Author: Sarah A. Hoyt

Kids and their games – Danette Schardt-Cordova

I am a gamer. I am completely and unrepentantly a gamer and have been since I was introduced to Atari (long live Pong!) at age 11, personal computers at age 12(does anyone even remember the affectionately nick named TRaSh 80 Color Computer 3 from Radio Shack?) and good ‘ole Dungeons and Dragons at age 14. Now days except for the bi-monthly AD&D game I run for my kids and a couple of their friends I do most of my gaming on the computer and a lot of it online. Even among other gaming people (of all ages) I get many strange looks for actually insisting on doing my gaming on the PC instead of any of the many console systems that can be found. But I do have a real reason for why I prefer it. Games, even open ended games like many RPGs are (that’s Role Playing Games for the unfamiliar) are still fully set and planned out requiring only that you remember two or three key strategies for several different games no matter how different they appear from the outer package. Computer games on the other hand ask for much more.

A few years ago my kids got me into this little indie game they had found. I usually describe it as Lego blocks on the computer since that is the basic premise, you take blocks and you build stuff with it. On the surface this is a game most would dismiss out of hand since in the age of such graphic and programing marvels as World of Warcraft, Skyrim and Halo the environment consists of lots and lots…and lots of blocks and the graphics are very simple eight bit. For those without kids that game was Minecraft, I think even the hermit in the cave has heard of this game by now. No one can really agree on what exactly makes this game so popular and truthfully that’s not the point of this anyway. I will however note that my three kids (19, 15, and 11) who are notorious for binging on a game for a month or two and then abandoning it have come *back* to this game multiple times so it has a stay-ability that a lot of games now days don’t seem to have.

What makes this game so interesting for this though is what it can teach our kids when they play it, even in the dreaded console version. At the most base, straight out of the box level it not only encourages imagination and creativity but planning, requiring not only envisioning the final result but organizing, keeping track of and acquiring the resources necessary for the project that is being worked on. People playing this game have recreated-in block form-everything from the Taj Majal to King’s Landing to a 1 block to one inch recreation of their bedroom to a working computer(only simple math but yes fully working computer within the game restrictions). And we aren’t talking about “oh that kinda, might be it” but true, beautiful, very realistic reproductions.

Another popular use for this is the very common pixel art often used for cross stitch and quilting. These works of detail oriented art have included things so well done as to fool the viewer into thinking it is a drawing or low resolution picture. I’ve seen reproductions of everything from Nyan Cat to well-known Nintendo icons to the iconic Da Vinci painting “The Mona Lisa”

In addition to this there is the versatility of these games. Ever since 1986 when the first Construction Kit was introduced players have been making modifications or ‘mods’. While they have been available for some time it really wasn’t until May 2002 and June 2002 when Bethesda released Morrowind and BioWare released Neverwinter Nights with the Construction Set as part and parcel of the game that the concept really became big. It is so big that the Elder Scrolls series has four different websites where mod content for the games can be found.

In Minecraft the first possible mods are called resource packs (changed from the original texture packs as it now includes the ability to change even the music in the game). A simple Google search for ‘resource packs minecraft’ nets you over 2 million hits in less than a quarter of a second. There are packs that change the art from the original 16×16 format to a simpler 8×8 to allow it to run better on lower computers to a mind boggling(and RAM hogging) 512×512 format. Those of all ages have made these for every reason from “I want it to look prettier” to “I want it to look like this thing there”. A quick scan of one of several sites hosting these show pack that simply clean up the art to packs that are homages to everything from Star Wars to Nintendo’s Link to Candyland. Many of these packs require the author to not only be artistic but familiar with programs such as Paint, Photoshop and GIMP. These packs have been made with everything a simple mouse to drawing tablets.

Another piece of editable work is one that one of my own daughters (who claims she’s not artistic at all) participates in. The term skin or skins is used for the look of the avatar that represents the player. These have also been used to pay homages but have birthed a plethora of original art that have led to the popularity of ‘skin competitions’. The making of these requires the learning of yet another art program as well as an artistic eye.

Not interested in art but still want to build something and don’t think you have enough blocks? Add in the More Blocks mod that adds enough blocks to the game to keep even the busiest, build happy for years. Maybe the next thing you build will have you learning architecture.

Like the farming mechanics? Try your hand at Magical Crops that has recipes for making seeds for every resource available in the program including the metals.

Want to pretend you’re Merlin? Have a look at Thaumcraft or Witchery.

Rather play with some Tech? There’s Applied Energistics or Buildcraft.

Not enough trees? How about Biomes ‘O Plently!

Adding in this content makes the kids playing have to learn more than just how to point and shoot at something. They have to learn mapmaking, accounting, wiring (yes the tech ones can get that fussy), energy creation and consumption, ecology, forestry. And most of the time? They don’t even realize it! Heck they go looking for stuff that teaches this to them themselves!

And the best part of it? Most of the people making these? Had to learn how to make them first. Had to teach themselves or be taught how to use the programs or the programing. At least two of the authors I know for a fact ended up going into the field of programming because of making mods for Minecraft. So the next time your kids ask for a game? If they already have a computer look see if it’s available on the PC with a construction set attached. Who knows you might turn out to have the next ‘Notch’ in your house. Because I can certainly get behind something that just might be the push needed to gel a future career choice for my kid.

Sorry this is so ridiculously late.  I went to bed and slept almost twelve hours.  Not sure why, except that my body might sense the onset of winter. I have been having allergies from h*ll but no sign of infection, which is new.  Anyway, I gave in to the sleep, partly because we’ve been driving all over creation in all our spare time, looking for the “permanent house.”  (We’re in a rental right now.)

Partly this is because I need a sense of permanence (and I need the d*mn research books which are either packed or thrown on a single bookcase, higgledy, piggledly with no discernible organization, which makes it hard to find just the sentence or the reference I need in the middle of a story.

Partly it is because the whole search itself keeps throwing off my attempt to establish “regular habits.”

“Regular habits” is often used in old fashioned mysteries, as in “he is a gentleman of regular habits” by which we are to assume they are somber and modest and unlikely to commit crimes.

I was talking, in a private group, recently with one of my fans who is in the mental health profession, and he was expressing his feeling that civilization is doomed, since we started not only allowing people with the worst possible genetic tendencies to survive (by subsidizing their survival) but we also subsidize their reproduction.

To an extent I think he’s unwarrantedly gloomy (and in his defense, he said nothing about weeding out the unworthy or the carriers of bad traits, okay?)  Yes, the useless (in terms of societal maintenance or utility) flourish like the green bay tree, but they are also, to a great extent, dying young and hard.  Yes, I know all the stuff about teeth per tattoo ratio.  And I know if you have more tattoos than teeth you’re unkillable.  But that’s only true to an extent.  And at any rate, your continued survival is ALWAYS at the expense of others.  Which means when the blue state hits a hard patch, your survival becomes very… chancy.

But it goes beyond that.  I am somewhat sensitive to this, because I come from a mixed marriage.  Dad’s family could have “We have the bourgeois virtues” engraved on their forehead.  I grew up with such helpful proverbs as “them who don’t work when they’re young will break their backs when they’re old.” His paternal family was very well to do indeed, but grandad I suspect had the same sensory issues of younger son and in those days, being the 9th son they didn’t bother discovering that.  His brothers (some of them at least) went to college, but he was considered “stupid” and left school in third grade to learn a trade (carpentry.)  He eventually married grandma, who came from a relatively well to do background (in that her family owned several houses) but who had no one with a college degree and who were only wealthy in terms of the village.  OTOH they had habits of thrift and work.  (And I suspect their rise in the world had mostly been hampered by the permanent depression that seems to come with the Marques name.  It was not the sort of depression that leads to grand dramatic suicides, just a sort of little grey cloud that makes your focus not as keen.) Not to say they were unlettered.  For their time and place they were “bookish.”  All the women knew how to read, and great grandmother would pinch the family budget in order to buy books.  To her we owed the complete collection of Dumas and Sir Walter Scott, also Mark Twain and others.)

On mom’s side, OTOH…

It is rumored in the family that when dad announced his engagement, my grandmother threatened to not receive her daughter in law.  (I’m sure rumors that she threatened to climb on the roof and put her head in the gas oven are false.  For one she didn’t own a gas oven, and if she did, it wouldn’t be on the roof.)

Mom held this against her all of grandma’s life, but I’m the mother of boys and I don’t.

Mom’s family had roots in local gentry, but it was decayed.  VERY decayed.  Mom’s dad drank away his inheritance, and raised five kids in a one bedroom shotgun cottage with a dirt kitchen floor, in the middle of a slum.  I suspect, from the architecture, that my grandparents’ (leased) home was once a crafter’s cottage in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, and for that time it was spacious and tidy, but in the 20th century?  No.

As a little kid I hated going to visit my grandparents, because we passed an insula — i.e. an “ilha”  (Beyond its meaning as “island” in Portugal the term is applied to any decayed building with lots of tenants.  Some of them MIGHT be survivals from Rome, but that’s unlikely) and we’d have to run the gauntlet of half naked, (the bottom half) dirty kids begging for money and scratching at you for anything they could steal.  Sometimes they took the ribbons from my braids.

With all this, all of mom’s sisters became solidly middle class, having married professional men.  The brothers… well, one of them was probably brain damaged to some extent (or the result of too many cousins marrying.)  I loved my uncle, but he never seemed fully grown up.  He worked as an orderly at an hospital and married twice.  The first time he married a woman from “decayed good families” and when that broke up he married a woman from the lowest urban class, and raised the second family in an urban slum.  My second uncle, I did not like.  He was accounted “the wit” of the family, but this was usually at others’ expense.  He was trained as a plumber and made very good money, but it ran through his hands.  He raised his family in the same slum he was raised.

Which brings us to heredity and “regular habits.”

It might be that my uncles received the short end of the genetic inheritance.  Or it might be that being boys in Portugal they never had to work as hard for parental approval as the girls.  Or it may be that grandad had problems with his sons in particular.  I mean, I loved him dearly but he seemed to me to be a lousy father to ALL his offspring.  However, for reasons of family dynamics and his history he might have been particularly bad as a parent for the boys.  (I.e. he might have derided them and undermined their confidence more.)

I don’t know, and I don’t particularly care (it’s a long time.  The uncles are both dead, and I have no contact with my cousins from them.)

However, it’s important to note something: from mom’s side, the only grandkids who went to college were my brother and I and the abandoned, cut-off (I’ve never met them) cousins of my oldest uncle’s first marriage.)

The children of my aunts are middle class and relatively well to do, but never pursued college.

And my brother and I were raised more or less BY my dad’s family, where all the cousins but one (and that one for various reasons) have degrees.  (Most of them engineering or medicine.  The cousins in law, psychology and I are the black sheep.)

To me — and I realize anecdotes aren’t data — having grown up in my family, it was perfectly clear that my brother and I weren’t that different from our maternal cousins.  In fact, mentally, we probably had more in common with mom’s side of the family.  (Except for my grey cloud thing.)

Mom’s dad was a brilliant man, who could discourse with and intimidate college professors (one of his favorite games) on his self-taught knowledge.  I remember he had a lot of books in his carpenter’s workshop, and he seemed to have known all the luminaries of the arts and literature from when he was a young man.  (The fact these were mostly Romantics probably did nothing for grandad’s moral character, mind.)

Dad’s side, people were smart and bookish (save for the one uncle who inherited grandad’s issues) and well informed of the world, but the casual brilliance, the ability to learn with minimal effort, and the almost casual way of correlating knowledge were missing.  My brother and I, though, seemed to realize early on that we learned easier than other people.

And I figure therein lay the rub, at least for my aunts’ children and maybe for the ones of one of my uncle’s.

When you know you can “cram” stuff two hours before the test and remember it for ten years, or even deduce the stuff you should memorize from other stuff you’ve picked up, it’s very easy to leave it till it’s too late.

And yet, my brother and I had results like those of our paternal uncles, not our maternal ones.  How?

Well, mostly because we were raised under the influence of dad’s mom.  And because mom adopted the culture of the family she married into.  For both my brother and I there was “no try, there’s only do.”

So, while my classmates could come home with Cs or Ds and have their parents say “it’s okay, do better next time” the only time I had a negative grade in a test (and the teacher had mis-graded) I got threatened with being locked out of the house.

Look, in first grade, I knew myself to take after mom’s family.  I was indolent, unless forced not to be, a wretched planner, and very fond of wasting time (and money.)

But I knew those were simply not acceptable.  If I wanted to keep grandma’s respect (and I’m still aiming for that, even though she’s gone.  She might still be keeping an eye on me, after all.  Formidable woman, grandma, I don’t think a little thing like death can stop her) I had to develop regular habits that countered my innate defects.  And so I did.  I studied EARLIER because I was afraid I’d be sick just before the test and unable to study.  I applied myself.  I didn’t miss classes.  I didn’t go to coffee shops or hang out with the bad girls on my spare time.  I knew my tendency to the irregular and the bohemian and I tried to counter it with “regular habits.”

This is part of the reason I watch myself, all the time.  Like, you know, not admitting I’m sick, because it might be just an excuse to do nothing.  It’s also part of the reason it took me so long to stay home and try to do the writing thing — I wanted to write, and was as close to having a vocation for it as it’s possible, but it seemed like an irregular, bohemian and risky way of life, while having a regular nine to five job was what I’d been trained for and SHOULD do.  It was only having kids, and not wanting to give them to someone else to raise that got me to stay home and also write on the side.

Unfortunately we’re all susceptible to what Kris and Dean call “bad life rolls” from a game they developed to teach their students how a writing life can change.  Over the last three to four years, starting I think with burnout, and a sudden relaxation of the stress I’d lived under (when it became obvious Indie was an alternative) my “regular habits” broke.

I’d long ago realized the only way I CAN make a go of writing is to establish a work routine and writing hours.  If I didn’t get up when Dan got up to go to work, I was as likely as not to get up at noon, take till three pm to get dressed/showered, and generally get nothing done. Even as a stay at home mom that was deadly (I wanted to model good habits for the boys) but as a writer that was deadly.  I could very easily write only one short story a year.

So I made/make it a point of getting up when Dan does, getting dressed by the time he’s dressed.

The complement to this is “get to my desk when he gets to his” — but that means I have a little more time to linger over a cup of coffee and the morning instapundit — and only knock off when he does.

But having been very burned out, then ill, for … oh, a good four years, I couldn’t concentrate and I broke my regular habits and fell into irregular ones of loitering on social media, checking news obsessively (though I also do that when I’m … not feeling good about the state of the world) and such.

I’m trying very hard to build new ones, but hampered by things like house sale/search for house.

None of which matter.  I still need to try as hard as I can to build regular habits again.

Because I suspect while some genetic component goes into developing bourgeois virtues, a lot of it is just “regular habits.”

There is some back up for this in that the countries that industrialized later are those we associate with slovenly habits of time and application.  BUT if you read to the beginning of the industrial revolution you find those habits even among the famously punctual British people.

Which brings me to the mental health professional’s assessment that we’re breeding civilization away.  Yeah, to an extent, maybe.

But man is more than what he’s born with.  The worst thing we’re doing to the new generation is teaching them (in school, in popular entertainment, in philosophy) to mock the bourgeois virtues, those “regular habits” of careful spending, careful living, regular schedules and faithful work.

And that — THAT — will be the undoing of Western civilization.

Teach your children well.  Give them regular habits. Enshrine those as “the way to be” and don’t be afraid to criticize people who don’t have those habits in front of your kids.

Humans are social apes.  Social disapproval and general enshrining of regular habits will bring even those who weren’t taught from childhood into the fold.

Humans are unruly apes, but habit is a powerful force.

It might yet save civilization from itself.

Just what does Cultural Assimilation mean? – Doug Irvin

Reading or watching the news, it’s easy to tell what groups are most represented in the media. There is positively a competition to see who gets the largest scare fonts, or who will generate the most column inches of coverage.

And the main issue seems to be group rights that are perceived to be trampled on by the government of that country.

Refugees from Islamic societies are in arms (not always figuratively!) because Italy dares to serve them pasta, instead of the types of foods they are used to. Mexican spokespersons (legal or otherwise) are fighting to gain benefits and rights for the people they represent. And curiously, the same people are often in the news supporting union measures that would limit or eliminate any jobs the migrant workers would do.

But it wasn’t that long ago – certainly within my lifetime – when such activities were not only not needed, they weren’t even contemplated.

I could claim membership in several groups. Of Irish and German descent on my father’s side, and Irish and Indian on my mother’s, I represent a large portion of Americans who also have mixed ancestry.

But that’s okay. I rather like it like that.

America has been described as a melting pot of nations and cultures. It’s never been so. Instead, it is a thick and chunky stew of varied tastes and shapes. It’s only been the last few decades that the stew has decided to curdle and separate. It can’t successfully; it can only be rendered useless. But that, I think, is the intention of the masterminds behind all the ruckus. There may or may not be a conspiracy, but it’s really hard to see how the idea of America can be destroyed without one.

For America is more than a country, a nation. Its actual borders are enclosed only by the hopes and dreams of people wanting a chance for themselves. And during the 19^th and most of the 20^th Centuries, the groups representing America expanded those borders not by maintaining their separate status, but by working together despite their differences. Communities abounded with ethnic clubs such as Sons of Italy, Oktoberfest societies, even Native American ceremonies where non-natives were allowed to observe.

We were different, together. America was most vibrant as a society when the differences combined to impel us all forward. And that is true cultural assimilation. It isn’t the destruction of cultural imperatives to create homogeneity of thought and practice. It is enjoying the differences that could separate us, but are allowed to unite us. We are different, but we are one. That is America at its finest.

But why is there such a fuss today about different races being oppressed? How did that idea get started?

Well, there have always been segments of society that sought to magnify the abuses different peoples faced. It’s true – America has had a great deal of prejudice and abuse in its history. And, yes, some groups had a greater proportion than others. But individuals of all races and cultures face obstacles. Some fail to conquer them. And some conquer their barriers and succeed beyond what was expected.

People like Helen Keller, who as a deaf-mute was expected to be stuck in an asylum all her life, yet became an internationally renowned speaker and orator. Mickey Mantle, who overcame the polio that struck him in child hood yet caused him to struggle all the greater to become a sports hero. Ben Carson, who as the son of a single mother of limited means and education, became an internationally acclaimed brain surgeon.

Animal scientists tell us that the most crucial time in an animal’s life is when it is born or hatched. A tiny lamb must struggle to gain its feet and walk; although wobbly, those first steps enable it to overcome other challenges. Birds must fight to break out of their eggs; if you do it for them, to save them the struggle – they’ll die. They MUST win their fight or they won’t even try to survive

And those struggles continue on past the birth process. But success breeds success.

Those seeking to make things easier for various races and groups are not doing them a favor, but are causing a hindrance. Those crying out against abuses are correct, if they can stop the abuse. But when they start demanding special favors, requiring more than others, they become traitors to their people.

America – as a system – is not designed to promote any particular group, but it is designed to allow those who struggle against difficulties to rise above the crowd.

And cultural assimilation? Today some say that’s the voice that whispers, “You aren’t any better than anyone else. Why even try? Don’t make waves. Go along to get along.” That’s not the way America succeeded. America never achieved greatness by just getting along. America was born in turmoil, faced dangers throughout its existence, and now faces another one.

To make America great again, it’s not enough to proclaim the glories of our ancestors, from wherever they came. America is great when we make our ancestors proud of their descendants.

Never mind what they did; what are you doing? Be different: stand out.

*Blame Marina Fontaine for reminding me of this post.  I was going to write one on a similar theme, but hey, it’s already here.  (And yep, went looking at houses yesterday.  One was ALMOST doable for our admittedly eccentric needs, but it’s too early in the process to settle.*

Giving Back My Middle Finger – A Blast From the Past Post From June 2012

Yesterday in the comments someone mentioned giving back to the community.  That is one of those phrases that makes my eyes turn red and smoke come pouring out of my ears in loony-tunes style.

Don’t misunderstand me.  It’s not that I don’t believe in “community.”  Or rather, I hate the word community.  I prefer almost any other word including “group.”

But I believe in groups of people and I believe in the synergy of groups – not so much, mind, that the group is better than the sum of its parts, but that the group is the sum of its parts.  Or healthy individuals make healthy groups.  Or whatever you’d like to call it.

I’ve been a member of several groups that for a while made it easier for me to reach my goals, and I still am a member of groups that do.  I used to be a member of a largish (I think we were ten people at our greatest size) writers group that, while it lasted, made it easier for me to focus and work every week, despite having small kids and a schedule so full that any writing time came off sleep time.  I used to get up at five in the morning so I had two quiet hours of writing before the kids woke up.

I’m now a member of a much smaller writers group that is not quite so focused, but which talks me through snares and supports me when I’m in the dumps.  The same applies to the somewhat larger group of friends (some of whom are writers.)

Of course, looking further back, I was a member of an extended family.  In my case when I title something “me and my cousins” I’m not just talking about the Arab proverb.  By culture or design (I never knew which) though my family ran to small nuclear families, the cousin-group was raised more or less in and out of each other’s pockets.  I used to think of my cousins the way Americans think of their siblings.  In many ways, I still do.  If I managed to be a solitary kid at all, it was because I was so much younger than the rest of them, being almost ten years younger than my brother, who in turn was five years younger than the (female) cousin who was raised (even more so than our other cousins) as our sister, and who is four years older than him.  The other day I almost died watching this video, because that baby elephant was me, from trying to get involved in stuff that was well beyond him, to giving up, throwing himself to the floor and trying to become the center of attention.  Yes, I had a very happy childhood.  Idyllic in many ways.  Not “ideal” which is not the same thing, but good enough.

And of course I’m still a member of that family, even far away, and I’m a member of my nuclear family, and our family sometimes worries me that it might be too close.  We didn’t raise the boys to be our friends.  That was not our job.  Our job was to raise them to be adults and to trust them to find their own friends.  Of course they have done that.  But we seem to accidentally have become friends, somewhere along the way.  Not equals, but you don’t have to be equals to be friends.  I realized we were going the friend route when vacations with the boys were way more fun than vacations alone with Dan.  We might now be at the point – with them living in the house through college, and us wanting to reclaim our lives again – when we need to resume running away from them for some periods of time.  BUT it can’t be denied that the family is a group, and a functional group at that, which allows each of the members to excel.

Heck, this blog has become a group of regular commenters, a “blog community” (one of the few times this word is more appropriate than group) which adds to my own experience in writing the blog.  I know whatever I throw at you will be enlarged and deepened, or just made more fun by your takes on it.

So, why is community appropriate in this case and not in the others?

Because “community” is – at least in my mind – a more undefined and softer edged critter than “group.”  A group is me and Bob and Joe and Mary.  A community is “the group of people who comment on this blog” which, yes, has some core groups, but meanders and changes and defines itself differently moment to moment.  In that sense, community is a term out of sociology.  Take a mountain village.  It’s a community.  Is it the same group it was a year ago?  Maybe.  Depends on how many people moved in and out.  Is it the same it was 100 years ago?  Oh, h*ll no.  With bells on.  People have died and been born, and, if it’s in the States, moved in and out.  You’ll be lucky if there’s one person who is a direct descendant of someone who lived there 100 years ago.  Unlike a group, also, you’re not aware of everyone in the group and usually don’t have any say in who joins and who leaves.

This might not be true in communities where you have to be voted in, like country clubs, and in many groups – families – you might not have much of a say on who joins or leaves, either.  And of course some groups are too large for you to be aware of every member.

Now that I’ve made a big muddle out of those definitions, let me try to make some clarity: I view a group as more of an association of individuals.  You’re part of a group because you want to be, and your individuality matters to the group.  A community, on the other hand is a group of undefined faces.  “People” belong to communities, but it won’t be the same over time.  There can be groups within communities.  There is a definite group of core miscreants in the community of regular commenters on this blog, and I worry when one of them disappears too long and start wondering if I did something to offend him/her.  But there is a larger community around that group: people who come in now and then, in a way that’s statistically but not individually significant.  In the same way, when the Baen bar was healthy, I knew “mine” in Sarah’s Diner, which was definitely a group (at least at its core) but we existed within the community of the Baen Bar, from which a few stragglers would join us or stray out on a more or less random pattern.  To make it clearer: My writers group, but the writing community; my family, but the community we live in; my friends but the community of writers in the area.

So, now that we’re clear as mud, let’s talk about “giving back to the community.”  (Give me a minute.  Must control fist of doom.  Okay.  I think– Yeah.  I’m all right now.)

Why does that phrase annoy me?  Haven’t I said that various groups, starting with my family have helped me along the way?  Aren’t I prone to books that become group efforts?  Even in Darkship Thieves, with an individualistic narrator, told first person, would Thena have got anywhere without Kit and his family?

Yeah.  Okay.  I’m not advocating the lone wolf way of life.  I’m actually – particularly for a writer – highly social.  My profile can tip introverted or extroverted, depending on how I feel.  And though I recently had the first party we’ve held in 9 years, it wasn’t so much not wanting to do it, as the fact that my schedule has kept me in “h*ll on Earth” for about that long.  I love AIM and email because it allows me to get work done AND talk to my friends every day, on my own schedule.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: humans are social animals.  It is both our downfall in many ways, and one of our greatest advantages.

No, what gets on my nerves is two fold “community” and “giving back.”

First of all, let’s define community as it applies to any individual.  What communities am I a member of?  Well, I’m an American (Thank you, G-d, thank you, for allowing me to find my tribe.)  I’m a Coloradan.  I’m part of the science fiction community and the writer community.  I’m part of a community of libertarian (note small l, guys) thinkers community.  I’m part of the cat rescue community.

So, what am I complaining about?  Shouldn’t I be giving back to those communities?

These are my middle fingers.  See them?  They’re waving in the air.  Yes, it’s rude.  But it’s not as rude as telling me I need to “give back.”

I should give back what?  What have I STOLEN or TAKEN from anyone?

“But Sarah,” you’ll say, “doesn’t being an American give you the freedom and peace of mind to carry on your life?  Don’t you like the rights you have as an American, to make an example of a community?  How could you have anything or be anything if you were squatting in a dirt pile, clutching a spear to defend your food?”

Uh.  Right.  And every one of the other American citizens has decided, FOR MY SAKE to make sure that we live in an ordered and lawful society, have they?  All this effort has been expended to let little Sarah achieve her goals, is that it?

“Well, no” you say “that would be ridiculous.  But we have these laws and conventions and customs that allow each of us to develop and do our best.  It’s a community.  You got to give back.”

See middle finger?  We are a nation founded on laws.  Those laws allow each of us to do our best – that’s why we have these laws.  It’s called our constitution and to the extent it’s not ignored, it works better than any other organizing charter in the world.  BUT it doesn’t work because we each wake up in the morning, sing kumbaya and decide to abide by it.  It works because it functions well with human nature.

To hell with you and your giving back.  My duties as an American are to defend and uphold the Constitution that made me an American (yes, I took that oath when I got citizenship.)  That’s not giving back.  That’s my duty.

“Okay, okay,” you say.  “What about the writer community?  Are you going to deny you’ve had mentors along the way, people who put themselves out to teach you and help you become the writer you are today in both craft and career?”

I have no intention of denying that.  Yes, a lot of writers help me and have helped me.  Yes, some sacrificed time and earnings to do so, or risked displeasing their publishers.

So, shouldn’t you give back?  Well… no.  What I got was freely given.  This doesn’t mean I’m a monster of ingratitude.  Most of the people who helped me along the way have claims on me.  I’ll do anything for them when I can.  Some have tested this.  BUT it is not “giving back.”  I didn’t steal something from them that I’m scrupulously returning.  Rather, I’m under obligation to their kindness and their friendship FREELY given to me.  And they have the claims of kindness and friendship on me.  What is the difference?  Well, for one I don’t feel I owe them a finite amount.  Their claim on me is infinite.  I’ll do what I can when I can until one of us dies.

I also pay it forward.  Some of you I mentor, even if I’m the world’s worst mentor ever.  (I hope this will change as I’m more able to control my own schedule and perhaps as health stabilizes a little after this upcoming round of “consorting with doctors.”) And I teach a workshop in Bedford, TX, ever September (and no, the price doesn’t go to me.  It benefits the local library.)  And I try to advise people online.

Do I do this to give back?  Well, hell no.  I didn’t take anything away from the newbies coming in.  I do it because I’m human and I remember being where they are.  I needed help (and eventually got it, but not a for a while.  I didn’t KNOW anyone) and so I give help.  It’s a love offering, freely given.  It’s also, in a way, a self-interested act.  When my newbies develop nicely, I have new authors I love to read.  As a reader that’s a plus.  (And I’m eagerly waiting Kate Paulk’s next con book.)

“You call it love offering, we call it giving back.  Why are you arguing words?”

Because words matter.  When you give back something, you return what you took.  It’s an obligation – sometimes a legal obligation – and it puts you under a constraint to act a certain way.  Now, I don’t know about you, but when I undertake work under an obligation, I feel like I’m lifting a very large rock, pushing and making an effort to get it where it needs to go.  I rarely fulfill an obligation, particularly while someone stands over me screaming “you owe me” with a light and happy heart. RES has made the point in the comments that it’s hard to do for money what you do for enjoyment, and the same thing applies.  I’ve found that I have an almost pathological distaste for editing – even though NRP is waiting for me to do some of it – if I’m obliged to do it by contract.  I will read/critique friends stories fine, but NOT if I’m the editor for an antho, say.  If I owe it, I keep blocking on doing it.  If I owe it, then I hate doing it, and will try to do it as quickly as possible.

Most of all I hate the idea of “giving back” because it presumes that the individual is nothing without the undefined, faceless community.  No one is going to dispute that people do best with rule of law and private property (well, the “community people” might dispute that last.  That’s all right.  They’re wrong) but the “community” doesn’t do that for the benefit of its members.  Rather, each of its members does that for his/her own benefit.

I also hate the (you knew we’d come to it, right) Marxist ethos at the back of that phrase.  In “giving back” is the idea that whatever you achieved was achieved at a cost to others.  Instead of a group, where we each do better because we have this charter that supports all of us (which is what the best writers groups I belonged to were) we end up with the idea that people did this FOR you and that whatever you have came at their expense.

It all comes back in the end to the idea of economics as a finite pie and a closed system.  This is completely insane (each of us now has more “wealth” than any king in the Middle Ages) but it is the only way Marx could define envy as a virtue, and, by gum, he was running with that.  Envy is only a virtue if anyone who does better is a thief.  Someone needs to “give back” only if he took more than his fair share.

This is my middle finger.  See my middle finger?

But I’m not a thief.  I didn’t steal.  And the faceless “community” can earn its own rewards as I have.  I will give, but I won’t “give back.”  I will volunteer, but I volunteer because I want to.  (A lot of my volunteering involves saving orphan and sick kittens, and much as the cats I’ve known have enriched my life, I don’t owe the “cat community” anything.)  VOLUNTEER should be just that.  Don’t get me started on the schools that “require” “volunteer hours.”  It strikes me as getting kids used to slavery, and I disapprove of slavery.

What I have is mine and I earned it.  I will pay back the debts I know I owe along the way – and the cornucopia of the retribution on those is infinite, mostly because what I was given was a free offering, and I return it as such.  There is no limit to what I can give in those cases.

For the others, the ones who want a piece of me because “you’re not squatting in the dirt and defending your possessions against all comers” can have my middle finger.

The end result of your envy and your belief anyone who achieves anything owes you something IS a society where we each squat in the dirt and fight off entitled little pests like you.  (Well, not really like you.  You’ll be long dead.)  I will fight to my last breath your attempts to make me “give back.”

Go and make your own.

*So, there is the promo post.  I might/probably will post again later, unless we can manage to go look at some houses we have bookmarked, in which case I won’t post till tomorrow.  IOW Keep checking this space.  Things are likely to happen.*

The Promo IS — Free Range Oyster

Joe Vasicek

Bringing Stella Home

Gaia Nova Book 1

The war has arrived at home. James McCoy, the youngest son of a starfaring merchanter family, never thought he would face an invasion. But when an undefeated enemy slags his homeworld and carries off his brother and sister, nothing in the universe will stop him from getting them back.

Not all wars are fought on the battlefield. Hard times show the greatness in men, and those who give all are changed forever.

This book is rated T! according to the AO3 content rating system.

Currently free

Cyn Bagley

Hilda’s Inn for Retired Heroes

In Delhaven, there is an Inn run by a retired mercenary. If you are a down-on-your-luck mercenary or men-at-arms, come to the public rooms and Hilda Brant, the owner, will give you a bowl of stew. If you want ale, hand over the coins. Hilda may give you floor space, but she expects you to pay in favors or coins.

Hilda is also an untrained mage with an elemental, which is another reason she is retired. Most mercenary companies are wary of mages for good reason.

When Lord Barton decides he wants the magic on Hilda’s property, Hilda pulls together her resources, including her brother a mage and her sister a brothel Madame, to save her Inn.

Hilda isn’t prepared for the damage and chaos caused by a dragon, black mage, and elementals. And a very angry Lord Barton.

CJ Carella

The Ragnarok Alternative

New Olympus Saga Book 4

Christine Dark faces her most dangerous enemy yet – herself.

In another reality, Christine became corrupted, evil, a murderous villain with immense power and no compassion or restraint, a tyrant who destroyed the world and surrendered to the Outsiders. And now she has arrived to Earth Alpha, bringing chaos and destruction in her wake.

The fourth book of the New Olympus Saga follows heroes and villains endowed with great power and all-too human flaws as they deal with the aftermath of the Genocide War and a new threat in their midst. This story combines action, romance, suspense and humor.

Some time back, I was reading a book on life in the middle ages, and they tried to explain the mindset of the middle ages, and how different it was from ours.  Like, you know, if you got sick, they wouldn’t think of giving you meds.  They’d tell you to go to confession and communion, and to live a holy life.  Because in their mind illness was not the opposite of health, illness was the opposite of living in grace.  For illness to penetrate, you had to be in sin.

In the same way, their households might be filthy, but they paid scrupulous attention to the… cleanliness of their spiritual lives, which was not what we’d expect.  I mean, it wasn’t so much concentrating on being good, and kind, and strictly moral, but more a superstitious appeasement of the disturbed forces of holiness.  So you might make sacrifices, or go on pilgrimage, or whatever.

This wasn’t that strange a mental situation, because I sort of grew up with it in the village.  People would naturally say things like “I knew that I got sick because I dropped my rosary in the dirt last month.”

And so, I understood and got it that this pattern of thought was the primitive thought that predated our scientific thinking and even our religious thinking, and was radically different from both, and yet still remained coexisting with our current thought.

It remained usually in the uneducated and the very young.  I know until I was about 10 or so, I had a series of things I did/didn’t do in order for tests to go well.  I still have occasional attacks of it.  You know, if I wear a certain outfit on the day a book launches, I know it will do well.  Something like that.  It’s harder to get rid of all of it, but since the enlightenment we’ve at least had the idea that education was supposed to help, and that the scientific, modern life was supposed to not function like that.

I am not against mystical thought, mind.  I think there is a mystical life, an attempt to draw nearer to something greater than us, perhaps to G-d himself, for those of us who are believers.  BUT this is not the same as this type of magical thinking, which is the opposite of it, a sort of ocd compulsion and a game of tit for tat individual or cultural.

It’s okay kept on the fringes of normal life, in private circumstances.  I mean none of us really care if you have to cut your sandwiches in octagons in order to be lucky in your work project.

The problem is that more and more — and unexpectedly — I run up against this type of thought in places I don’t expect.

We ran into it a lot over the puppy stuff.  No matter how many times we told them we were in it for the stories, and because our story taste was different from theirs, they kept thinking magically.  It went something like this “We’re good people, and we’re for minorities.  So if these people don’t like the same stories we do, they must be racist and sexist.”

This was part of the nonsense that started Gallo’s flareup.  She had some idea we’d get all upset at TOR publishing Kameron Hurley’s book.  Because you know, we have different tastes than those primarily on the left who controlled the Hugos so long, so we don’t want them to … get published?

This only makes sense if the person saying it is inhabiting a magical world, where objects/people of certain valences are played against each other like some kind of card game.

This is not real.  I mean sad puppy supporters might not — or might, I won’t because it’s not to my taste, but — read Hurley’s book, but we won’t recoil from it like a vampire from a cross.  A Hurley book doesn’t magically cancel out a Torgersen book.  Or vice versa.

On the good side, at least on that level, our side doesn’t act like that.  We don’t say “ooh” at a new Ringo book because “Oooh, that will upset those liberals”  we say “oooh,” because we’ll get to read it.  Books are books and people are people, not points in some bizarre game.

But it didn’t hit me how weird things had gotten and how far magical thinking had penetrated EVERYWHERE, even in academia, until the http://thepeoplescube.com/peoples-blog/u-t-austin-anti-gun-protest-advocates-cocks-not-glocks-t17067.htmlcocks, not glocks campaign.

University of Texas grad Jessica Jin has started a campaign called Cocks Not Glocks, asking students to protest the introduction of legal guns on campus by open-carrying giant fake dicks on campus—the logic being that sex toys, although they are not deadly in most circumstances, are still banned while firearms are permitted.

As Jin puts it, a dildo is “just about as effective at protecting us from sociopathic shooters, but much safer for recreational play.”

From here — and yep, I can see how this would baffle anyone not exposed to how our colleges work.

You see, I have no idea what Ms. Jin majored in, but I can sort of follow the tracks of her thought.  Logically, carrying sex toys to campus to protest guns makes absolutely NO sense.  I could see carrying signs, or … I don’t know, police whistles, if you’re convinced you’re completely safe if you can just call the police.  I can even see, in a more sane way, wearing a protective vest and claiming this is better than guns for defense.  I mean, at least they are in the same general kind of thing and sort of kind of address the problem in different ways.

BUT no.  Because this is not reasoning.  This is magical thinking.  WORSE.  This is magical thinking based on a world that doesn’t exist, a world that was sold to Ms. Jin (literally.  College is expensive) by academics so divorced from reality that they can’t find it with two hands, a cane and a seeing eye dog.

In this world, you see, conservatives love guns and hate sex.  This is all “explained” with pseudo Freudian patter about how guns are a substitute for the penis. This is total nonsense and old nonsense at that, stuff we LAUGHED at for being pseudo profound way back in the seventies.

But they absolutely believe that we defend the second amendment not because we want to be responsible for our own self-defense, not because we believe power derives from the individual and that therefore an individual must be capable of reining in the government when it gets out of control.  No.  They think we want guns because that’s the way we express our sexual repression. (Actually now I think about it, my gun obsessed friends are also the most sex-positive, so their idea not only is wrong, it’s bizarrely wrong.)

Since Ms. Jin has never considered that these stories she was sold are in fact stories with no relation to reality, her reasoning went something like “They’re carrying guns and that upsets me.  I must carry something that upsets them.  Ahah! Dildos.”

In an even mildly sane world, the press would have made her a laughing stock, because that reasoning makes no sense whatsoever.

But the press buys into the same imaginary world in which somehow the belief in guns for defense is a Freudian thing and so the “gun” value can be countered with the “dildo” value.

This is not grown up thinking.  It’s magical thinking, in which complex issues get reduced to amulets and symbols, countered by other amulets and symbols.

Again, this is sort of the human default.  And believing absurd things about those you believe to be the enemy is also completely normal.  The left calls it “othering” and is completely oblivious to the fact that they do it.  A lot.

But it’s still human-normal.

What is not normal, civilization speaking, is for a culture that reaps the benefits of science and rationality to devote a lot of its resources, its money, its personnel to TRAINING people into thinking this way and into treating complex concepts as magical symbols to be countered by other magical symbols.

More importantly I don’t know how we break through the indoctrination that these people so dearly paid for to convince them to think and discuss things in logical terms.

Before we all pay for it.

Make the Pink Mean Something – by Nicki Kenyon

It’s that time of year again. Secret messages permeate Facebook as women mysteriously make their male friends guess the color of their underwear. The endless sea of pink… pink ribbons, pink towels to wipe the sweat from football players’ faces, pink sneakers, limited edition pink mugs, “Save the Ta-Tas,” go bra-less… it just goes on and on.

At the same time, a slew of enraged cancer survivors will use blogs, articles in women’s magazines, and social media to angrily call on women to stop their lurid worship of the pink and do something truly worthy to help combat breast cancer!

I admit I was one of those angry women a couple of years ago. (http://thelibertyzone.com/2013/10/27/breast-cancer-awareness/) I impugned women for falling for the garish, pink gimmicks. I scolded them for reducing women to nothing but a pair of “ta-tas” instead of focusing on all forms of cancer and doing something substantive to eradicate this plague from existence.

When my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer 10 years ago, I was terrified. I did not know how to deal with the news. I always thought of cancer as a death sentence. I never thought this could happen to me and my family. I refused to acknowledge the illness, because cancer was something that happened to other people – to other people’s parents – not to my 60-year-old mom.

I refused to believe it even when I held her hand as she was being wheeled into surgery.

I refused to believe it even when I watched her sleep, all bandaged up after the doctors took her breast and her lymph nodes.

I even refused to believe it even when she underwent chemo and lost all her hair.

I couldn’t look at her like that – all frail, small, pale, and nauseous. I was scared to be in the same room with her. For the longest time, I refused to visit my parents at their home, because I could not look at her.

And so when I saw the tacky games, the bright pink accents at football games, and the merchandise, I was angry, because I thought they lacked the gravitas that beating cancer required. I didn’t think they understood the tragedy, the importance, the horror of cancer. They, with their stupid, perky breasts – breasts that were carved out of my mother – prancing around as if there was no suffering human being behind those “ta-tas,” and making a mockery out of what is so tragic for so many!

And I hated them.

There’s a part of me that still resents them, but now – two years later – I am trying to understand them a little more.

It’s got to be tough to watch friends, loved ones, and complete strangers get carved up like Thanksgiving turkeys, leaving both physical and emotional scars. It’s got to be agonizing to look at oneself in the mirror and see a whole, healthy body, while your mom/sister/aunt/best friend struggles to hold down food, hides under a wig, and isolates herself in her house in fear of contracting an infection.

So you wear pink, and you run around without a bra, and you buy the special edition merchandise, hoping that despite the fact that only a tiny percentage of that special edition pink junk will actually go toward research to fight cancer, maybe that one penny from their one pink mug will be the one that will make the difference in finding a cure.

I do understand the desire to do something. Anytime tragedy strikes, decent human beings give in to the urge to do something – anything. I suppose it’s selfish in a way – because it’s really about making ourselves feel better, about assuaging our own feelings of guilt for being healthy, while our loved ones suffer. But it’s in our nature to want to fix, to help, and to care.

And sometimes, we forget those for whom we do it.

And sometimes we neglect to acknowledge that other forms of cancer kill as well. Yes, it’s Breast Cancer Awareness Month, but there’s also prostate cancer, pancreatic and lung cancers, leukemia, malignant brain tumors, adrenal, esophageal… so much evil! So much to fight!

So go ahead and wear that pink, but don’t let that be the only thing you do.

Get vaccinated. There are vaccines out there that are very effective in preventing infections with HPV types 16 and 18, two high-risk HPVs that cause about 70 percent of cervical and anal cancers. Don’t listen to the conspiritards who squeal that it’s a Big Pharma plot to make money off you. Protect yourselves. Protect your kids.

Get tested to be a bone marrow donor. When I was in college, I volunteered to be tested, because a young man needed a donor, and a likely match would be an Eastern European Jew. I did not turn out to be a match, but I still did it. It would have made a huge difference in his life had I been a match for him!

Volunteer at a hospital. Play with the little kids, who have spent their young lives fighting this horror. Bring some joy into their lives. Sing to them. Read to them. Or visit with an older cancer patient. Make them feel wanted, human, loved, and appreciated. Show them their lives do matter, and motivate them to fight like hell against this malevolence.

Make that pink mean something more than just a cheap trinket, and I will try not to get angry when I see silly underwear games on Facebook.

*Two blasts from the past posts in a week?  Well, yes, I have guest posts, but as you know I hate posting those late, and yesterday was a day of getting nibbled to death by ducks.  Tons of little things, none of them important, all of them eating my time.  And this morning I woke up late, partly because allergies have my nose completely stopped. So forgive me.  About the post below, now more than 4 years old, let me assure you that ALL IS PROCEEDING AS I’D FORESEEN.*

Set My Bytes Free – A blast from the past post of August 2011

A realistic guide to new publishing economics for the Idealistic, the Angry and the Fearful.

In one of my articles on another site, in response to comments about teens not reading (which made any teen reading it justifiably indignant) a – from spelling and word markings – very young woman yelled back that they read all the time, they just do not buy the books. They get them from torrents and friends because “information wants to be free.” She also informed us, in no uncertain – if clearly thumb typed – terms that this was the way of the future, and if we don’t like it, deal with it.

This of course, feeds directly into the fears of the majority of my friends and contemporaries, roughly described as between thirty and sixty.

And both the innocent young lady and my contemporaries are wrong.

Let’s start from the top – this is not a post seeking to prove the concept that information or data “wants” to be free. (Though the animist, not so say personifying statement makes me cringe a little.)

I believe any raw data, and to an extent data collected with governmental money and support, (with caveats on that*), should be “free” to access. This is not out of any deep redistributionist impulse but as a qualification of informed citizenry. For instance, if you hear that during superbowl most assaults by men on women occur, you should be able to trace that factoid and prove it or disprove it. (You’ll disprove it. Or at least you’ll prove it can’t be proven. Try it if you don’t believe me. Yes, tons of people say it, but the statistics don’t back it up. At any rate, it’s flawed psychology. If you believe that, you also believe every teen playing first person shooter games is a murderer waiting to happen. That is something like 90% of teens. [rolls eyes.])

However most books aren’t raw data. And I’m not setting out to prove it wouldn’t be “fair” to not pay for them because “blah blah blah.” Neither the idealistic young, nor the scared old pay the least bit of attention to those bromides, nor should they. “Fair” is a beautiful word and works great in kindergarten where the teacher can enforce the distribution of crackers. And appealing to people’s morality is always risky. Most of them might not have any. And some of it might be different from yours.

Instead, what I’m setting out to do is explain both to the idealistic and the fearful why this model cannot and will not apply to either fiction or researched-non-fiction books. Or if it does apply, it will be for a vanishingly brief time and then collapse under its own weight, and something else will succeed it. Because what this “system” is happens to be economic Marxism by another name. And Marxism, whether called that or “happiness” or “social justice” has never worked as an economic system anywhere, since the dawn of time to now.

I know, I know. Look, I was young once, too. Yes, I know it’s hard to believe, but I’ve got the pictures to prove it. And though I was always reflexively, knee-jerkingly anti-communist, I grew up in a society even more steeped in Marxist principles than ours, from the elementary school room on. And I thought that “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” was a lovely principle. And then I stumbled across the essential question “Who shaves the barber?” and was floored. Because the question that principle begs is “who decides?” Back then I was a teen, and I ran my nearest and dearest, the people who purported to know me best, through my mind. Who would I trust to decide what I could “give” and what I should “take” – my mom, the woman with whom I had knock down, drag out fights on the subject of what shoes I should buy? And how much housecleaning I could do while attending school? My brother, the sixties idealist who thought I could write great literature by the time I was sixteen? And who thought everyone should subsist on love and a crust of bread? My dad, the poet, who had the vague idea I should write whether anyone bought it or not and perhaps live in a garret and talk to the sparrows or something? (Eating them would be out of the question. Dad likes sparrows. And not on his plate.)

The absurdity of trusting even these people, more likely to have my best interests at heart than any bureaucrat could, to decide for me what I wanted and could do made the entire thing a ridiculous notion. I decided it would be a great system if we could get angels who could see into every heart to come and administer it for us. Until then we had to make do with what each individual knew he wanted, and what he knew he could give. And it was all arranged through this wonderful means of exchange – money – which seems to appear in every society large and complex enough to require it. With money as a reward of effort (not of want, because as the wise man said “you can’t always get what you want) and ability, the person being rewarded (or in the case of midlisters trust me, children, punished) with it can then provide for his or her own wants and needs. It’s not a perfect system – see the part where we’re not angels – but it is the best we can get. And now that I’m older and wiser, if an angel descended from heaven, who could look into every heart, determine everyone’s wants and needs, and undertake to govern us, the shield for minds and hearts and the assassination plot couldn’t come fast enough for my taste.

Now, after this digression to explain what’s wrong with the system, lets look at the whole information versus novels or investigative journalism bit, shall we?

I realize that what we’ll call for lack of a better term creative writing, like raw data, is composed of words, and that it can even convey factual information, as well as emotions, feelings and point of view. This doesn’t make it raw information.

I can give you most of the raw information about the novel currently holding me prisoner in one paragraph. “Man who has been confined for fifteen years to one of the most high tech and unbreakable dungeons humanity has created, escapes. He finds he’s the heir to one of the highest-power positions in his world. He also becomes convinced that the system under which his world is governed is both unfair, unjust and ultimately counterproductive at providing for most people’s needs, let alone wants. Spurred on by the fact a lot of his co-rulers want him dead, he finds himself getting involved in the coils of a revolution to overturn the system.” There. Now you don’t need to read the book, right? Oh, wait, silly me. I forgot a little bit. “There is also a love interest.” So, now you don’t need to read the book, right?

Oh, you do? But why? You already have the information.

The answer to that, of course, is that creative writing is not information. While it uses words as its raw material, its objective is not to convey “what happens” but to make you experience it, feel it. Well done novels (and some creative non-fiction) are the only way you can experience being someone else for a while. It is in fact an “entertainment experience.” The difference between te raw data that goes into the novel and what the author does with it, is the equivalent of reading the lyrics of a song, or hearing it performed by a talented singer.

“But, Oh Sarah,” say the most classically minded of my frightened colleagues, “what you define writing as doesn’t matter. These children think they can get it for free. They’ll steal it. They’ll break our DRM. They’ll read our books without permission and we’ll starve in the gutter and dogs will eat us.”

To which I say, take deep breaths, reconsider DRM and think the situation over.

DRM is at best an irritating barrier, and at worst an annoying one. No DRM will keep your books safe. So, ignore DRM. I don’t believe in it, and it’s never applied to anything of mine by my request. Some of my publishers insist on it, and I let them because there isn’t enough time in the world to talk everyone out of it.

It is not DRM that will keep your livelihood safe. It’s your talent and – yes – your craft. Why? Because no one has ever worked for free, while starving to death, with no expectation of ever being paid and created good crafts or art. Even those romantic artists of my dad’s imagination, starving their garrets for the love of creation, weren’t doing it without the expectation of ever being paid.

We do have examples of artists who were paid what their betters thought they should be (usually not much, unless you kissed the right #sses) and trust me, children, it is painful to see.

As part of one of my native country’s forays into socialist correctness, our TV played eastern European movies. A lot. Let’s say the only time they worked as entertainment was when my brother and I sat together and made a running commentary about the movie, ascribing the characters and events the most outrageous motivations.

And mind you, these artists were being sort of paid – with greater access to the stores, or with villas in the country, or… But the thing is they weren’t being paid to produce entertainment. They were paid to produce “messages” and it didn’t matter how painfully bad those were as entertainment. They got “paid” per message.

How does that correlate with working for free? And – say my colleagues, pulling their hair – how can you say that when you work for free? Like, all your Austen fanfic?

To which I say stop pulling your hair. Half of you are already bald anyway. Also, yeah, I do Austen fanfic for free. I also embroider for free. And I make stuffed animals for free and, occasionally – I don’t have as much time as I’d like to, these days – I draw or paint for free. However, the Austen fanfic, when done for free, is done at the same level as drawing or painting. It’s done as an amusement. Before Naked Reader Press published A Touch of Night, which was the most professional of my fanfics, they had to do extensive editing and chapters and clarifications had to be added.

Let’s just say I enjoy the heck out of writing fanfic because it is NOT my best work, it comes without the pressures of oh… self editing; fact checking; making sense… etc. It’s also highly targeted and I cater irrepressibly to the people who read that site. I use fanfic, in fact, to try out techniques and because of the ready comments, to see how they play to “normal” people defined as “people who don’t write for a living.”

It is no more serious than a professional seamstress doing cross stitch in her spare time. And the work is not the same as that of a professional embroiderer. It’s relaxing because it’s not being done for a living. And I can do it because I make a living elsewhere.

And here comes the rub. The idealists believe it is possible to have a “right” to other people’s labor because they’re by and large not supporting themselves. Their livelihood comes from elsewhere, in large measure parents or other arrangements. So it’s perfectly plausible to them to imagine a world in which “people just work if they want to.”

Of course, when you’re a college student you do a lot of that on the side, because you want to. But let me tell you, as someone who has had to work for a living (besides writing) that while many of my friends manage it they do it for extra money on the side and in the hope of one day quitting and writing full time. There is no one who writes forever, on the side, with no expectation of reward. EVER. And no status is not enough, not when you grow up and have kids and start thinking that this time could be better employed, perhaps, doing something you could sell.

Yes, I’ve heard the utopian nonsense about a society that provides the basics for everyone and where people can work or not. Even if it were possible – it’s not. These are dreams of academics and white collar workers who’ve never been near enough to a farm to get cow muck on their toes. Yes, I can explain it one of these days, but not now – this society would last maybe a generation. We are not angels. We’re creatures designed by evolution. To a vast – and possibly sanest – majority of us “basic needs provided for” translates to “do nothing, wallow in your own favorite vices, get bored as heck, get suicidal.” At the very least it translates to no reproduction. Those people that survive will not be the contented aesthetes people who write about this tend to imagine, but nasty, brutish and short lived. And barbarism will come shortly after.

Yes, I’ve also heard “So writers stop writing. Big deal. We still have nineteen centuries of literature.” Right…. Look, chilluns, if you think you can pleasurably read anything pre-Shakespeare, power to you. I can, but I was trained. (Not for free.) And even I don’t do it for a lark.

If you think you can read nineteenth century fiction for fun the same way you read the latest Urban Fantasy, you’re either highly unusual or you haven’t read much of that.

Science fiction ages, of course. Quickly and badly. Heinlein is now alternate history (and others, more recent, are worse.) But – you might not realize this – fantasy ages just as badly. No, seriously. A lot of it (granted not all) is near unreadable now, because the language feels “stilted” and this is less than 30 years old. Mystery? Well… A lot of it has also aged badly. I know, I know, but mystery when contemporary is steeped in the moment. Even to me references to phone booths, let alone phone books, and encyclopedias, feel odd and stilted, and I have to put myself in an “historical” frame of mind to read that. Only it’s not written as historical, with support and cluing of the anachronisms, so it’s harder work. Romance? Well… Let’s put it this way: I love Heyer. Do I love other romance writers from her day? Children, I can’t even read romance writers from the sixties, for the greatest part. The way people interacted in the sixties taints even the historical stuff. And since I spent the sixties learning to walk and getting potty trained and, at the very end of it, learning to read and write, it also feels stilted and weird to me. And much as I love Austen, I can’t stand the Brontes, let alone any of their lesser contemporaries. I’m not alone in this. If I were, Gutenberg would be a SERIOUS challenge to Amazon. Particularly in these days of tight funds. (And heck, I’ve been known to buy books on Amazon that I KNOW are on Gutenberg, because they’re better formatted or have an active index on Amazon.)

So, let’s suppose the idealists managed to make all “data” to include artistic performances, such as novels, “free” – what then? Well, I predict within a very short time – probably within a year – some writer a lot of people want to read and who has stopped writing to work as a cashier in the local store, will be accosted and offered money to finish the next book in a well loved series. And then the old system will be back.

So, to the frightened I say, Stop pulling your hair! Wipe your nose! Wash your hands before you touch that keyboard. And don’t be afraid. Economics is a natural system (natural to humans, at least) and can’t be abolished by fiat. If you have something worth the selling, people will pay your for it. There might be some lean months or years, but eventually you’ll get paid. Will the pay be commensurate with your effort, craftsmanship and talent? Who knows? There’s a factor of luck in all this. But at least you can try and don’t have some know-it-all angel (or – shudder – bureaucrat) dictating what you can do, and how much you can get.

To the idealist I say, go ahead. Pirate that book. Steal that entertainment. You’re young. We were all young once. (Except my older son, who was born at the age of fifty three.) And you’re broke. We were all broke once. (Some of us have been broke for years. We’re EXPERTS.) And you really don’t have a clue what it’s like to be responsible for your own survival, your own comfort. Worse, you don’t have a clue what it’s like to be responsible for the survival and comfort of creatures – cats, kids, dogs, etc – wholly dependent on you.

So steal those books. Get hooked on them, now when you have tons of time to read. Please do. Because in five or six years, you’re going to want more. And then you’re going to realize you’re not entitled to having someone work for you for free. That’s called slavery and it’s illegal. And you’re going to realize that no one does their best work for promises and prestige.

And then you’ll buy the books.

* Note – The caveat on any data gathered by government programs being free is that some of that data can endanger innocent lives and also that (for continuing research) other data can rob the people who gathered it of their reward. Suppose scientists have been working for years, tracking a gene that allows humans to be far smarter. If all data is published as collected, then someone else can come in at the last minute and scoop them, rendering all their work useless. Why would anyone – government or not – pay for research only to be “scooped” at the last minute. The same caveat applies to proprietary systems and discoveries. If people won’t be rewarded for them, everyone will lose because this type of research just won’t happen. Sorry. “All data should be free” is a fantasy. A pernicious one that – in the end – means “wha, wha wha, why can’t I have a right to other people’s work?”

Many years ago, in a library sale, I came across a booklet of … well, science fiction scenarios.  From the context — not being absolutely stupid — I could get that it had been commissioned before the election in 80, and had probably been distributed for free by the Democratic party.  I am afraid to look it up, first because it’s the sort of quest that could take me something like three years (and be lots of fun, but no work would happen) and second because I’d hate to see which ones of my colleagues lent themselves to that rather preposterous effort.  Fortunately I lost the book in one of our many, many moves since then, so I don’t have to know.

Now, when I bought it, I was thirty, just about, but younger than that in craft, as I hadn’t started seriously thinking about world building and scenarios of world building till 22 or so, and I wasn’t yet… fully immersed in American culture.  For instance, how preposterous the scenarios were didn’t hit me at all.  (Yes, I used to be an innocent.  I actually thought anthologies about the coming Ice Age or about how we needed to disarm had no ulterior motives.  Probably self defense.  It allowed me to enjoy some art and literature, while, if I’d been fully conscious of its intent, I’d have thrown it across the room.  More on that later.)

So I read it and re-read it, admiring the extrapolation and trying to figure out how to do this in my own writing.  (Rest easy, I know better now.)

They really were preposterous scenarios. For instance the one where Reagan had gone elected went (Natch) into this scenario of endless war and of American soldiers sent home in sealed caskets which, if the grieving mothers dared open them showed corpses killed by a weapon beyond our comprehension.  (Which makes perfect sense, because you know, the USSR was so much more advan– Oh, wait, no, it was complete and unadulterated BS.)

Some of the scenarios I liked.  At this time I had virtually no political sophistication, and though I’d started reading Reason had no clue what “libertarianism” was.  And yet, instinctively I liked the scenario that I THINK was called “The center cannot hold.”

I think, so help me Bog, I was supposed to recoil from it.  Partly because it also started with Reagan’ s election.  But then DC and all the great cities get nuked, and the US devolves to a regional-centered organization.  First, this scenario was about as likely as feathers on a horse — because there was no invasion from outside following on the destruction of our centers of political organization — and second I think the picture the author was striving for was something out of mad max, or something.  Instead, what I saw was small, decentralized, and less regulation.  I saw thriving small centers of civilization.  I saw more individual freedom.  I ignored the rest.

Again, this scenario (All of them, really) was completely impractical, not to say impossible.  There is no way — no way at all — that kind of destruction would have led to regionally centered anything.  Yeah, I know a lot of dreams on the right and left start that way, but right now, the way we are, it’s more likely that widespread famine and invasion, and the other horsemen of the apocalypse would follow.

So it is funny that these days, looking at this great fractured polity of ours I keep thinking “The Center Cannot Hold” and it evokes both Yeats great mythical poem, and the scenario above, which means I end up dissolving in giggle fits at the unlikelihood of the scenario and missing the … ominous thoughts that the line should provoke.

And there are omens enough in the line.  And for a long time, I’ve been listening to that poem at the back of my mind as I read the news or think over some recent event.

Because if there is something that describes our current days it is exactly “The center cannot hold.”  And yea, anyone who trolls twitter can agree that

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity

And yet, just like the future scenario that was supposed to scare me spitless and make me not vote for Reagan (I didn’t, of course.  I was only an exchange student.  I did, however, work for his campaign) I look at this shattering and I listen to the ominous lines rolling in the back of my mind, and then I start grinning.

I’m not a nihilist.  I don’t smile at the end of the world.

But what is very important to remember is that his is not the end of the world.  It’s the end of a world.  (And if any of you ever read Ray Bradbury’s Almost The End of the World, that was closer to what is happening  in terms of major movements, than any apocalyptic scenarios.  Oh, not in WHAT happened, but in the metaphor of it.) However, behind that dying world, around it, beneath it, over it, unsuspected, unseen by the glitterati and the gatekeepers, another world is being born.

Okay, so our major cities didn’t get hit, thanks be to all divinities, since I think the result would be chaos and destruction.   Also, because I have friends in almost every large US city.

But the center is losing its grip anyway.  Mostly in culture.  But that culture is starting to influence politics, which is why there is this appearance of total chaos and the establishment (both sides) aren’t having it all their own ways.  Granted, the left still gets more compliance than the right.  It’s the nature of the beast and also part of how the culture fractured.

Which bring us to why we do have this impression everything is fracturing, and the “center cannot hold.”

This is a scenario not one of those big brains came up with.  Not a big stain on them, mind, since even after the computer revolution was well under way, even as Amazon was starting to take the pillars out from under the pillars of the publishing push model (the model according to which you could only find in the bookstore shelves, not what you might want to read but the books that the publishers had thought worth it to “push” onto the distributors.), most of the people whose job it was to foretell the future were saying that Amazon was maybe like one large brick and mortar shop, and it would make no difference.

As for ebooks, we got the whole thing about how books are a tactile and scent experience.  (Yes, I know some of you agree, but for the love of teardrops, I can’t see it.) And how ebooks would never displace “Real books” (listen, sonny, the scroll is here to stay and the printing press is a fad.  Shut up and copy.)

Blogs?  Some unwashed people in their pajamas. Not like those newspapers with layers and layers of fact checkers.  You know, the newspapers who were wrong so many times they’re bleeding money faster than they can plug it.  The newspapers no one under fifty really subscribes to anymore.  THOSE newspapers.

And the TV stations… Yes, yes, Dan Rather.  Fake but accurate.  Or something.

And then there’s the universities.  Oh, they’re holding on.  But the competition is coming up fast.  And I think they’re the next industry to truly get overwhelmed by catastrophic change.

Now, before we start dancing around the witch with the farmhouse planted on her snout, let’s be clear: none of these systems are dead yet.  It is a mistake to underestimate the enemy, particularly the wounded enemy.

There are still people — I know some of them — for whom the mainstream media is still the main means of information.  These are smart, thoughtful people, but they believe the weirdest things.  And that same media can do as much damage by ignoring stories as by beating the drum wrongly.  Benghazi, for instance.  It should be a shock and a horror, particularly the way that government officials lied to us and said it was all about a video.  But the media has refused to report on it.

And if you’re looking at that stuff, at the power still left in the mainstream institutions, you might get desperate.  You might think it’s all lost.

Except that the reason you feel that way is… that things are getting better.

Yes, I know that’s paradoxical.  But here’s the thing — cast your mind back to the time before we had internet — there were rumbles that, say, during Clinton’s time, the militias weren’t the big bad problem he painted it as, and there are more holes in the stories of incidents during that administration than there are — to paraphrase Heinlein — bastards in an European royal line.

BUT the point is you couldn’t know.  There wasn’t a web.  There wasn’t reporting first person what was happening.

In those days, the barrage would have held and we STILL WOULD THINK that Benghazi was the result of a bad video on youtube (only there wouldn’t be youtube.)  We would have no idea — as weird as this is — that there was anything wrong with Fast and Furious.  We’d just think that guns were being sold from the US down there.

In fact, you could say the reason their cunning plans keep misfiring is that they still control the media and therefore think they control everything.

Like publishers with the “paper books are coming back” fetish, most of the rest of the gatekeepers everywhere from publishing, to education, to politics are stuck in that place where they control all the means of communication, all the media, all the education and of course all government.  Because politics comes from culture.

They are so focused on the traditional way they don’t see that things have changed.

And so they miss one important thing.  We no longer feel alone.  We’re as disorganized as cats.  We’re as fractured as shattered glass, but we know we’re not alone.  And we know that the facade they have built — probably not as a big conspiracy; probably just because they all want to advance the “progressive” future-that’s-supposed-to-be so badly — is broken.

And that’s enough.  It’s enough for us to start talking about alternate solutions, to start building alternate structures, to network, to create, to keep our jobs even when we speak out.

Look, it only looks like everything is falling apart because the false consensus has been broken.  But at the same time that break is what allows us to build under, to build around, to build over.

One thing we know is that the structures they’ve taken over are no longer in contact with reality at any level.  Yeah, things look scary out there, and I’m not going to lie to you, they are scary, particularly on the international level.

Because the so called consensus was unchecked by dissenting voices, it has spun well away from reality.

But the new tech has given us a means of correcting that.  It might be almost too late.  And unless we have a miracle, there’s going to be the devil to pay for this.

Still, the correction is already in progress.  Their way is passing.  Our way is just starting out.

Funny how believers in dialectical systems didn’t see that coming.

Work.  Create.  Build under, build around, build over.  It’s all going to come apart more before some sort of sense can be made of this mess.  But the sense that’s coming, the ah spirit of the age embodied in its technology is moving away from big organizations and towards the individual.

And the individual?  That we’re fine with.

In the end we win, they lose.

Be not afraid.

I’m Not Crazy, I’m Just A Little Unwell – A blast from the past post 10/12

So, are writers mentally ill?

By whose definition?

Look, part of the whole problem with the deinstitutionalisation of the mentally ill, which goes all the way back to the early seventies at least, and as far as theory is concerned probably a lot further, is that health professionals started, DELIBERATELY blurring the lines between mental illness and mental health.

Part of this was – I think – a genuine effort to make it possible for some people classified as “mentally ill” to be able to make a go of it in the community.  A lot of new psychiatric drugs had been discovered which, while they didn’t heal, masked the symptoms of mental illness and therefore made it possible for these people to integrate in normal society – provided they would take their meds (more on that later.)

The other part – I know, my SIL took the mental-health portion of her MD in the late seventies – was the insane “equivalence brigade” which tried very hard to convince themselves that the US too did EXACTLY the same things the USSR did.  Since the USSR put political dissenters in mental hospitals, then the people in US hospitals MUST be also political dissenters.  This was hard to prove, since the Soviet system provided ideological support for mental treatment of dissenters: i.e. the Marxist system was perfect, so anyone disagreeing must be mad, while the American system mostly tried to get people off the streets who would do harm to themselves and/or others.  However the medical profession found their justification in an upside-down of the Marxist system.  Since Capitalism was bad for humans and other living things, then everyone who went mad under capitalism were, ipso facto, political dissenters.  So, if you happened to be a woman who liked to throw rocks at strangers and go into bizarre monologues on the subject of cabbage, you weren’t mad, you were a feminist protesting male aggression.

Now I have no proof this was intentional or a coordinated AGITPROP operation.  It’s entirely possible it was (merely) the predictable mix of ill-intentioned agents and well-intentioned idiot fellow travelers.

However the end result was making people too crazy to live alone into political victims and incidentally to give the USSR room to claim the capitalist system created homelessness.

Fortunately or not, the intervening decades have brought more and more evidence that a lot of mental illnesses have a physical basis.

Also, curiously, just like the “freeing” of women has resulted in a lot of them behaving like Victorian maidens who demand special protection from those all-masterful men, the blurring of boundaries has worked in the other direction too.

I’ve mentioned here before that … must be… 14?  13? Years ago, I had a UTI that didn’t let me sleep for a week, and then on my birthday, all the sixty stories or so that I had out came back rejected.  And I had a cold. Also, Dan was in the middle of one of those projects that caused him to work eighteen hour days.  He got out because it was my birthday, in time to take me to dinner.  We had a babysitter.  As I got in the car, Dan looked at me and said “You look dead.  What’s wrong?”  When I told him, he said, “We’re going to emergency.”

So, there I am on my birthday, getting prescriptions for various ailments and knowing when we got out it would be too late to go to dinner (which I’d been looking forward to for weeks) and the doctor tells me “You look depressed.”  I said “I am a bit” and explained why.  And he told me “No, no,  You misunderstand the process.  Depression is caused by an imbalance in your brain.  If I give you Prozac you’ll feel better and that proves it’s chemical.”

My answer was unprintable, and I think I called him a witch doctor.  BUT he was absolutely convinced of what he was saying.

Since then, older boy has taken psychology.  I read his textbook (you can’t trust these critters.)  And guess what?  ANY fluctuation of mood is now described as bipolar.  Apparently we’re supposed to be on an exact even keel all the time, like robots.  External factors are discounted and it’s all “brain chemicals.”

I think witchdoctoring is light.

But what this means is that more and more, I keep finding the “clinicalization” of perfectly normal conditions.

I mean, I knew growing up that dad was of what we could describe as a “depressive habit.”  Not that he moped, but he read a lot of history and he had this tendency to think our most principled days were behind us.  I also knew mom was bipolar and SHOULD have been on meds, because she could get outright scary.  One of these things is not like the other.  Dad was inclined to be saddish and think the world a sad place, but he never talked about killing himself.  To be honest neither did mom, whose stronger cycles are maniacal and involve things like painting half a house overnight.  BUT to the untrained eye it was very clear who could do harm to him/herself and others, and who wouldn’t.

Even for someone of a depressive habit who might have suicidal thoughts, if never acted upon, it’s probably not a concern (at least if they’re over thirty and aren’t doing anything else related to depression.)  But go to any doctor and admit you’ve thought of opening your wrists in a warm bath, no matter what the provocation, you go on the happy drugs.  EVEN if they had to prod and poke and ask if you ever had the slightest suicidal thoughts, and even if the thought was twenty years ago.

And my kid once quoted Ray Bradbury in a school essay to the extent that “I’m seventeen and I’m crazy.  My uncle says both happen together.”  Mind you, he went on to explain he was only fourteen, but he felt that adolescence was a difficult time period.  You guessed it.  They sent him to a psychiatrist without telling us.  Fortunately the younger kid is sane as a rock (literally.  He’s so stubborn and so sure of who he is at his core that he’s like solid rock) so the psychiatrist told the counselor she was making a storm in a teacup.

I would suggest (because I can, because this is my blog, d*mn it) the old definition of mental illness from the village – you might have all sorts of crazy beliefs in your own home, on your own time; you might believe that there is a miraculous shrine of the Virgin formed by mold on your wall, and you might pray to it everyday; you might think your dog is your kid’s reincarnation; you might think you have to wear purple or the demons get you; you might still be mourning your husband who died forty years ago.  No one cares about any of this, and people will laugh a little behind your back (sometimes.  Unless they’re crazier) but you’re still a functioning member of the community.  HOWEVER if you believe you see the devil in your kid’s (or dog’s) eyes and go after the creature with a knife; if you decide you can no longer wear clothes and start wandering the streets stark naked screaming judgment is coming; if you think you’re an onion and start taking slices off yourself, the village elders (after being prodded by their wives) are going to put you in a car and take you to the asylum, because you can’t function as a member of the community.  (Turned out the gentleman who was going around naked did so because he was convinced from the neck down his body wasn’t his, and that someone had replaced it in the night.  Turns out that this isn’t mental illness, but the result of a stroke.  We didn’t know that, and yes, mistakes will happen.  But mistakes will happen either way because we’re human.  He actually went around screaming “This isn’t mine.”  And yes, he died in the asylum, something that upsets my older son very much.)

So, are writers crazy?  Let me say right up front that even if you go by historical standards, no creative person seems to have his/her head on quite the right way.  I mean Da Vinci?  Van Gogh?  In the composers, it’s entirely possible Liszt was sane, but I’d like proof of that.  Among artists, writers are almost sane.  Or at least we can pass.  I mean, I could make guesses about Jane Austen, but no one around her seemed to think she was nuts.

Is this because we’re sane?  Look guys, leveling with you: I’ve had characters appear fully formed in my head and speak in such a compelling voice I had to write it (Lucius Dante Maximillian Keeva of A Few Good Men was one of those.  So was the Athos of the vampire musketeers.)  This can’t be normal.  I’ve had books come to a grinding halt, because I wasn’t getting the dictation right.  This can’t be normal.  I’ve had stories haunt me and hunt me down for years till I write them.  I write 4+ books a year.  THIS CAN’T BE NORMAL.

And yet, I raised my kids no worse than anyone else.  I keep the house clean(ish).  I have been known to curse/throw things at the TV, but only during political campaigns, and who hasn’t?

Am I crazy?  Probably.  Certainly I’m very different from the norm.  However, I can function as a member of the community.

And I’m not going to say that without MY peculiarities society would lose a great deal.  I’m just going to say that without the peculiarities of most artists – if those were cured or masked instead of tolerated, society WOULD have lost a great deal.

So, there is a method to madness, or at least a use.  And if it doesn’t impair your other functions, only a madman would try to “fix” it.