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.

I’ve admitted before I’m not good at writing/thinking about aliens.  It’s not that I think they can’t exist (logically they should.)  It’s that I have next to no interest in them.  Sure, the point at which humans interact with aliens is interesting but that’s about it.

You see, I like humans.  The ways in which we fall short of the ideal and sometimes manage to be better than any idea fascinate me.  I might actually be interested in humans interacting with aliens.  Full disclosure, I have a novel where aliens are the very bad guys somewhere in the endless cue.  But they are also incomprehensible. We don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing or if they’re bad guys according to them, because they’re DUH alien.

I am not so Odd that I don’t get that people write aliens to explore facets of humanity that they know just can’t be so. I do GET that. I just can’t do it, because in my deep brain I don’t believe we could understand aliens enough to make them interesting.  Rather, I think if they interact with us they’ll be like the forces of nature: remote, unknowable, and just happening.

Mind you, yeah, I also have a space opera called “translators in space” that will probably never get written because every year I’m further away from what I knew of language and linguistics.  (No, seriously.  I should have written it in my twenties.  Ah well.)  In those the aliens are really humans.  Or rather, maybe elves.  They are like humans with some essential differences.

Oh, okay, fine.  This being an Odd audience I’m going to guess everyone here has heard of the man who walked around the horses (yes, I know.  Probably assassination, blah blah blah.  Bear with me.)  There was a similar case in 1992 when we’d just moved to CO. Girl on a hike with a group, walked a little ahead, around a rock.  There was nowhere else for her to go but the trail. but she vanished, they couldn’t find her, no one ever found her.  There were stories at the time of people who vanish into thin air.  Believe it or not a trivial number of people have.

In this world, these people would get kidnapped, because some program identified exceptional ability at languages.  You see, aliens do exist, many of them.  And they trade. But no other species has the ability to learn languages.  Languages are hard coded.  So they kidnap humans, who don’t even know they exist, give them immortality treatments and auction them to be translator son alien ships.

The aliens are like those in the Weber-Ringo Prince Roger series.  Human-analog-aliens.

And you guys knowing me, you probably know how the series would go.  The first novel would be called Star Tongue.  Anyway — G-d only knows if I’ll get to it before I die, but…

The aliens are still not real aliens.  Because real aliens, my back brain thinks, would be incomprehensible.

All of which is still preferable to — well, mostly leftist — writers’ tendency to remake humans.

I don’t know if I ever told anyone at large (my friends know) my impetus into writing was the same as most writers.  I read something that drove me nuts and made me go “Oh, no, it wouldn’t be THAT way.”

I’m strange only in that I was very young and that the book that caused this reaction was a classic of science fiction The Left Hand of Darkness.

Let me start by saying that I LIKED the book.  Loved it even.  Mostly because it was different and it made me think.  (Like other books of the time, it didn’t age well, mostly on language, but also structure, which I guess was innovative and daring at the time, but strikes me as “too early seventies for words. Not this might be JUST ME but there’s a whole batch of books — one Heinlein — I can’t stand to re-read. I came of age in the seventies and eventually grew to loathe that false-craft feel of art at that time.  No one else is forced to agree with me.)

But part of what made me think — because my relaxing reads are books on evolution and animals and their biology and behavior (guys, I read Konrad Lorenz for fun) is that the left (and at the time anyone with even vague intellectual pretensions was at the very least soft left, because the zeitgeist was) was very funny about humans.

They often opened their books on humans by gesticulating broadly at imaginary religious fanatics and rubbing said fanatics’ noses in the fact that “we are animals.  No, we’re really animals.”  And then proceeded to go a little bananas, sometimes in supposed non-fiction, like Desmond Morris in The Naked Ape, which assured us only humans killed their own species, or something equally ridiculous (I read it at around 14 or 15, I just remember his thesis that humans were uniquely vile made me snort-giggle at the time.  Because, you know, you can sustain that if you’re religious, and say humans should aspire to the divine image, but if we’re really just animals, there is NO vile.  We do what instinct and nature tell us, no judgement, right?)

But mostly this dysfunction showed in science fiction, particularly at the time.  “We’re just animals.  If we just changed/removed/tweaked x y z we’d be communitarian, sharing, no war animals.”

The way hermaphrodites behave in TLHOD made me snort/giggle too for various reasons, the first being that hermaphrodite species on Earth (granted mostly very small) have some of the most violent mating behaviors in the world.  Makes sense since at least in live-bearing, or for that matter those who care for eggs, species, the cost falls on the one who carries young or sits on eggs.  The other one just goes off, whistling his merry way and lives to mate another day.  So in a species where either of the couple can bear, there would be a “war” (There are several books on war of the sexes in various species, which has led to things like praying mantises and duck penises.) to determine who bears.  And yes, she did get right that in an intelligent species, value would have to be put on children-of-the-body or no one would want to do it. (Or most children would be conceived by rape.  Which to be fair, is most hermaphrodite species on Earth.)

What she got wrong, related to that, is then having the kids raised in some sort of hippie dippie commune.

In fact, the whole setup makes perfect sense as a professional woman’s fantasy.  “I want to have kids, but someone else raises them, and it will be the perfect communitarian family and no one will think it’s bad if I’m not there, or take no more interest in them than in any of the family kids.”

In point of fact, from evolutionary pov, an hermaphrodite species would have a hell of an attachment to their own biological “of the body” kids, for the simple reason that otherwise, being intelligent and able to circumvent instinct, no one would have kids “of the body” and those born of rape would be abandoned to die.  World’s shortest species/race/breed.

Yes, I’m sure that some human (and these were supposed to be modified humans) tribes have done the communitarian child raising, but it’s not the norm, it’s not usually as communitarian as it looks and…. oh, heck, even extended family raising the kids, which it sort of is, is nowhere nearly what US leftists think it is.  There’s squabbles, politics, and the mothers very much care and “pull” for their own kid.

Anyway, it amused me because it was nowhere near the only.  There was this trend back then for hermaphrodite modified humans that somehow made them more cooperative/better at not warring, etc, which I found absolutely mind bogglingly bizarre and made me wonder why people thought injecting the fierce young-protecting instinct of the female into a species at large would make it more sharing and caring, not the other way around.  (And lord, study any society with multiple concubines and wives.  Women protect THEIR children, there is no sisterhood or love all babies, when yours is in the mix.  Some of the most horrific tales of mankind are the vengeance wrought by a woman on rival women AND THEIR BABIES.)

So this caused me to write my first book.  And yeah, my biology was better, but honestly, the writing sucked, mostly because well… I had no clue how to tell a story.

But you know, the left looks at “we’re all animals” and instead of viewing it as the permanent struggle of humans and what we, religious people, view as “needing grace to overcome the animal” (We never thought we weren’t animals.  What do you think most of the admonishments of religion: original sin, fallen nature, clay of the earth, etc. are all about?) they think they can just wish away.

Honestly, it shouldn’t surprise me how people who tried to levitate the Denver mint with their minds also think that the “natural human” would be perfect and sweet and cooperating if “capitalism” didn’t corrupt him.

I just sort of assume they’ve never paid attention to how humans work, including themselves.

From eugenics “we’ll breed this bad trait out.” To open borders “all cultures are equally valid and nothing bad will result from mixing them willy nilly, also they’ll all change to the perfect, inborn socialist culture of all brown people” to “if we just distribute all the wealth, everyone will work for the joy of it” the left is at war with reality, and the reality of humanity most of all.

We’re animals, okay?  Sure, some of us aspire to being better than that, but it’s not magic, and the macro system changing won’t turn us into angels.  (Except in the sense it kills most people, so I guess….)

Nah.  If the left truly believes that, we’ve found the aliens.

Sorry this is so late.  It’s not that we went to the doctor: that wasn’t such a big deal.  It’s that we went to the doctor and then got high-jacked by the demon of small details: oh, yeah, I need some kind of exercise clothes since current set (36lbs down) is falling off me, and would be shocking to wear in public; oh, we need to return redbox and grab another one; did you know we’re out of yogurt?; I probably should stop by craft store and buy the craft caddy thing I’ve been putting off.

That’s not what I want to talk about today.  It’s also not this, though I love this, and if I started a blog today it would probably be called Glee Club of the Damned. Because, well, that’s kind of the way my mind works.  (Favorite lines? Oh, heck.  But I’ll go with “I hated that book” mostly because I did.)

If’n you have time go and take a gander, because there will be a test later it actually ties up with the post. Later.

You guys know now and then, for reasons, I have almost shuttered this blog.  Usually the reasons go something like this: I don’t have time; PJMedia pays per post while what I make for this blog is very little; I don’t want to wake up every morning with this obligation hanging on me.

But I don’t shutter my blog, because you guys are friends and because, to be blunt, this is the only publicity I get, pretty much.

This time it was different. Let’s say there are secondary stresses on this, which I don’t intend to throw here, but let’s say younger son is trying to start a typesetting business for money while the university plays class scheduling games… (yes, if you want his email, ping me on fb or email me.)  And there’s… other stuff.

So I woke up on Wednesday feeling like everything I’ve ever written is nothing much, and I can either start my career anew, right now, or I can retire.  And retirement looked good.

On top of which someone went out of their way to make me feel non-valued as a professional.  Which was the cherry on the cake that made it all blow up.

I started questioning what I’m even trying to do writing, and considered giving ALL OF IT up including the blog, and going off to do something less stressful and more productive like being Walmart door greeter.

Questions like “Why do you write?” And “What do you want to accomplish?” became very… squirmy and uncomfortable.

I have talked to friends (some of whom are mental health professionals) and done a lot of thinking about where I am and where I want to be.

And I think the problem is somewhere along the line, in my course through traditional publishing I let them get in my head and determine what I can even dream.  I trained myself to write what I THINK is “publishable” — which means, trad pub publishable — And I lost ME.

Oh, I’m not dropping planned projects, but I need to spend some time figuring out what happened to that little girl who wanted to be a writer, and the truly strange (or not so strange, but not “acceptable” stories she wanted to write) and find out what happened to the zest and the joy of writing.

Some of it will spill here, and it also means the writing schedule will get reorganized.  Heck, you guys have been waiting so long six months more ain’t much.

The some that will spill here might be snippets and starts, and just questions.

Back to that music video, and the “literal lyrics” that make fun of it.  The whole video is surreal, and we can pick it apart all we want, but when it came out it was innovative and it spoke to us.

And the literal lyrics are very silly, but I’m glad someone did it, because it’s amazing.

So, I’m going to try to learn to be more like my writing friend who just writes what in his head, and cares not the least what people will think.

There will be slips, falls, and steps back.  But… but maybe somewhere along the line I’ll reconnect with that girl curled up in the big armchair with a book dreaming of the things she would write.  Or with her more sophisticated teen self, creating entire worlds.  Or even with the young mother who put herself to sleep by telling herself stories she couldn’t sell.

And maybe I’ll find my joy and creativity again.

Somewhere in the distance there’s a light glimmering.  I’ll walk the labyrinth to find it.

Sunday Book Promo

FROM ALMA BOYKIN:  Oddly Familiar

Ah, October, when the ghosts, and spirits walk, and the Off Ramp of Doom falls quiet. Too quiet…

Lelia Chan and her Familiar, Tay, continue learning about magic and what mages do. When a customer drops a strange silver disk in Belle, Book, and Blacklight, it starts a chain of events that pull Lelia deeper into shadow magic. André Lestrange and Rodney return to help sort out the off-ramp. Someone else returns, someone who wants to open doors best left closed. Lelia and Company have their hands and paws full dealing with the forces of darkness and bad jokes.

Evil walks on All Hallows Eve. It’s up to Lelia and Tay to send it back where it belongs. Or else.

ALSO FROM ALMA BOYKIN:  Against a Rising Tide.

FROM MARGARET BALL: A Creature of Smokeless Flame.

Thalia Kostis and her cohort knew the CIA was funding their group of research mathemagicians, but they’d never demanded results like this before! After terrorists use magic to kidnap hostages from the agency’s headquarters, the Center for Applied Topology finds themselves torn from their cubicles and dragged across three continents, from holding cells to terrorist safehouses as the superiors who never believed in them before are now demanding impossible results.

Now academics who can’t organize a donut run are finding out there are worse fates than loss of funding… If they don’t find and stop the magicians responsible, they’re going to lose their lives!

FROM LAURA MONTGOMERY: Like a Continental Soldier.

The starship Valerie Hall failed to reach the terraformed world of its original destination. Instead, it found a habitable substitute where the settlers split into two factions. First Landing devolved into a rude replica of medieval despotism. Seccon might promise more.

Or so hope Gilead Tan and his companions.

Gilead spent three centuries in cold sleep, held there by a First Landing custom that decreed only one sleeper could be awakened every fifty years. Once awake, Gilead freed two dozen of his fellows—all soldiers like himself—and led them into the wilderness.

Close to two hundred civilians still lie trapped in the decaying cryo-cells of First Landing. Their captive slumber haunts him.

But despite its vaunted freedom, Seccon has one rule. No one goes back to First Landing.

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: nerve

In 1997 my heart broke and I decided to give up writing.

Sure, you can read that again.

Look, I’d been at it for 12 years.  And I mean seriously, even though sometimes we couldn’t send novels out because we lacked the $8 for postage. But still, by that time I had written 10 novels (8 in the same universe) and come in second in two contests.

My first short story got a personal rejection, but after that I was stuck in bad-photocopy-land.  I used to fill a big plastic bin of rejections every March because I was circulating 60 stories on average.

And then our writers’ group decided to send out submissions to a writers’ contest (I think in NM) and I sent out two novels (both finished) that I’d worked on and polished.  They were both rejected in the elimination round.  Meanwhile my friend who had dashed off a proposal (and never finished that novel) won the contest.  She’d been writing seriously for … three years.

It wasn’t that I envied my friend.  I just decided that I was doing something wrong, that something about me was intrinsically non-saleable.  (I wasn’t even wrong, as such.  Friend’s proposal was far more accessible.)

I’d always wanted to be a writer, and now it was impossible.  So I gave up writing.

It might have been harder, honestly, but Dan was traveling five days a week and I don’t sleep when he’s not home.  So I was stumbling drunk with sleep.

But even though I’d realized that I’d never be what NY wanted (and boy, was I right!) I also wanted to be around writers, to write, to learn, to spend sometime with adults, even virtually.

I looked around for fanfic I could write.  This was a little problem, since I don’t watch TV.  And while it’s theoretically possible to write fanfic in a show you never watched, it would probably get weird.  (It got weird, anyway.)

I tried to find Three Musketeers Fanfic and ran away.  It was ALL slash and also let’s say “only fandom that runs to foursomes.”  But the worst part — which tells you a lot about me, alas — is what offended me: they were all about the Disney movie.  The idea that Porthos used to be a pirate, or that D’Artagnan had an affair with the queen (for heaven’s sake) was woven all through.  THAT I couldn’t take.

So I found Jane Austen fanfic, which is always mostly Pride and Prejudice fanfic.  For those of you who only know it through the execrable movie with Keyra Knightly she of the flat chest and stupid expressions, or from the movie set in 19th century TX, you’re doing the work the same disservice as if you only knew Starship Troopers through the movie.

Honestly,if I read one more fanfic that makes a comment about being fools in love, I’m going to reach through the screen and…. uh… nevah mind.  “Break fingers” is probably indicated.

Jane Austen wasn’t writing about being “fools in love.”  In fact, she was not a very romantic writer.  Or I should say her romance was more realistic in that people marry for all sorts of reasons, sometimes zany.  What she was mostly was someone with a sharp eye for folly, but one who still loved humanity nonetheless.

The book might be mostly inaccessible unless you’ve made a study of the era and/or are willing to work harder.  Even I find myself going “Wait a minute, why is saying that wrong? It’s the logical thing!”  Let’s say their manners and morals are sometimes bewildering.

I think well of the A & E miniseries which is fairly accessible and fairly respectful of the book.  I watch that when I have a cold or can’t function.

So I drifted into a fanfic group, and eventually got thrown out of it by implying that Mr. Crawford (whom I gang pressed to marry Kitty) might have a taste for being whipped.  No, it wasn’t even that blatant.  When they met I had established that he was excited, mostly by danger, which is why he had previously run away with a married woman.  And Kitty has gone bonkers and is threatening him with a gun which makes him fall in love with her.

I simply had a scene in which a married Kitty is coming into the house (secretively) with a whip and tells Lizzy that it’s to subdue unruly pillows.  (Honestly, I wasn’t visualizing S & M, just the threat.)

Apparently this was too hot for that site, the story was expunged and my log in terminated.  Which meant I bounced into another site and posted the same story.  (In retrospect, you can tell how not-sleeping I was.  Printed it out recently, and it’s borderline incoherent on the word level.)  No one cared about how risque I was.

I stayed with that site ten years, and I honestly learned more there not about writing per se, but about the tastes in story of normal human beings, than anywhere else, ever.

On the site I was “adopted” by a family of five women who’d taken on Bennet girls personalities.  Because they were all taken, I had to be Mrs. Bennet.

Honestly, they offered me the chance to be sensible.  Charlotte.  Sensible, me?

I became Mrs. Bennet because she’s sort of a grown up Lydia.

Today I was meditating on the book and the personalities of the women and I thought “Good Lord, I AM Lydia.”

Think about it, I open my mouth when I should stay quiet. I have a weird sense of humor.  I don’t bow to the dictates of my society. And I am running away with indie, which is probably as bad as running away with Mr. Whickam.  If not worse.  I understand ALL the proper society is VERY properly scandalized at me and after 18 years and 34 books I ADMIT TO including a for-hire book which made someone else’s career, a Prometheus, a Dragon, two collaborations with bestsellers, my first book being a finalist for the Mythopoeic, I’m not a real writer, and not qualified to be at panels at cons.

Isn’t it amazing that the people who fancy themselves anti-establishment are the most hide bound of mannered ladies, just in a different way.  “No, no, deary.  You must challenge convention like everyone else.”

All the PROPER LADIES will look down on me.  Why, I have no reputation left! (Snort, giggle.)

Oh, yeah, the rest of the story: eventually I decided to try my toes in the publishing water again (seriously, if I had the ability to send my younger self a letter.  Never mind.)

I wrote Darkship Thieves, which was rejected sometimes with furious letters, and I had NO IDEA what they objected to was the Libertarianism.  Eh.  I iz dense and don’t get these social signals well.

Eventually I went to a workshop met an editor and sold the Shakespeare trilogy and since then we’ve been trundling along in this hell-bound basket.

I’m bringing some of my Austen stuff under Alyx Silver.  Only one out right now.

The whole point of this post, though, is that while most women of an intellectual bend identify with Mary Bennet, I am apparently and forever much closer to the scandalous and imprudent Lydia.

Well, you know, if you can’t fix it you must embrace it.  I’ll snort giggle in the face of the proper ladies of science fiction and go on in my socially-unapproved way.

Because sometimes, it’s the best you can do.