Author: Sarah A. Hoyt

Eighteen years ago I sold a book that wasn’t written because the house passed on the book that was almost finished.  The reason given for no interest in the book nearer completion was that and I quote “The Red Baron is bad. He fought Snoopy. Also, he was a Nazi.” which explains the arguments on politics I’ve been having with people in my field ever since. It also reminds me I need to dial down my vocabulary. And get a way to look into parallel worlds.

Later, when I understood NY publishing I realized I was trying to sell a mil sf novel to the wrong house. (Yeah, they bought some, but the slant was different. Hence not from me.)

I’ll be danged if I have the SLIGHTEST idea where the rest of this novel is (I had trouble finding this) though my guess is in one of the boxes filled with diskettes.  Don’t know if it would be worth looking for.

To my eyes, though I’d do it differently today, there’s still SOMETHING here.  Is the something worth going into the unpacked boxes and spending a couple of Sundays searching through diskettes? And then spending a couple of weeks fixing the fact I had clue zero how to foreshadow? Or is it just something to nod at and say “it might have been.” Maybe.

The rest of the story, btw, could be encapsulated (though not PRECISELY of course as the personalities are different, and… anyway but it’s the feel of it and there are aliens) Prince Roger against the Good Men. I no longer remember if I sent Richthofen back in the end.  I remember DEBATING it with myself. But not what I actually did.  (Not sending him back meant sequels. Again, think Prince Roger.)

Anyway, I know some of you don’t like snippets.  This isn’t so much a snippet.  I’d like ya’ll’s opinion on the advisability of doing an all out search for the rest of this. And I KNOW ya’ll have opinions (a few.)

The Years Undone

Sarah A. Hoyt

Over The Valley Of The Somme, the 21^st of April, 1918.

The wind bit Manfred Freiherr von Richthofen’s exposed face, whipped his white silk scarf into a frenzy.

He didn’t notice.

Hunched forward, Manfred, the Red Baron, held the levers of his airplane in his right hand, his square-tipped fingers simultaneously controlling the flight of his plane and firing both of his front-mounted machine guns in a well-practiced way at the fleeing enemy plane.

Far beneath Manfred’s plane, a persistent fog obscured the trenches and the men in them.

Manfred had done his time in the trenches and he would prefer death in the cold, clean air above the clouds to life in the damp mustiness, the sluggish boredom, of the trench.

Despite the cold and the wind that, intensified by the speed of his flight, made the red-painted plywood frame of his plane crackle and groan, Manfred felt warm.

Hot.

His heart beat fast and his pumping blood made his pale-skinned face glow.  His right hand managed the levers, his left thumb squeezed the trigger that fired both machine guns at once.

Tracer bullets flew to the right and left of the enemy plane, leaving glimmering white trails behind.

Right where Manfred wanted them.

Suddenly shots from behind Manfred startled him.  He had a tail.

No matter.  He took a deep breath.  He couldn’t turn and run.  Not now.  Not when he was so close to bringing the enemy down.

Manfred concentrated on the plane ahead, not the one behind.  He thought of what he wanted to happen.  What must happen.

The enemy pilot would land.  He would be forced to land.  And Manfred would claim the credit of having made yet another prisoner for the fatherland.

His sweaty fingers played on the controls, taking his airplane lower and lower, in pursuit of the zigzagging airplane ahead of him.

He savored the inevitable joy of his soon-to-come triumph.  It would be his eighty-first.

The fog had cleared.  Yet, if Manfred glimpsed the mud and trees beneath him — if he saw the hulls of bombed out buildings, destroyed in the years of World War I — it was as an animal sees things, without comprehension or understanding.  He certainly didn’t know where over the valley of the Somme he flew, or when he crossed the lines to the enemy side.

The focus of his icy blue eyes had narrowed to the plane he was pursuing.  Only his prey mattered.

He cared for nothing else

He lost altitude without noticing it, sinking in pursuit of the sinking enemy.  The pounding of blood in his veins, his dry mouth, the excitement before the kill, all of it kept him narrowly aware of the chase.  Only the chase.  He noticed a green hedge ahead of him and jumped it with a tug of his lever, gaining altitude for a moment.

Suddenly, bullets came at him from the front, joining the bullets of his pursuer.  Ground battery bullets.  Futilely, he thought he needed to escape.  Turn tail.  Make for home.

Too late.

He had time to think that he was over enemy lines; that he had been an idiot; that he had violated his own rules, pursuing an enemy into the mouth of danger.  He always told new men in his squadron not to fly too low; not to pursue enemy behind their lines; not to–

Bullets tore into his flesh.

Hot pain ripped his skin and muscles and nerves.  Bullets hit his legs; one shattered his knee.  The convulsion of his pain was cut short by a volley of shots drilling into the soft flesh of his stomach.

A fiery hot bullet pierced his chest.  Unbearable pain blurred his vision as his rib broke under the impact.  His heart trembled, fibrillated, as — stricken — it sought to pump blood to veins it could no longer reach.

He was dead.

He knew he was dead, and yet his head remained clear.  His lungs filled with blood and he felt as though he were being pulled under water — drowned.  His fingers, of their own accord, turned off the engine of the plane.

He didn’t want to go down in flames.  A fiery death had filled all his nightmares for months. Death, yes.  But not in flames.

His body shook uncontrollably, and the mouth he desperately opened couldn’t gather breath into his flooded lungs.

The sharp, salty taste of his own blood, mingled with the lingering sweet traces of the biscuits and marmalade he’d eaten for breakfast.

He thought of his mother and his sister Ilse.  When Germany lost the war — and Manfred had known for some time that Germany would lose — his mother and his sister would be defenseless, at the mercy of the enemy.  If only Lothar— But his younger brother could not be counted on to take responsibility for his family.  Or for himself.

Manfred had known that for some time, too.

He felt cold.  Much too cold.  His body twitched and wrenched spasmodically, in a final, senseless dance.

Why did death take so long?  He couldn’t breathe.  Why did he remain alive?

His plane spiraled towards the ground.

He pulled his goggles off, threw them from him, irrationally trying to remove the red haze that obscured his sight.

His heavy leather flight jacket, his leather coveralls, his fur flight boots, all of those were no obstacle to the cold wind that whipped around and around him as he went down, down.  Blood bubbled out of his mouth.

Lights flashed through his blurred vision and he heard odd voices speaking a language he couldn’t understand.  He caught English words amid the gibberish, “transport” and “time” and “now, now, now, now.”

Hands grabbed him and pulled him.  Celestial beings were unduly rough.  Who would have known the angels spoke English? Manfred tried to remember a prayer, but couldn’t.  And he’d never been taught to pray in English.

Light expanded around him, and yet he fell into darkness.

As far as the world of 1918 was concerned, Manfred, Freiherr von Richthofen, the Red Baron, World War One’s most famous aviation ace, was dead.

I

Manfred woke up feeling drowsy and drunk.

He stared at the ceiling a long while, trying to remember where and with whom he might have gone drinking.

As a rule, he didn’t drink to excess and lately he’d hardly drunk at all.  He’d been too afraid that if he drank too much he might see the ghosts of all the comrades he’d lost in this war; the ghosts of all the enemies he’d killed in combat.

He lay in a bed and he felt— Tired?  No.  Not tired, just oddly confused — detached — as though he watched himself from a long distance off and none of it mattered very much.

The bed, the heavy dresser, the wardrobe, the small round table, all were familiar, all well known from his childhood.

He must be in his room in Schweidnitz, his ancestral home, in Silesia.

The light fixture on the ceiling was made from the rotor of a plane he had downed.  Around the room were his other trophies: pieces of canvas with the numbers of airplanes he had shot down; and there, on the southeastern wall, near the window, was his very first trophy: three duck feathers stuck to a piece of cardboard.

He smiled at it and at the memory.

As a brash young boy of seven, he’d shot three of his grandmother’s pet ducks with his airgun.  And though the adults hadn’t entirely approved of his exploit, he couldn’t help but still feel proud of it.

On another wall was the head of the boar he had killed while still in the cavalry, when he had wiled away long nights of boredom by escaping the trenches for the nearby game preserve of a fellow nobleman.

To the right of that was the little shelf that held the silver cups he’d ordered for himself, to commemorate each of his victories.

He stared at that shelf a long time.

Something was wrong. Something was very wrong with that shelf, though he couldn’t immediately say what.  He stared at it till his mind started counting the trophies.  Sixty-four.  Sixty-five.  Sixty six.  His hair stood on end.

He pulled himself up on his elbows.  He counted with growing terror from sixty six to eighty.  Eighty trophy cups.

Though he had eighty victories to his credit, Manfred had stopped ordering the trophies after the sixty-fourth.  And no one else would continue such a private ritual for him.  Not even his mother.

Cold sweat sprang from his every pore, soaking his short, pale blond hair.

He forced himself to sit up.  The room spun around him.  His chest hurt with a dull ache, like much-bruised flesh, and breath wheezed in and out of him, as if he had a bad cold.

The room smelled funny.  He’d obviously been sick, yet he couldn’t smell the sickroom odors of illness, sweat and disinfectant.  In their place, there was an odd chemical smell, barely masked by floral scent.

His bed felt different.  The mattress moved beneath him, as a living thing, and the sheets and blanket felt lighter and softer than anything he’d ever touched.

Suddenly, with startling clarity, he remembered he had been shot down.  He remembered the bullets entering his body.  His chest.  Memory of the pain made him start and draw breath.

He’d been shot through the heart.

His hands flew to leg, and stomach, and chest, everywhere he’d felt the bullets penetrate.  There were no wounds.  His hands met only his own soft, unbroken skin.

He was sleeping naked.  He never slept naked.  His heart beat fast; his head spun.

He should have been dead, but he was alive.  He should have  pajamas on, but he was naked.  Of the two, the latter puzzled him the most.  He might, by a miracle, have survived those wounds.  But he never slept without at least a shirt on.

Who would put him to bed naked?  Under what circumstances would he, himself, go to bed naked?

His familiar room in the ancestral mansion at Schweidnitz looked different in minute ways.  Who would have altered his room?  Why?  How long had he been unconscious?

Was he truly in Schweidnitz, or in an English prison camp?  And if he was a prisoner, why would they play with him?  Why make this room look just like Schweidnitz?  Why give him this mattress—

It twitched under him, as his weight shifted.

He managed to haul himself out of bed.  Standing on the wooden floor he held holding onto the mattress with his left hand, while he shook with the effort of being upright.  His legs hurt, as if he’d been lying down for so long that his muscles had forgotten their accustomed purpose.

With his right hand, Manfred pulled the sheet off the mattress.  The material beneath was soft and looked like pig’s skin.  It felt warm where his hand touched it, and moved to accommodate his fingers, cuddling against them like a cat.

He pulled his hand away.  Holding onto furniture and walls in the crowded room, he managed to make it to the window.

If only he could look out and see the familiar terraces of his home—  If he could, perhaps, see his sister, Ilse, or his youngest brother, Bolko, out        in the gardens, then he would know he was home.  That, despite all the odd details, he had nothing to worry about.  He would know everything was fine and that all his feeling of danger was a remainder of his illness.

But the curtains — though they looked like his familiar, heavy velvet curtains — didn’t open.  No matter how or where he pulled, the material resisted him.

A mad dream.  This had to be a mad dream.  Curtains didn’t resist being pulled.  But then mattresses did not nuzzle you.

He stumbled to the massive dresser beside the bed.   He would put on some clothes and then he’d go in search of someone who could help him understand this madness.

The drawers of his dresser wouldn’t open.  He tugged and pulled; pulled and tugged until he was panting, breathing hard, his chest aching.  Until the whole dresser should have tipped over on him.  The drawers didn’t budge.

He rushed to the door.  He was going mad.  The bullet he’d received in the head in July 1917, almost a year ago, had finally driven him insane.  The bone splinters, that the doctors had never succeeded in removing fully, must have worked their way into his brain.

If only he could get out of his room, find his mother.  She would know what to do.  She would calm him and comfort him.  She would—

To his surprise, the door knob to the entrance door turned under his shove.

He’d half expected to be a prisoner in his room.

Outside was a corridor that looked like nothing in Schweidnitz, like nothing Manfred had ever seen.

The walls and the floor glistened like glass — deep grey glass.  They met at not-quite-straight angles, as if they’d been poured while liquid and had hardened into shape afterwards.  Soft lights shone from within the ceiling, their glow halfway between the gentle light of candles and the brash intrusion of electrical light.

Manfred took a deep breath, steadying himself with a hand against the slick, cold wall.

Naked, in a strange environment, he felt helpless and lost.  Mad.  He must have gone mad.  He had suffered a head wound.  Since then, he had felt reluctant to go up.  He hadn’t wanted to kill again.  Yes, he must have suffered a breakdown.  But what kind of strange asylum was this?

His bare feet slapped the cold, smooth floor, as he crept down the hallway.

From somewhere, nearby, came the sound of voices.  They didn’t sound German.

As he struggled along the smooth, glassy hallway, closer and closer to the voices, he tried to identify the words he heard.  Most of them were gibberish, but some sounded like ill-pronounced English.  From his meager store of English, he identified, or thought he did, the word “transfer” and the words “back” and “time.”

In the middle of it all, a German word struck his ear: doppleganger.

Manfred frowned as he inched around a corner in the hallway and saw an open door, with bright white light spilling out of it.  The voices came from there.

A doppleganger was a double, someone who looked just like you.  What an odd word to pronounce, amid the gibberish and the English.

Perhaps he had misheard.  Perhaps he’d just misinterpreted a collection of foreign sounds.

Keeping knit to the wall, sliding his back against it, he approached the well-lit room.

His heart beat faster.  What would he find?  What people were these?  Was he in their power?  What did they intend with him?  He mustered all his strength to keep walking, though his legs felt tired and powerless and his whole body ached with the strain of standing up.

He must reach that room.  He must find someone who could tell him where he was.  He must find out whether he was mad.

He edged into the door and stood there, his bare back against the slick, cold door frame.

People clustered around a high, narrow bed.  The people were all young — some male, some female.  Their skin colors ranged from as pale as Manfred’s own to as dark as midnight.  They all wore orange pants and shirts.

As they moved away from the bed, Manfred looked past them.  And froze.  On the bed lay—

Manfred blinked.

Standing there, his feet against the cool floor at the entrance to the room, Manfred saw himself laying on that portable bed.  Himself, Manfred von Richthofen, in the flight suit he’d worn the last time he remembered climbing into his airplane.

He blinked again.

The press of people around the bed, men and women — all dressed in look-alike orange suits — stepped away.  One of them stepped back, almost as far back as Manfred stood.  She held a gun in her hands.

They were so intent on their work, they didn’t see Manfred.

She lowered the gun, aimed it.  A shot rang out; two; three; four; five shots.

The pale-skinned man on the portable bed shook with the impact, arched his back, convulsed.  Blood ran out of his chest and mouth, stained his flight jacket, the top of his pants.

Manfred remembered the taste of blood in his own mouth, the pain of the bullet tearing through his chest, ripping through his heart.

These people had killed him — or were killing him.  The same wounds, the same…  He shook.  Unsteady on his feet, he lurched forward.

The crowd noticed him at last.

A woman shrieked and men and women exclaimed in the language Manfred couldn’t understand.

He forced his way through the disoriented group, up to the bed, his hands in fists, his heart hammering in his chest, his mind clouded by a rage he only half understood.

The body on the table still looked like Manfred.  It glared at him with his own pale-blue eyes.  It wore his flight suit.

It was dead.

And yet Manfred lived.  Or was he a ghost?  But no.  Hands grabbed him.

“Calm, calm, calm,” someone said, in badly pronounced German.

He looked at the group now clustered around him.

Men and women — young, healthy, well fed, their features more exotic than any he’d ever seen — they all stared at him, their eyes wide open; suspicious, shocked.

No words were needed.  They’d captured him.  They were the enemy, and he their prisoner.

Two men grabbed his arms.  Manfred tore away from their hands, but other hands grabbed him, brought his arms behind his back, held his hands together.  Other hands held him in place.

His mind whirled with confusion.  His head pounded.  He struggled to free himself, but he was too weak and there were too many of them holding im too firmly.

They would kill him now.  They would shoot him as they had shot— The man on that table— Who was— Himself?  How could he be Manfred?  Who was Manfred?

His lips formed the words “Wie?” and “Warum?”  How and why.

The only answer he got was that same, oddly-pronounced, “Calm, calm, calm.”

A slim, dark girl held something green and round in front of his face and squeezed it.  A fine, cool mist surrounded him.

He smelled flowers, then lost control of his legs, lost control of his body.

With his eyes still open, his mind still spinning, trying to find an answer, Manfred fell.

The crowd of strangers broke his fall, held him up.  Many hands lifted him, and placed him on a bed like the one where his look-alike had died.

He wanted to fight then, to fight his way free of these people who were going to shoot him, to execute him when he couldn’t even stand up.  They weren’t… honorable.  Who knew what they might do?

He heard himself make a high, keening sound of protest, but couldn’t control his mouth to either speech or silence.

The people around him pushed the bed.  It slid forward smoothly, floating on air.

Near the door, for just a moment, Manfred caught a glimpse of a girl with green hair and the face of an angel.

She had oriental eyes, a broad chin and gently curving lips and the type of body men in the trenches dreamed of but rarely got to see.  Her skin was a deep, shining gold.

Manfred wanted to call for help, and managed to open his lips and shape, “please, please, please.”

But she only smiled at him, as he passed.

Her smile was the benediction of a mad angel.

II

Magda Pilates, a.k.a. Mag-pi, pulled back a strand of her outrageously colored hair and walked past the open door to the med-room, ostensibly not even glancing inside.

But she saw.

She saw everything well enough, though she didn’t allow even a pause in her rolling walk to betray it.  Her feet, in their accustomed heavy boots, hit the floor rhythmically.

Seemingly, she stared straight ahead, her hands deep in the pockets of her dark-blue suit.

She missed nothing of the room or its occupants.

Though most of the med-techs had left with the blond guy on the carrier, three of them remained behind with the strangely dressed corpse that resembled the blond.

So, another substitution was under way.  And a new flier had joined the ranks.  From the looks of him, and the fact that they’d had to tranq him to get him under control, a psychotic flier.

Mag-pi smiled.  This was going to be fun.

No one had explained the mechanics of time-transfer to Mag-pi.  No one had told her that each of the transferees were fighter pilots brought forward in time; nor that they could only be brought forward after their death had become a certainty in their own time; nor that after bringing them forward they created a double of each of them and killed it in the manner each of them was supposed to have died and then tunneled back through time and put a corpse where a corpse would be expected.

No one had told her, but Mag-pi had an habit of finding out things.  It had kept her alive for her twenty two years of life.

A twenty-third century pilot, who’d helped Earth’s land states win the war against the artificial sea cities, Mag-pi had been amid the first transported to the twenty fifth century.

Confined to this compound for over two months now, she had talked to other transferees.

And she knew about the death thing.  That you had to be as good as dead in your own time to be transported.

Mag-pi remembered her own death all too well.  She remembered the wine her superiors had served to her and her squadron, to celebrate their final victory.

She remembered her throat closing and the spasm that had bent her spine backward.  Even now, at the memory, her mouth filled with the bitter aftertaste of the poison.

Damn.  They’d killed her — they’d killed them.  And now in this future age, having talked to people of all times and places, Mag-pi knew why: because Mag-pi and her boys were bioengineered human artifacts.  Improvements on the human model — their genes tailored for better speed, coordination, reasoning.

Those same improvements that had made them such good pilots and helped the old, land-bound nations of Earth win the war had been their death sentences.  Because the old countries could not afford to have the enemy find out that they owed their victory to bios.  The landstates couldn’t admit they had broken international law against tampering with the human genome.

Exit Mag-pi and her boys: Falcon, Sparrow, Eagle, Phoenix, Owl, Condor and Macaw.

Mag-pi’s fists bunched in her pockets.

Well, now the rulers of Earth needed heros again.  And this time she’d make damn sure their reward wasn’t death.  She’d make damn, damn sure.

Deep in her own thoughts, she jumped, in surprise, when a man stepped out of a side door, in front of her.

He had very short dark hair and wore the orange uniform of a Peace Keeper — some sort of policemen who did the maintenance and crowd control work around the compound.  “What are you doing here?” he asked.  “This area is restricted.”

The non-challance Mag-pi had exuded while walking down the hallway fell from her shoulders like a loose coat.  She ducked her head and managed to push her cleavage just slightly forward, making it even more prominent.  Looking down, she said, “I’m sorry.  I got lost.  The rec hall?”  Peeking upward, just slightly, between the green strands of her hair, she saw the man glower at her, and kept her submissive posture, her bent shoulders.

The man made a derisive sound in the back of his throat.  “The rec hall is on the other side of the compound,” he said.  “As you know.”

He nudged her shoulder to get her walking, and escorted her down the narrow, grey-walled corridor.  The grey corridors were the ones where people were brought in, where interesting things happened.  The ones Mag-pi gravitated to, to figure out what those in power were planning.

It wasn’t the first time that Mag-pi got caught, but somehow these people never checked with each other.  Or didn’t care.  Why wouldn’t they care?  Perhaps because they were planning to kill her.

Frowning towards the ground, she saw her boot clad feet hit the shiny floor in the same rhythm as her guard’s slippered feet.

They reached a door and the guard allowed the eye-level camera to scan his retina.  He pressed a green button.  The door slid open.

Mag-pi walked through it, feeling the weight of the guard’s suspicious glance on her back.  She waited until she heard the door slide shut behind her, before lifting her head and resuming her rolling walk.

It never occurred to these guards to ask how she got into the restricted part of the compound.  She certainly wasn’t about to tell them that she’d got in through a ventilation window set fifteen feet up a smooth wall, where no normal human could climb.

No normal human.  Mag-pi smiled to herself.  She walked down a green-walled corridor, made of the same dimatough as the grey corridors, but open to all.

The rec hall announced itself form a distance by the sound of rapid fire speech in many languages, by occasional laughter and by the smell of food, alcohol and tobacco, the latter a substance Mag had discovered only here – having been so tightly controlled as to be non existent in her time.  Though other, more serious drugs, had been abundant and free-flowing.

Entering the rec hall, Mag-pi instinctively looked around for her boys, glancing over the heads of a hundred or so fliers – mostly men — hunched over tables, talking, eating, drinking.  Most of them spent their whole time talking about their situation, trying to understand it.  And none had even figured that this must be the twenty fifth century because they had people who came from times up to the twenty fourth.  Fools all.  And the half dozen women among them were no better.

Of course only Mag-pi was a bio-improved female.  The only one of her kind.  And only she had figured that someone had been gathering combat fliers from all eras, which meant they were preparing for some big battle.

Mag and her boys would be fighting again.  And this time she would protect herself.  And them.  By all means available.

“Mag.”  A familiar large hand grabbed onto Mag’s arm.  “Where have you been?  We were worried.”

Without looking, she shook away the grasping hand.  Rudolph Sven, aka Raven, was getting above himself.  The tall blond had been sharing Mag’s bed for the last month and clearly he’d forgotten that – as the only woman in the group – she made the decisions as to whom she would favor.  And none of them kept tabs on her.

But she had time for no more than frowning at Raven, because the rest of the boys pressed in.  All in their twenties and all different, from raven’s pale hair and bright green eyes to Falcon’s towering ebony frame.  Race meant nothing when you came out of a test tube.

But they all looked as concerned as Raven.  All except Macaw, who did justice to his nickname by dyeing his hair a deep red, with an abstract overlay in bright colors that made it look like an old tapestry.

He looked amused and gave her a fleeting mad smile.  “What shiny treasure have you gathered, Mag-pi?”

She shrugged.  Maybe she’d give Macaw a turn next.  He was as mad in bed as out of it.  Exhausting, but fun.  “There’s a new flier arrived,” she said.  Exciting news, because it had been over a week.  And that meant that they had researched to bring up someone historically important.  “Pale blond.  Short.  Totally psycho.  They had to tranq him.”

They all surged forward.  All of them could have found things the way Mag-pi did, but they never even tried.  Instead, they relied on her.

“What kind of clothes was he wearing?”  One of them asked.  Mag-pi grinned.  “The flier?  None.”  Mag-pi grinned.  “But his replacement…”  She demurred.

“You saw the–”  “What did the–” “How did they–”

“He,” she said.  “Was wearing a leather flight suit.  Early twentieth century, I think.  Red boots.”  A short silence.

And then Sparrow, short, dark haired, with dark, dark eyes peering attentively from beneath a slick-smooth mass of hair, asked, “Did he speak?  What language?”

“Like English.”  In her months here, she’d got quite good at figuring out the cadences of ancient languages.  “But harsher.”

Sparrow’s face lit up.  “I’ve been wondering when he would arrive.”

“He?”

“The Red Baron.  German.  They were bound to get him, since they’re getting the best.”

The Red Baron.  Fragments of his legend flitted through Mag-pi’s mind.  His courage, coolness and daring.  His ability to unerringly fly the wooden crates that passed for planes in those days.  His accuracy at shooting and air combat.  All of it had been talked about even in Mag-pi’s training.

She bit her lip.  Whatever battle was ahead, their handlers had clearly picked the best of each time.  Which meant they needed great fliers.  Not just good ones.  So though they were all at the mercy of their strange captors, the best ones were bound to be safe.

And Mag-pi was determined to be the best and keep herself and her boys safe.  She squared her shoulders.

Let Manfred of Richthofen be a legend.  She was sure she could fly better than he.  And kill better.  He was only a natural human.

Who are you really?

What I mean is if you met yourself at seven, are you the same person?  Some of us remember being seven, but I might have trouble even speaking to that little girl, attending a one room school in Portugal.

And some of the things she believed and did I know just ain’t so.  We have some memories (some of them pleasant) in common, and I’d probably break the face of one or two of her enemies, just because they were smug and full of themselves and that annoys me.

Then how about 12? 14? 18?

Hell, my teen years are even more embarrassing than the kid ones.  Or as Terry Pratchett put it “You have to crawl through a lot of twerpitude to be who you are.”

But heck, what about 30?  Ah.  My big L Libertarian years, when I was even active in the past.  Things have… changed, let us say.  Not much.  I just learned the limits of the possible and the real world.  And OMG, if I could go back and hit that kid over the head with what a cesspool traditional publishing is, was, and by design will always be.  Could have saved her a ton of heartache.  Particularly if I could tell her to write anyway and just keep it in the drawer till indie.

On the other hand I wouldn’t have been me.  I’d have written FAR different things, would never learned how much I LOATHE writing “Literary”after “Literary” for four or five books, might never have fallen into the blogsphere as self-therapy and might never have met any of you.

If I live that long, particularly if I succeed at the stuff I’m trying to do now, I’m sure my seventy year old self will shake her head and think I was a crazy kid, trying very hard, but really didn’t have a clue.  And I’m sure some of my core beliefs will be revised or reversed.  Not the ones on the USA thing, likely, but a lot of feelings.

Butterflies are lucky.  They leave their cocoon once.

It’s probably very scary.  Think of it, even their living space isn’t the same.  They go from crawling on things to flying.  The poor dumb beasties probably have no idea what comes next.  Of course, they’re not humans, but I always imagine them emerging and going “WTF are these things on me?  Ahhhhh.  When I flap them I get hurled around!”

We emerge from cocoons all the time.  In fact, if we haven’t in a long time, we’re probably overdue.  Thank heavens, it’s not normally as complete a transformation as for that poor larva/butterfly.  It’s usually one area at a time, but–

We were watching a show the other day where a guy maintained he wasn’t a murderer because it had happened 14 years ago, and all his body had turned over at a micro level in that time.

To an extent, of course, yeah, physically it was true.  But he had killed and remembered killing and as Agatha Christie insisted, it seems to get easier the second, third, fourth time around.

However, sometimes, particularly in a life in which one major process of acculturation and one major process of conforming took place, it’s hard to trace the continuity of personality through the years.

Sure, the basic impulses are the same.  And I don’t think I’ve changed about my kids or my husband (except I swear I love them more every day) but everything else is subject to change, seemingly.

We roll through life as a changing continuum.  Even appearance and food tastes change, and if you could meet yourself from a few years ago, chances are you would say “who is this person?”

Something that always bothered me about a final judgement was that.  Am I to be judged on what I did at two? Three?  But that wasn’t ME.  Otoh it shaped who I am.  And most traditions have either forgiveness or infinite mercy in the mix.  (My only chance is TRULY infinite mercy.)

The one thing that came up yesterday, though, because we were discussing change and how people see it as an unalloyed good, as though change was never for the worse (see, Venezuela! Or for that matter, Iran.  And I’m sure we all have seen that in individuals changing for the worse too.)

Even when it’s for the best, change hurts.  We won’t discuss change forced from above and societies, because there is pain and death and all these eggs are broken and no one has ever made an omelet, so stop screaming “this time will be different.”

But even good change, like for instance the internet, which has made things so much better, is also upending commerce, disrupting our day to day life, upsetting our relationships and therefore “hurting”.  The industrial revolution is the cause of our present prosperity, but it hurt too, by making people change how they lived.

People don’t like to change how they live.  No matter how innocuous.

On the other hand if you don’t change…

This being a group of writers who was discussing this, talk to turned to friends who got stuck at some place or another, either limiting their success, or limiting it so hard they got discouraged and stopped writing/dropped out.

I’m not sure I’m not one of those friends, right now, where I stand.  I just stopped at a “higher” point than others.

Partly because I’ve been sick and I’m now recovering, I’m aware of short cuts that have become habitual to avoid expending energy, and to avoid trying something that scares me, and…  Those don’t help my writing.  So there’s going to be pain in the future, as I chew through the restraints of the cocoon and see if I can emerge.

Then there’s indie o’clock.  I’ve been aware for… 5 years? that not only are people doing much better in indie, the only thing keeping me from doing it, is a mind tooled to traditional.  (Well, that and illness and recovery.)  In other words, the cocoon, that has been familiar.

Well, you know and I know what happens to butterflies — or moths! — that never emerge.  They die.

The last year has felt like a series of kicks to the fundament, the sort of thing that also propelled me into coming out of the political closet.  Like someone or something has been cornering me, blocking all my avenues of escape, forcing me to do what scares me and will hurt.  Forcing me to retool my mind, my affections (no, not the guys or Dan.  Or even the cats) my loyalties, my … cocoon.  Pushing me to grow and change in ways that are going to hurt if for no other reason because they’re new and I don’t know how.

Also, you know, some butterflies emerge damaged. Or emerge just to be gobbled up by the early bird.

Fortunately I think I’m a moth.  Watch out for that owl!

All the same there is no other choice.  Well, there is death, but you know, that’s something I plan to avoid as long as possible, even if only metaphorical.

So I’m gnawing my way out of the cocoon.  In a few years, we’ll see if I’m a butterfly or a moth, or a very brief flash a bird ate.

The only thing I I know is that in five years, I will probably be so different I won’t recognize me now.

Look, there are these things on my shoulders.  And here comes the wind.

Sorry this is so late.  I woke up with a blinding headache.  And don’t go getting all paranoid. My head aches because I’ve become a human barometer, and we have a storm blowing in.

On that, conversation last night with older son he says I’m wrong and meningiomas are ACTUALLY very rarely malignant and can’t figure out why I remember it the other way around.  I can. I was so hypothyroidal and sleeping in one to two minute increments at the time, that it’s a miracle I don’t remember more walking dreams as reality.

Anyway so the overwhelming chance is that the thing outside the brain skin is NOT malignant, but we should still check it for mass effect since my vision is wonky.  To be fair, the other part of the vision being wonky is probably that the thyroid is getting FIXED.  See, while I’ve actually become near-sighted since I fell in bathroom and got concussion 16 years ago (I was before, but of  the “if reading for a long time” type)) my biggest problem was and remains astigmatism.  That’s an eye shape thing, and gets worse or at least different with … well… tons of things.  My pregnancies threw it off, but stress threw it off, too, and, and and.  We’ve eliminated one potential cause: diabetes.  I don’t have that.  I eat low carb only because otherwise eczema goes WILD.

The thing to take home about my health is that everything is pretty much better.  For the first time in decades I have not a single open sore, or even rash from eczema on my body.  I’m lighter, and my blood pressure is down, my thyroid is probably ALMOST there, though still a little low (have to do tests) and honestly, most of the problems are “coming up” problems.  It’s like this, you know how to clean your house you have to make it dirtier?  Well, to come up from severe illness (Or in my case, three, which is apparently what it takes to make me STOP writing as I did six years ago or so) you are going to have new and interesting stuff show up.  Some of it is not even new, but you were too tired to notice it before.

It’s like during our first snow storm this year, which arrived out of a clear blue sky, and we went from 60 degrees to under thirty in a couple of hours: the tree in our front yard shed all its leaves in those hours.  Son who is a biologist laughed and said “Yep, tree just went ‘preserve core function to survive’ like a human in shock.”

Long-lasting illness is like that.  Only it’s SLOW.  Slowly you cut everything peripheral, until you’re just concentrating on surviving.

This is why the writing shut down.  Those of you who don’t write might find this weird, but to write action, or really anything demanding, you need PHYSICAL energy.

When I was writing the big fat Mediterranean fantasy (sure, and fairly soon, since what it needs is rewriting, breaking into three books, and maybe one book from a different perspective added, but probably not till Fall next year) the end is a series of battle scenes and chases, some of them magical.  I was writing all morning, taking a break to scarf down a whole pizza (This was a month that something… Dominoes? had a ridiculously low price special, and I didn’t want to take the time to cook. And btw I don’t really LIKE pizza.  I’ll eat it, but I don’t’ go out to look for it.  But it was fast and by the time it arrived, I was ready to eat my chair or pieces of the desk, and the cats and toddlers were looking mighty tasty) then write all afternoon, eat a normal dinner, and I was losing a pound a day.  Because writing fully immersed and heavy action is exercise and burns calories.  (There is some support for this from a study.  The trick is to IMAGINE INTENSELY.)

As I got really ill, even writing emotions was too much effort/work, and the writing stopped.

Because I needed that energy to survive.

Now the energy is coming back and unfortunately anger always comes back first.  Which leads to my periodically being less than diplomatic, or stomping around the house going “Sarah smash.”  Mind you, the things that upset me are upsetting, but normally didn’t grant this reaction, because I didn’t have anything to react with.

And I notice little things more, too.  When I’m not in pain 24/7, I notice stuff like my head being a barometer.

I’ve been managing my depression for years, for instance, but I think the current bout was brought on by my being better.  It goes like this: I’m a weird introvert, just like I’m a weird everything, I guess.  I don’t like large crowds and they exhaust me (even when I like seeing all you guys at LC. There’s a reason I get con crud.) I even hate to work in an office and be surrounded by people.  But I need a “minimum amount of people I like” a day.  Mostly Dan to be honest.  Well, in this house (and the one before) our offices are separate, and in this house different floors.  So, what happens is that we only see each other an hour or so a day.  It was easier to disguise this when we had the kids in the house, because they are also “people I like.”

Last Monday we realized that part of the reason I’ve been on the edge of depression is “just not enough time together.”  So we took the afternoon off and I got markedly better.  I think we need to return to the habit of date night every week.  How to do it with our butt in a financial bear trap is something else.

So, that bear trap: younger kid had some money when he started college (mostly from odd jobs, etc.  I used to joke I rented the boys out for heavy labor for the summer.  It wasn’t wrong.  They’d say carry stuff for friends doing yard projects, and get fed and paid some minimal amount.)  We had also agreed we’d pay half tuition.  He’d take loan for what we didn’t cover.  (Same deal with both of them, undergrad only.)

Problem is two fold: a) his college plays scheduling games, so what should have been 5 years for two degrees is going to end up being 7 (sigh.)  Second, after 4 he ran out of eligibility for the lower-interest loans.  And none of us wants to touch the higher ones.  However, since college seems to think everyone will take the higher ones, they didn’t warn us of this until this time last year. b) He’d been using his own money to live near college, because… well… he’s going to kill me for saying this in public, but he has sensory processing problems.  Not as bad as they were as a kid, and yeah, I know there are accommodations, but he’s a proud bastard and refuses to take them.  Also he says employers won’t accommodate.  I know that’s wrong, but I also get his point.

The problem is that he needs — often — to go over the material in silence after the class to really get everything, because the slightest amount of ambient noise disturbs him/makes him not understand what is said.

It’s difficult to do that when taking a full load and driving an hour and change each way.  I get that.  So he was paying his way for house and food and such.

However, when the loans weren’t in play he ran out of money very fast.  Since he’s taking a full load plus labs, he doesn’t have a hell of a lot of time to work.  Right now he’s paying lodging from his work in summer.  HOWEVER before he did that, we had run through out “can get at without fuss” savings (we have savings, but we’d lose a portion just by getting them, and we’re trying to avoid that.)

And we have — damn it — apparently another year and a half (though the last year is light on scheduling.)

There is no way anyone can cover that from donations, unless one of you is a mega-millionaire, honestly.  Last year I made around 60k and after taxes he took everything I made plus.  Yeah, tuition is expensive partly because his minor requires some graduate level classes.

He doesn’t want to move in next year.  We don’t want him to move in next year.  (we’re just getting to like empty nest.)  But if we can’t find a work around, between my making tons of money maybe even from indie (ah!  I’d still prefer Baen buys more on the series they have, partly because I’m going to continue those series anyway.  We’ll see.  They can only do what finance allows, of course.  And numbers are part of that.)  and his making enough for rent, he’ll have to move in. We can take a loan (and have him pay back when he graduates) but we don’t WANT to.  So we’ve been cutting everything to the bone.  And of course being tight on money cuts out expeditions, fun stuff and just… well… things that keep Sarah from driving herself nuts.  And stop the writing.  Which is a hell of a bear trap, you must admit.  Ah, well, maybe I’ll get well enough to chew off my foot, metaphorically speaking and write like a hurricane.

Meanwhile, he can’t really hold a job while taking maximum load (for another six months) because the hours he has are ridiculous.  He can HOWEVER do his own business.  He’s trying to do that, by running his own typesetting business (He’s really good, being very detail oriented.)  He’s thinking of getting people on call to subcontract things like copyediting and covers, so he can run a complete publishing business.  (his email address is Typesetting Hoyt at gmail dot com    UPDATE, IN AN ATTACK OF COMPLETE DERP I DID THAT WRONG: IT’S  typeset Hoyt at Gmail dot com.  No spaces and symbol instead of at.)

One of his gifts is to organize work groups (which is weird for an odd) and to well… manage.  So if he ever gets to his own little organization he’ll probably be very good too.

Right now he’s building his client list painfully slow, but maybe by next summer he’ll be making enough for rent.  And maybe I can write enough, too.  It’s possible.  It could happen.

Anyway, at least we know what the problem is, and now we can get better.

Which is what I meant to say: sure, sometimes I still glitch, but overall things are getting better.  Even when I suddenly notice other problems.

Things are getting better.  And frankly, since my entire career was with hypothyroidism, and half of it (the half where I didn’t write a minimum of three books a year) with sleep apnea and oxygen insufficiency on top of that, I’m kind of curious to find out what I do without those.  Yeah, just running in circles without focus IS an option, but I’m hoping not.

And I’m hoping to have enough relatively healthy time between now and old age setting in to find out.

Wish me luck.

I woke up at 4:30 am with the need to explain an altercation I got into in my conference (Sarah’s Diner) on facebook, yesterday night.

I wasn’t raised in a barn, and public blow ups upset me because they SHOULD be beneath me.

The explanation turned VERY long and pulled together threads that I don’t think I ever made explicit here, including stuff about my health and what is going on with my career (though a lot of you caught some of it by implication and inference, I haven’t been explicit on anything.) To be blunt a lot of this was stuff I was trying to ignore in the hopes it would go away, or at least leave me alone.  Since it’s now, 3 years later, clear that it won’t, the least I can do is explain it.

So I copied that post and it’s below.  When reading it, remember it partly refers to events in a conference on Facebook.  But the general explanations as to why I behaved like a fishwife still apply.

As is in the post I have a doctor’s appointment shortly, but I should be back around 10am my time or so.

Anyone reading this blog knows that not only I but any number of my readers were childhood outcasts.

I spent vast portions of my early childhood walking in circles on a ledge that went around the playground.  You know, after that vital moment when I’d need to escape a locked room by walking on a tight rope.  And the very fact that I actually thought that told you why I was an outcast.

In a very traditional village where televisions were rare, and where most little girls playing at being grown women just like their mothers, and where most of their views of the world were created by mommy’s and neighbors’ gossip and (radio) soap operas, by six I had my had full of stories.  Sure, most of them floated in soup of my not knowing geography and history, so that Robin Hood could totally pick up the Three Musketeers on his way to an adventure with the Lone Ranger, but you know, that didn’t matter.  What mattered is that I had a head full of stories and ideas that didn’t fit.

Yes, probably — almost certainly — I moved weird.  I know I was incredibly, unbelievably clumsy, more like a toddler than a six year old.  Both the mind full of stories and the total lack of ability to perform normal physical actions, like walk a long time without falling were probably due to the fact that I’d spent most of my early childhood in bed (no wonder I being bored) because I got sick a lot and though we had antibiotics, the habits of the society were pre-antibiotic, meaning if you were sick you were sent to bed.  Yes, partly because you needed all your strength to fight the illness, but also because when you were in bed it was easy to isolate you and remember you were sick and people shouldn’t get too close.  (When we look down on, say, the ways that former centuries treated illness, we should remember that.  Over time, they developed practices that allowed the most people to survive. If they seem truly weird to us, remember they lived in a different time where they had no way of telling if someone was infectious, or how infectious they were.  In fact, they had no idea what caused illness.  All they had was these practices that had worked in the past. Societies that learned them had enough people to go on. That’s it.)

Anyway, so I probably moved funny. I used words they’d never heard and talked of things they’d never even thought of. The miracle is not that most of them looked at me askance and wanted nothing to do with me. The miracle is that I always had one or two friends, even in a class of 12.

The other — and I have no explanation for it — is that I more or less invented Live Action Role Playing Games which made me incredibly popular from the second through the fourth grade. And yes, gentle readers, we even had LARP nazis (not me. Making up the story line has its privileges) since I read a lot of military fiction set in WWII, so some of our games were spy missions and prisoner camp escapes.  Though the most popular were Robin Hood and the Three Musketeers.  (Plus que ca change.)

For fifth grade I went not only to a vast school but one divided in forms, and I couldn’t get anyone to play my “let’s pretend” games.  I think they accidentally put me in the “total lack of imagination” form.  No seriously. It was that bad.  Sure, it made the stories I was starting to write really impressive to the teachers but dear Lord, those were dreary two years. Partly because the female half of that form was ruled by two queen bees.  The fact that I know their background and where they could aspire to go, and if I remembered their last names (I don’t) and looked them I’d probably find they were low level office drones or housewives only partly makes up for the fact they made my life a living hell.  On second thought, those queen bees were probably responsible for the fact that I could not organize live action role playing games AND that I was ostracized and everything I said and did criticized, mocked and snitched on.  (My favorite was when I was practicing French verbs and the arts and crafts teacher was told I was swearing at these two under my breath.

These girls were the antithesis of me — of us — in thought and behavior.  They were only happy when the center of attention, and when dictating how everyone else should think and perceive things.

In retrospect, I was a very pretty little girl.  This is neither here nor there, as I did absolutely nothing to achieve that result, and most of the time wore my brother’s hand me-downs not only because it saved money, but because if my mom put me in a pretty dress she had to then watch me like a hawk to make sure I didn’t get dirty.  Sure, part of it was the lack of coordination, that had me spilling anything I ate or drunk and tripping over my own two feet.  Part of it though was that I was used to doing what I wanted with no regard for what I was wearing.  But the pictures show a rather pretty child with soulful dark eyes.  (Mind you when stressed I had eczema all over my face and looked like a third-degree-burn victim, but by then eczema was moving off my face and to my arms, and also becoming less frequent.  I guess being a tiny is very stressful.)

These two girls… One was conventionally pretty and blond, which in Portugal immediately makes you pretty.  But her cohort had buck teeth and a face like a spiteful monkey.  However one day I heard them (in a gathering of all the other girls in the form) laying down the law of who was the prettiest to who was the ugliest.  I was the ugliest.  And all the other girls agreed and acted accordingly.

Now, I know part of the reason they did this is because they were afraid to be the target next.  And the reason I was the target and never one of the mass was that while not interested in being a queen bee, I also did not go along with this type of order. I asked why.  I pointed out things that whoever laid down the law — other kids or teachers — didn’t want to hear.

This is why the only friends I had in the years from hell were outcasts as well: in that year, mostly kids with actual physical problems.  But also kids who were brilliant and tiny and subjected to bullying. Odds. Cast offs. The puzzle pieces that wouldn’t fit in.

I suspect this is what caused my RE teacher (the year before I was kicked out for talking back to a QUITE different teacher) to tell me I was G-d led and that He clearly had plans for me.  (In point of fact, yes, he told my 11 yo self I was on a mission from G-d. No, I still don’t believe me.) But I didn’t do it for charity or to be praiseworthy.  I didn’t even do it to follow commands.  I did it because these were my people: the nails that stuck out.

This habit persisted long after I’d left that ridiculous school and the two spiteful little girls behind. I was actually fairly popular in High School — for values of popular, other discounts do not apply, void where prohibited — at least if one takes in account that I was put in one of three forms for gifted misfits, so I was pretty much average.  I still collected those who didn’t quite fit in, who did the unexpected, who, in fact, were the goats in the sheep flock of humanity.

I was very popular in college, mostly because I’d learned to dress well and had enough practice being on my feet not to trip every two feet.  And frankly because I took too many classes, worked on the side, and generally was on the go the whole time, which I’ve found is the only way to keep me from being a neurotic loon.

I’d also learned to pass, which is an important skill for Odds to have, if they are careful not to let it fool them into thinking it’s the real them.  Because then they’re miserable, and they don’t know why.

It taught me to pass politically — had to. Would never have finished college otherwise — which in turn taught me how to pass in the writing field, until, that is, things got crazy enough that the mean girls of the left required positive affirmations of allegiance. Because that would make me lose myself, and I knew were that ended.

But all along, I kept collecting the ones who didn’t quite fit in, because they are my people.

I didn’t have a name for them — for us — until one late night talk with Dave Freer.  We used to talk late into the night a lot. Late into the night my time.  Early morning his time.  We stopped because the state of both our careers just depressed us and vehemently agreeing with each other we were burned out and screwed didn’t help anything, and made us more despondent.

Dave is a biologist.  His doctorate is in marine biology, specializing in sharks, because he lived on a graduate student’s stipend and wanted to be able to eat the leftovers of dissections.

But as I know because older son’s undergraduate is in biology (and another in chemistry, because my kids cannot take one single undergraduate degree.  Not sure why.) They study all sorts of different animals, particularly if they study animal organization, psychology and/or evolution (and all of them do, at some point.)

Dave Freer explained that in any social species, which great apes are (and we’re great apes.  Oh, okay, pretty good apes, if you prefer) there are “goats.”  These are animals that stick out from the bunch, that don’t quite fit.  In healthy bands they’re allowed to persist, because they’re the ones who try out new things.  Say, there is a drought.  They’re the ones who try that weird foliage or that strange berry no one has ever eaten (or maybe seen, if conditions have changed) before.

Yes, the vast majority of them die shortly thereafter.  In a lifetime of befriending the odd, the despised and the bullied, let me tell you that I’ve found many of these people are despised for a reason.  And yes, sometimes I was taken advantage of.  In one singular situation for over a quarter of a century.  Also many of them are spectacularly unsuccessful and you figure out the reasons fairly soon, and it’s not being odd, it’s other stuff like baked-in laziness, or avoiding anything unpleasant until eventually they avoid anything uncomfortable, which includes learning or thinking.  (In the case mentioned above, I can pretty much keep myself from failing completely by asking myself what he would do and doing the opposite.)

However, sometimes the gamble pays off.  And sometimes the little kid who will not shut up or go along with the crowd is saying what the crowd needs to hear.  This was codified in the story of the little boy who says the king is naked.  Which I suspect is an incarnation of a very old story.

The goats are needed because the sheep are too social.  I don’t know if it’s true they’ll follow their leader over a cliff, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Sheep ain’t too smart.

Nor are humans.  Sure, we’re cock of the walk, top of the tree, etc.  Maybe. But there’s the social ape thing. Where people would rather have a little girl with a face like a monkey tell them how pretty they should consider everyone in the class.  Because otherwise they might be the target, and they really wanted to be part of the group.

Now, other than making my life miserable, Irene (yeah, I remember her first name) didn’t do too much evil in the world. The rest of the class seemed pretty happy, at least from the outside.

But when you put this on a national scale, it’s a terrible thing.  We’ve seen exactly how horrible it is over things like the Cultural Revolution, or under Stalin, or for that matter under Hitler, or, in a smaller scale — it was a smaller time — the French revolution.  Because people will do horrible or destructive things rather than buck the group under any circumstances.

Yes, the goats are often wrong, but they are also the only breaks humans have against really bad ideas.  (And keep in mind a lot of odds have really bad ideas.  A ton of them are socialist because they think it will force other people to like the/accept them/behave like they’re normal.  That’s not the way that works, that’s not the way any of that works.  But being a goat doesn’t mean you don’t long for the acceptance of the flock.)  The few that actually dare grouse often don’t do it properly or clearly, or … but they are the only brake.

Instapundit has left twitter because the boss is sick and tired of the drive for unified leftist speak.  Honestly, so am I.

On that same day I got a private message from a facebook “friend” whom I’d never talked to or even paid much attention to besides accepting her request.

She sent a meme some guy put up making fun of a transwoman. In this case, the “transwoman” is in some question, but that’s a long story.

The message said the person who sent it had unfriended this guy and that as I could see what a horrible person he was, if I were a decent human being I’d unfriend him too.

This didn’t work on me at 11 and it doesn’t work on me now.  I researched what this person was talking about. The meme was basically accurate, even if stated in the most shocking terms possible, as memes usually are.  It was who this person was and the article he/she/it wrote for the NYTimes that was a true shock.  If I can stop being ill when I read it, I’ll write a post about it for PJM. (The link is not to the actual article.)

Here’s the thing: that private message was more chilling and horrifying than any meme, even if the meme really had been mean and about all transsexuals and not just crazy-talking-looks-like-bag-lady-guy-with-the-issues.

Sure the article inspires pity, but not in the way that should shield the writer from criticism. There’s such a thing as ‘intervention’ that consists of very blunt talk indeed.

However, transsexuals in general, even those who hurt the idea of transsexualism by being bog-out-there-insane and making it clear, have been decreed the “prettiest girl in class” greatest victim group evah by the queen bees, and the queen bees will enforce this in any way.

This really has nothing to do with transsexuals.  These people don’t give much of a hang over their victim groups.  They’re now screaming at lesbians who refuse to sleep with “girls with penises” for instance.

They’re adult human beings.  It can’t be that the difference between “treat them as if they are what they say they are” and “be sexually attracted to them” has evaded them.  Anyone in possession of the ability for sexual attraction knows that this thing isn’t entirely under our control. (Like my writing, now I think about it.)

No, it’s that the whole victim category and the whisper campaigns against anyone, no matter who, who dissents from today’s narrative, are designed to do only one thing: give power to the queen bee (even male ones.) In fact, the narrative changing completely is a feature, not a bug, because it allows them to know who really is just following them because they love them/are afraid of them, as opposed to being fellow-travelers.

And they’re willing to destroy anyone that gets in their way, by destroying their reputation, ability to keep a job, standing in the world, family.  ANYONE. By any means necessary.  Including private emails to strangers, when the story in public would hold no water.

It didn’t impress me overly at 11.  It impresses me even less now.  We’re the outcasts (from the clone group) and we’re the wreckers (of the narrative) and the one thing we need to do is keep talking. And not fall for the would-be-intimidating and pushy attempts to make us fall in line.

Just by being who we are, it shows normal people the queen bees aren’t the only option, and frankly they often do look like spiteful monkeys.

More importantly, we cause people to re-examine what “everybody knows” which is sometimes needed to save the whole species from disaster.

If they were sure of the truth of what they proclaim, they wouldn’t be underhanded, spiteful and DESPERATE bullies.

In the end we win, they lose.  Be not afraid.

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: Spy.

How to select wine.

How to clean difficult stains from carpet.

How to set traps for adversaries.

If you’re stubborn enough the story line will change to accommodate you. Sometimes it makes for a better book.

If you refuse to go away eventually the author will write you into another book.

No matter how bad things get, they could always be worse.

Sometimes you just have to broom it up.

There’s always a time to say “d*mn it” and jump.

Be memorable.

Everyone has a role. Sometimes it’s a sucky role, but you’re still needed.

Pick up random weapons you find lying about.

Everything is a weapon.

Your scars are the places you’re strongest.

People get bored with your depression and interior monologue

If you don’t set it on fire now, you’ll regret it later.

It’s better to have loved and lost, but why lose, really, when you can fight for it.

Take care of little furry/scaly/tentacled creatures. Today’s waif is tomorrow’s guardian.

You don’t choose the plot, but you can choose your attitude to it.

There’s safety in numbers.

You can always fix it in post.

G-d is probably not an author, but it’s easier to think of Him as one.

I can yell upward “Get a critique group, already” but it won’t change much.

While alive there’s always hope for sequels.

Robert A. Heinlein — though he wasn’t the first — says a lion who’s been freed still paces in the confines of the imaginary cage, and that something like it happens with intellectual boundaries set by totalitarian regimes of thought.

As a society that has been bound (and gagged. Mostly gagged) by such a regime, increasingly tighter for the last fifty years, many of us are pacing that cage.

One of the — admittedly many — things that drive me bonkers about the left is their tendency to want people to have exact-match role models.

What I mean by this is that by reasons that evade me — except that Marxist identity politics makes widgets out of human beings and creates a sort of uber-aspergers in how followers see the world. Um… maybe it’s why aspergers has been non-medicalized — the left thinks the only role models one can follow must match all of one’s EXTERNAL characteristics, or one won’t know what’s achievable.

So, for instance, since there is no other female Portuguese first generation immigrant who was ever successful in publishing (or at least not at a level anyone ever heard of) science fiction and mystery, younger me is supposed to have walked in circles, flopping and floundering before the publishing establishment wondering “can I even do this? How do I do this? There is no other person with a vagina and my level of tan doing this. Maybe I can’t do this.”

I did flop and flounder, and occasionally run in circles, screaming and shouting, but the problem was not “no role models that match me exactly. How do I do this?” Because I did have role models, and writers whose bios I read, and whose books I studied and who showed me how it was done. They were male, female, and probably — according to today’s asperger’s classifications all however many — 75? — genders there are, a multitude of colors, and a multitude of backgrounds.  But they could write, and they wrote stuff I wanted to read, and stuff I wanted to learn to write. So as far as role models went, I had them.

Because the important thing in the role of writer is the writing, not the external characteristics or even frankly, the upbringing of the one who writes.

I had an argument on this on FB a couple of weeks ago and had to explain to the lefty telling me that people’s external characteristics and background created their writing or gave them a unique voice or something that he was parroting 19th century literary analysis, that this wasn’t true — provably not true, as far as such a thing can be proven — and that no one but crazy people tried to analyze art according to the biography of the artist.

For the love of Bob, I had a degree in the stuff.  And you can’t really tell why Shakespeare wrote what he wrote. Or why Jane Austen wrote what she wrote.  And that’s with minute studying of their biographies.  Sure you can come up with “this incident inspired this” and we might even be right, but in the end? Judging by myself, what inspired a story might be a pun at the dining room table. Or a joke I overheard in a diner. Or even a dream.  And while some of my stuff can probably be guessed to have an origin in childhood preoccupations — say my tendency to write gender/benders and gender/ignorers probably traces to the fact that I couldn’t wear earrings and mom insisted on dressing me in my brother’s cast offs (cut down to size. He was six feet by the time I was four) because she thought having my legs bare while wearing a skirt would give me colds, in a society where this made me the boy named Sue. MAYBE. Or it could be because it’s something fascinating to pay with intellectually.  Hell, until this year I’d never touched a horse, and my other fairly consistent theme is centaurs — but does it? Does the theme of acculturation that runs through some of my books have to do with my own acculturation to the US?  What if I told you I wrote percursors of those books at 12, when I thought I’d live all my life in Portugal?

And if biography is a really bad explanation for the themes and preoccupations of an artist, matching the author’s skin color to a vaguely similar paint chip, or orientation, or even origin.

What the left misses in the “but the skin color, etc. of the author informs their experience is “And each set of experiences is highly individual.”  It would require insanity or iron-clad racism to think, say, that the Obama girls would create similar literature to the daughters of a crack-addicted inner city black mother.  They might tan alike.  Hell, they might even look something like each other.  But that has zero to do with what their actual experiences and view of the world is.

The only reason the left can think this, is because they think culture is genetic.  So, you know, Mala and Sasha, raised in a fourth generation communist household, shouldn’t have more in common with oh, Occasio Cortez than with some little girl whose mom was selling it on the street before the kid was out of diapers, who has no philosophy beyond knowing something is very wrong with her, and who has never read… anything, and watches soap operas and reality shows only.  Seriously? Only dyed in the wool racists would think that skin color was the most important thing in that equation, and that culture comes with skin color.

Oh, sure, they all face the same micro aggressions.  Because micro are the only aggressions that could make it past the secret service guys and to the Obama Girls.

Seriously. The entire philosophy of “We’ll hire our authors by color, and all authors of color are either Marxist or race traitors” and also “it’s your level of tan, national origins and sexual attraction that make you unique.  Other than that, we’re all exactly the same” doesn’t pass the snort-giggle test.

Take Dumas, for instance (I’m not doing anything with him for another 6 months at least.) How much did the fact that in US contemporary parlance he was technically black (black grandmother) inform his writing?  Ah…. nothing?  Sure, the stories of his father about his adventures might or might not have leaked in, but do tell me how you can read Dumas and know his father was technically raised a slave, that Dumas’ grandmother and aunts/uncles were sold to finance his grandfather’s and father’s passage to France, or that his father was only freed when hitting French soil?

Other than a certain moral flexibility in his writings — and honestly, that was the spirit of the time — there is no trace of any of this in his writing. (Yeah, I know “but he hired other people and had a writing factory. Maybe.  Or maybe he had graphomania. As a fellow sufferer I’m not taking bets. If it weren’t for the months or sometimes years of depression, I suspect people would accuse me of the same. Keep in mind the last twenty years I’ve had near critical hypothyroidism.)

Sure, sure, there are things I can’t write — and I’ll tell you I can’t write them, if you ask — but they have bloody nothing to do with my skin/sex/orientation, and everything to do with the ways in which I’m broken (we’re all broken. Just different ways.)  I’d give an arm and a leg to write action like Larry Correia, say. I can’t. And it has zero to do with “he knows guns better.”  Sure. He does know that.  But he also writes physical action of ALL SORTS better, including had to hand combat and car chases and…  I don’t visualize action in enough detail to write it like that.  I can sort of wave at it, but I can’t get down to that level of detail. Yes, I’m working on it, but I’ll never be THAT good.

And while I CAN write convoluted word-play novels, I can’t do it one after the other, because it depresses me.  It’s not my normal mode.

And hell, it took me ten novels to figure out PLOT (thank you Dave Freer for making me SEE foreshadowing.) I got published on the strength of characters, but I had no idea how to make plots work for readers.

So there are things I can do and things I can’t.  What the hell they have to do with Portuguese genetics or being female, evades me.

Sure, I needed to figure out how to write books for an American public, but that’s because I was born and RAISED abroad, and the tastes for what gets published in Portugal are different, and even though I’d read a ton of American books in translation, my tastes had been informed by what Portuguese considered good.

Sure, if you were raised in a tiny, insular community in the US, be it Amish or Ghetto, you’ll have trouble breaking in and your voice will indeed be unique.

Of course, you’ll have trouble breaking in BECAUSE your voice is unique.  The Mass Entertainment business is a business of packaging and selling experiences that will apply to the largest possible denominator.  So, that’s not to say you can’t write unique stuff, just that you have to tailor it to appeal to a community that’s used to standard stuff.

Seeing what people latched onto as worthwhile in my early books was an education. For instance, apparently Any Man So Daring is about racism. (REALLY?)

Point being, we’re let the entire society be turned into a pretzel to the tune of asperger’s screeching.  “But I can’t do that. I don’t see anyone who matches me doing that.”

We’re not a caste society (not even a chaste one. Apropos nothing. I almost spelled it that way, is all.  Too much blood in my caffeine stream.) No one is holding you back from doing/saying/being what you want.  Sure, it’s good to know when one’s natural abilities stop us.  Stuff like, if you’re 5’5″ you’re not going to be a basketball star.

But in the end? Everyone who does what you aspire to do is a role model.  You want to do that? Study how they do it.  Most intellectual barriers can be broken down with enough stubborn and insane amounts of work (which is why I’m still practicing writing action.)

Be not afraid.  BE the role model.  And hold that lantern aloft for people of all colors, shapes and backgrounds.

We’re all individual but we’re all human. If we can think it, we can figure out how to do it.

Refuse to be turned into a widget. Free yourself.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING EVERYONE! I’M OFF FOR THE DAY.

But to amuse you, here is a book promo and a complex request.  Love you. -SAH

FROM MACKEY CHANDLER:  The Way Things Seem.

How much trouble would you go to for an inheritance? How much would it matter what your estranged and disliked step brother and family thought of you? How much would you allow the dead hand of your distant father to influence you? Would it matter how much money was involved? And what if in the end, nothing you thought important at the start mattered? What if everything you believed wasn’t the way it seemed. Not only in your personal world but the wider reality you thought you knew. Could you deal with that?

AND ALMA BOYKIN HAS A THING ON SALE! A Carpathian Campaign: The Powers Book 1.

War rumors stalk Europe, but István Eszterházy has other concerns. Or so he thinks.

The Powers—ancient creatures living on the very energy of the land. Allied with the Houses, together the Powers and Houses have guided parts of Europe for a thousand years and more, humans, HalfDragons, and True-dragons working as one. But other forces shift, movements of peoples and of pride. István ignores them, intent on his military duties and his forthcoming wedding. War waits for no man, and the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand turns rumor into red war, setting Power against Power and House against House. And war is not what István imagined.

How can he survive this new world and protect his new family and his House? He must find a way, even as he begins a delicate dance with the Powers, that of his House and some far older and much more dangerous.

István’s world is changing. He will survive this new campaign, or die trying.

And a request:

I’ve been distracted and haven’t put anything up on sale for the holiday sale.  Any of you want to cast an eye towards what I have extant and tell me what I should put on sale tomorrow through Monday? And what else I should put on sale, when?
Yeah, I’m totally outsourcing.

Yes, you probably should take this as a warning I’ll take tomorrow off.  If you guys have thanksgiving sales on, send them to me now as I can assemble a post for tomorrow by tonight.

As all of you, and some other people know, I’ve been disheartened, dispirited and down right depressed over my writing, and my soit disant career, but yesterday one of my “kids” (HOW did the woman who tried to have 11 kids but ended up only birthing two sons end up with a tribe of you who call me “mom” anyway? It’s a miracle.) reminded me that without the 40 years in the desert, the exodus would not have lead to Israel as a nation, much less as a people.  And without the whole “kill a man and run off into the desert” Moses would not have made a good leader, anyway.

I mean, it had to be unpleasant as hell to live through.  But without it, he wouldn’t be what he was supposed to be.

It’s unpleasant as hell to start a new career at 56. And I’ve been avoiding it because it’s like being told there’s yet another mountain to climb.

But as a friend reminded me, it would be more unpleasant at 75.

I was never one to subscribe to the “everything happens for the best in the best of all possible worlds”.  Husband, incurable optimist that he is, does.

But without the no-promo, uphill both ways career, I probably wouldn’t have this blog or you lot, or all the “children” and “grandchildren” I keep accruing.

And I wouldn’t have learned to write upsidedown, sideways, and wearing a straight jacket while locked inside a tank of freezing water.

Yes, it’s also tired me out and made it difficult to find my real self as a writer, but it’s taught me an awful lot.

It could be much, much worse.

Without all of that, I’d not have the network of indie friends.  And perhaps I’d not be able to take advantage of indie now it’s available (it’s taken me long enough to jump, and even before the soit disant career, the self-confidence sucked.)

Who knows?

I’m willing to admit I have a lot to be thankful for.  And some of it are things I’d rather I hadn’t lived through.

And I have hope.  And that’s the thing to be most thankful for always.

So, go forth and have your turkey.  Send me your sales (your free books, your strange links yearning to be read) and I’ll do what I can tonight.

For now, go prepare your turkey. Armour your heart to be charitable to crazy relatives. Bask in those relatives you have and love, because time is fleeting and we’re all mortal (I was thinking today how much I miss the kids when they were little, and I wish I’d known how happy I was then. I’m sure in a few years, as the kids disperse around the country I’ll miss this time.)

Let’s make the future something to be thankful for. Be not afraid.