I’m also, honestly, not trying to see how late I can be before I check in here.

The day just sort of took a weird turn, or I’d have put on a Blast From The Past.  No, nothing bad, just I knew I needed to do some things today, and they necessitated driving, only I’m not driving yet, and it was easier for son to drive me before I’d put the post up, so…

Anyway, speaking of things in the air, that aren’t exactly a conspiracy theory, because it would take too much effort to coordinate across thousands of sites and classrooms, etc but which are everywhere, because they fit what people are taught, even when what people are taught is complete, laugh out loud nonsense.

Going through the Viking exhibit, for instance, we kept being told time after time how powerful women had been among the vikings, and also there were things like treasure troves, which in one case they said “was a woman’s treasure trove, probably to honor women in her ancestry.”  At which point I looked at the case enquiringly, because these idiots don’t seem to understand someone’s unearthed treasure trove is someone else’s panicked burial.

I do because it’s not unusual in Portugal to find “treasure troves” while doing house repairs or digging in a field that “has always been a forest.” (actually aerial photography of the village shocked me by showing that the “immemorial woods” had at one time had buildings in them.  Look, we knew there had been buildings here and there and the occasional mill.  One of the things dad and I did, while walking in the woods was read Roman inscriptions, many of them (now utterly meaningless) boundary stones.  And you often tripped on mill wheels and such.  No, the weird thing is that the entire “forest” was once upon a time a village, larger than the village.  So those mill wheels and other things left in the middle of the forest were not places where the owner died without descendants and left it to rot, but places where some catastrophic disruption occurred.  And the population of the village was once almost as large or as large (assuming they had no multi-story buildings, not always a good idea with Rome) as today.  I’d guess either the fall of Rome, or the Black Plague shrunk the village.)  Usually too small to warrant calling the authorities, most of these troves contain five or six coins, and were someone’s whole fortune before an invasion, or a catastrophe.  I don’t and can’t imagine the householder pausing to hide certain objects to “honor” certain women.  There is no way to even get in the mind frame of whoever wrote that card, except to say that they never new privation, need or threat in their entire lives.

Which brings us to the next part.  All through the exhibit, people told us over and over again that the Vikings were — contrary to legend — peaceful, peaceful I tell you.  Most of the Vikings were, after all, farmers and householders.

I wasn’t buying it.  Yeah, sure, most Vikings, if you count women, children, and people to old to go aViking, just stayed put.  But no civilization where dying in bed gets you sent to Hel (which was cold rather than hot but much like our Hell) is a peaceful one.  In the same way I didn’t buy the continuous reassurances there were as many women as men aboard those ships.  Cooeeeeee!  Really?  The men saddled themselves with a liability likely to get pregnant, give birth, etc AND be weaker in battle?  That’s…. amazing.  Oh, I forget.  The idiots writing these cards think women are naturally as strong and physically as fast as men and that the “patriarchy” is a six thousand year old conspiracy to hide this.  Sure, there probably was the occasional female in a male role.  Contrary to much bleating on the left, the patriarchy didn’t enforce strict gender roles, life generally did, and there are always outliers, and Helga the Ugly who could lift a pig under each arm, probably was allowed to join the guys in their expeditions.  For one, who was going to tell her now.  For another, no guy ever got drunk enough for her to be at risk.

Other than that, sure, there were as many women as men aboard Viking ships.  Coming back from a raid.  They called those women “slaves.”

One thing that surprised me (though it pretty well put paid to the “peaceful Viking” image they’d been trying to build, was the skulls and the list of healed injuries, etc.  A lot of the skulls or fragments of skulls showed just how hard life was, from the health point of women.  Women’s skulls probably in early middle age, around their early thirties, showed osteoporosis we’d expect in an elderly women.  All the bones showed signs of someone headed for the grave in their forties, if they weren’t killed by a violent illness first.

This shouldn’t have surprised me, except that one of those “not a conspiracy but they all believe this” lies going around seems to be that life expectancy hasn’t expanded, that all the increase in life expectancyy is do to less child mortality.

And this is poppycock.  It might have applied to “average age at death” but not to “life expectancy”.  Life expectancy when I was little was around early sixties for the village.  This was not so much a calculation as a “no one is surprised if you die at this age.”  Keep in mind we were reasonably prosperous, in historical norms, and reasonably well fed, again by historical norms.  And yet when someone died in his sixties people went “well, he was old.”

OTOH when my cousin died, in his early sixties, five (?) years ago, it was a horrible shock to the whole family.  It was like someone dying in his thirties back in the day.  The words “so young” were in everyone’s lips.

Sure, some people lived longer.  Like my family, which had a tendency to live to their eighties or nineties.  BUT even then, eighty now is not like eighty then.  My parents are in much better shape than their parents at eighty.  They look and act 10 years younger, easily.  And older son, when he worked at the hospital, told me that it wasn’t rare to see people 100 and older.

When I was a kid, turning 100 was a joke, and most of the people who “did” didn’t, as the birth records were imprecise. (We’re still not absolutely sure when my father was born.  What we know for sure is that he was either not born on that date, or not in that year.  Because Grandma’s stories of his birth involve giving birth on a Sunday when a festa happened in a nearby village, and she was alone in the house.  His birth date was not a Sunday for the year he was supposedly born in.  And like most people his age, in the area, grandma got around to registering his birth when he was school age.  We don’t THINK she lost track of his year of birth, because she had a kid less than a year older and one less than a year younger.  If she miscalculated dad’s age, she miscalculated ALL of their ages.  Which is POSSIBLE, because our family runs to large and precocious and she might have convinced herself they were all a year older, because the oldest was reading.  But it’s more likely to be that it was a different date, probably by a month or two.)  Still, it was a big enough thing to get your picture in all the papers, and it happened every few years.  If they did that now, they’d never publish anything else.

However, I have had arguments with earnest academics, most of them very, very leftist, that if you survived childhood then you’d live “about the same time” you live now, and with the same degree of health.  One of them told me she had dug a village in Germany in the 19th century and knew this to be so.  (Turns out it was a very wealthy area.)

No, you couldn’t expect to live the same time, certainly not with the same degree of health, because you’d have vitamin deficiencies, not enough protein, and honestly, a lot of infections that had to run their course, due to not having antibiotics.  Anyone who has lived in a time or place where vegetables and fruit were not plentiful in winter, where there was no temperature control in human habitations, and where antibiotics were difficult to obtain, knows this “they were just like us” bullshit deserves a bullshit medal with d*ck clusters.  But most of these people have never had a day of privation in their lives and think their good fortune is how human life has always been.

The side effect of this is that they are like stupid little romantics, seeing everything that’s “wrong” with human life (anomie, artificiality and the heartbreak of psoriasis) but not how much better, how amazing our life is compared to past generations.

Because of this, they think we can give up the gifts of science and industrialization and all we’ll lose is our “capitalist shackles” of having to actually earn a living.

They imagine we could live in the middle of the forest and be as healthy and strong as we are now.

And thus they facilitate the Socialist power grab via bleating about crisis, be they crisis of the “environment” or of redistribution.  They believe in the same idiocy as Mr. Obama who thought “At some point you’ve made enough money.” Because money is just money, nothing else.  It’s not health and longevity, and sufficient food of the right kind not to be malnourished.

It’s tempting to think these beliefs are being disseminated in order to push these bah lambs to the slaughter with their enthusiastic cooperation.

But no, like the beliefs in powerful women Vikings, (who apparently can ONLY be powerful by pillaging and plundering.  Being mistress of a farm is not enough), and in peaceful Vikings too they’re simply an upending of long-held beliefs about something.  I.e. if Western culture has long believed something, progressives will believe the opposite, because that’s about as hard as any of them can reason, and congruent with their initial mission to topple civilization so perfect communism will emerge.

Note that whether it’s a conspiracy or not, disseminating and believing in these lies still has the effect of corroding civilization.

May G_d have mercy on their souls, because the world is merciless, and their beliefs are counter-survival.

Humans are curious things.  I once read a description of the human mind as an instrument for bringing order out of Chaos.  (Which puts the story of the creation in a whole different light, but never mind that.)

It might very well be the mechanism responsible for our success in becoming the dominant species on Earth.  We can take hints and signs, and weave them into a complete whole, so that grandma G’u’g who can no longer see very well can add up almost unheard rustle in the bushes, a certain smell and the way the birds went quiet to: Predator is after me, and end up saving herself and grandchildren just in time.

This sort of thing is great for individual survival, but it puts an odd kick in our gallop.  We also add up rustles and intimations and whispers and make up conspiracy theories (supernatural or not) that would make your head spin.  What’s more, we LIKE them.

I realized this morning, as I had to fight myself into not buying a book about how CERN will bring back demons (with notes, and proof!) that all of us like that kind of thing, and I’m just LUCKY I can buy such things for research (it fits rather neatly into the background of a novel I’m noodling.  Though I didn’t buy it.  I think I can find most of it for free on the net.)

Other people, who aren’t writers, end up believing in grand, arching conspiracies that “explain everything.”

It used to be I hied away from any site at one of these words: tri-lateral commission, masons (unless a history of masonry), Rockfellers (unless an history ditto) and others that won’t come to mind now.  If you add in Russians for the present day, you start understanding how pervasive this stuff is.

The reason it satisfies an old human craving is because we know the world isn’t fair.  We can deal with that.  But the world also isn’t logic, and things happen in reality that no novelist would dare write about.  To explain it, our brains try to forge these immense, convoluted conspiracies, involving centuries and thousands of people.

The sanest among us realize those are nonsense.  Yes, there are unified “pushes” across the world, but mostly they’re the result of people raised in the same few institutions, believing the same thing, and all of them trying to do what they think is right.

You don’t need a conspiracy to predict what a fourth generation red diaper president will do, because you know what he believes, and you can extrapolate from there: he’ll hate America, because he inherited his ancestors’ inchoate resentment that America won the cold war, never bowed to communism, and by our very existence proved communism wrong; he’ll try to import as many immigrants from third world countries as possible, because the Marxist idea of the proletariat never dies, it just goes to other countries and becomes exotic; he’ll think that if he depresses American economy the world will get richer, because to him economics is a fixed pie and it’s all a matter of sharing it out.  Etc.

In the same way you can predict what the progressive-infested institutions like publishing, the arts and the news will do.  It doesn’t take a conspiracy.  It takes all their heads running the same malware, and communism having become a sign of “high class” in the west.  Which happened because the people with money thought they had to convert to escape the massacre, when “inevitably” communism won.

But we LIKE conspiracies.  And in my case, at least I admit, the more loony the better.  Partly of course, I like the loony ones, because they keep me from swallowing them whole.  Partly because the larger and more encompassing they are the more they activate the “wow” feel.

It’s a great part of what makes MHI so much fun.  And it’s encapsulated in the moment in Galaxy quest when the pseudo space captain says “It’s all true” and the kid says “I knew it.”

We all want it “all” to be true because a grand conspiracy controlling everything absolves us of personal responsibility, allows us to dismiss our failures and the way in which the world disappoints us, and is just… neat.

The point is to remember that that feeling of neat is deceptive.  It’s very hard for more than three people to keep a secret.  And keeping a secret — a real one, that matters, not a secret handshake — through generations is almost impossible.  If you work on the idea that it’s all a grand conspiracy your actions won’t match with reality and you’ll often act crazy.

But if you keep that in mind, and particularly if you write, a good conspiracy theory read or two can lend that much more depth and strangeness to your world, and readers will probably like it.

Now if I can find a way the people tracking searches, and the Amazon algorithm won’t peg me under too crazy to live.

The Free Market versus Death Panels by Alpheus Madsen

A few days ago, I encountered a question on the evil time-sucking website called Quora that I wished I could answer, but I had lost track of.  The question in question was something about wondering if the Free Market could provide health care, and the answer that I wanted to counter said, essentially, “No, because the profit motive doesn’t belong in health care, because the value of any given life is infinite, so doctors will charge millions of dollars to save every single life.”

On the surface, the argument makes sense, but it’s not hard to find a good example that will show that something about the reasoning is very flawed:  food is far more necessary for life than medical care.  Why doesn’t a farmer charge $1.5 million for every apple?  Indeed, for every grain of wheat?  Or even for every particle of flour?  The answer is complicated — thousands of people get PhDs of perhaps somewhat dubious value in their attempts to answer this question — but clearly, things like competition and “marginal utility” work together to make food affordable, and it’s altogether not clear at all why these same forces shouldn’t cut medical costs as well.

Furthermore, the answer ignores the biggest problem with socialized medicine in all its forms — indeed, the problem that any government controlled resource has — the exact same problem that develops every time the Government steps in and tries to “fix” market forces:  you get shortages and surpluses because bureaucratic meddlers cannot predict what people will want, or even what people need, or how people will respond to the price controls, incentives, and punishments they set up in their infinite lack of wisdom to provide health care to “all”.

The Free Market is the only way we can balance costs in a reasonable way.  I want to go a step further, though, and make the case that the Free Market is the only moral way to address these issues as well.

Consider the case of Charlie Gard, who has been in the news recently because the courts of the United Kingdom have declared him brain dead, and wish to pull the plug on him.  The parents would like to seek treatment, and barring that, would like to take him home so that he could die in peace with them — but bureaucrats insist that he must die in the hospital.  The bureaucrats only have the best interests of all involved, after all — not just Charlie, whose life, apparently, isn’t worth trying to save, and who shouldn’t be allowed to continue to live on account of the pain he is suffering — but he can’t receive care, because of all the people in Great Britain’s health care system who also need the resources that could go to Charlie.  The Bureaucrats have made their decision, and they will enforce it.  And according to many people, this is the most humane outcome that we can receive in this situation.

Compare this to the alternative that Charlie’s parents seek:  they have asked doctors who wish to help, some of which have said “Yes, I will, if you give me money”, and others who have said “We’ll even do it for free”.  They have asked friends and strangers alike for donations to pay for the treatment, and people have responded, to the order of about £1.7 million, last I’ve heard.  Yes, it’s possible that Charlie might now be braindead, but doctors have been wrong about this before — and besides, the disorder is rare, and even treating a braindead patient can help doctors understand the disease better, and allow them to be better prepared to address this disease in future patients.  It may even help doctors understand the human body a little more, and thereby help patients suffering from other diseases, some seemingly unrelated to the rare mitochondrial disorder that Charlie suffers from.

No one is being forced to help little Charlie.  Every person who donated money, did so knowing that they can afford to do so, and if not, they did so knowing that a little bit of sacrifice is acceptable if it can be used to save a little boy.  Even the doctors who won’t do this for free are willing to offer their services, and as the number of doctors who can provide such services grow, the price of the services will naturally come down.  (Probably not too much, in this case, because of the rarity of the disease — only 16 people in the world are known to suffer from it — but it’s also clear that it’s not all that hard for strangers and friends to come together to donate to the rare child who is diagnosed with this disease.)

The friends and strangers who have donated money get to take pleasure in supporting the care of a child in dire need.  The doctors who receive money get to put food on their table, and pay for shelter for their family; those who don’t accept the money will treat the child for the pleasure of doing so as well — and in both cases, these doctors will be better prepared to help others.  And while the parents might not be able to save Charlie — and I suspect that Charlie’s condition has likely deteriorated during the months that his parents fought the courts and the hospital for treatment, in their efforts to do everything they could to save their son — in the end, they will have the satisfaction that they had done everything in their power to save their child.  Well, not <i>quite</i> everything, but only because Bureaucrats barred them from certain actions that any compassionate soul would have allowed.

Charlie’s case is not an isolated incident.  I still remember the testimony of a cancer patient who explained that she was sentenced to die because the National Health System would not approve in a timely manner breast cancer drugs that would have stopped the cancer (if I remember correctly, she was eventually allowed the drugs, and the National Health Service even paid for them — but only after it was too late:  the disease had progressed to the point where it couldn’t be stopped) — and they would not allow her to buy the drugs herself, unless she were willing to pay for all  her treatment, which she could not afford to do — all in the name of equality (because it wouldn’t be fair to the poor souls who couldn’t afford those drugs, you see), and of keeping NHS costs down, and doing the greatest good for the greatest number of people.  I don’t know how many cases like this occur in Great Britain; sadly, most of these cases most likely never make it into the news, and likely even have a hard time making it into statistics.

The irony here is that everything we’ve been told about why the Free Market is evil — that treatments would be prohibitively expensive, because we all will pay anything to save the lives of our children from hypothetical illnesses — is exactly the evil that Socialized Medicine Bureaucrats impose on actual children, even when the parents are literally willing and able to pay $1.7 million for the care of their son.  And yet, for all this, those who defend the cold-blooded, heartless, and soulless Socialist Bureaucrats have the gall to accuse the Free Marketers of cold-blooded heartlessness, and insist that they only have the best interests of everyone in their hearts, all because it’s somehow evil for a doctor to charge money for his services!

George Bernard Shaw is known for insisting that we should have a panel, where every person has to go before the panel to justify their existence — and if the panel finds the justification wanting, they will have the power to take the person and make sure that they are eliminated in a humane way.  (I have always suspected that Shaw imagined himself on the panel, and never imagined himself standing before the panel, trying to justify his own existence…and being found wanting…)  This is literally what is on display in Great Britain.  And this is what Socialists consider to be humane.

But consider an alternative:  that every day, each of us must justify our existence to others — through job interviews, and through appealing directly to friends, strangers, and charities for support — and if we are found wanting, rather than be eliminated immediately, we get to make more appeals the next day.  If our ability to do things is hampered by injury or disease, there’s a good chance that people will take pity on us; if we are able-bodied, and can find a little bit of time each day to improve ourselves, we might very well become useful in ways that we weren’t before.  Granted, we are in danger of dying in an inhumane way — we’re in danger of starving — but this is countered by being given a chance, every day, to prove our worth.

Which is more humane?  To have your life held at the mercy of the whims of Bureaucrats, who alone will determine your worth?  Or to be free to make the case that you are worth something to everyone you can talk to, and if found wanting yesterday, nonetheless might find you worthwhile today?  I will not answer this question directly, but I will simply suggest that you look at societies that embrace the former, and compare them to societies which embrace the latter, and then ask yourself:  which type of society prospers more?  And I would propose that you would then have your answer.

(Alas, it is too late for the tiny victim of socialism. The End of Charlie Gard’s Story)

There are two times that movies made me and a friend who is also a writer laugh so loud we were almost kicked out of the theater.  This was made worse by the fact that the lines weren’t particularly funny.

Not to anyone not in our business.

The first one is from sliding doors, when the girl tells her no good writer-wannabe boyfriend “I know you’ll finish your novel and we’ll be rich, but…”

Yeah.  It happens.  Look at the mountain who is buying a a mountain.  Of course it happens.  But it takes so many things.  Talent, that’s a given.  Under the old system, many were pushed, few had the staying power.  It takes push, too, so it takes a house believing in you.  The debacle that was my first trilogy kind of did for that.  Sure I could get a house to pick me up, but not to pick me up with any sort of push because I’d “failed” once.  (Oh, yeah, and “fail” in this field is interesting too.  I “failed” while earning out the advances on all books.  But, oh, it was SUPPOSED to have push and go big.  The fact it didn’t actually GET push didn’t matter.  It’s all still my fault, as per rules of traditional publishing.)  But once you get push you have to have the talent there, to back it up.  And you had to have the sort of book that is just right for that place and time.  And… and…. and…

Someone says it’s like one in a thousand in this field that even makes it to making a living (yay, me, I’m a winner) and perhaps a tenth of that that makes it to “rich” by any definition.

I was once told that Heinlein ran scared (financially) his whole life.  It seems impossible, for someone who had millions of dollars in advances, but million dollars in this field is qualified.  Usually those are benchmarked to this and that performance and paid over ten years.  In the end, you get the kind of money you’d make at a normal day job, but with twice the work and the hassle.

So my friend and I laughed and laughed at that line.  Years later, while working nights at Target, she got told that she must be there to do research.  Her books were still on the shelves, so surely she had millions.  I don’t know if she laughed or cried.

Then there’s the other line.  It was at the end of Chicago, the musical.  One girl had told the other she wasn’t sure they could do their act together because they couldn’t stand each other.  And the come back line was “Well, honey, this is the one business where that doesn’t matter at all.”

Is this true of writing?  Oh, brother.

It used to be way worse.  I get a feeling it’s still worse for other people.  For me?  Once I realized I’d always have indie and proved with witchfinder that indie would pay me at least as much as I made from trad (or in this case more) I stopped clenching, stopped minding my words, stopped being envious of my colleagues, and just generally started liking the people I liked and hating the people I hated and not generally giving a damn.

But it used to be you watched yourself and your back all the time. If a friend were in bad odor, particularly if you didn’t know why, you distanced yourself, because there might be a whisper campaign, and it might rub off on you.  If someone you hated were a bright rising star, you at least tried to be nice in public.  And if you got a chance to work with someone you purely couldn’t stand you did it if it was good for your career.  (I’m an oddity.  All three collaborations this year are with long-time friends who-are-like-family.)

There were currents running through the field that fans never saw, and you tried not to let them see.  After all they might love you and what’s his name who is always sticking a knife in your back, and you didn’t want to disappoint them.

Perhaps it is this way still.  I suspect for most people it is.  Particularly for newbies who don’t seem to view indie as quite true, since they suffer from the velveteen syndrome and want to be “real.”  (A lot of them after being ‘real’ once regain their senses and hie off to indie again.  But some don’t.)

The problem is that unless you’re one of the darlings, right on top of the heap, with book tours and ads in Times Square, it’s kind of hard to read if you’re in favor or disfavor at the publishing house.  I had an editor that, while I was earning out, would often completely cut me dead at cons, not answer my emails, and treat me like trash, and then sometimes, when I was in trouble (or not) out of the blue would be my bestest friend.  Never figured out why, but she was a hell of a strain on the nerves.  Around here we called her “the hot and cold running editor.”  Possibly it corresponded to the stage of divination of my political leanings that week.  Who knows?  Or perhaps to the birds she saw out her window in the morning.

This reduces most writers to the state of teen girls with a middle-school crush.  “My publisher sent me an email this morning, so they probably like me.”  Or “I didn’t get invited to dinner at Little Con so they probably are about to punt me” or the truly crazy making “my editor only had three minutes for me and turned off my pitch like a faucet, but she spent an hour with that new chick they just hired.  OMG, they love her and hate me.  They’re going to give her my promo money.”

It’s crazy making, and if you ride it it will make you crazy.  Don’t.  I was only able to do this when indie became a possibility, but indie is a possibility.  Even if you are hell bent on traditional, you have other options.  Relax.  Be nice to newbies, even ones who look like they will take your promo.  If a colleague tries to stick his knife in your back, he might be a dick.  Or he might be completely insane at the moment, from trying to read the tea leaves of his career.  File whatever he did as in the realm of possibility with this person, but don’t retaliate.  Shrug and smile.  Get over it.  Try not to have an enemies list.  Yes, of course, I DO have one, but those are people who have sunk more than an incidental knife in my back.  No, you may not know what it is, nor what the knives were.  None of your fracking business.  And the biggest retaliation I’ll do against these people is not work with them.  I.e. they won’t get invited to anthos I edit, and should I become big, I will not offer a hand up.  In a business as shaky (and getting shakier) as ours is, that’s punishment enough.

Be nice to those above you, unless you really, really, really can’t stand them, and then just avoid them.  Be nice to those below you.  Offer help.  Shrug off the shallow cuts to the back.  Make note of the deep, and don’t take it too personally.

Writers be crazy.  And part of it is business induced.

Which brings us to the other part: relationships outside the field.

Years ago, when I was green AND cabbage looking, Kevin Anderson offered me friendship.  I was shocked and said something along the lines of “I don’t know why you’d bother with a newbie.”  His answer was that I had written three books in two years, so I was probably in it to stay “and writers end up only having REAL friends who are writers, because they’re the only ones who understand our crazy business.”

Boy.  Howdy.  Was he ever right.

So far this business has cost me two outside-the-field friendships, both more or less the same way.  This might not seem like much in 19 years, but you have to understand I don’t make friends easily and as one of my long-term long-suffering friends put it last time I talked to her (oh, hell, Court, I need to call or text or something.  Was that a year ago?) “you have friendships that are more like platonic loves.  Friends are not just people you hang out with.  Friends are people you have feelings for.”  And she was right.  And that insight is probably why she puts up with my being the world’s worst correspondent.

The last of these friendships I suspected was lost but confirmation came of course during the last week, now known as “week from hell” for various family reasons that aren’t mine to tell.  I suspected so because this person had intimated as much, but not WHY.  We found out why last week.

Yep, it’s the old “you don’t care about us.  You never make time for us, and this project I’m interested in helping with you keep putting off.”

With the exception of the project (more on that later) I got this in the last friendship I lost.  (The other two were political, yes, even the one at 18.)

The last straw in that one was when my friend called me in the middle of the day, three days in a row and “just want to talk.  We haven’t seen you in so long.”

This was 2003, the summer of paying two mortgages, finishing the house we’d moved out of to sell, and no one (NO ONE) touching my stuff.  I was hanging on and making mortgage on SHORT STORIES by the skin of my teeth.  (Bless the late Marty Greenberg of the old Tekno.  If you told him you were in trouble, he’d put your name up on the list of people to call when there were holes in anthologies.  At that time I was on call and could get “we need 10k word story on fairies in three hours.  Can you do it?”  and hell, somehow I did it.

At the same time, I had a new agent, and she wanted to submit my stuff, but we needed a blitz if I was ever going to work again.  Yep. That was the year of the 17 proposals and two ghost written novels.

The third time my friend called, I pointed out it was my working time, and I REALLY couldn’t talk.  (Back then my working time was when my kids were in school.)
I got hit with a tirade, half of it tearful, about how I was too greedy and I was trying to “roar everyone off the field with my sheer volume” and I didn’t care for anyone or anything but writing.  And she could see she and her spouse had never mattered to us, and I had no decent feelings for anyone.  It was all about my career and my ambition.

Keep in mind, at the time I was very nearly completely broke and she knew, or should have known that.  But that image of the “rich writer” is so powerful, that in her head, the only reason I could want to work that hard is because I wanted more millions to roll in.  Or something.

In this later case it was complicated by our friend coming over, for a scheduled thing, in February, also known as death-month.  Neither Dan nor I had our heads on straight, and we must have come across as imbeciles.  But if you think of writing as really high status and suspect people are looking down at you, then, oh, yeah, you’ll think we’re being snooty or something.

Then there was the side order of “this project I’m really interested in, you keep putting off.”

Which is when I sigh.  I’m really interested in the project too.  If it’s the one I think it is.  And at least three of my fans email me about it weekly.  But you know…

I’m a midlist writer.  Yes, I know, this mean I work for myself and I’m free as the birds.

No, no, really.  It’s okay, it only hurts when I laugh.  And I ain’t laughing.

I’m grateful for the collaborations this year.  REALLY grateful.  These guys are my friends and in two cases I’m a fan of their world (in the other it’s a new world.)  One of the paths up for people like me appear when bestsellers share their worlds and their fans.

I’m not a natural collaborator.  Hell, I’m not a natural series writer.  I get really nervous I’ll forget details or mangle them.  So, I’m doing the work, but it’s slower than it would be without the fear of f*cking it up (particularly for series I like.)  But yeah, those collaborations come first, because people count on me.  And you don’t disappoint your friends, much less friends who are extending you a hand to climb up.

After that come the series continuations, which means another three books I’m hoping to do for Baen this year, and three for the indie side.  Yeah.  Because, you know, I not only owe it to my fans (and I do.  You’ve been extraordinarily patient through my years of illness and moving.  And yes, I’m mailing loot out.  That too has been back burnered, partly because I still have unpacked only HALF the office, because well… 5 moves in two years.  Some stuff I can’t find at all and might have to re-order, like t-shirts and mugs.) I owe it to the house.  Baen is re-issuing DST, so I owe them a “future history” post-scriptum, to distinguish the edition, but the investment calls for my also giving the series continuation asap.  Hell, the series has suffered from long hiatuses.  If it’s ever going to recover I need to hit it hard.

There are books I want to write, practically climbing their way out of my head, but you know… this is my day job too.  And there are considerations beyond “what I really find oh so exciting.”  EVEN when you have friends who’ve done research for you and are waiting.  Because you’re a midlister.  You can’t just say “Yo, publishing house, there are these books you’re waiting for, but I want to write THIS instead.”

I probably actually shouldn’t have been surprised — and I actually wasn’t, because as I said, there’d be allegations and intimations — because under those lost friendships (only they weren’t really friends, more like friendly acquaintances) we could add a fifth: a couple Dan and introduced.  She was my college friend.  He was Dan’s college friend.  We introduced them and they got married before us.

They happened, pure happenstance, to be at our wedding.  But they were never exactly friends, because they wouldn’t stay in touch.  We called when we were near.  We spent years trying to call and didn’t have their number.  That kind of thing.

After one of those hiatuses, when Dan was working on assignment near DC (they live near there) we called.  My first book had just come out (and sank without a ripple) and I knew my career was in serious trouble.  No, this matters for the story.  We called, because we had a day in the area and thought we’d visit.  They weren’t close friends, but they were college friends.  We thought we’d talk.

Turns out the girl worked at the time in an airport bookstore and had seen my book.  When we called we got screamed at and told we were looking down on them, because she worked in retail, and I was a rich-and-famous writer (given the area they lived and worked in, she probably made as much in a month as I did from that book) and they knew we didn’t care about them, and get lost.  Then we got hung up on.

That one didn’t hurt much, though it still sort of did in a hurt-and-perplexed sort of way, because other than the college connection, we didn’t have much linkage to these people.  But it should have impressed me as a warning of things to come, instead of leaving me staring at the phone in a hotel room, wondering if the world had gone crazy.

The other two… the other two hurt like hell, and the last is still hurting like hell.  This too shall pass.  And it would probably not have hit as hard except for the Murphy week for this family.

If you’re friends with a writer, cut them some slack.  No, they really aren’t horrible human beings (well, some of them might be, but most probably not.)  Yes, we forget lunch dates.  Yes, we spend months not calling.  Doesn’t mean we don’t think of you.  Yes, you might live three blocks away and we never see you.  At least with writer friends, you often (though not always) see each other at local cons.  KJA and I average twice a year for face to face meetings, and we usually have to make an effort.  He lives… 45? minutes away.

But in the end he was right.  Only other writers fully understand the crazy business we’re in.  Only other writers get that we don’t think we’re massively important because we write stuff.  Holy hell, people, we get paid about as much as a secretary.  And that’s the ones who are LUCKY enough.  And there’s a reason I used to cry when I heard Billy Joel’s “running on ice”.  I no longer remember who said that far from being a series of plaudits and triumphs a writing career more resembles a series of kicks to the teeth.  (It might have been Jerry Pournelle.)  Whoever it was, he was right.  I could tell you of the year I wrote six books and NOT ONE made it to the shelves in ANY bookstore.  (And yes, of course that WAS my fault, duh.)

If a writer even TRIES to keep up a semblance of contact, you’re probably massively important to them.  Yes, I know, we’re incredible pains in the ass and more so as friends, but don’t attribute to malice what can more easily be explained by a crazy making career.  Don’t count on us, but don’t count us out either.  Because more kicks in the teeth, we don’t need.

And meanwhile…

And meanwhile, I have a future history to finish.  I’m late on the collaboration with Larry and I HAVE to send him chapters today (and again on Wednesday.) Week from hell with side-order of sprained ankle as mom would say “emburked” everything.  (Always wondered if that came from Burke and Hare.) And I’m hoping the week from hell is past, and I can get some work done and catch up on what was lost to Drama!

I’m grateful for indie, which makes my relationship with my publisher WAY more relaxed, but I still owe them a modicum of professionalism (we owe it even before we are professionals, which is weird) and reliability.  Not much of which has been in evidence the last five years.  And for that I’m sorry, and I’ll seek to improve.

There’s books to write and places to be, and no time to mourn for lost friendships.  And this too shall pass.  It only hurts when I laugh.

And I ain’t laughing.

Another Tiny Promo By Freerange Oyster (Write more, guys)

Stephanie Osborn

A Very UnCONventional Christmas

Division One

It’s Christmas in NYC, but for Alpha Line it’s anything but a Silent Night: The Agency has a mole, leaking classified information to toy manufacturers and film producers alike, and the Agents are in danger of losing their anonymity. To complicate matters, the Prime Minister of Lambda Andromedae III, complete with entourage, has arrived to negotiate a new trade agreement with Earth. Worse, the more paranoid Division One field agents look at Omega’s recent history with the Agency and suspect they have identified the mole!

<p.Simultaneously, the discovery of a grim countdown in the most incongruous place possible – the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center – augers the threat of horrific events on Christmas Eve itself.

Meanwhile, Omega is struggling to adjust to her very first Christmas in the Agency, made more difficult by the exposure of parts of her past long hidden from her conscious mind.

Will Omega be able to refute the accusations, or be punished for crimes she did not commit? Will the internal conspiracy expose the Agency? Or will efforts to thwart it see Echo – and Fox – caught up in the accusations as well? What is the meaning of the countdown to Christmas Eve?

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: wonderful.

So, two or three days ago (seems forever) I sprained my ankle, so I’m now extremely cranky, because I have to stay off it, which means I can’t get rid of the crankiness by walking around or even cleaning the house, which DESPERATELY needs it.

Apparently the very sedate trip to seem the Vikings exhibit in the DMNS yesterday was a bad idea, as I’m worse today.  The exhibit was great, btw,  but so dense with information, that I would like to go again, and will try to persuade husband to accompany me.  Well, honestly, I could have DONE without the 2 females about 10 years older than I explaining to each other how powerful female Vikings were and how patriarchy was the fault of Christianity, but I managed to get out without giving them a grand rant so that’s okay.  I mean, seriously, what is wrong with “progressives” who continuously project their ideals onto the most unlikely past civilizations?  Progressing towards pre-history again?

There is an article on PJM which RES has linked in the comments, but if you haven’t seen it, it’s here:

What if we were invaded by aliens?

Meanwhile, I leave with this EXTREMELY dubious personality test.  Note it classified me as a Liger which is not, to my knowledge, magical in any shape or size.  Eh.  “Magic” must be different these days.  And also they should get off my lawn.

Which Magical Creature Are You?

For those of you worrying, I’m sorry.  We had a family errand to run early morning, and I came home with a head-splitting headache.  Probably just tiredness, which means after this I’ll be taking a nap.

For those following my adventures at pjmedia, this week this was published:

We Free Men, A blast from the past -November 2nd 2014

“Secrecy is the keystone to all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy and censorship. When any government or church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, “This you may not read, this you must not know,” the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man who has been hoodwinked in this fashion; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, whose mind is free. No, not the rack nor the atomic bomb, not anything. You can’t conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.”

― Robert A. Heinlein

When I was six, I found out that my parents could yell, they could threaten, but they couldn’t actually, physically, get in my brain and make my body do things.  This must have led to a fun and exciting time for my parents, in finishing raising me.

However, to this day, I remember that.  In the ultimate analysis I am free.  People can kill me, but they can’t MAKE me do stuff.  (absent neural programming, which Speaker assures me we don’t have yet.)

In the same way, in the course of almost as many years as Shakespeare’s total life, I’ve found Heinlein was right.

I don’t care how noble a side sounds, how profoundly urgent its benevolent message, if they say “this you cannot think.  This you cannot read.  This you cannot even consider” they are a tyranny in the making. If they get power over you and yours soon you’ll find that it’s “This air you cannot breathe.”

They are also unsure of their logical appeal and their ability to withstand the market place of ideas.  Otherwise, why ban certain thoughts and ideas and points of view?

This is why “political correctness” is a bad thing, because it takes away your tools to think of things properly.  If you can’t even express that men and women might be different, you surely can’t think about it.

It is also why progressivism with its ever growing list of “forbidden terms and words” because of racist sexist and imperialist bad thought (brown bag, really?) is a tyranny in the making.

I read an article this week, from Popehat about gamergate. I would like to say he made some good points, but he didn’t. Impossible to make good points when you mis-define the sides in the Gamergate and (by extension) the SFWA dispute and everywhere your favorite Social (in)Justice Whiners attack.  He seems to have bought into the definition of the sides brought by the SJWs and so views them as mostly urban, educated, often in tech professions, etc.  I.e. “Smart and cutting edge.”  He also seems to think they’re in search of true social justice.  (Le sigh.)  He says he is neither on “team blue” or “team red” (his terms) because while he’s fiscally conservative he’s for gay marriage and he prefers urban environments.  And he defines the opponents to SJWs as homophobes.  (I wonder if he defines them as racist and sexist too?  Including the women and the many gamergaters of interesting racial origin?)

Yeah, by that measurement, and actually including the “well educated” and “citizen of the world” measurements, I’d be in between too.

I’m not in between.  I’m staunchly in opposition to the SJWs.  Why?  Because the sides aren’t as pictured.

Are there some homophobes on the side of Gamergate?  I doubt it, particularly in the States.  Look, most of these people are younger than I, and gay relationships are just a thing that at worst we don’t care about one way or another.  Are there some homophobes on the right side of politics? Undoubtedly.  Probably not as many as there are on the left, though.  (No? Look to their favorite slurs and accusations to people they hate.)  More organized, maybe, though disapproval of homosexuality for religious reasons is not necessarily (or often) homophobia.  (Can be, but I’ve met very few.)

As for educated… pfui.  It’s possible that on the SJW side there are more graduates of “good universities” with impeccable credentials, but listen to them for ten minutes and you realize these credentials were acquired by regurgitating the indoctrination poured down their throats by their patchouli-infused professors.  In fact, if you try to discuss anything real with them, from the history of Western culture, to the real issues of some non-western civilizations, they gape at you like guppies in search of a crumb.  You’re talking of things they were told don’t exist and they can’t think about them, because thinking about them would make them automatically bad people.

So if your head hurts and you’re confused, this is because Popehat mis-defined the sides involved in this dispute.

The SJWs aren’t for equality or inclusion or any of that grand stuff.  They’re not even for upending the “scales of privilege” which at any rate haven’t been as described for at least fifty years.

They are for one thing only “Do as we say, and enshrine us as arbiters of all that’s right and just.”

Because their “system” of competing victimhoods is so confusing and irrational, they need someone to tell you when and how to discriminate, and whether a black handicapped straight woman has precedence over a Muslim, communist, gay guy.  These hierarchies change, too, depending on whim and whatever comes from the top.

So you need to constantly pay attention to the “voices from above” to know what to think and believe.  And even the wrong word you didn’t know was wrong — “lady” — can get you attacked by people who are keeping up with the SJW diktats.

Which means there must be SJWs in charge, and they must be listened to constantly.  IOW they get power to tell you what to do, what to think, what to read and what to believe.  Read or believe the wrong thing, and the pack descends on you like the red brigades on a deviationist.

In fact the whole thing smells of the power struggles in the Soviet Union.

This is not coincidental.

Both systems are tyrannical and aim at controlling your thought.

This you must not read, this you must not think, this you must not see even if it happens before your very eyes.

To be an SJW you must believe that, the long history of life on Earth notwithstanding, the attraction between male and female is arbitrary and part of “conditioning.”  That men and women are both exactly alike save for sex organs, and completely different in that women as historical victims have all the virtues of humanity, including compassion, peacefulness, healing, etc.  That if only we weren’t “oppressed” by a capitalist system, everyone would have enough of what they need/want and there would be no war or strife.  That saying that a 200lb man can carry a 90lb woman under one arm and laugh at her struggles is sexist.  That saying cultures are differently functional is somehow racist (even when the cultures belong to the exact same race, like say, Morocco and Italy.)

In other words, you have to be willing to believe things that just ain’t so and that simply won’t work in the real world.

In the article, Popehat makes reference to how they’re trying to get into gaming because it’s one of the sectors of the economy still doing well.  All the places that the SJWs have colonized before: books, news, industry, corporations are floundering.

It never occurs to him there is a cause and effect here.  As John C. Wright points out, everything they touch they destroy. EVERYTHING.  That is because what they want is power over the human mind, and because their set of beliefs is completely out of touch with reality.

You can’t, for instance, run a corporation as though men and women were exactly the same from the neck up.  As though they were both capable of leadership sure.  Identical, though?  Never.  Women have a completely different style in social relations.  To deny that is the true sexism.

The difference between the two sides is not red and blue, a scheme that changed in my lifetime anyway (Really, since when isn’t red communist?  Were they afraid of the linkage?)

The difference is between the bound and the free, the mentally enslaved and those who can read and think anything.

To compare us to the “party of the past” and the “party of the future” and to ascribe to the SJWs the future is to forget that America is not Europe.  Our past is not the staid past of aristocrats and serfs.  It is the past of revolution and freedom.  And none of us is advocating stasis.

We know technology changes, and its changes affect society.  It is the SJWs, the party of the past of Marx and Lenin and Stalin and Mao and other blood stained, dead, and for the most part white males, who are afraid of the change. They own the imagined future of the past and they can’t face the real future with interpersonal communications they don’t control, news they don’t control, entertainment they don’t control.

It is they who want to shut down internet discourse, or at least control it.  It is they who hate the free and chaotic environment online.

It is they who run around telling everyone “this you must not do” and “this you must not think” and “this person you must not associate with” on pain of being ‘worse than Hitler’.

We?

Heck, I gave my sons The Communist Manifesto when they were 12.  I figured it was better they taste the poison from the source, and not from the various repackagers who made it more palatable.  Looked at, in its naked horror, the ideology can’t fail to repel.

I also let them read their fill of various of the diluted sources afterwards, because if you’re armed with logic, the dankiest corners of the SJW universe hold no terrors.  Mostly, they hold boredom, because without the ability to be challenged there can be no independent, individual or new thought.

The two sides are as follows:

They’re the would be slave masters; we’re the free men, holding two middle fingers aloft in their faces.

Yours is the choice.

Sorry this post is so late. This is my third attempt at posting. The saga started last night, when an attempt to write a post was cleverly foiled by wordpress by letting me type in a title but never actually giving me a window in which to type the post.  I.e. the window in which the post could be theoretically typed was less than a line, and therefore you couldn’t type in it.

This morning I woke up afraid to face the same at Mad Genius Club, but in fact it let me post with no problems.  When I went back to ATH however, I got the same thing.  Another attempt on another computer wielded the same result, to the point I’m astonished it is letting me type here.  Let’s hope it continues.

Weirdly, this ties in with the rest of the post, and what I meant to write about.

Sometime ago, Dorothy Grant reminded me of Russian Caravan Tea.  I used to get it when there was still a tea shop in downtown Colorado Springs and enjoyed it immensely.  (Yes, I do like tea you can chew.  Heck, I like tea you have to subdue with a machete before chewing it.)  I found it on subscription on Amazon, (Amazon being the main reason that I allowed my husband to drag me to the suburbs after 30 years of attempting to do so.)  This acquisition posed another problem: I now needed a tea infuser.  I promptly acquired a tea ball, which promptly fell apart.  I then bought another one, which is slightly better, but still allows some leaves to escape, which then lead to #1 son, the persnickety one, complaining about “Chunky Tea.”

The percolator I use for my coffee in the morning (I told you I’m a low brow sort of person) died on account of the plastic handle breaking.  Since this happened after three years of use, and the percolator cost us around $15 I wasn’t too heartbroken, but I did go browsing on Amazon which is a very dangerous thing to do.  I ordered a new form of the percolator, now $4 cheaper.  This is similar to the trajectory taken by the teakettle from the same company, which I first bought in 2010 because I was tired of having teakettles rust.  I have since bought three more, one for each kid and a replacement for one broken in moving, each one cheaper than the last.

So while I was on the amazon site, being me, I thought I would try to find a teapot with infuser for under $50 (when you want a 12 cup one this is difficult) and I found this one for $25 (the infusers themselves tend to run in the mid tens) which had the added bonus of double walled glass cups.

It came with an effusive message from its makers, apparently a family business in England, which I’m going to save for posterity, because its mix of capitals and exclamation points reminds me it’s not just newby indie writers who come across like over-eager puppies.

The teapot and the cups are just as described, perhaps more so.  I can’t yet say anything as to durability, since I’ve used it exactly one morning.  However, the thing is so PRETTY that my husband commented on it as I unpacked it last night, and my son this morning.  It’s one of those things that are beautiful in their simplicity.  (I’m a weird creature and I can appreciate Victorian ornamentation, but mostly what I like is things that are QUALITY.  I.e. well made, functional, and needing no ornamentation to make them shine.  Oh, I also like glass and sparkly objects.  I figure this is on account of being a magpie.  So glass teapot makes me very happy.)

Son asked me how expensive it is, because he would love to buy one for himself, his also being a tea consumer and having his own apartment downstairs (even if he visits upstairs a lot.)

When I told him he was surprised at the price.

This started a sort of percolating in my back brain.  It’s not the post I meant to write yesterday, but it is the result of the recent events, plus something someone posted in a private FB group about how young “expensively educated” youths think capitalism should be abolished, and the government should just make the things we need as efficiently as possible (I’m ignoring the idiot who thought each person should make the things he/she needs.  Because eff you Jean Jacques Rosseau.  That’s why.) and distribute them, which would be better for the environment and free many resources from the economy for SCIENCE!

There must be a glitch in the human software that makes otherwise intelligent people think this is an amazing idea.  It never seems to occur to them that in that type of economy someone has to decide what you need, and there is no room for what you want.  (There is always room for the deciders’ wants, of course.)

If I recall clearly from arguments had in my teen years, and from the pages I read yesterday, this would be met with the counter argument that it’s fairly well documented what humans need, and if you want stuff beyond that you’re a greedy capitalist and an environmental despoiler.

My instinctive response to that is to hold both middle fingers aloft and invite the speaker to gaze upon them.

I was not born to one of the poorest places on Earth, nor raised in extreme privation.  That would require being born in Africa.  I wasn’t even born or raised to the type of poverty my mom knew: five children plus a niece in a one bedroom cottage with no stove or running water.  Four girls sleeping in a double bed, two facing each way.  An outhouse in the garden, and food cooked on coal scrounged from along the train line.

I was born in dad’s mom’s house, a two floor place that would be familiar to anyone who’s seen a Tuscan farmhouse (the new owners even added a veranda to the upstairs back.)  We raised our own chicken, rabbits, grapes, and grew a substantial portion of our food in what was probably around 3/4 of an acre.  (It took me years to realize most of the world doesn’t produce like that.  We considered the soil poor in the north, but it’s possible to feed a family from half an acre to an acre of land, provided you can scrounge grass for the rabbits and buy fodder for the chickens.  (you don’t grow cereal in that space.))  It took my sons exclaiming at the amazing fertility of people’s backyards for the dime to drop.  I GUESS that’s why Portugal was invaded so much when most of the world depended on agriculture.

We had running water of sorts, only because it was hard with the tech of the time to pierce the very thick stone walls, we only had water in the kitchen and in the bathroom built right outside the kitchen door.  (It was a full bathroom, with appliances and a shower, not an outhouse.  Maternal grandparents outhouse scared me, and I gave my infant self UTIs from refusing to go in it.)

Now, we weren’t precisely rich, and the backyard required a great deal of work (my first job, at 5 was weeding the onions.  And the grape harvest was an all-hands-on-deck type of work that excused students from school and men from paid work.) but we were relatively well off.  Mom married up.  (And when I was six, she and dad built a house that is in all senses “modern” except for wimpy electrical service, and that’s governmental and now EU (Goreball warming prevention, donchaknow) crazy.) Our neighbors next door were a shoemaker’s family that lived in the conditions mom grew up in.

What I’m trying to drive at, though, is this, even mom’s growing up conditions were MORE than is strictly needed.  They were — thanks to my erratic but beloved grandfather’s occasional efforts at handiwork, cultivation and building — considerably better off than THEIR neighbors.  In fact, they lost none of their 5 children to childhood diseases or to things like typhus, which made them a rarity amid their neighbors.

Somehow, when you get “the enlightened” in charge, deciding what other people “need” to live, the common people always end up reduced to conditions far worse than mom’s childhood.  I mean, what do you really need to survive?  If you don’t want to live to a ripe old age, you can make do with some flour some oil, some water.

Better for the environment?

These are my middle fingers.

Even when we were very very broke and I thought I’d never climb out of it, I took joy from the idea that other people, elsewhere, were living better — that there existed in the world some joy, some beauty.  In fact, at the time in our lives when we were the most profoundly broke, we used to make sandwiches (or buy from burger king on deep special, if we had a coupon) and park in a beautiful neighborhood by a lake to eat them.  I wonder what those people made of it, or if they thought we were casing the joint.  The truth is it gave us great joy to look at the well tended lawns, the kids playing, the windows with lovely curtains, and the pristine lake beyond.

Because this existed, our very spare existence was more bearable.

But when you put the “best people in charge” of deciding the minimum everyone needs, what you get is hand to mouth existence, and btw, destruction of the environment too.  Because the peasants have no say in how they live, who cares if their mountains are strip mined, or their forests clean cut.  After all, it’s done in the most efficient way possible, so it must be better for everyone, right?  And because the “best people” are still human and have wants, if they can let their cronies despoil some little mountain and get enough money for a trip some place where luxury exists (Switzerland comes to mind, but America is also a destination for such people) it’s no more than they deserve.  After all, all this planning is so stressful, right?  They need special perks.

And what about science?  Well, most of the science that gets funded by the best people is science that reinforces the idea we need the best people in charge.  I refer you to all the scientific breakthroughs form North Korea.  Or, if you prefer, ask a friend in the sciences what they think of Chinese breakthroughs and “scientific papers.”  Then step back and wait till they finish laughing.  Might take a while.

Oh, and new things never get created.  Because what’s the point of coming up with a beautiful little glass teapot — and four cups — if you can only distribute them to yourself and your friends? after all, it’s not NEEDED.

All of this reminds me of O’Rourke’s description of traveling in the transiberian express.  not only were the facilities for bodily functions inadequate, but no one had thought that in the way of humans, some men would piss in between carriages.  So, there was a lip that wouldn’t allow the piss to flow out, so it pervaded all the floor of every carriage.  And of course it was never cleaned, because people didn’t have a choice of traveling in any other way.  So clean, pleasant carriages were wasted effort.

We see the same type of thing here, as a service (often helped/subsidized by the government) becomes the only way to go.  I refer you to the airlines.

WordPress itself seems to be going a little silly even for paying customers (which I am) as it becomes dominant in the market.

That’s okay.  The freemarket has a remedy for that.  Become annoying enough, and a competitor will succeed.

Which is a great advantage we have over the best people planning our whole lives.

Is a planned economy more efficient?  What is efficient?  What do humans really need?

From each according to his ability, to each according to his need might be doable.  If you let each person determine what they can do and what they need (it goes way beyond ability, btw.  I’m very good at somethings — translation comes to mind — I just don’t LIKE doing it.  Force me to do it every day of my life, and I’ll start finding ways not to do or not to do it well.  Not even on purpose, just through being human. Because we, curious monkeys, don’t do well with boredom or forced labor.  And sometimes what you need goes well beyond bread and water.  As a wise rabbi once said, man doesn’t live of bread alone.  At our lowest point both economically and emotionally (remember, we thought we’d never escape an existence that was just the bare minimum) we needed those picnics in the richer neighborhood.  Also I needed a book of art with reproductions of DaVinci paintings.  They kept me motivated enough to get up out of bed and look after my toddler.

You want from each according to his ability and to each according to his need?

Great.  The only way to do it is free market capitalism, and a free exchange of goods and services across the entire world.  The closer we get to that, the closer we’ll get to that ideal.

Marx’s promises were never well served by his control-freak social architecture, and anyone trying to implement that here will have to do it over my dead body.

I not only want my lovely, strictly unnecessary glass teapot — with four complementary teacups! — I want my kids and grandkids and great grandkids to be available to find their own amazing discoveries at a price they are willing to pay, world without end.

It is free market capitalism, to the extent governments allow it to exist, that has lifted most of humanity out of poverty.

Planned economies just give us the Trans-Siberian express.  And its pervading smell of pee and misery.

I’m very late with everything, though this is quite a new ability of mine, being late while producing furiously.

I just want to say this once, that this is not what I imagined when I was a kid and wanted to be a writer.  There would be a more… stable situation.  I often read in books, including Frederic Brown’s Martians Go Home (you should read it if you haven’t, at least if you like funny and somewhat silly books.  It has caused one of my friends, who self identifies as a racoon, to send me peremptory messages saying “Write faster, toots.”) about agents calling the author, urging the author to write (the raccoon is not my agent) even making them small loans, suggesting books, encouraging.

I never had a relationship like that with any of my four agents.  I don’t believe most writers do.  Or at least, perhaps some top bestsellers do.  Or perhaps — of course — it is my amazing quality of doing everything sideways and backwards, since I’ve heard of beginning writers,making far less than I, who had long conversations with my last agent, and got suggestions for novels and such.

Honestly, I didn’t want long conversations with any of my agents.  The writing thing — which is not exactly under my control — will take suggestion, but not the suggestions anyone wants it to.  The type of suggestion it will take is more while driving back from dinner at Pete’s a couple of weeks ago, leaning back in the seat and saying to my husband “Someone should write something as fast as the chronicles of Amber but tighter.”  Husband looked over and said “Science fiction, perhaps?  Is that why you’ve been reading of possible ancient civilizations?”

And in the next minute I had seven, maybe ten, books in my head, because my muse is a female canine that wishes me to die.

Yes, you’ll see that in the fullness of time, but not right now, because, you know, right now I’m late with everything, from collaborations (yes, Guardian proceeds apace) to indie books (yes, Dyce four hit a minor snag, but it’s getting done) to my own continuing series (G-d willing and the creek don’t rise, I would like to do Hacking the Storm (third book of the Earth Revolution) and Darkship Defiance for Baen before the end of the year, so that fans of the series’ are just sitting by, waiting for years, something that has blighted the growth of the series.  Then there is the part-written Bowl of Red.

And I haven’t even come close to achieving my goal of 3 articles a week for PJmedia, being stuck at more like 8 a month.  Okay, this will have to change.  I have a list of articles to write, but the body is also not entirely under my control.

I have now lost a few days to late-hitting con-crud in the form of stomach flu.  This one was sneaky, since my son caught it (he swears he wasn’t hanging out with Mike Williamson!) and had it for a week and a half or so before passing it on to me.  (The one infallible method of getting rid of it.)  Then I had it for a day and thought I was okay, but it came back last night “Return of the con crud, this time it’s serious.)

It’s mostly annoying, honestly, but it leaves me feeling as though I have no energy, and it’s really hard to write action when you feel like taking a nap. It’s even hard to write articles.

And so, what has this to do with you, other than displaying I’m obviously also having trouble writing posts.

I was musing the other day, having talked to both sons on the matter, that one’s training never prepares one for one’s profession, or not really.

Well, my profession has never had any formal training (other than what I took at the Oregon writers’ Professional Workshop, but you know what I mean.)  And yes, if you’re a beginner, no, creative writing classes won’t prepare you for life as a commercial novelist.  They might in fact hinder you.  My literature classes did hinder me.  It’s only useful if you are writing “literary” which is a small and unproductive genre.  In that, acquaintances made, if you take the course at an ivy league institution at least, will get you in with the top brass of NY publishing, who then might push your book to the limit of their abilities.  (Which right now aren’t great.)  But in other genres, they’re more likely to look at that part of your resume with a critical eye and ask if your well-rounded characters can be punctured with a sword.

But going beyond strict training, to the idea of what people actually do for work, most of us are totally unprepared for the realities of the working world, which turn out to be… not at all what we expected.

For instance, one of the attractions of being a novelist for me is that politics and office politics wouldn’t intrude.  Okay, I’ll wait till you stop laughing to continue.

There’s more than that, now, of course.  The job that wasn’t exactly as I expected has mutated, and I’m glad it has, as it is now less office-politicky. What I mean is, should someone (eh, most of publishing, apparently) conceive a strong dislike for me, I would just step sideways into full indie, which pays me more, and resume producing.

But the old forms, and what we thought our profession WOULD be — even though it never was — holds sway in our minds.  People who grew up watching movies in which every novelist was rich or at least making a middle class life, are shocked when the advance on their first book is 5k (or these days 3k) paid in three installments.  I’ve had to calm newby writers panicking because their first short story has attracted neither an award nor a movie deal.  I have to deal with friends who can’t understand why they’re not rich 10 books out the gate.  They think they’re no good because of this, and I know it has nothing to do with it.  The field was never like that.  Heavy promotion, the attendant money-making, at most houses was always the result of fast and concerted “push.”  I.e. demand that bookstores stock THIS much.  It also needed a certain type of book (noticed I didn’t say good.  In fact very few novelists are good enough to capture “easy to read” and “deep” — though some are, and many of them are my friends) at a certain time.

Even if my first book had been the best thing since sliced bread with honey (It wasn’t.  I mean, it’s a very decent book, but I had no clue of commercialism and therefore allowed myself to roll in words like a pig in muck, and indulge in affections that lock most readers out.)  But let’s say my first book had been MHI.  (Ah, I wish.)  Even then, with it coming out in hard cover (a decision I had no part in) a month after nine eleven (with all the conspiracy theories flying around, I must say I had no part in that either) and the orders being crossed so most stores said the paperwork said it was supposed to have a dump of its own (its own standing cardboardy thing in the isle) but only two were ordered per bookstore, and there was no dump, the book would have sunk.  It would have sunk if it were the best thing in G-d’s green earth.  Which it isn’t.

I’ve learned (failure is very instructive) to set my goals at writing and delivering, which I can at least control and avoids my going too crazy.  Except, of course, when I’m late at everything.

I also appreciate indie, and frankly ebooks for traditional, because they give you a chance of being discovered years after your book came out, and while no bookstores carry it.  I have a strong feeling, from the inflow of fan letters, and the stuff I’m asked about at cons and on social media, that the Shifters series is enjoying somewhat of a revival.  14 years in, it’s finding audience.

Traditional publishing is not prepared to cope with this.  Their investment in the book must be paid earlier than that.  (Fear not, if Baen will not take Bowl of Red, it goes indie.)  Otherwise they won’t stay afloat.

But there’s always indie.  Which is remarkably freeing.

It also pays better.  Did I mention it pays better?  One of the reasons I’m forever surprised at watching my friends who are indie only waltz over (or rather crawl on their knees over to traditional.)  I don’t get it.  I suspect it is part of the image in their heads.  They want to be “real” as they expected it to be when they were little.

I suspect we’re going to see a lot of this in a lot of professions, where the profession is changing so fast, even if the training and the image were accurate at one point it wouldn’t be now.

Don’t be afraid.  Stay flexible.  In most professions, as in writing, the change is towards your having more control of your destiny.  The water might get choppy but if you hold on to the sides of the boat, it will get easier.

Yeah, I know, this is a time of great technological change, and we come after a cycle optimized to work in the old way (which doesn’t mean it was either better nor more lucrative.  Remember that thing about taking over institutions, gutting them, wearing their skin demanding respect.  That was the old cycle, and everyone was kow towing to the dead husks.)

Be not afraid.  The future is what we build.

Get out there and build it.

(Lest the wallaby accuse me of secret writings, here are my PJM articles for the month:

What Happens When the Artist Chides His Audience?

When I Think Back on All the Cr*p I Learned in High School

Teach Your Children Well Part 2

Teach Your Children Well: The Subversive Way to Homeschool