I am a novelist with work published in science fiction, fantasy, mystery and historical "novelized biography". I've won the Prometheus award and the Dragon award. I also write under the names Elise Hyatt and Sarah D'Almeida. http://sarahahoyt.com/
Back in the dawn of time when the world was new, a time when my memories are bathed in a golden light, I had an arrangement of my time and mind down pat and it worked.
Okay, the time was the 90s and since that started with the year of our Lord 1990 I guess it wasn’t the dawn of time. It just feels like that. I’m not joking about the time being suffused with a golden glow.
It actually started out pretty badly as 1991 and 1992 were mostly years from hell. As in, Dan jumped to a work-from-home job while I was pregnant with #1 son, and in the way of work-from-home jobs in the nineties, it was a scam that never paid him. It took us six months to figure that out. Anyway, turned thirty in 1992, just as we finished packing to move to Colorado, and that initiated the happiest almost-decade of my life, cut short by 9/11, not because of 9/11 but because of what it did to my friends’ group.
For a while there, while #1 son and later #2 son were toddlers, I settled into a routine. My favorite years were the six years in Manitou Springs, on top of a hill, in a house that was full of light. I worked in the attic, overlooking the mountain town. Incidentally this was also probably the year that set my thyroid on the road to h*ll, since I managed to pass the invisible upward line that means the altitude is REALLY bad for me. I was okay in downtown Springs (would have been better in downtown Denver) but get me anywhere above that, and the autoimmune starts kicking random stuff. So Manitou and Castle Rock were definitely bad ideas. Particularly since we lived on tall hills and in tall houses both places. Anyway….
My days settled into a very nice pattern where I took a long walk before breakfast (and usually before the kids woke up) then had breakfast, got the kids up, settled them doing something and did a one to two hour “running-clean” of the house. Most moms here will know exactly what I’m talking about. you flush toilets, wipe sinks, make beds, collect discarded stuff and put it in its proper place, then dusted and ran the vacuum, interrupted by the kids doing their thing and coming to show me stuff or asking me how to write something…
BUT what made those hours was that either I called my writing buddy or she called me and we chatted, while she was doing her running clean.
You see, we’d met through our husbands, who’d met at work and were both amused by finding out their wives both were trying to break into SF/F. So we started — haltingly — talking about it. And it became a thing. We talked about markets and submissions, of course, but mostly we talked about what we were writing, the chapters for that day, what we thought was coming out in the current story, etc.
This conversation centered me for the day, made it clear what I was doing, so that I could sit down and work afterwards. This was easier after the kids were both in school (as were hers) because we called each other after dropping the kids off at school, and after cleaning up sat down and wrote till it was time to pick them up.
From it came the writers group that met on Saturdays from 3 pm till whenever. We were usually still kicking people out of the house at 10 pm, and I often made the kind of group dinner you make when you’re young and broke: usually pasta and homemade sauce.
These were my most productive years, until this last year and — it’s shaping up — this one. I always attributed it to the connections, the fact that I had someone outside my head to talk to about my imaginary friends; the fact there was a rhythm and structure to my day.
It fell apart after 9/11. Partly politics. Well, you know. “Did you go crazy, or did you report, on that day they wounded New York?” as Mr. Cohen put it. When world views shatter, they tend to take friendships and writing groups with them.
But there were also economic upheavals and people married, divorced, moved away… and died. By 2003 our group of friends and connections was gone, and I was slogging through writing and increasingly more difficult trad pub landscape all on my own. None of which got easier after I came out of the political closet circa 2010.
So why am I telling you all this?
I realized recently that I haven’t had a group, a connection to humanity in general until my close-in-reader-group that I call the Chinchilla of Hope gang (Yes, there is a story to it. Hold on. Because, first:) This led to some of the most arid times of my life and career. The stories still arrived, on command, but I had no words to write them; no ability to concentrate. It felt like being locked in a stone chamber passing out my stories through tiny cracks on fragments the size of a fortune cookie fortune. I still wrote, but sometimes an entire year went by I couldn’t finish anything.
Yes, there were health issues too, and a lot of it is real, like when the big fires in CO made my asthma go insane which in turn affected everything. But I also wonder how much was the lack of connections.
The Chinchilla of Hope gang are a subset of my fan discord (the closed one. Explaining why it’s closed is… a long story. Yes, there is also an open one, and I promise I’ll visit it more often. Just not yet.) which started out by my threatening them with my Chinelo, which as all of you know is the Portuguese word for Chancla. (There’s chanca too, but no one hits anyone with a chanca, because that’s — in Portuguese — a closed wooden clog. Hitting anyone with that would be felony murder.) One of them who is more dyslexic than should be allowed decided I was hitting her with a Chinchilla, which she thought given the hardness of her head was cruel and unusual to the Chinchilla. Next thing I knew they were throwing virtual Chinchillas at each other and hitting each other with the Chinchilla of Hope. Which was then turned on me when I started writing again, and was very doubtful about the sanity of EVEN WRITING No Man’s Land, the story that I’d been sitting on for (then) 42 years because I was sure no one wanted it. Then started bombarding me with Chinchillas of hope and… well, it turned out all right.
Anyway, the point is, I’m an extreme introvert. How extreme? Well, since 2020 and the lockdowns I have to talk myself down from panic when we’re hosting my kids and their wives for a holiday. Also mostly the “con crud” I get after any con (or let’s face it, dinner with fans) is mostly introvert exhaustion.
While I’m the kind of introvert that needs to see people, usually I’m perfectly content sitting in a corner of a coffee shop, writing, and watching people move around and do things. Seeing them is ENOUGH.
But it turns out even I need a connection. Even if it’s pixels on a screen, via a Discord group.
As I type this, younger son and wife are trying to find a local friend group, and its…. difficult. People were broken, and not just by 9/11 which fractured opinions and made them extremely vehement, but by 2020. In retrospect, the 90s were an anomaly because even though people were very different politically, we were all so relieved we were no longer living under the shadow of “WWIII will break out any minute” that we could talk across political lines. This was mostly tolerance on the right, I think, because we thought without the USSR our local commies weren’t really that much of a threat, and we could afford to let them widget on, and even be friends in the hobbies and stuff we shared.
Yea, we were wrong, but we didn’t know it yet. Now we know it, and things are way more complicated.
But on top of that, 2020 genuinely broke people’s ability to relate, to talk, to get to know strangers and relate to them. We’re more fragmented, more distant.
Yet we’re still social apes. And if even the extreme introvert needs that connection, you probably need it too.
I don’t have an easy way for you to do it. Even with our local friends, we see each other… occasionally. Because meeting in person requires effort, and it feels weird and unnatural after the year of silence and isolation and then the last crazy five years or so.
The problem is that I think something about the human brain equates having no group, no human connection, to “They’re about to put me on the ice floe” or “Hit me on the head and leave me for the jaguars.” and we start going loopy. Well, for some of us loopy-er. Which makes the creative work or even “just” the mind work stop.
What can you do? I don’t know. Start establishing a connection. Somehow. It’s work, but it is worth it.
In the end, humans become and stay humans by being around other humans. And yes, you too need it, even if virtual, even if discord, even if distant. We all need, sometimes, to hear from someone who is not the voice behind our eyes.
This morning I woke up with my husband reading to me. As we know this is always a problem. That’s why I have two novels with the Red Baron, one fantasy and one a science fiction trilogy, sitting at the back of my brain, waiting to bust out…. As soon as I do another 10 ahead of them, including the second of Elly, which is now being a problem.
Fortunately or unfortunately what he was reading didn’t pertain to dead heroes, or fiction or much I could convert into anything beyond a preachy short story, which I don’t write.
You see, he was reading me a politics editorial. First let me tell you, right now, that if this had been even ten years ago, I’d have performed an exorcism on the spot. Because the Mathematician and I divide the world in two as surely as the treaty of Tordesillas, (spell checker insists this is “tortillas.” This amuses me more than it should.) but in a more insubstantial ways. We specialized within the first three or four years of our marriage. He does the accounting for the household and my business(es) (poor man) because I’m digit dyslexic. I do the housekeeping. He keeps abreast of movies, games, music and informs me if there’s something I might like. I keep abreast of books and blogs and inform him if there’s anything he might be interested in. I refinish pianos, he plays them. He does math, I do politics.
That last one is hard and fast. Mostly because while I’m a nervibore (I live on my nerves) and politics makes me crazy, not keeping abreast of them makes me CRAZIER. I view politics as a dangerous ocean that might at any moment throw out a sneaker wave that drowns me. I have reason for this. If the streets are going to turn into the kind of mess where I turn a corner and run into armed lunatics who will shoot on vague impressions, I want to have some (years of) warning.
He on the other hand hates arguments and sneaking and such things politics are made of, and he would be driven completely raving insane by following all the tendrils of argument and nonsense that is my bread and butter.
It took him years to realize when I started yelling at a movie he was watching and calling it “rank propaganda” I wasn’t being paranoid. He still enjoyed some movies that would make me put a shoe through the expensive screen. (This is why I have noise cancelling headphones and a laptop and am usually blogging, doing instapundit, editing, anything but watching the movie, unless I think it will be “safe for Sarahs.” Those are rare.)
But well… he started paying SOME attention during the Obama administrations, because the sheer rain of sh*t that little psychopath inflicted on this nation got through his consciousness. Then there came 2020. In 2020 for the first two weeks he went raving insane in a mathematical way. No, really. He created a program that extracted actual numbers of hospitalizations and deaths from Covid from every County hospital system (y’all in Utah gave him problems because you use a system different than the rest of the country. I no longer remember why.) Even knowing half of those who died “from Covid” were “with something else like a hole in the head” the numbers were ridiculous. For instance, KC went to “condition red” and hard lock down with four hospitalizations and no deaths.
Anyway, he made this program that updated weekly and told me to share it on instapundit. I did. Every day for a week. The push back was insane. Including “Oh, but they haven’t updated the numbers yet. Next week it will be black plague level.”
He was baffled — guys, he’s a mathematician. His big problem is that he doesn’t understand people being illogical, just like I don’t understand people being rude. Or rather we do, but we just feel it shouldn’t be so. Very strongly — and persevered for a while. The numbers never really increased. The response was all out of proportion. Most people didn’t believe him.
And suddenly he saw what I’d been yelling about for years. And suddenly some of his favorite movies went out of watching rotation because all the good characters were leftists. And suddenly he read politics.
Now keep in mind he’s still not by instinct a political animal, like the rest of us. He’s still, actually, largely apolitical. Those who know us well can attest that I’ll be deep in discussion with a buddy about some ridiculous political snag and Dan will erupt from the office with a baffled expression and say “Did you guys know that–“
He’s outraged, we’re laughing because this is something we were exercised about three months ago, and have since successfully fought back on. He’s my barometer for what the normal “right of center” is like. He’s the person who shows me “Why aren’t we all running around the hills with Klashnakovs yet?” is nonsense, since most of the normal people don’t know a tenth of what the jokers on the left have done. (We’ve learned not to laugh btw, since it offends him. It shouldn’t. He’s the sane one.)
Anyway, so waking up to a mathematician reading politics at me is still confusing at best, alarming at worst.
Picture it: I usually wake up with his alarm clock circa seven thirty, then lay there arguing with the morning.
Morning: is
Me: Oh, no. Oh, no. Not ready. Go away.
Morning: You know you have to get up. You have books to write, a house to clean, food to cook, and you didn’t cue up the blog last night you lazy bum.
Me: mggggggffffffffff.
Morning: Up, up, up….
Meanwhile he showers, and by the time he’s done the morning has usually won and I get my *ss out of bed. (No, you don’t usually see me till close to noon, which you know when I forget to cue the post the night before, or set it wrong. That’s because I’m enrolled in this aerobics program where I run up and down the stairs carrying laundry baskets, or dust and vacuum, or clean the litter boxes, or– Look, it keeps me from being 400 lbs. And provides a sense of accomplishment.)
Anyway, this morning, in the middle of these delicate negotiations between me and the rotation of the Earth, someone walks in phone in hand and says, “The left thinks we’re stupid.”
My eye — on a stalk, yes — emerges from under the covers and I say “mmmmf?”
And then he proceeds to read me this editorial written by some preening MSM slime about how the SAVE act is all a ruse to disenfranchise minorities because:
the documented cases of “undocumented” (like they forgot their birth certificate at home, and their home is not in another continent.) voting are negligible all over the country.
This is just to make it harder to vote and prevent black people from voting.
My husband, who likes to think the best of people is indignant. Since we have motor voter, vote by mail on request, machines where the votes get “adjusted” how do we even prove illegals vote? And do they really think that black people have no ID? Or that black people think they have no ID? Hence “they think we’re stupid.”
He’s right of course, though I wonder how much it is “they think we’re stupid” (They undoubtedly do. Preening disdain for everyone who disagrees with them is a hallmark of the left, because they mistake their political opinions for an IQ test. But they’re probably not the only thing at work) and that their ideology and concentration on theory makes them a peculiar kind of dumb that has nothing to do with natural mental powers. As in, their theory says this, and they need the theory to be right for emotional reasons, so they never think past it. And never examine what is behind the theory.
So, yes, they don’t understand that when you have a school district administrator in Iowa who not only got his position on forged credentials but also — ALSO — is an illegal who has voted for years, or a MAYOR in Kansas who not only is an illegal but has voted for decades, this is what we call a “leading indicator.” Note these are flyover places, not exactly centers of illegal immigration and fraud. If we found the school superintendent in Chicago was a voting illegal, that might be a “Forget it, Jack, it’s Chicago” (Or Detroit. Or California, or, increasingly, Minnesota.) But this is IOWA and KANSAS for sobbing in bed till your pillows are soaking wet. If these two cases exist you bet your sweet and swinging beepy that they’re ALL OVER the country. They’re not documented because as with “undocumented” immigrants, no one has gone looking for documentation. Because what they would find would end up toppling our already worm-eaten trust in our electoral process.
So “documented cases of fraud” are a stalking horse.
More importantly, he’s absolutely right. Look, humans are humans, whether they’re from El Salvador, Barbados or the US. This is something I learned really hard as an exchange student. The Germans had a different culture, but weren’t inherently more sinful or kinder than the people from Guinea.
We have so many means of fraud. SO MANY. From Motor Voter, where, if you’re not a citizen you have to FIGHT not to be signed up to vote, to vote by mail, to vote ahead, to no ID needed to vote, to– And one thing you learn really quick is that if the means of fraud exists SOMEONE will exploit it. And groups who are good at organizing will exploit all those means on an industrial scale.
The Motor Voter thing is peculiarly insidious too, because it can even catch people who aren’t TRYING to be dishonest. Look, Americans themselves don’t understand the difference between illegal immigrant, legal immigrant, resident and citizen. On my civil wedding day a month after I landed in the country for the second time and BEFORE I HAD MY GREEN CARD (which came around December, because bureaucracy) I had an argument with my smart, civically active mother in law, because “You’re an American now. You need to register to vote and make your voice heard.” No, she wasn’t joking. She really thought that’s how it worked. And since then I’ve run into any number of college educated (sometimes with graduate degrees) Americans who think stepping on American soil conveys citizenship. Or an even stupider set who thinks that the rest of the world should vote because “our elections affect the world.” (Let’s not. Most of the world has the kind of culture where if they voted here we’d be as miserable as they are. This is also why “no citizenship without acculturation”. And yes, I have IDEAS.)
So when the newly arrived illegal (or even legal) goes to get a drivers license and the kind lady, having looked at documentation that shows they’re definitely NOT American asks them if they want to register to vote… WHY SHOULD THEY THINK IT’S ILLEGAL? Yes, there’s a line on the paperwork. BUT this is not the paperwork. This is something she does does on the computer, and that’s it. So why would you think something is wrong? And then, because you want to prove you deserve to be an American and Americans vote, of course you VOTE.
So how many illegals vote? Oh, I don’t know. Probably more than 50% of them. Perhaps as many as 80%. (The rest not voting because they’re busy with other stuff and don’t care, not because they think it’s illegal) AND MOST OF THEM HAVE NO IDEA THEY’RE DOING ANYTHING WRONG.
I really can’t emphasize enough the new arrivals complete disorientation in the US. The US is different from most other places in various ways, and when you get here, it’s as though everything you learned as true and solid your entire life suddenly shifts. And not just upside down, but it goes dancing upside down and sideways and tiltawhirl to the point you have no fricking clue what’s legal and not, what is correct and not, or even what would “just” shock your neighbors.
I was college educated and had spent most of my life reading American authors, and I kept being sucker punched by “Wait, what?” I knew stuff like what being a citizen meant because I’d actually taken two civics classes during my exchange student year in the US.
BUT the number of even legal immigrants who understand that stuff is vanishingly small. And the number who are willing to doubt native-born “smart” citizens are even smaller.
This is why requiring proof of birth or citizenship to vote is not any kind of onerous requirement. Look, the people already registered will stay registered. They just need to show ID to vote. (Which means, yes, some illegals will stay on, but since we’re disincentivizing their staying here… well… It’s also why Jeffreys (Temu Obama) is so upset about ICE having access to polling places. It might discourage illegals from voting. Which he thinks is bad. SMDH.)
We don’t actually have a ton of people born in the US who lack a birth certificate, and those who do can usually get one. And a lot of states accept “entry in the family Bible” still, or did last time I looked. And naturalized citizens, TRUST ME have a citizenship certificate. And it’s in their go to bag if they ever need to evacuate. They also usually have a passport. (Because we don’t trust the funny people on the left, that’s why. At least if we speak against them.) And that’s not counting funny places like Hawaii where they will write you a birth certificate even if they have no proof you were born there. (They have some weird name for it like preponderance of evidence, or something.)
Women who changed their names? Well, most women are not mentally damaged. I have friends who were divorced more than once and have no trouble obtaining passports and proving their identity. That is, what do you call it? Bullshit.
However even if 80% of illegals vote, that’s the tip of the iceberg. I’m much more concerned about people over 140 years old voting. On principle, vampires shouldn’t vote, and no one else CAN be that age. And that’s not counting imaginary people. When we bought a house that smelled like an ashram in downtown Colorado Springs, we later received voting cards for 90 some people. This was I GRANT YOU a large Victorian, but it only had six rooms. And the family that lived there before us was three people. And I hear enough of those stories to tell you it’s not just Somalian Learing Centers that are housed ten to the abandoned warehouse.
If people have to vote in person and show ID to vote, that — by itself — will force them to at least get fake IDs for all the people registered as Minnie Mouse and Daffy Duck. That will, at the very least slow the fraud enough to make the margin actually controllable. It won’t stop fraud but it will make the fraud actually “a marginal number” that might affect district elections but not state ones.
Which brings us to “But it will make it harder for people to vote” or my “favorite” “But it will disenfranchise black people.”
If you think the first you’re merely an idiot. I actually have to show my ID to vote. And a picture ID, not merely a (Imminently fake-able in batch lots) utility bill, as in Colorado (And while we’re at it, stop the same day registration bullshit. If it didn’t occur to you you want to vote until the day, you failed the “proof of IQ” needed to vote. And you probably don’t exist, actually.) Do you know how much trouble this is? Well, I usually take my purse. When my name is called (my first middle name pronounced as Marquez because why not? Gah) I grab my license, show it to the volunteer, then get assigned a booth. That’s it. It takes maybe ten seconds. And the license is in the wallet with my credit card and other things I take for literally every transaction in life, from buying a gallon of milk to cashing a check.
“But Sarah, what about people who don’t have those documents?”
Well, people who have been in a persistent vegetative state for the last ten years and whose documents have expired shouldn’t vote. Next?
“But black people–“
Well, and now you can take your frigging racist ass out of the conversation. Because while Joe Biden thought that poor kids were “just as smart as white kids” the rest of us don’t march with KKK hoods. It would be as bad for my asthmatic ass as the Covidiocy masks for one. For another sooner or later someone would tweak to my 23 and me profile and… well, you guys have seen Blazing Saddles. ‘nough said.
FOR THE THIRD AND MOST IMPORTANT HAND: I don’t believe people are defined by race. I think 99% of the differences we attribute to race are actually cultural. And even if we had hard biological differences that weren’t stupid shit like a susceptibility to some genetic issues, and/or an inability to process milk or wheat (REALLY? I needed that why? I don’t care if ggggrandmamas preferred Cassava or barley and oats, this is stupid. The majority of my ancestors lived on wheat!) it would be unlikely to hit American blacks who are, frankly, genetically, as much of a mutt as anyone else here, and more so, since most of them have had ancestors here well over a hundred years. Don’t believe me? Go look at the picture of the LA Mayor in Africa. Your first reaction will be “Who is the white chick?”
I don’t understand how the left can pound their chest and say “I am standing up for blacks who are too stupid to get an ID” and not spot the racist. I mean, the men have to shave and the women have to at least occasionally apply makeup. How do they manage not to look in the mirror.
No, most black people aren’t some kind of infant being looked after by someone else. (Always excepting people who have been in a persistent vegetative state for 10 years.) They do have to bank, or at least cash checks, fly and buy groceries. This means most of them have an ID. Like 99.9% of them. The ones who don’t landed here yesterday from Somalia, and the Learing Center hasn’t gotten around to faking them an ID yet.
So would it hinder people from voting? Yes, billions of them as a Democrat in Congress (I don’t even remember which just now) said. (HOW MANY PEOPLE LIVE IN THE US AGAIN?) But they are mostly illegal, imaginary, vampires and such.
Like you I want the SAVE act to pass, and I do think we should be making sure the GOP leadership hears from us.
But if it doesn’t pass, does it mean all is lost? Not even close. It means we will go through some narrow and unpleasant places, and that our children, probably extending to our grandchildren, will have their work cut out to make this country half as glorious as it will be otherwise. But this has happened before in our history. In fact the last 100 years, with brief, glorious intervals (Salutes Reagan’s shade) was one such period of waste and destruction, which is why recovering is so difficult. We’re trying to repair problems that started before most of us were even born.
I also think Trump is trying very hard not to leave uncompleted work for his followers, even those of his own party. Yesterday he said he had to take Iran because if he didn’t, he couldn’t be sure his successor would have the courage. I think he feels the same way — perhaps rightly — about the SAVE act.
But the fact remains that our majority is thread-thin and that the act might not pass. That is not the end of the country. We might still win the midterms without it. And we might very well win the presidential in 28.
Look, the problem is that you’re underestimating the amount of fraud. No, seriously. And that the amount of fraud should give you a reason to hope.
I saw immense, massive fraud in Colorado in 12, but the win for the democrats — which they then use to install vote-by-fraud — was razor thin. What does that mean? It means that Colorado at least back then was not a purple state at all — that was the fraud — but an almost bizarrely red state.
And I think we are a bizarrely, solidly conservative (for American ways of being conservative) country. Not at all half and half.
Every time I say this, some of you try to come back with “oh, now, the fraud is just on the margins.” Poppycock.
Of course we can’t be absolutely sure. We can’t be sure of anything. One of the results of pervasive fraud everywhere is that you can’t precisely KNOW everything. Which is why we’re all unsure of everything from scientific fact on down. It’s okay. Look, for years we were sure of things we shouldn’t have been. Turns out COVID is not the first time the US left conned the rest of the world into a jump scare. I cant’ find the link anymore, but apparently the study on eggs and cholesterol didn’t show that eating eggs was bad for your cholesterol. But the results were published that way, because FDR wanted to lower the demand for eggs, so as to bring down the price of eggs. (WHAT IS IT WITH DEMOCRATS AND EGGS!) But people believed it the world over and for most of his life my father didn’t have eggs for breakfast — which he loves — because they were unhealthy.
So it’s best that we’ve finally realized we can’t trust the experts, we can’t trust “studies” and we definitely can’t trust polls.
So how do I know that everything isn’t lost? Well, there are ways to tell. If you ever take an art class, they will tell you the way to know the real shape of the object is to examine the “hole” it makes in the background.
Like that.
If everything were truly lost, they wouldn’t need so many means of cheating. If the cheating were only “on the margins” Moter Voter would have done it. They wouldn’t need to keep piling on so much nonsense, from crazy redistricting for decades to finally “Vote by Mail.” And now, trying to agitate to voting by email, because that’s secure or sane. Or the crooked machines would have done it. Or the fact they still control all the media would have done it.
No Republican would ever have won an election, except as a way to make it seem we were still free.
And how do I know it’s not that? Oh, please.
Yes, the first Reagan maybe they would have given it way (but even by then they wouldn’t. They hated him as a Governor.) But the second? And the same with Trump. The first election they might have let him have it — but didn’t. No, seriously. They didn’t. They thought they had it under control — but the third? They would never have allowed it.
And the second? It took SHUTTING DOWN THE WORLD with a bioscare and then — even then — last minute cheating of all kinds to put their chosen corpse in place.
They don’t have this sewn up. If they did they wouldn’t have needed that.
For that matter, yes, they won the midterms in Trump’s first term. Am I the only one who remembers the votes that were counted for days and weeks to achieve that? DESPITE all their other means of cheating.
Look, judging by all the cheating they deploy and how desperately they’re fighting to preserve ALL OF IT? They are at most — and I’m saying at the very most — 25% of the population.
Yes, yes, women, the young, the…. does anyone else notice they have the groups that are prone to preference falsification and not wanting to stand out with an “unpopular” opinion? How many people are undercover, with more or less degrees of success.
I want the SAVE act to pass, because I have this idea that we’ll see a map like Reagan’s wins again.
But if we don’t pass it? We’ll still get it eventually. It will just involve a lot more blood, sweat and tears getting there.
In the meantime, I mean this very seriously STOP HELPING THEM.
When you act blackpilled. When you talk about being afraid of “backlash” against Trump? When you say “if this isn’t perfect by the midterms, the GOP is done?” You’re doing the donkeys work for them.
You see, all of that is battle space preparation that makes their outrageous fraud and election stealing plausible.
Please, I beg you, don’t help them with their battle space preparation. Don’t aid and abet the enemy.
No, you can’t help your feelings, but you can help what you show.
Game face on. Perception is half the battle. Keep exposing them for the ridiculous, insane people they are.
Recently on X someone posted a thing about how the Biden State Department had been very busy trying to make the maps gay.
You can’t say that sentence with a straight face. You also can’t read it with a straight face. It also wasn’t exactly what they were doing but what they were doing was both as ridiculous and more alarming.
You see, what they were doing was “queering the maps.” If you’re at all humanities adjacent, have a humanities degree taken in the last… oh, fifty years, or keep up with the insanity of academia, you know that “queering” encompasses gay, but isn’t exactly gay.
It’s more of a “turn everything upside down” type of thing, part of the absolute belief that if Western Society collapses Utopia ensues. This belief is both bizarre and widespread and is causing a lot — as in a lot — of suffering, death, cultural dissolution and horror the world over. For quite literally no good reason.
Before I get into it, let me explain what they LIKELY meant by “queering the maps.” You see, maps are weird things. Turns out it is really hard to translate a spherical (or really slightly pear shaped) object into a flat surface. This is why we have several methods of projection that give us the maps we’re familiar with. The important thing, when these maps were created being “To facilitate world navigation” in an era with no GPS or satelite guidance.
The thing is that at least according to the left, these maps give undo importance to Western countries. I saw this pass across my desk sometime during Barry the Red’s administrations, various academics agitating for weirdly distorted — compared to our familiar — maps that made places like South America and Africa MASSIVE and Europe and the US tiny.
Are they more accurate? I don’t know. I woke up late and I have a book to finish going over, a song to put to music, videos to make, another chapter of Orphans to write, a post to make on my substack, a few books to re-publish in updated format, Guilder to frame for it. I’m swamped. My immune system is also in a life and death battle with con crud. So far keeping it at bay, but younger son and wife are both ill.
Anyway, again, keep in mind that an absolutely “accurate” map is near impossible given the fact the Earth is a (deformed) globe. And that the maps we had were useful and serviceable for people navigating the coasts and the spaces between, which is why we have them. That way.
Now try to imagine the minds that believe — absolutely believe — that the shit show in the third (and much of the would-be-first) world is because their countries aren’t “proportionately represented” in this flat projection which most of us study in schools and is only really important and relevant for life to navigators, pilots and the like. (And less so, in a time of GPS.) They heartily believe that at the heart of the cultural dysfunction and to put it mildly the failure to thrive of millions of people is…. that they felt humiliated when they looked at maps in elementary school.
In the history of projection, this one is a planet-sized IMAX. First word problems whose major trauma was being laughed at in elementary school think problems caused by tribalism, barbarism, dysfunctional culture, dysfunctional beliefs and, yes, Marxism (the worst ever colonial export) can be cured if we just make third worlders feel better about the size of their countries.
Okay, not just by that of course, but by the whole “Attack Western Culture” project, which includes making Muslims feel better about their contributions to science, making people in the west apologize for colonialism and evils that people that looked vaguely like them might or might not have perpetrated, making men more like women unless they tan interestingly, showing only mixed race couples on TV (don’t get me started) etc. etc. etc. including but not limited to a lot of counterproductive stuff like defining stuff that every country adopted once it entered full on into the industrial revolution — no, seriously. The adoption of these traits and how strong they are traces neatly to who went into the industrial revolution earlier. There are reasons for that, but I’ll spare you the essay — like punctuality, preciseness and schedule-keeping as colonialism and evil bad. Thereby cutting the however faint and nascent trends that could elevate the third world to first world living standards. Or at least eliminate a lot of the sh*t from the sh*tholes.
Anyway, if you dig hard enough at the roof of their belief in the evils of Western civilization, it lies “It makes people who aren’t part of it feel bad.”
Hence their absolute crazy cakes attempts — over and over and over again, including with unlimited mass immigration — to take down Western civilization. Because if it isn’t around to make people feel bad, surely other people will pull in the bits and create their own, perfect, equitable, utopian civilization with none of that imperialistic “better than thou” western stuff, right?
This is mind bogglingly insane. In fact, it is the equivalent of bleeding a tuberculosis patient to make them well.
Worse, as I understand in the absence of antibiotics, a shock to the system, if it doesn’t kill you, might just get your immune system in desperate fighting mode that cures the illness. (I understand that’s how the practice started) while trying to cure the ills of the third world while attacking the model of society that lifted the most people out of famine and desperate poverty in the long, sad history of mankind is just wanton and evil for no good reason.
It is obviously and clearly insane if you stand outside the theory which — in pure Marxist fashion — goes something like “People are poor because other people are rich” and look at the absolute sh*tshow of most of the world. Which are indeed poor and wretched (though still way better than they were before the rise of Western civ, whatever fantasies the left feed themselves) but mostly due to local customs (like mordida), corruption, tribalism, ineffectual or uneven laws, lack of freedom (of speech, marriage, residence, heck, living), etc. etc. ad nauseum. It is not because their SELF ESTEEM was hurt.
Which is at the bottom of it what most western leftists think. The third world only acts up and fails to be paradise on Earth because they have insufficient self esteem.
This is like Marxist psychological analysis done by morons, applying a theory that doesn’t even work for misbehaving kindergardners — or anything outside sitcoms, really — to complex, historically complicated, anthropologically complex regions PEOPLED BY REAL HUMANS. Self esteem, ladies and gentlemen. If we give them that, they will suddenly lose all their bad traits and become perfect angels. … In bad fiction, not even good one.
The tragic reliance on theory over real life — which most of the propagators of this nonsense never got to experience in any significant degree — is also responsible for the way Britain hid the rape gangs. And the way Britain lay supinely back, legs widespread to be invaded by all the dregs of the third world, the contents of prisons in places where prisons are filled with true horrors, and various gangsters of various stripes. Because if they just took them in and welcomed them with open arms, and ignored their little faux pas like well, raping minor girls of the host country, they would recover their self esteem, realize they were “as good as anyone” and instantly become perfect citizens. And then the academics could have their ideal society, where everyone marries someone of another race (no, seriously. Watch the latest British Mysteries. Or… Bridgerton) and everyone behaves like affluent liberals.
Most people refuse to examine things to this level. They laugh at “queering the maps” and move on without taking in the full picture, because it’s hard to believe real, adult human being can believe such a load of absolute nonsense.
In a while it is a measure of how successful Western Civ has been, that we raised and kept ADULTS, sometimes elderly people so innocent they can live in this sort of fairy tale and think that it makes perfect sense. We are so rich, so amazingly wealthy that we generated an entire class of people who have never had to DO anything real. They’ve never planted a garden, they’ve never looked after a dying parent, by and large they’ve never really cooked their own food, or raised their own kids. They have traveled, but never unchaperoned, without maps, and without gravitating to their counterparts in the countries/areas they visited. That’s how they can remain ignorant and deny such things as the third world’s usually hostile attitude towards women or gays. (And confuse things like forced transitioning in Iran with being good about transgender issues. Or confuse the boys raised as girls from an early age in the third world with tolerance of gay lifestyles.) And how they fail to understand that issues are way deeper than “self esteem.”
At personal, tribal or country level, really, self esteem tends to be highest where aggressive, destructive traits and behaviors are also highest.
Western civilization collapsing (no, I don’t think we are. Even Europe is showing signs of life. I just think the next century is going to be lit) wouldn’t raise anyone. Just collapse human civilization to maybe eighteenth century level for a long while.
Which is why I beg you not to look away. Yes. They really are this crazy. They really are this destructive.
They need to be laughed at, sure, but also confronted everywhere and have their pet theories ripped apart whenever they so much as dare to hint at them. We need to make them face the full glaring absurdity. Need to. For our own sake.
If you can homeschool your own kids. The indoctrination starts in kindergarten. Yes, even in good private schools. If they also receive government money, they have to conform to various governmental directives AND to the official curricula. You might be paying a lot for a better dressed version of your local public school. Bring the kids home. Homeschool them. Or read everything they learn and homeschool after school. It will make them a little cynical but that’s all to the good.
The only way this nonsense survives is that it’s pounded in so early it becomes revealed, unquestioned truth. Destroy indoctrination at all levels and do not give your kids to it. As well have them pass through the fire.
I’m not going to propose we raze universities and salt the ruins, but I am going to ask that before anyone donates to these organs you visit incognito, talk to their humanities students and find out what’s really going on. And also that anyone who has any power at official capacity in our government look into this nonsense. Yes, I think government is MOSTLY a force for destruction, but some things need to be destroyed, to be fair. Like, disconnected, head in the clouds theories.
That’s fair. Anti-Western theories want to destroy us and our way of life. I suggest we do onto them first.
If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo,please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months(unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, by clicking through and buying (anything, actually) through one of the links below, you will at no cost to you be giving a portion of your purchase to support ATH through our associates number. A COMMISSION IS EARNED FROM EACH PURCHASE.*Note that I haven’t read most of these books (my reading is eclectic and “craving led”,) and apply the usual cautions to buying. I reserve the right not to run any submission, if cover, blurb or anything else made me decide not to, at my sole discretion.– SAH
When Bobo Buttons, Private Eye takes a side trip to visit Jock Robin’s grave, he sees a family conducting their own funeral. To his surprise, he recognizes one of the mourners: an acrobat from a rival show, a man whom Bobo recently saved from prison. The deceased is the acrobat’s wife, and his family and others think he killed her. The fall of this Sky Dancer is tearing the circus apart.
So the show’s Governor hires Bobo to find the truth. Bobo goes undercover in hostile territory to dig up the real story, secrets that someone has already killed to conceal…
FROM DALE COZORT: Raphaela, Princess of the Jungle: A Snapshot Novel (Snapshot Jungle Adventures Book 2)
Nearly a hundred years ago, in an alternate reality Africa dotted with lost cities, Raphaela of Zan was eleven years old and dying of a rapid aging disease. A mysterious gray-eyed man gave her a drink he claimed would cure her. Instead, it stopped her from aging at all, trapping her in an eleven-year-old body, on the verge of life, but never able to truly live. Now, the rapid aging disease is back, threatening to turn her into a withered crone before she has a chance to live. Can she survive man-apes, Romans and Mad Puritans to find the gray-eyed man and convince him to save her?
The planet Sanddoom. Desert exile world for most of Earth’s Radical Islamic Fundamentalists. Run by Mad Mullahs, who repay the favor of American leniency by creating a world of slavery, insurgency, and export of dangerous drugs via their own outmigrating people, headed for other colony planets.
The first two are covered by a hands-off agreement with the Americans.
The last, not so much. And Captain Delaney Wolff Fox’s special assignments fire team, FTSA1, aren’t going to stand for it. Their job is to hunt down and eliminate
Welcome to Space Station Halcyon! (Management is not responsible for anything that happens to you)
Joey Mumbai’s down on his luck and over his head. To pay off his gambling debts, he’s forced to run an old space station at the end of the galaxy as a “legitimate business” for the mob. All Joey has to do is make money—and not attract any attention. But Space Station Halcyon is like a floating death trap, with a rage-filled manatee, a psychotically cheerful computer, and a sports bar that may or may not be possessed.
When a government code inspector and her enforcerbot drop by the station, Joey must bluff, bribe, and connive his way through interstellar bureaucracy, laser gun fights, and the worst beer in the galaxy. Can Joey turn his derelict station and degenerate crew into something resembling legality? Or is the whole place going to explode in a cloud of code violations? Or maybe both?
Space Station Halcyon is a wild and raucous sci-fi comedy about bad luck, worse decisions, and the cosmic horror of being put in charge. A Hitchhiker’s Guide-esque romp that answers the eternal question: “Who’s in charge around here?”
On Neptune’s frozen moon, humanity finds a warning written in stone.
When the exploratory vessel Argo reaches Neptune, its crew expects silence, ice, and scientific routine. Instead, they uncover impossible signals coming from Triton—a moon that should not exist in its present orbit, and may not belong to our solar system at all.
Beneath Triton’s frozen surface lie ruins older than Earth’s history, carved with Egyptian hieroglyphs no human hand could have made. As military commander Colonel Marcus Hale struggles to keep his crew alive against failing suits and relentless cold, idealistic scientists push to decode the message left behind by a vanished civilization.
What they learn is both astonishing and unsettling: Triton was once a waystation for a wandering world—Pluto—cast adrift across the galaxy after its creators destroyed their own sun through reckless science.
As time, oxygen, and power run out, the crew must decide what to tell Earth—and whether humanity is ready to hear a warning written millions of years ago:
Some knowledge comes at too great a cost.
Written in the spirit of classic 1950s science fiction, The Triton Enigma is a tale of exploration, moral responsibility, and the thin line between discovery and disaster.
The Hotel Miroir, with it’s mirrored halls and endless repeated patterns – not all quite the same. A place of fractal patterns where universes — might have been and could be collide. A place where Lark had once danced with the man she would always wait for.
Dumas house Zeller. A Servants bastard who was caught using Mentalist Powers and chipped. Still brilliant, but without Power, with speech issues, sold . . . But he’s got a Grand Plan . . .
A small part of the Baranov Family has been kicked out of Baranov House after their son is accused of improprieties with the Family Head’s daughter. Retreating to their old hunting lodge on a low population World, with their old servants and a couple of new ones, they’re going to find themselves right on the spot when the Machines arrive.
Almira Hartington was heir to the largest fortune in the galaxy, amassed by her father during his time as a director of the Andromeda Company. But when Sir Josiah commits suicide, Almira discovers that she and her siblings are penniless. All three of them must learn to work if they wish to eat, and are quickly scattered to the far reaches of the universe. Almira stubbornly remains on-planet, determined to remain respectable despite the sneers of her former friends.
Sir Percy Wallingham pities the new Lady Hartington. But the lady’s family will take care of her, surely? It’s only after he encounters Almira in her new circumstances that he realizes the extent of her troubles and is determined to help her if he can. He doesn’t know that a scandal is brewing around Sir Josiah’s death and Almira’s exile from society. But it could cost him his life, and the lady he has come to love.
From Prometheus Award winner Sarah A. Hoyt comes a dazzling collection that showcases why her work has appeared in Analog, Asimov’s, and Weird Tales—and why readers can’t get enough.
Magic-soaked noir in 1920s Denver. Mirror-hopping time lords fleeing across infinite universes. Survival in John Ringo’s zombie apocalypse. Murder and mystery in the world of Darkships and Rhodes. Each story in this collection pulls you into a different world—and refuses to let go.
Previously published in acclaimed anthologies from Baen and Chris Kennedy Publishing, these nine tales span Hoyt’s most beloved universes alongside standalone adventures. Whether she’s writing in Ringo’s Black Tide Rising series, exploring her own Darkships and Rhodes worlds, or crafting speculative noir that defies categorization, Hoyt delivers the vivid storytelling and emotional resonance that has earned her a devoted following.
From rain-slicked streets where magic and murder collide to the far reaches of space-time itself, Done With Mirrors demonstrates the genre-hopping brilliance of one of speculative fiction’s most versatile voices.
Nine stories. Nine worlds. One unforgettable collection.
Contains the short stories: Honey Fall; Scrubbing Clean; Last Chance; Great Reckoning in a Small Room; Horse’s Heart; Do No Harm; Dead End Rhodes; Knights of Time; Done with Mirrors.
With an introduction by Holly Chism.
FROM SARAH A. HOYT: No Man’s Land: Volume 1 (Chronicles of Lost Elly) – STILL THE PASSION PROJECT!
On a lost colony world, mad geneticists thought they could eliminate inequality by making everyone hermaphrodite. They were wrong. Catastrophically wrong. Now technology indistinguishable from magic courses through the veins of the inhabitants, making their barbaric civilization survivable—and Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus Kayel Hayden, Viscount Webson, Envoy of the Star Empire—Skip to his friends— has just crash-landed through a time-space rift into the middle of it all. Dodging assassins and plummeting from high windows was just the beginning. With a desperate king and an archmagician as his only allies, Scipio must outrun death itself while battling beasts, traitors, and infiltrators bent on finishing what the founders started: total destruction. Two worlds. One chance. No time to lose.
Volume 1 The Ambassador Corps has rules: you cannot know everything, don’t get horizontal with the natives, don’t make promises you can’t keep. They’re a lot harder to follow when assassins are hunting you, your barbarian allies could kill you for the wrong word, and death lurks around every corner. The unwritten rule? Never identify with the natives. Skip’s already broken that one. Now he’s racing against time to save his new friends from slavery—or worse—while dodging energy blasts and political intrigue. One crash-landed diplomat. A world of deadly secrets. And absolutely no backup.
Some rules are meant to be broken. Others will get you killed.
And yes, I do know that finding your own work funny is like eating your own nail pairings, and yet… this amuses me unduly:
AND MANFRED WEICHSEL IS HAVING A KICKSTARTER FOR HIS ACTION GIRLS PROJECT: Action Girls: Triple Threat – Illustrated Omnibus
Note I’m making this small, as some of you apparently read this post at work or near small children. It’s not pornographic, just spicy, but still I don’t want to get anyone in trouble!
Vignette Writing Challenge!
This is one of those fun days when I failed to get a prompt for vignettes thanks, probably, to the inscrutable hamsters of the internet. So as usual, I’m giving you an image to write a challenge about. Have at it.
Several years ago, my brother thought is appropriate to send me a stupid little video about how many wars the US has been in. And the conclusion from this was that the US is a warmonger, of course. (There is a reason we don’t talk politics, yes.)
The fact that several of these wars were waged against the US (England, we’re looking at you) though the revolutionary war is a matter of opinion. I’m sure that Dan’s ancestors would say that England waged war on the colonies, which is why the colonies had to secede, but I understand Great Britain has a different opinion. OTOH it’s arrant nonsense to blame us for the wars we got involved in to save European butt (mostly against the Germans) or for defending allies during the cold war when the USSR went on the prowl.
Yes, we’ve been at war a lot, and I suspect there’s more wars ahead. Part of this is that we fit uncomfortably in the world and that for some reason we haven’t responded to provocations harshly enough that people leave us alone. Also that as the single hegemon we’re going to have a lot of countries taking pot shots at us.
This does not mean we’re a war like country. Americans are the weirdest at war, because we keep trying not to hurt people. Which is of course stupid. And perhaps it’s time to realize that sometimes hurting a few people in a targeted way is the best way to avoid hurting a LOT of people over the long run. Yes, we have pride and a certain military attitude, and are the only country in the West that still knows how to fight. But we view it very much as “If you want peace, prepare for war.”
However Europeans have a big hole in their head. I know because I went to school there for… way too many years. On account of being born there/being one of them until 27. Which means that I heard the stories they tell themselves, in the classroom but also the media, fiction, etc.
They believe — no, listen — they believe two things cause war: nationalism and being prepared for war.
When they study the causes of WWI for instance it’s all flattened down to “The culture in Germany was so militaristic, and they were nationalists” when the fact is the main cause of WWI was internationalism: the empires and links between empires which would drag the whole world into war if the fuse went up. Also it was monarchy and family quarrels, but that’s something else.
It certainly had nothing to do with people waving the flag and the common man loving his country. Because I love America it doesn’t mean I want to go and pound Mexico or Canada. Even if Canada is doing its best to kill batchlots of their own population and sell out to Beijing. And yeah I’d prefer Mexico not export its narco-issues and half of its population to us. Yeah, the food is cool, but the intake of Marxist Koolaid is higher than in our college campus and the chip on the shoulder and culture make things difficult for us. I’m not saying a few of them can’t come over, but no more mass immigration. Oh, and I’m even less inclined to go off and stomp further distant countries.
Unless of course they are interfering with us.Which yes, Venezuela, Iran and of course China and arguably Russia were/are.
So us retaliating and slapping them so hard their great grandkids say ouch is justified. And it’s not because we’re patriots or “militaristic.” It’s because they’re screwing with us. (Don’t touch our boats. Or our citizens. Or our homeland. Or, really anything of ours. How hard is that to understand?)
The whole idea that patriotism and being armed CAUSE war is USSR propaganda, of course. No, seriously. They hated both people being attached to their own countries and being able to defend themselves. Mostly because international socialism, which flies under the flag of socialism/communism, only meant one thing: Russian nationalism. Russia puppeted the USSR as its ticket to conquer every country it considered a threat.
If you’ve studied Russian history you know that it considers every country a threat. So for Russia to feel safe, it needed a world empire. And it viewed communism as its ticket to such world empire.
Which means that it preached internationalism, because internationalism means you won’t fight back when they take your homeland. And it preached pacifism, because pacifists don’t fight back.
Its accusations against the US were always that it was militaristic and imperialistic and aggressive, which was projecting with an IMAX.
But you can’t argue with the logic that if other countries didn’t defend themselves militarily the world would be peaceful, peacefully living in squalor under the Soviet boot and sending the best of everything to Mother Russia….
But Sarah the USSR fell. Yes, it did, physically. It became unable to hold its empire because frankly socialism of any kind kills, fast or slow, but it always kills, and at some point it couldn’t occupy other countries and steal from them fast enough to keep its citizens even semi-contented.
However its ideological debris went on, in Western universities which it conquered and particularly in the upper class of the US where, thanks to decades of controlling the industrial-entertainment complex, it had become a positional good.
Which is why you see spectacularly and extensively maleducated leftists claim things like if you defund the police crime will stop. Or if we disarm no on one will attack us.
These are delusions that don’t survive kindergarten. Bullies don’t stop hitting you if you don’t hit back. Nor is life pleasant under their boot. But if you’re educated enough you can believe it. I suppose.
Will this debris survive? I don’t know. I always said that communism would have to die here, where it infiltrated our elites and academia. But at the same time, I very much wouldn’t like it to die in blood. Because that will change us in ways we won’t like. Maybe it needs to be. But I’d rather not.
I very much hope, though, that things change in such a way that we can indeed give peace a chance. And our only chance at peace is to smack those who disturb OUR peace hard enough to make them stop it. Then go away and come back if they do it again.
It certainly beats being the world’s social worker and (actually, in point of fact) funding communism by other names abroad. (Even in the weird format of transexual operas in Bolivia, yes, it’s Marxism if not actual communism at the heart of it. And I suspect anyway the money went directly to groups who hate us, rather than their stated purpose.)
Peace is possible: through superior firepower and willingness to use it in the most devastating and efficient (and sparing) way achievable.
We should try that.
*UPDATE: I think maybe I should let the regulars know that for the last 3 days this blog has been under continuous attempted DOS attack. I’m getting hits so massive that anything but my gold-plated hosting service would already have buckled. Truth is, so far the gold plated hosting service has paid for itself. But combined with very hostile uninformed and incoherent (not approved, natch) comments it makes me wonder HOW I pissed on their cheerios this time? Anyone have any idea? Just curious. The opinions of fools don’t interest me but sometimes they amuse me — SAH.*
When I was in 12th grade in Ohio in the early eighties, my Comparative Political Systems teacher (whom I liked) had made an effigy of Iran’s Ayatollah and hung it from the blind support bar at the window.
He could go on for hours and there might have been spit flecking (I DID say I liked him, right) on the subject of why the Ayatollah needed to die. He was right, of course. And it was both baffling and puzzling to me why we hadn’t done it yet.
It’s been puzzling or infuriating, depending on how you look at it, to me for 47 years. I understood marginally, maybe, why we didn’t bomb the living daylights out of them until they surrendered when they were holding our hostages. But why stay our hand after they were freed?
Oh there were reasons and due to our apparent wild overestimation of Russian capabilities, the first stopping point was probably “if we attack Iran it might precipitate WWIII. Which is why our overestimation of their capabilities, based on obviously faulty intelligence is a crying shame and evil and cost in human lives and suffering, because we let the USSR get away with many things and stopped ourselves from taking needed action for fear of starting WWIII and the “end of all life on Earth.”
Fine. We didn’t know it was faulty and we were trying to be the life-preserving humans in the world. And yet–
The USSR fell how long ago? And we kept tolerating a country that not only horribly mistreated its population, but which financed terrorism against us, and which routinely shouted “Death to America” and “Death to Israel.” We just pretended it was a rational author and sometimes — Obama — gave it pallets of cash.
It is a mark of historical illiteracy that — though I think the polls are (duh) manipulated — around half of the population think we just attacked Iran out of nowhere, not that this should have happened almost half a century ago.
I think the final trammel that gave way was Trump realizing that no, Russia can’t retaliate even if it tried. Their three day war on the Ukraine that has turned into the tar baby for Russia and a graveyard for Putin’s dream of reviving the USSR, was clear as print on that. If Putin could we’d already be nuked and Ukraine for sure long ago. Therefore, he can’t.
So Trump decided we could just do things and did them. First with getting Maduro out of Venezuela (Henceforth referred to as Demadurizing Venezuela.) and then using extensive Ayatollah be gone on Iran. Which is still ongoing.
The left losing their mind explains that there was something holding our — particularly democrat presidents’ — hands before this than “fear of retaliation.”
I honestly think — PSYCHOLOGICALLY — the left has convinced itself it is illicit for the US to lose force to defend its own interests. The left is chronically addicted to getting us involved in war on behalf of other people: Somalis, Balkan people, etc PROVIDED we have nothing to gain from it. Remember when their big accusation against war in Iraq was “No War For Oil.”? This is exemplary of rats in heads. After all, given that industrial civilization can’t subsist without energy, why not make war for oil? If in addition to that one has a legitimate beef against the country, why not take the oil for our trouble?
But in the left’s mind even if the war were licit, our PROFITING from it would make it wrong.
The truth of course is that for most of human history nations have fought exclusively for their own interests or what they perceived to be their own interests. (Sometimes they were very wrong.)
But now we’ve done it. I am relieved on behalf of the people of Iran who have suffered enough. And my dream for them is “No more Ayatollahs”. Is this likely? I don’t know. Sometimes when people have been crushed for a long time, they have trouble coming back from it.
Which is why the reasonable thing is to get rid of their awful leaders, let them figure it out, and if they get another set of awful leaders get rid of those, rinse and repeat.
The point being that we’re not obligated to nation build. We’re not obligated to make sure the people are okay. We’re not obligated to export democracy.
Yes, we’ve done it in the past, kind of, but — glares at Europe — with indifferent success. Culture is something we don’t fully understand and old cultures tend to re-emerge.
There is only ONE way to make a country in your image and semblance. Invade and stay there for generations, heavily punishing those who don’t get with the program. (Tips hat towards Rome.)
But I don’t want America to do that, and if we did it would change us as much as we change the world. I like America as America (I’d like it to be even more America.) It just wouldn’t be a good idea.
Barring that nation building is just an illusion.
So, in this era when we can just do things, we are allowed to use our force for OUR OWN INTERESTS. Which means we punish countries and leaders who do things against US interests and keep doing so until they stop getting up our nose.
And that’s enough, in this era when we can just do things.
For most of my life, I was convinced I was on the wrong path.
Am I?
I no longer think so. But you see, the problem is that women — and men — of my generation and after (I don’t know before) were raised on the certainty that we must have a career. And careers were to have a certain touch feel. I wasn’t sure exactly how — though briefly I considered that I might achieve this if I owned a chain of magazines, but I was supposed to go to work nine to five at an office with large windows and some kind of assistant that brought me tea. Everything else was, of necessity the wrong career.
Also, though we’d decided we had to stay home and raise the kids because, well, with kids like ours it would be cruel and unusual to throw them at daycare, I felt very guilty I wasn’t bringing in a lot more money. Like for instance at least half what Dan made. Every time we were tight, every time we had to make compromises, every time I couldn’t buy the kids what they needed and had to settle for something not so good, I thought I was in the wrong career.
Worse — did everyone else do this — I decided on what I wanted to be when I was six and frankly knew bloody nothing of the world or what a writing career entailed. From things I had gleaned in books, I thought your agents were kind of like your bosses, and that your editors did their best to keep you publishing. Maybe it was true, at one point, but not when I came in.
My so called career careened from disaster to rescue to fresh disaster, from ridiculous contretemps to people taking a strong dislike to me for reasons I could not figure out. I lived on edge, afraid it would crash at any time, for twenty years. And of course, working even when my mind didn’t. Enjoy what I did? Most of the time I wasn’t sure I could drag myself to the end, and when I did, I had to think of starting the next novel.
It’s hard to feel a lot of joy in your work, or pride in your accomplishments when you’re so burned out that even when you finish a book that you can’t remember what you actually put in it ten minutes after you’re done.
Was all of it a slog? No, but eventually it was. And the more sloggish it became, the more I dreamed of “the career.” Mostly a career in translation — since that was the only real honest employment I had a chance at turning into a career — but it never happened. I almost took a job as a translator in Denver, but we lived in the Springs, and it didn’t pay quite enough to commute that far. It certainly didn’t pay enough for Dan to quit his jobs in the Springs, so I turned it down at the least minute.
By then I was starting to get a feeling THAT career too would be a disappointment. I’d seen Dan go through enough issues in his career. Not as bad as mine, granted, but– And though his career was what he wanted to be, I also knew that like me his satisfaction and joy had shifted to something else: our life together, the children. But of course, the children weren’t a career. It wasn’t what I was raised to expect.
So?
So, I’ve come to realize that most people don’t have careers. They have jobs they do. Some are better suited to their jobs than others, and over time they might come to realize they’re good at what they do and enjoy that fact. But most of of the time people do what they can do, perhaps what they decided to do early on, perhaps what they fell into, and they make enough money for their purposes. And they keep doing it.
Right now everything is embuggered because all our institutions have been infiltrated and destroyed from the inside, our personal relationships have been poisoned by group victimhood to the point that people don’t relate properly, and it is not only marriages that have suffered, but every day life, and so it is only the blessed few whose jobs aren’t cursed with a bit of that insanity and nonsense. Most of my friends have had problems, some worse than my so called career had.
Most people’s happiness lies not in their jobs. That was a lie they told us. Jobs are not “careers” of the glittering kind. Even the kind of Hollywood “careers” that set the idea that a career should be all we ever dreamed of, and make us happy and fulfilled were, it turns out, not that at all, but more akin to the so called career.
Most people’s joy and happiness lie in their marriages, in their children, or failing those, in their parents, their pets, even their hobbies.
People who put their hope of joy and fulfillment in their careers will be disappointed over and over again. Because that’s not what careers or even jobs are for. They are to allow you to survive so you can pursue your happiness. We’re fortunate that jobs today allow us to do that without — in most cases — killing us at forty. And that we have weekends off. And that most of us live long enough to retire.
Because the center of our lives is not work or a career.
And yet, and I can’t explain it, in the last six years I’ve slowly and through some truly horrific events and doubts come to realize that my job is exactly what it should be; that I’m doing exactly what I should be doing; and to derive (almost) as much joy from my writing, both here and in fiction, as I did from raising my kids.
More than that — you have to understand I’m a religious believer, but not a believer in woo woo or fate, so this is weird — I believe I was placed here by a higher power and that I’m doing exactly what I should be doing.
Even though I’m not making nearly that much money. And I certainly am not amazingly famous. And I certainly don’t have any kind of glittering career.
And yet my so called career feels right, and like exactly what I should be doing.
Even trifling, “unimportant” jobs can be what you’re supposed to do. Where you’re supposed to be. And you can derive comfort from that, if not great amounts of money or acclaim or “glittering” career.
And yes, there will be slogs and horrible times. The world is what it is. And I can’t promise you’ll come to the conclusion you are exactly where you’re supposed to be.
On the other hand it is what happened to me.
And yet, through and despite my so called career, my disappointment of it, my hatred of it, my acceptance of it, my love of it (Of course it might be Stockholm syndrome, but I don’t think so.) most of my love, my happiness, my joy was my family.
It still is.
And as a friend reminded me today, the so called career is still alive when it should not be. It should have been dead long ago. After all when I came into the field, the average career was three books. After that no one would publish you. Now it’s only one. If you don’t hit the jackpot out the gate, you’re cooked, at least if you’re with one of the big houses.
And yet, 25 years later, through some improbable saves and some bizarre miracles, the so called career marches on. Maybe that’s why I have the sense I’m doing what I was meant to do.
Or maybe, just maybe I’m that stubborn.
And I have absolutely no idea why I wrote this, or if anyone out there needed to hear it, or even why anyone out there WOULD need to hear such a bizarre tale.
I just felt I should put down these rather unorganized thoughts. Now you deal with it. I do hope someone needed to hear it.
*A minor update before your Tuesday-Sunday book promo. For those who saw me at ConFinement coughing and hacking and having trouble with the whole upper respiratory symptoms: I actually brought meds in the car for the trip in fear it would be doing that all the way home. And it was fairly horrible at the con, to the point I was always exhausted JUST from coughing. Spoiler: I stopped coughing completely about an hour into our car trip, and haven’t needed inhaler or cough syrup or any of it. I think the issues was a combination of very strong scent soap booth (Don’t get me wrong. It’s that lady’s right to sell them, and the booth was very popular. I use scented soap myself. It was just a LARGE booth and therefore overwhelming) and some ijit smoking pot near our room. I’ll note here that since the latest bout of thyroid I have ALMOST no sense of smell, but I smelled pot in the elevator and apparently it was very obvious on our floor. Again, for the record, whatever, and there are actually people who use it for medical conditions, but if you’re in a hotel would you have mercy on us poor asthmatics (I can’t smelll it but my bronchi and lungs still respond, and I’m deathly allergic) and use comestibles or whatever. Thank you. My lungs thank you. Anyway, if you were worried, I’m perfectly fine. Of course I started coughing while writing this, because my brain is like that. But it will stop as soon as I do the rest of the promo.
HOWEVER, I SPENT A LOT OF TIME HIDING IN MY ROOM, BECAUSE EXHAUSTED, SO I MIGHT HAVE ESCAPED CONTAGION — FINGERS CROSSED — BUT APPARENT THE FLU WAS MAKING THE ROUNDS OF THE CON. SO IF YOU’RE FEELING ODD, GET TESTED. – SAH*
If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo,please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months(unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, by clicking through and buying (anything, actually) through one of the links below, you will at no cost to you be giving a portion of your purchase to support ATH through our associates number. A COMMISSION IS EARNED FROM EACH PURCHASE.*Note that I haven’t read most of these books (my reading is eclectic and “craving led”,) and apply the usual cautions to buying. I reserve the right not to run any submission, if cover, blurb or anything else made me decide not to, at my sole discretion.– SAH
In the heart of the Fire Nebula, war rages across the stars. Crown Prince Wolf Alexander-Morgan and Princess Mariella, forged in the crucible of combat and mech warfare, stand at the forefront of a desperate counterstrike against a ruthless empire that has already struck at their homeworlds. With elite squadrons, aging battleships revived from slumber, and hard-won alliances hanging by a thread, they prepare to carry the fight straight to the enemy’s stronghold.
But victory demands more than firepower. As hidden truths surface, old grudges resurface, and the line between ally and threat blurs, Wolf and Mariella must navigate treacherous politics, overwhelming odds, and the weight of their own destinies. One wrong move could doom their kingdom—or end the war in flames.
Pulse-pounding space battles, brutal ground assaults, and the clash of crowns await in the explosive conclusion to the Valley of Fire trilogy. In a galaxy where loyalty is tested in fire, some legends are born… and others are extinguished.
Captain Jem Raznick and the weary crew of the Tanager crave a moment’s peace after grueling evacuation runs across star systems. But spymaster Jade Star’s urgent summons shatters that hope, yanking them back to the fog-shrouded swamps of Boudreaux. Posing as orchid hunters, they must infiltrate the murky underbelly of the port to find missing operative Dilar Restin, and the explosive secrets he’s uncovered, before it’s too late.
What begins as a covert rescue spirals into a deadly trap: buried family betrayals surface, pirate shadows close in, and unexpected allies emerge from the mist with their own hidden agendas. Only when the true stakes are revealed, the culmination of Jade’s decades-long master plan, does the crew realize the galaxy itself hangs in the balance, with one wrong move dooming them all.
In this gripping space opera finale, Jem races to untangle a web of galactic deceit, protect his makeshift family, and ignite a defiant legacy. Heroism isn’t born in solitude. It is forged in the fierce, unbreakable unity that defies the encroaching void.
In the frozen kill zones of Tau Ceti IV, Terran Marine Private David Hernandez fights a brutal war against the relentless Kharkan hordes. But when peace shatters the battlefield in the most unexpected way, survival takes on a new meaning—one far from the front lines.
Years later, Hernandez joins the elite mercenaries of Jackson Solutions, trading fatigues for high-stakes contracts in the lawless Zone of Separation. Amid corporate betrayals, pirate raids, and shadowy alliances, he uncovers a conspiracy that could ignite interstellar chaos.
As loyalties fracture and enemies close in, Hernandez must master the deadliest battle drills of all: trust no one, and fight to the last breath.
In Aulis, capital of the distant world Iphigenia, Dardana Fenek is a detective with more secrets than clients. Stumbling into a high-stakes murder investigation, she finds herself in a race against time to make her career—or end her life. In a society where clones are property, and women are second-class citizens, Dardana lives on a knife’s edge. Can a detective with everything to lose solve the case of a lifetime? Or will enemies seen and unseen destroy her? With her loyal partner and lover Barsina—an indentured clone girl won at cards—she finds conspiracies reaching from grimy Aulis markets to a desert archaeological dig. Complicating the case is handsome Ensign-Captain Mardonios, whose attraction to Dardana is matched by his dedication to justice. As the clock ticks and a household of servants faces execution, Dardana confronts corrupt officials, a ruthless madam, and her own mysterious past to unveil the truth about a fifteen-hundred-year-old painting…
In rural small-town 1930’s Indiana, a boy becomes a bootlegger– and a man too.
Fifteen-year-old Matt Wyatt knows the Depression is squeezing the life out of his family’s farm. When the Crawford clan offers his father a lifeline — cash in exchange for quiet runs of moonshine–Matt becomes the least-suspected bootlegger in Polk County. What starts as a thrill soon plunges young Matt into a world of violence, loyalty, and moral compromise.
Anchored by the girl who steals his heart, Matt navigates dusty back roads, outlaw justice, and the thin divide between right and wrong as one run goes terribly wrong and the consequences will follow him far beyond the Indiana flatlands he calls home.
Spanning the last days of Prohibition to the shock of Pearl Harbor and World War II, Hoosier Flats is a coming-of-age novel about duty, family, and the heavy price of growing up in hard times.
A debt of honor. A murdered son. A war that comes home.
Joseph Boghadair was once one of the U.S. Army’s deadliest snipers. Now retired and struggling to support his family, his life is shattered when his son is murdered.
With the justice system offering no answers, Boghadair turns to the one man who still owes him everything.
Paul Connors is the richest man in the world—though almost no one knows it. Years earlier, in Iraq, Boghadair saved Connors’ life. Now Connors intends to repay that debt, using resources and influence few people even realize exist.
What begins as a personal mission of revenge quickly uncovers a powerful conspiracy buried deep within the federal government. As Boghadair takes up the rifle once more, Connors brings overwhelming force to bear, pushing the conflict into the open and making secrecy impossible.
Each strike raises the stakes. Each move draws more attention. And once the war is declared, there’s no turning back.
The Sniper is an action-driven techno-political thriller about loyalty forged in war, justice pursued outside the system, and how far two men are willing to go when the enemy is no longer overseas—but at home.
This is going to be the best post-apocalyptic high urban fantasy pulp detective novel you will read today!
Cin City. The tinsel crown of the magical Kingdom of New California – and Tom Vargas’s favorite place in the whole, wide world. Sure, as a Shamus he has to Clear a lot of Cases, listen to a lot of lies, and get battered and bruised in the process, but it’s worth it. Cin City is worth it.
But when trouble shows up as a dead mage at the Castle, he’s got to work fast and smart to save his city. New California doesn’t have mages, you see. And Cin City is safe for just as long as nobody can prove otherwise.
(Note: this book has a sequel, but it is not part of an epic fantasy trilogy.)
Fae Wars returns on a new front as war rages in the Pacific Northwest!
Corporal Erik Doherty isn’t some kind of special operations super soldier; he’s just an infantry grunt trying to get by in what was once the United States Army, now an enforcement arm of the Fae overlords. When orders come down from a chain of command more interested in boot licking their new masters than protecting American citizens, he has to make the choice. To serve and live, or run and die?
Ashleigh Greene is a teenage girl with a price on her head, the Fae looking for retribution for the killing of one of their nobles. As her hometown burns behind her, she flees into the mist shrouded forests of the Pacific Northwest, her family killed by dragon fire and her world destroyed.
On separate paths, each human comes face to face with a haunting legend that has lived for thousands of years. One that has been waiting, watching, and hating the old enemy that has finally returned. Together, they bring war to the Fae in a battle for honor and revenge.
Black private eye Toussaint Moore knew a murder frame-up when he saw one, especially when it was hung neatly around his neck. Instead of dawdling around New York waiting for the NYPD to arrest him for a murder he didn’t commit, he followed the one lead he had: the victim’s hometown in Ohio. Only a stone’s throw north of Jim Crow Kentucky. If he can’t find who wanted that white man dead, and quick, all he’s going to have left is room to swing!
Winner of the 1958 Edgar Award for Best Mystery Novel by the Mystery Writers of America.
This iktaPOP Media edition includes a new introduction by D. Jason Fleming giving historical and genre context to the novel.
It’s the Roaring Twenties all over again — well — the 2120’s, that is. Where New York City has reverted to its Jazz Age roots of two centuries before. What’s missing? Prohibition, and gun control. What’s not missing? Tough guys, and the dames who (sometimes) love them. Gin joints. Speakeasies. Dance halls. The Social Register is still a thing, and the Beautiful People litter the society pages of the local hypernews sites.
Enter a typical gumshoe private detective — a member of that high society himself, yet a man who left society long ago for other pursuits. And his latest client, a rich young woman of leisure, who needs her new husband followed.
Throw in the recently-crowned queen of one of Chinatown’s tongs, a beautiful investment wizard from upstate, and a hundred million dollars in assets, and suddenly it’s all
We’ve all seen the memes about that… crossword puzzle game being played in German, right? Well, here you have a collection of some of the most staggering linguistic morphological nightmares ever found in the wilds of German and Austrian newspapers, magazines, nature shows, legal documents, websites, and academic publications. All of these are to prove just how accurate those memes really were… no…. to prove how understated those memes really were. Along with the gigantic chimeras of the compound word world, there are some everyday vocabulary items you might actually use some day. Viel Spaß!
On Titan, survival isn’t guaranteed. Trust is even rarer.
Commander Elias Quade was preparing to retire.
Then the offer came.
A buried alien vault beneath the methane storms of Titan. A sealed artifact no one has opened. A private contract no one else will take.
The risk is extreme. The pay is exceptional.
But Quade quickly discovers he’s not alone.
A rival expedition—backed by the powerful Axiom Directorate—is already moving in. Corporate interference, sabotage, and cryovolcanic instability turn the mission into a race against time.
As drones fail, temperatures plummet, and the terrain fractures beneath their feet, Quade must rely on skill, discipline, and human resilience—not just machines—to survive.
What they recover will point to something far larger than a single artifact.
And someone is willing to reshape humanity’s future to control it.
The Titan Contract is the first novel in The Quade Expeditions, a hard science fiction survival series blending realistic space exploration, corporate rivalry, and high-stakes planetary danger.
TRAPPED BEHIND ENEMY LINES, CAN HE FIND THE STRENGTH TO DEFEND ALL THAT HE VALUES MOST, OR EVEN JUST TO SURVIVE?
It’s the dead of winter and George Talbot Traherne, the new human huntsman for the Wild Hunt, is in trouble. The damage in Gwyn ap Nudd’s domain reveals the deadly powers of a dangerous foe who has mastered an unstoppable weapon and threatens the fae dominions in both the new and the old worlds.
Secure in his unbreachable stronghold, the enemy holds hostages and has no compunction about using them in deadly experiments with newly discovered way-technology. Only George has a chance to reach him in time to prevent the loss of thousands of lives, even if it costs him everything.
Welcome to the portrait of a paladin in-the-making, Can he carry out a rescue without the deaths of all involved? Will his patron, the antlered god Cernunnos, help him, or just write him off as a dead loss? He has a family to protect and a world to save, and little time to do it in.
When you know you can regenerate any organ, fast…why not donate your kidneys?
Prometheus has been a teacher all of his life, nearly. Sometimes, like with teaching Man to harness fire, it got him in trouble. Sometimes, he’s able to make an even bigger difference for his students. Especially when they need a kidney as much as they need knowledge.
From Prometheus Award winner Sarah A. Hoyt comes a dazzling collection that showcases why her work has appeared in Analog, Asimov’s, and Weird Tales—and why readers can’t get enough.
Magic-soaked noir in 1920s Denver. Mirror-hopping time lords fleeing across infinite universes. Survival in John Ringo’s zombie apocalypse. Murder and mystery in the world of Darkships and Rhodes. Each story in this collection pulls you into a different world—and refuses to let go.
Previously published in acclaimed anthologies from Baen and Chris Kennedy Publishing, these nine tales span Hoyt’s most beloved universes alongside standalone adventures. Whether she’s writing in Ringo’s Black Tide Rising series, exploring her own Darkships and Rhodes worlds, or crafting speculative noir that defies categorization, Hoyt delivers the vivid storytelling and emotional resonance that has earned her a devoted following.
From rain-slicked streets where magic and murder collide to the far reaches of space-time itself, Done With Mirrors demonstrates the genre-hopping brilliance of one of speculative fiction’s most versatile voices.
Nine stories. Nine worlds. One unforgettable collection.
Contains the short stories: Honey Fall; Scrubbing Clean; Last Chance; Great Reckoning in a Small Room; Horse’s Heart; Do No Harm; Dead End Rhodes; Knights of Time; Done with Mirrors.
With an introduction by Holly Chism.
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.
According To Hoyt 