature has a slow and tragic feel.  At least most traditional Portuguese literature.  But not only.  I used to be able to identify Portuguese writers in anthologies, even when they were writing under English names, simply by the “feel” and tempo.

That I was aware of when I first started writing for publication.  That I’ve tried to counter.  At least, unless it’s a short story that calls for it, and I want to emphasize it.  Even then, the tempo is a problem, even when the tragedy isn’t.

So, if you’ve ever read one of my stories that left you sobbing and puddled on the floor? Thank a fado.

If you think I need to speed up my narration and add more action?  You’re not wrong. And I’m working on it. But you should probably curse a fado.

I’ll go into other bits and pieces that might have seeped in, Monday.

For now? I don’t know my influences, except for the slow tempo, are unique.  As I said, all old European-upbringing people would have them, and I find echoes in Pratchett and Christie.

Like most human beings, I came to writing with baggage. And if we look carefully it goes all the way to the Iliad.  At least. Maybe further back.

And all I can say is: And? Other than being human, what does that mean?
I don’t know.

In one of his more eloquent moments, my son referred to Portugal as an iceberg in time: whatever you see of the present is a tiny part, towed and moved by the massive weight of history.

He wasn’t wrong, of course. Part of the freight on Portuguese culture is the “way we do things” some of which go back to Rome, and it’s impossible to see how counterproductive they are, because they have become “the way we do things.”  In fact, they are largely invisible, just like water is to a fish.

Not that it hasn’t broken, at times, with traumas or — forgive me for using such a term — a paradigm shift, such as the discoveries. But — like art styles, which is what makes Portuguese monumental architecture so fascinating — it never really goes away, it just gets overlaid.

Europe has come the closest I’ve seen to changing the culture, and it’s not really, it’s just another layer.

How does this influence someone growing up in it?  Well, history is impossible to ignore, and you get a sense of how tightly packed it was.

It is comparable to the two Victorians we lived in for the last 30 years or so: you couldn’t turn around and change something, without becoming acutely aware of all the people who’d lived there the hundred years before you, and everything they’d done and changed.

The US, in contrast, is like living in the nice suburban home we have now.  Sure, it was hastily built and it shows in places, and the only couple who lived there before us never wasted an opportunity to do something in the most bass awkward and bizarre way possible, but overall, it’s just a nice relatively young house and much easier to change because you’re not dealing with a century of stranger’s (and strange) decisions and short cuts.

So how did growing up with that freight of the past affect my writing?

I don’t know.  I don’t know for the same reason you can’t be on the street and watch yourself walk by.  J. K. Rowling spent two or three years in the city next to the village I grew up in, i.e. the place I spent most of my time after elementary school.  People keep tracing to her work all sorts of peculiarities of the city.  Though I’m not sure they’re right about the cloaks and suits, because you know, Cambridge and other university towns int he UK preserve medieval attire too.  Honestly, though, I can see the platform whatever and a half coming from her experience with Portuguese railroads, because it often feels like your train is leaving from a secret platform. (And anyway I had all sorts of daydreams tied in to the Portuguese railroads and stations, mostly because they’re chaotic and never throw anything away: there’s carriages and abandoned trains in forgotten byways. But mostly for the same reason I had daydreams about roads.  “I wanna get out of this place.”)

I know that I grew up in a family — or at least with a dad — that cherishes history and historical accounts, as well as legends, and in a place so old that it’s thought to be the longest inhabited area of Portugal.

There were Roman mines in the woods near the train line. There were Roman and medieval inscriptions in the woods dad took me through. It’s impossible not to be aware of these people, that they lived there, and that they and their way of life are mostly gone.

Does it change anything?

I don’t know.  There is only so much deep history you can put in a story, or a future history, before your readers roll their eyes and go “oh, please, now.”

And you have to make the events right there more important, right? Or else, you get lost in grey goo. “Sure, there’s a barbarian invasion, and civilization might collapse.  There’s been many civilizations. Yawn.”

I think perhaps — at least son said this as we were trampling around Porto’s oldest part, (oldest house stills standing dating to the 9th century, before the country existed) — most games and books in the US lack that feel.  The feel of deep time, of things just getting overlaid and surviving wars and revolutions, etc, and still being used, more or less for the purpose they were built.

Maybe I can write more convincingly about stuff being really old and overlaid, and the feel people lived here a long time.  Maybe.

Because with writing the problem is always that you have to both be aware enough of it to write it and communicate it to the next person.  And mostly, what really comes through is the stories people tell themselves about the past, which tend to have a certain sameness to them, whether the past is actually there or not, if that makes sense.

Next up: songs of fate.

This series of reposts/posts started partly because someone in Sarah’s Diner, on FB asked me what was Portuguese about my writing.  Which set me thinking.

Years ago, I’d have said “my writing tends to be more poetic than average.”  Only I’m not sure that’s true anymore, or at least not in most circumstances. I have fought it pretty hard the last several years, mostly because unless it’s a certain type of writing (say, involving Shakespeare and fairies, for instance) it gets in the way of readers experiencing the story. If you stop and marvel at the words, you’re not following, much less living the action.

And yeah, the poetic thing is absolutely a Portuguese survival.  Not only because Portuguese as a language approaches meaning in spirals and therefore is more suited to poetry than to any other type of writing, but because Portuguese culture emphasizes and favors (makes heroes of) poets.

It is said that every Portuguese has a poetry book in his drawer (written by himself)and I used to doubt it but not anymore.

What’s truly amazing is reading history books written in Portuguese and seeing all the extra words added to a sentence to “make the rhythm work” even though the book is non fiction, factual, and the added words add nothing.  Heck, sometimes there are subsidiary phrases that make no sense, but are there to add the rhythm and the feel. Which to a now thoroughly accultured mind reads really odd, let me tell you.

Now, Charlie Martin, who occasionally edits me, says that my writing still has a Latin Rhythm (please, make it not be the Girl From Ipanema) and I can sort of buy that, at least when I’m writing off the cuff and letting myself go.  Perhaps like the accent in speaking it is something trained in so early that you cannot lose it, no matter how you try.

I know it’s given people very odd ideas of who I am and what my ambitions in the field are, probably from the beginning.  People have thought that I aspired to be Faulkner, when in fact I can’t even read Faulkner without getting impatient, and people — by which I mean NYC publishers and agents — have assumed I aspired to or was best suited to literary fantasy and then were horribly disappointed I wanted to write “Space Opera trash.”

Eh. Indie makes that not a big deal, though there must be something still remaining, considering I often get praised for “beautiful language” on something I wrote while sick or sleepy and which I only gave a cursory look to to kill typos after.

So, that’s possible. Something of a penumbra of Latin might remain on my word choice and rhythm, though I’d argue it’s grown much fainter or at least much more controllable over the last 20 years.

But that was not what the person asking wanted to know.  They wanted to know what ur-story, what trained in bit of thought came along for a ride in my plots and character creation, which would never have been there if I hadn’t spent my first 22 years in Portugal and hadn’t spoken Portuguese almost exclusively for the first 14 of those.

It’s a fair question, but one which, like almost everything in life, is far more complicated to answer than it might seem at first glance.

Because your early training in infancy is everything from legends to lullabies, from the environment you grew up in, to the the unspoken assumptions of your relatives.

Now, I am perhaps more conscious of those than most people, having had to deconstruct them as part of my attempt to acculturate.  But how far does the unraveling go? How far the root?

I don’t know if this is of any interest to anyone but myself — feel free to tell me to shut up — but if anyone else wants to follow along tomorrow we’ll look at “A sense of history” which is definitely different than if I’d grown up in the US and which arguably influences everything, including future history.

Recently I was reading a book by a sensible-sounding Christian author about the dangers of fiddling with the supernatural, and was lulled along, in a sense of “that makes sense” until I hit her condemnation of D & D and how it prepares people for deals with the devil.

To be fair, this might have been like when I was following along with the geologist describing Pangaea, and suddenly hit his conviction that dinosaurs are circling the Earth in a world-spaceship.  Because moments later this lady was going on about backward Satanic messages in Rock and Roll and moments later of fantasy books that talk of magic in general, both of which seem to be to put it mildly exaggerated dangers.

After all, it might be a danger to believe the devil doesn’t exist, but an equal danger is to attribute every little thing that annoys us to him, when it’s adequately explained by human folly, frailty and perverseness or when, like fantasy books in general (in particular some are pernicious, as are all kinds of books), there is nothing to explain beyond “people like to dream about harmless stuff that doesn’t hurt them.” Though I suppose it might be baffling to people who don’t like to indulge their imagination or who, like this lady, might be prone to more danger from their imagination than others.

But yesterday night, possibly because of Fever, The Return, I found myself thinking of D & D in particular. I’ve played it a total of one time, and what I noticed about it is that it “pulls” from the same place as writing.  Which is why I haven’t indulged since, because I save my work for paying work (in theory. Soon, I promise, there will be finished stuff. I hate my body.)

I should explain this lady, in the rest of her book, details some harrowing possibly dangerous supernatural experiences, before her conversion and invoking of protection of religious prayers and symbols.

This is something I can’t really explain to anyone who hasn’t/can’t experience it, but trust me, some of us can have this stuff happen to us; there is a frame of mind that invites it; and this woman seemed unusually prone to it, and also unable to tell good from bad at a fundamental level and I don’t mean just at the level all of us can be fooled, but having had no instruction at all on what can go wrong when messing with such things.  Maybe that’s fairly normal for the US? Maybe I’m lucky to have grown up in a place where old traditions and old dangers are remembered?

So perhaps she sees exaggerated dangers, because she is unusually prone to falling into trouble? Kind of like I’m terrified of driving in a six lane highway because I know my reflexes are slow? (It’s the other mugs I’m afraid of.)

Because of my job, I do a lot of reading on paranormal research/legends.  I’d recommend Hungry Ghosts and Signals in the Storm on the subject.

Most — like 98% — of paranormal phenomena and research are prone to the trickster effect.  Not just because the people involved are often tricksters (and worse, lie to themselves) but because there seem to be, for lack of a better term “trickster spirits” out there that will mess with anyone who undertakes research or experimentation in the area.  Or if you prefer, because our subconscious tricks us and plays bad jokes on us, when we put ourselves in a susceptible mood.

That said, I suspect this writer’s (and other’s) issues with D & D because D & D brought into the “susceptible mood” (or mode) people who are not writers, and therefore not used with the fact that your imagination/subconscious/whatever kicks up fully formed eideations that seem compellingly real.

There are two types of writers. Those who work in the limnear dark, the “muse led” or gateway writers (as Kate Paulk puts it) and those to whom writing is a process purely of the rational mind.

There are dangers to each side of it.  The purely rational people are often beguiled by how rational they are and how they must instruct all the rubes out there, resulting in just-so stories, stories that virtue signal, and stories that would put an insomniac to sleep.

I’m not going to say these are the sum total of such rational writers.  I know such writers who are very good and produce really good work.  And I’m not going to say the sum total of snoozers are produced by such writers, because there are muse-led writers whose muses are deeply perverse or perhaps filled with a sense of their moral superiority, who knows? (Maybe those really are Satanic? ;) )

On the side of the muse-led writers, there are perhaps more dangers.  One of them is of course that you never actually finish anything, because the dang things really are tricksters and pull you from story to story, never finishing.  (In which case, you need to learn to train them, and exert discipline.)  Another is that you fall victim of the trickster effect and your work is at best incoherent and at worse evil. (I.e. it espouses or promotes objectively evil principles and ideas that even you, in the cool light of day, feel revolted by.)  The answer to the first is to know enough of story telling technique (I can’t recommend Dwight Swain enough) to fix it in post.  The answer to the second is of course to know good from evil and stop before you embark down that road, no matter how seductive (and it is always seductive.)

There is also the problem that your work schedule can get waylaid by a sudden, overpowering idea and that this thing is not totally under your control. I’ve been dealing with that as best I can for over thirty years. It hasn’t killed me. It’s also not wonderful for the career.

The big danger, though, it’s that you’ll come to believe your own writing.  I mean, that you’ll come to believe the thing is alive and has an important message for the world.

I know writers who’ve gone down that path, and it never ends well. Often it changes the person into… something else.*

It’s rather like the effect on people who go full hearted and unprotected to play with the supernatural. It leads the same way.

The problem, I’d say, like Terry Pratchett, is forgetting which voice is your own. Trusting the wisdom of what comes to you fully formed better than your own mind/beliefs.  If you believe in the supernatural, then the problem is trusting invisible things/ethereal beings more than flesh and blood ones, because they’re invisible or ethereal.

In that sense, I could see how D & D could be a problem. If you fell so enthralled with your own creation that you started trusting it.

I suspect the function of being wayled by “spirits” or “muses” is similar to being wayled by storytelling. It’s amazing how often in ancient cultures bards or storytellers had a ‘priestly’ function or else, the opposite of that.

Some of us of course have to work there, in that half-light of the shores of imagination. But perhaps we should never leave behind our mental faculties aided by our sense? Perhaps they’re only safe when we go into them, remembering who we are and why we’re there?

And perhaps in the end that is better than proscribing all activities that stimulate the imagination? And eventually storytelling itself?

There must be a space between fear of the dark and irresistible attraction to it.  And the same with the imagination.

Else, in either case, we make ourselves less than human.

*And perhaps when Shakespeare called Marlowe “The Muses Darling” he meant more than we assume.

*The point of two posts today is to write a post on Muses and other afflictions, tomorrow – SAH*

Why I Write The Things I Do – A blast from the past from October 2007

(You should read the post previous to this to know what the rant is all about.)

I’ve been accused — in fact, I’ve been accused recently and by someone who should know better — of writing to market.  This is not true, though it might not be immediately obvious.  What I choose to write — what I have to say in each short story or novel — I want to write.  Often desperately enough to do it — often — for the drawer.   And, hell, if I wrote to market, I’d write a lot more thrillers, romances and women in peril.

With one exception — my one write for hire book — I write a story when it chases me down, pins me to the desk and makes me type.  I write it because I must.