Author: Sarah A. Hoyt

Mercy Mild? -CACS

This all is in reaction to our esteemed hostess, who made the following two comments in a post titled Sheep Who Think They’re Wolves:

Unfortunately over the years this has morphed into the more sinned against than sinning villain, into the repressed/tortured villain. Into the person who lashes out because, like a tortured dog, they can’t help it.

and

The problem with this is that all of us, every one here, I’d bet, knows someone who had a horrible childhood, was beaten, was kept in the cold and rain, or whatever, and has never committed a single crime.

I grew up on older books and movies. They might give you reason for a person resorting to a life of crime, but the mothers would still weep for their children when they made a bad situation worse by that choice. When given an understanding of why the bad choice was made everyone was clear on one thing: You shouldn’t a ought a done it.

Anyway, for some reason, this started a flood of movie images to come to mind.

One of the standing themes in the Warner Brother’s 1930 Hollywood crime dramas was dividing choices. They didn’t excuse the criminal behavior, but sometimes they did suggest that even the bad boy or man was capable of redemption.
Trailer for Angels With Dirty Faces

Post war realism had the socio and psychopaths who were the scum of human existence — gleefully pushing mothers in wheel chairs down stairs.
Richard Widmark as Tommy Udo in Kiss of Death>

Their fellow crooks knew they were something particularly loathsome. We didn’t like them and we weren’t supposed to.

When you were given ample reasons for someone’s brokenness most of us understood they were the rabid animals of the human race in need of removal.
Jimmy Cagney as Cody Jarrett in White Heat — ‘Made it ma! Top of the world!’

No one in the audience doubted that it was a good thing for everyone when Liberty Valence was shot.

Although we were made aware that Bill Sikes had once been a child of the streets, because of what he had become, an entirely selfish person who took joy in being a perverter of the innocent, we were relieved when he inadvertently hung himself while in murderous pursuit of Oliver Twist.

The turn may have started with one of the first Hollywood films to be made in the style of the French New Wave directors. There was a certain romanticism in spite of the violence to Bonnie and Clyde. Still, it is clear they were crooks — as in bent, not right.

The Godfather portrayed the beginning of the mob as the transfer of a form of shadow government into an area where the local government did not take care of the people. By the end it was clear they were victimizing people which was not to be considered a good thing, even within the family. Why else would the goal be to get Michael out of the family business?

Yes, the Motion Picture Code, originally instituted in 1930, had a lot to do with films consistently portraying clear images of criminal activities being unacceptable and the consequences of living a life of crime shown as unpleasant. Post WWII the code’s hold on films began to break down. People still preferred to see films where there was an underlying morality. There was still the understanding that crime was wrong, harmful not just to the immediate victims, but also to those living in places with high crime rates. Films that, even if they portrayed criminals as charming, did so with care.

Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid left me conflicted, they are charming, but in the end they remain murderous robbers and they are ultimately hunted down for it. In 1973’s repairing of Newman and Redford The Sting, the (anti) heros of this film are charming con men. It largely worked because it was clear that the target was a thoroughly unpleasant Chicago bookie that the equally corrupt law enforcement would not touch. It did not dwell on the general crimes that had been committed by the con men. It emphasized that the criminals are taking down other criminals – a form of retributive justice where the proper authorities fail to do their job.

So when did our stories so completely change and what are the effects of this change? When did we start to present an argument that a law abiding citizen should even entertain feelings of guilt because they had something to be stolen? When did actions that tear down a civilization — the inexcusable — become excusable? I don’t quite know, because at some point I gave up on watching or reading most new stuff, particularly when I discovered it had such a narrative.

A nebulous ‘they’ has been teaching us that to have stuff somehow justifies it being taken by force, and not just in the Marxist’s sense by the collective. This ‘they’ includes the community activists who teach we should seek to understand and in that understanding thereby excuse criminal behavior, are destroying society in the name of helping. Activists insist that the police unfairly target minorities, particularly young minorities. The activists further insist that lack of parity in the numbers of convictions between various social groups can only be the result of racism.

Society has been pushed to where we are reluctant to hold criminals responsible for their actions, or send them to jail when convicted, in part because of the fear of accusations of racism. In doing so they we have been hurting the very social groups from which they come. It is the minorities from bad neighborhoods that are most often the victims of crime. Why isn’t creating a situation where that occurs considered racism?

So poor minorities are victimized by crime. Having been victimized they have what is now acceptable excuse to turn to crime – and we are led to believe they have no other choice. I suggest that to say that any group has no other choice but to turn to crime is in itself racism.

Who this does compassion and understanding help? Maybe the community activist, but certainly not the community.

What can we do? One thing is to write new stories to capture the imagination with a different picture of what could and should be. Human Wave stories.

*Oh, and if some of your relatives got Kindles for xmas, don’t forget all my Goldport Press novels and one of the collections are on sale! Also, go to MGC and read Kate’s post.  Warning, DO NOT DRINK ANYTHING while reading it, or your monitor will be Wassailed.*

It’s late, there’s two beasts to roast (not the boys) and I have spent the last two days cleaning and setting up (late minute travel and illness make the holidays so much fun) so I haven’t written in two days and I’m starting to get the shakes.  Besides, I have a character to kill.  So if I get the beasts in the oven soon enough (we’re mountain time, so it’s not 8 yet) I might get two/three hours to lay down words.

Which is why I’m going to leave you with someone else’s words.  In this case Giovanni Guareschi in a story called “Men of Goodwill.”

It involves the parish priest, Don Camilo and the communist mayor, Peppone, who are in the middle of a heated political time.

Typos my own.  It starts with “Christmas was approaching and it was high time to get hte figures of the Crib out of their drawer, so that they might be cleaned, touched up here and there and any stains carefully removed.  it was already late, but Don Camilo was still at work in the presbytery.  He heard a knocking at the window and on seeing that it was Peppone went to open the door.”

There’s the body of the story I can’t copy because plagiarism but they talk while Peppone is co-opted into paining the figures — and then —

“”I feel as if I were in Jail,” [Peppone] said gloomily.

“there is a always a way out of every jail in this world,” replied Don Camilo.  “Jails can only confine the body, and the body matters so little.”

The baby was now finished, and it seemed as if His clear, bright coloring shone in Peppone’s huge dark hands.  Peppone looked at Him and he seemed to feel in his palms the living warmth of that little body.  He forgot all about being in jail.

“My son is learning a poem for Christmas,” Peppone announced proudly.  “every evening I hear his mother teaching it to him before he goes to sleep.  He’s a wonder!”

“I know,” agreed Don Camilo.  “Look how beautifully he recited the poem for the bishop!”

Peppone stiffened.  “That was one of the most rascally things you ever did!” he exclaimed.  “I shall get even with you yet.”

“There is plenty of time for getting even, or for dying,” Don Camilo replied.

Then he took the figure of the ass and set it down close to the Madonna as she bent over Her Child.  “that is Peppone’s son, and that is Peppone’s wife, and this one is Peppone,” said Don Camilo, laying his finger on the figure of the ass.

“And this one is Don Camilo,” Exclaimed Peppone, seizing the figure of the ox and adding it to the group.

“Oh, well! Animals always understand one another,” said Don Camilo.

And though Peppone said nothing he was now perfectly happy, because he still felt int he palm of his hand the living warmth of the pink Baby; and for a time the two men sat in the dim light looking at the little group of figures on the table and listening to the silence that had settled over the little world of Don Camilo, and that silence no longer seemed ominous but instead full of peace.”

Merry Christmas to those who celebrate it, and may we animals always understand each other and be at peace.

*ARGH.  If you’re looking for the writing post, it’s not here.  I posted it here by mistake.  Kindly go over to Mad Genius Club.*

Women in History or Women’s History? – Alma Boykin

They’re different. The End.

Ow! [Rubs spot where blog owner poked her.] Oh, you wanted details? Sorry, OK. Gotcha. This will gloss over a lot of details and academic points, OK? Right, onwards and odd-wards we go.

In the beginning there was no such thing as Women’s History. This is not to say that women never played a role in history, or that women were not important during that ever-lengthening period we call “history.” But the first people to write down accounts of past events focused on what they thought were the big, important things, such as wars, treaties, the rise and fall of dynasties and governments (often the same thing). Because men played the largest roles in such things because war required physical strength and stamina, and free time that women didn’t have, they got the main roles. A few people writing what we would call historical accounts, usually justifications for why their patron’s side was in the right, did include women, usually as bad examples or as models of patience and piety.

By the 19^th century, more women appeared in the historical record, thanks to Elizabeth I of England and a few other politically important women that historians wrote about. But still the majority of mentions focused on queens and other women in their roles as wives and mothers. Politics, diplomacy, and war still made up the bulk of historians’ accounts. First, the available sources in archives were mostly government documents and diaries written by people in government, so researchers focused on what they had. Second, women still remained within the domestic sphere (in Europe) and who was interested in that? Women had always been in the domestic sphere, aside from a few very notable (and book-worthy) examples who left documents or were mentioned in documents.

By the mid 20^th century people began writing about common folks, including women. But it wasn’t until the 1960s and 1970s that Women’s History really got going as a separate field. First, people started moving out of the traditional archives and digging into museum collections, family libraries, church chronicles, often reading between the lines to reconstruct domestic life mentioned in business and domestic ledgers and accounts, and finding a lot of material that had been overlooked (or unavailable) before. The first major works about women in history that did not center on reigning queens appeared. Some of the Marxist historians, mostly in England and Europe, began looking at women participating in economic activities, peasants and laborers’ wives. From this came both standard Marxist works about women as an economic class, and really fascinating accounts of women in business, equal partners in their merchant-husbands’ businesses. Historians in general also became less willing to take chroniclers at face value, and began wondering if perhaps Countess Elizabeth Bathory had not been the mass murdering monster of legend, or if Margarete Maultasch (Margaret of Tirol) had really been as sexually profligate as later writers claimed.

Alas, the pendulum continued to swing farther and farther from the center, until Women’s History appeared as a separate discipline with its own theoretical approaches and sub-sub-specialties. And with consequences for those women currently “doing” history. During a very forthright Q&A session in grad school, one professor flat-out told the five of us female-type grad students that when we went looking for academic jobs, we would be asked if we could teach Women’s History, no matter what our actual specialty was. And the only correct answer was “Yes.” If we’d focused elsewhere, the proper response was, “Yes, but I will need a semester/ few months to familiarize myself with the literature and major theories in the field.” Women teach Women’s History, and if we didn’t want to, tough. To which my (silent) responses were 1) “Well that stinks.” 2) “Thpppth!” 3) “I don’ wanna and you can’t make me!”

Don’t get misunderstand me: I enjoy reading history that includes women. The last written/next to be published Colplatschki novel, Peaks of Grace, came about in large part because of the spring 2014 issue of Medieval Warfare magazine, which focused on women in warfare, including a very nice essay about women war leaders and why they disappeared from tradition and history (probably because of the rise of the state and of large non-personal armies, to squish a lot of discussion into a tiny packet.) As you would expect, now that historians know what to look for, we’re finding out all sorts of interesting things about how women worked with, around, and against official law and custom to run businesses, manage properties, influence policy and other things, as well as raise children, cook, and pray (the [in]famous Kinder, Küche, und Kirche trinity of German post-Reformation tradition.)

Where things go astray is Women’s History as an academic subfield with a power-based conceptual framework. The idea that power relations between men and women, and the social construction of gender, should be a major focus (if not the major focus) through which to look at the history of women shifted the field in the 1970s and especially in the 1980s-90s. Ideas imported from Marxism, critical race theory, and the power structures between individuals and the state discussed by M. Foucault and others began shaping how Women’s Historians approached the field. That’s where I lost any interest in the topic. Historical theory leaves me sleepy, and once things like gender othering, gender and power relations, and related topics come up, I tend to head for the exit. At the extreme, women, like non-white, non-straight, non-western males, become a totally separate, isolated topic of study, acted on and oppressed by patriarchal society and losing their natural rights and position to a combination f the Scientific Revolution and the rise of the republic as a political system. This is where “intersectionalism” appears, and history becomes a long slog of abuse, oppression, silencing, and stories of women who abandoned the opportunity to uplift their sisters by siding with the patriarchy and embracing the male role (see Elizabeth I, the abbesses of Quedlinberg, St. Catherine of Sienna, et al.)

Ecofeminism wandered in about this time, the late 1970s, as Women’s Historians explained how the Scientific Revolution disenfranchised women’s knowledge of nature by enforcing a masculine-centric domination of knowledge via experimentation that separates humans from the environment and demoted women to passive, confined, domestic actors subordinated to their fathers and husbands, just as Nature was subordinated to science. I’m exaggerating, a little, but at its worst Women’s History can be that shrill, complicated, and tooth-pullingly tedious.

Meanwhile, women still participate in history. As mothers, daughters, and wives, as helpmeets and partners, businesswomen and domestic managers, women work with, around, despite, and for men. And vice versa. One of the best books I read in the past three years was about families in what is now Germany between 1300-1550, by an author who used the church, legal, business, and family records of the patricians of Nuremburg to explore how life changed and how the family shaped business and society. Although centered on men, because they left the records, Steven Ozment’s book provides a lot of information about women and children, and how precious those stern patriarchs thought their wives, daughters, and sisters were. Let’s face it, after eight children are still-born or die before age two, when you finally have a boy (or girl) live past age five, you are going to be ecstatic, dote on them, and wrap them in every protection you can think of. And you are going to worry about their mother and her health and well being after each of those other losses. And you will prize that wife when she assists you with business and manages the household. Laural Thatcher Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale is another good example of what, to me, how women’s history should be: history with lots of women that talks about how women lived, loved, celebrated, mourned, and made their way in the world. Not history of women as a class of and for themselves, oppressed by everyone and everything and bemoaning the lost glorious ages of legal and social and sexual equality and even superiority (that probably never was).

As you know I’m working really hard to finish Through Fire, interrupted by some health stuff which is getting me down. So the world’s most awesome husband took me away from the keyboard yesterday night and on a date to the Denver zoo, to see the Christmas lights.

It was just starting to snow, as we approached and we were afraid we’d get frozen but it was surprisingly mild the entire time we were there, and the lights were awesome.

We’d gone once with the kids, when they were little, and the lights were mostly stationary, but now there are a number of moving light shows, and also stuff like oriental lanterns in the elephant area.

Because we went relatively late (had an appointment that let out at six thirty, so no choice there) and because it was starting to get nippy, we weren’t as mobbed with kids as you’d expect. At the end, we might have turned around and gone again, except there was a light drizzle of snow falling. So we adjourned to Pete’s kitchen, where we sat at the window, watching the snow paint patterns in the window and the wind shake the lights outside, while we sat inside all snuggly and warm.

Did I have a point to this, other than bragging about my husband?

When I was a very little girl, I thought the holidays were magical. You see, they used to outline the little medieval church tower in white lights. In a village where streetlights were few and far between and most of the houses not only had only one lightbulb per room (usually naked, in the middle of the room and like 40 watts, no matter how large the room,) but everyone also kept an oil lamp or candles, because the light was off as much as it was on, the lights outlining the tower in the dark (glimpsed from my window late at night) was a miracle.

Fireworks were miracles too, particularly the more complex ones that made pictures.

And of course, festas in summer were a thing of beauty, because of all the light and sound. In retrospect, these were rather pokey ambulatory festivals, mostly booths selling crafts (only these weren’t cool crafts, just most of the stuff around there and then was hand made.) And there were maybe three rides, one of them the obligatory tethered airplanes and the other probably bumper cars, leaving the third to either a roller coaster or a carousel.

Why am I going on about this, just now?

Because in the middle of that amazing light show it occurred to me “as bad as things are…” As in, back then, my little self would have thought that lighted zoo a wonderland out of dreams.

My kids, of course, take it for granted.

But there is a difference between taking it for granted and imagining that, somehow, strangely, the past, with its privations, the past without any of these marvels, was a wonderland.

I’m not going to say my childhood was awful. In many ways, it was a magical place. But it was a magical place despite the privations and the lack of entertainment.

I was blessed with a father who would walk with me through the local fields and woods and not only show me the local fauna and flora (and tell me stories about it) but also read the inscriptions in Roman ruins we stumbled upon. I had a father who in the summer would walk me to the nearest pond to see the fireflies over it, and who taught me to make a pan flute out of reeds. (And who would also take me on an expedition to feed and observe the ants in a massive anthill down by the fields. And always, always, be ready with history or legend, or poem to illustrate something. And I was blessed with a grandmother (dad’s mom) who made up stories for me involving an alternate of the village populated with shape shifters and magical beings.

Add to that a brother and a cousin who were willing to let me tag along with them on their expeditions and who tolerated my thievery of their books, and it was a very good childhood.

What it was lacking was more on the material front: non-scratchy clothes, heated rooms (and bathrooms!) in winter, medicine that wouldn’t be available for decades and – well… entertainment.

Look, I’m a very boring sort of person. Even now, my favorite entertainment is reading. Surrounded by games and movies, I choose books.

But back then even the books were limited. Not only couldn’t we afford them that often, but fewer were printed than here, so the choice was far more limited.

Of course we read everything – I read history and mystery and romance (and when my brother found it SF) because I read everything everyone in the family bought.

Even the newspapers’ serializations of old books ended up clipped out and kept to re-read later.

I don’t think any kid born here and now understands that re-reading wasn’t a choice. You re-read because you simply couldn’t find enough to read.

That today I can research anything – I was just looking up hot buttered rum (shut up) – by typing a sentence on the net, would be enough to make me think this was paradise when I was a kid.

And this is why all the programs of the progressives have been outstripped. They had plans and ideas to bring about equality in 1930s terms. One stack-a-prole apartment, one ration of chicken a week, two suits of clothing a year: EQUALITY.

Instead, we have people living wildly divergent lives in the way they want to live them, and all these people can do is bleat about class and equality.

How do you determine class when, even if I were twice as rich, my life wouldn’t be much different day to day? I’d still live in a house that’s warmed in winter and cooled in summer; I’d still have light and music for the asking (I remember my brother’s transistor radio being a seven day wonder in the village.) I’d still have a computer and be able to read a vast amount of things for free. (And write with minimal effort.)

How do you determine equality when how happy and contented people are has a lot to do with what they choose to do with this immense common patrimony of science and abundance we have?

How can you even insist on equality?

In the end all their bleating is revealed for what it is: a plea for power. They want to control who gets the light, and who is shunted off into the dark.

Well, they’re going to have to think again.

We won’t go quietly into that good night. We’ll stay here and bask in moving pictures made of light.

They like the past so well, they can start their own self-restricted communities. We can always use more Amish at least for the cheese.

As for me, and my house, we’re going to go see Interstellar again tomorrow. We might even go do it in Imax. Because we can.

Hold my Beer and Watch This- Cedar Sanderson

There is some debate over what jobs men and women are best at. In the current cultural push to make women fit into slots previously held mostly by men, some inconvenient truths are overlooked, ignored, denied, and finally, outright lied about. Because the honest truth is that if we discard outliers on the data set, there are some jobs in which a man is better suited than a woman.

Let’s take for instance a snow-shoveling job. Yes, if it involves automation, or climbing into a sturdy truck with a plow on, the playing field is leveled. Doesn’t matter the sex of the person behind the machine. But there are still many places where it needs to be done by hand, and if you’re doing it hour after hour… the average teenage boy is more capable than a grown woman. Upper body strength is not the forte of most females.

Note that ‘most’ there. Look, I am acutely aware that not every person fits neatly into a labeled box. However, when you’re talking biology, you’re going to have an observable, quantifiable trend. Men are better at lifting and toting. Women are better at having babies. It just is. One of the biggest problems in our society today is the deliberate overlooking of that fact, and the desire to push everyone into the same mold.

When little boys are expected to sit still in class at age 6-7 just the same as little girls, you’re going to suddenly see a difference in the sexes. Unless you refuse to admit it exists, so there must be something wrong with those little boys. They need to be medicated, and have special remedial reading classes, because they aren’t learning the same way the girls are. Or, you know, we could stop treating children like widgets in a factory and serve their individual needs. Which includes acknowledging that boys don’t belong in a classroom setting as soon as girls do.

Only… only then you get some Umbridge-style female elevating her nose so high it’s a miracle she doesn’t drown when it rains, sniffing, and proclaiming “boys are not as smart as girls.” You’re wondering at this point what I’m getting at, other than our society being effed up.

• Boys and girls are different.
• They have comparable levels of intelligence
• Their Physical strength is unequal
• Their temperament is different
• Ergo, they will be better at different jobs.

Look, it’s not rocket science. It’s pure biology. The reason women have historically not been found in some jobs isn’t that they were being kept out – and no, I’m not denying that some were indeed kept out, or forced out – it’s that they were ill-suited for those jobs.

Which brings me back to the title of the essay. Men are far more likely to take risks that your average woman would consider insane. For far less reward than she would do a similar action in. This isn’t about intelligence, folks. We can all think of some bright men who have done things that ought to have won them a Darwin award. Not all men, no, same thing as above. I’m not poking you into a box labeled ‘Male: handle with care’ and leaving you there. Some men learn caution early. Others never learn it at all.

But without this sense of valor, where would we as a human race be? Cowering in caves, no doubt. Not that we’re all come down from cavemen, but that’s where we’d have wound up without men who wanted to see what was over the next hill, and then, to the Far Blue Hills.

Where were the women? Some went with their men, sure. But mostly, the women stayed home. I read a book some time ago about William Dampier, who circumnavigated the globe not once, but twice. His legacy lived on until modern times in the charts of currents he mapped. But his wife was at home in England, managing a home, family, and business on her own. At one point, he was gone for eleven years before returning to her. Was she any less strong than he? Certainly not. Here was a man addicted to the adrenaline of exploration, while she had to keep the family going. He wasn’t sending money home – in fact, I believe he was considered dead at one point. I’m talking about an era three hundred years ago, which isn’t precisely ancient history.

This is still an observable trend. The modern woman wants to have security, to take care of her family. The modern man wants to work hard and provide for that family (I’m talking ideals, here, folks.) But our society, in forcing both sexes into roles they don’t fit well, has been warping those desires for so long that boys and girls are no longer sure what is acceptable for them. The girl of today is told that she is to want a career, something big and splashy like doctor, or President. She’s supposed to go through 8-12 years of school after highschool to work toward this, and then, well, it’s a career, so twenty years? That makes her 18, 28, 48… and motherhood is going to have to happen in there somewhere, because if she waits until after all that, it’s too late.

Now, I was told recently by my precocious 15 yo daughter that she intends to get her doctorate, and I applauded that. She also told me that she was going to have babies and do it, while keeping straight A’s. I did my best to keep a straight face. Babies are not the same as kittens or puppies, but… If you have a baby, and put it straight into daycare, and see that child perhaps 2-3 waking hours a day while you work full-time, and then school when the child is 5-6 years old and daycare after school, and camps in summer, and…. You get where I’m going? Is it any wonder we’re raising feral, confused children? Their parents treat them like pets… or trophies. Or something, but certainly not as the loved products of a happy family.

Am I suggesting that women today should return to the kitchen and stay there, barefoot and pregnant? Listen, you dummy, I don’t think that’s where women ever were, unless they wanted to be. I wanted to be, at one point, because I love my kids, and I love cooking, and I grew up hating shoes which carried over into adulthood. But I was also running a successful small business from our home, and managing the kids, and would have homeschooled them had I the opportunity. I’m not, by any means, something special there. Women through the ages – go read Proverbs 31! – have been doing just that. Being in the house does not mean doing nothing and stagnating.

Sure, there were times I felt like the walls were closing in and I would have given much for an adult conversation. Fortunately, the modern woman has some advantages there, like cheap transportation and the internet. She can get out of the house, and she can talk to anyone at any hour of the day or night.

And men? Men are being treated like second-class citizens, because they are blamed for things they never did. Men who were born to an era where girls are hired first, simply because quotas dictate, are hurt and confused as they are punished for things that they were likely only taught in school from a tilted perspective, and for things that were made up wholecloth.

Equality does not mean standing on the backs of men and grinding them into the mud for sins they did not commit. It ought to mean standing side by side in partnership, working as a team, and acknowledging that while females have strengths, so do males. More, I would say, is to acknowledge that women have weaknesses. Because the title of this essay was not intended to mock men for their foolhardiness. We need that spirit of look what I can do, if we are ever to free our feet from where we stand now, and take that next step off into… the frontier. Wherever it may be. Men have ever been the explorer, and the women who loved them kept the homefires burning.

“Watch this” isn’t a weakness, it’s a strength.

It Came Upon A Midnight Clear

The pounding on the doors, the words, “Open up in the name of the law.”

Juan Johnson who had been lying in the dark, in his little bed at the back of the house, half asleep, retained only a sense of explosions, a smell of something burning, papa up front saying he didn’t know anything of these Usaians and besides, he was a honest carpenter and what could they—

And mama! Mama, who had never left dad alone in any difficulty, Mama who rarely left the house without him and never at night, had gotten Juan and Angelita out of their beds, in the dark, wrapping the baby and putting her in a sling, and dressing Juan, fast, so fast that she’d put a sock of each different color on his feet.

This still bothered him, as they ran down the alley in the night, and then up another alley, all staying away from the police.

Juan could hear other pounding and “Open up—”

And fragments of other sentences, too, “Forbidden,” and “Dangerous elements” and “Seditious ideology.”

Juan knew what “dangerous elements” were. He was only ten, but Mama and Papa had taught him at home and he’d been allowed to read a lot of dad’s old books, the sort of thing they no longer taught in the school. Dangerous elements were things like Uranium and other things that gave off radiation that could kill you. Why the police would be looking for it, he didn’t know.

He did not however have any idea what Seditious ideology meant.

He repeated the words to himself as mama stopped in a dark alley, by a flyer. It wasn’t their flyer, but then Mama rarely drove their flyer, and she certainly never burned its genlock clean off, reaching in before it could do more than emit a bzzzt and burning something else, murmuring to herself as though to remember a list, “Alarm off,” Then went in, leaving Juan alone at the entrance for a moment. She came back and threw something to the floor. Juan didn’t know what it was – pieces of something electronic. “Tracker,” Mama said.

She pulled Juan in with one hand, and closed the door, then sat him in a seat, and – strangely – put the sling with Angelita around him. The baby was only three months old, but Juan was a slim boy and the sling – and the baby – very big and very heavy. He thought of protesting, but Mama looked as though she would start to cry, so he said nothing. He let Mama put the harness over both of them, and saw her consult a paper in Papa’s handwriting as she set the coordinates.

Moments later they were in the air, and Juan might have dozed, but he woke with the flare of explosions, and the shaking as Mama sent the flyer careening side to side.

“Mama!” he said.

“Say it, Juan, say it, my little Juanito.”

“I pledge allegian—”

Mama made a sound. It wasn’t quite laugh and not quite a cry. “Not that one. The other one. The human events one.”

Juan blinked. He’d learned all these from as soon as he could speak. The only time dad was really strict was in making sure he remembered everything, every single word. And the meaning. All the meaning. “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God—”

An explosion came very close, making them shake and showing Mama’s face, very pale and marked with trails as if she’d cried a lot. He hadn’t heard her cry. How could she cry so silently.

“Nature’s God?” Mama prompted.

“Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness—”

Mama sobbed then, but didn’t say anything but “Go on,” so Juan did, as explosions rocked the small flyer, and Mama, finally, just took them really low, and did something, and pulled Juan out after her, but never took the baby sling of him, and she pushed him against a wall and put her hand over his mouth, while the flyer lifted off again and flew a programmed course.

“It was only a second,” Mama said. “Only a second. Maybe they won’t notice.”

But then she was pulling Juan, and running down an alley, and then another.

Juan heard heavy boots after them, and was surprised when Mama pulled out a burner and shot a man down. Juan didn’t have a very clear idea of what happened then, save the man fell, and mama pulled Juan after her again.

Up, up and up, they were climbing narrow stairs in the dark. Mama was talking to herself in Spanish, something she only did when she was really worried. Juan didn’t know Spanish, but he knew a few of the words. He knew “must do something” because mama used to say it at Papa when she was really mad or worried.

“Mama,” Juan said. “My legs hurt. And Angelita is heavy.”

“Yes,” Mama said, which seemed not to be an answer at all. From somewhere to their right came an explosion and then someone screamed, and screamed and screamed, the voice getting weaker as it went. Mama, who normally went to help all the neighbors, didn’t even slow down.

“Juan, you know what we’ve taught you? Papa and I?”

They’d taught him so many things. To read and to write, and to brush his teeth, and– “To mind and be a good boy?”

Again, Mama made that sound that wasn’t quite laughter or a sob, and her hand came down and touched his hair briefly. “That too, my love, but not that. About the Usa. About how it existed and was blessed by God as long as it kept to the precepts of liberty and equality before the law. And how it fell and gave its power to supposedly enlightened rulers and then—”

“It was reduced in size,” Juan said, puffing a little as it was hard to keep up with Mama as she ran down one alley, then another. “And punished.”

“Not reduced in size,” she said. “What remains calls itself United States, but it’s not.”

“But you said, if it returned to faithfulness and the…” He struggled for the words Papa had said so many times, “the inspired vision of the founders it would be forgiven and be great again.”

Sob-laugh and mama said, “It’s not the same place. It can’t return. We’ll have to remember and make it true again. Those of us who keep the faith.”

“Daddy said,” and now he was having true trouble catching his breath. “Daddy said that as long as the belief in the principles of the declaration of independence and the constitution-” deep breath. “As long as those remained in one human heart, the Usa wouldn’t be dead.”

“And so it won’t.” Mama stopped abruptly. Juan could hear the noise of people running after them, voices saying “They went this way. The Flyer was a ruse.”

There were flyers above too, with low-pointing floodlights. As one passed overhead, Mama pressed Juan against the wall. She spoke quickly, in a low voice, “That’s why they made us illegal. That’s why they’re trying to exterminate us. As long as liberty remains in one human heart, the bio-lords won’t have full sway. And they want full sway. They want to dictate our every thought. Listen, Juan, my son. Do you know where the Peace Tower is? From here?”

Juan thought. He wasn’t sure where he was, but he knew the neighborhood, and they hadn’t gone very far. Their flight had been too short. The Peace Tower, built to commemorate peace in the Americas, even if Papa said it wasn’t peace at all, just surrender, was big and lit up and right in the center of the city.

He shook his head a little, because if the peace tower were anywhere nearby, he would see its light. They lit it up in white and green every night.

“If you take that alley to the left, and keep going, mind, Juan, as fast as you can, you will come to the plaza where it is. Don’t go to the plaza. I don’t know if your description is out, but it might be. Instead, the alley that leads to the peace tower plaza, just before you leave it, it has a branch that turns left. Take that. It runs behind a lot of restaurants. Keep on that until you come to the back of a restaurant called Silver Palate – remember that. The name is on big red dumpsters in the back. Turn right there. Follow that alley till it ends, and climb over the wall to the right. It will be difficult, but mind, Juanito, keep Angelita from falling as you climb.

“You’ll be in the backyard of an apartment house. It’s what used to be a large house, long ago, but it’s now apartments. Go in through the back door, run up the stairs to the left, all the way to the top. There’s a door there, marked 4 B. Knock on it. Say Paul sent you. Say treason. They’ll know what to do. The man in the house, his name is James Remy. Do what he tells you. Can you remember?”

He nodded. One of the great advantages of the long stretches of memorizing Papa had made him do was that he could remember things much more easily than any other kid his age in school. But a worry remained, “Why Mama?”

“Never mind that. Just remember, you must do that, or thousands of people will die.” The light had passed overhead. It was dark in the alley, but the sounds of steps and the voices drew closer.

She reached in her pocket and pulled out something. It was a burner. Not a burner like they showed on tv, all glossy and pretty, but a short, battered thing, with a rounded butt, that looked as if it had been assembled together from spare parts. “Papa showed you how to fire these, right? You remember?”

Juan remembered. It was hard to forget as it had been only this week. Papa had taken him to the basement, set a burner on lowest, and had him fire at figures painted on the wall.

Mama said, “If someone tries to stop you, shoot them. Don’t stop to see if you hurt them or killed them. Burn center mass, and run on.”

“Papa said never to point it at a person.”

“No, dear,” she spoke very fast. “Never to point it at a person you don’t mean to kill. But everyone is allowed to kill, if the other person would kill them.”

“How do I know—”

“Trust me, Juan. If they try to stop you, if they catch you, they’ll kill you and Angelita. Or worse.” She pushed something into his pocket. He didn’t know what it was, but she said, “There are two scraps of flag there, Papa’s and mine. Papa’s is the one with the stain on the corner. Keep it when you grow up. Give mine to Angelita, when you’re sure she understands. Now go.”

“What about you?”

“Never mind me.” Mama leaned over and kissed him, a brief touch of lips on his hair, and then she pushed him, hard, down the alley.

He ran to keep from falling, and then he kept running, down the alley, at full speed. He was aware of burners firing and of cries. Was Mama shooting people or had she—

He couldn’t imagine Mama hurt, Mama dead, anymore than he could imagine the end of the world. And that’s what it would be if Mama died.

Instead, he held on to the idea that she would escape, she would join him.

He ran as fast as he could, the route she said.

He met no opposition, until, running so fast he almost couldn’t see, and sweat trickling into his eyes, making them sting, he almost ran into the Plaza of Peace. There a uniformed soldier turned around and said “You, Kid!”

Juan didn’t think this counted as trying to stop him, and he didn’t want to shoot the man, who was young and looked a lot like the brother of his friend Klaus, back at school. So instead he ignored him, and turned left, into the alley with the dumpsters. Mama hadn’t said it would be this long.

He ran down it as fast as he could, but it wasn’t very hard, because his legs felt as though they were made of water, and his breath was coming in short puffs. He felt like he would collapse, but he remembered what mama said. Could he live with knowing he’d caused the death of thousands of people? Or failed to save them? He tried to picture thousands of people, but he couldn’t. That would be like everyone he knew.

“Hey, Kid, stop,” came from behind him. And as he ignored it, another voice told the first, “It’s just a kid, why are we chasing him.”

“It’s not just a kid. His description and that he’s carrying a baby is on the bulletins. He’s going to alert the other rebels. Those damned Usaians.”

Juan didn’t want to turn. Juan didn’t want to shoot these young men. But Mama’s words rang in his mind, and he could not doubt these people wanted to stop him. And they’d said damned Usaians. These men wanted to kill them. People like him and Mama. Mama had said–

He pulled the safety on the burner, as dad had taught him to do it, by touch. And he set it on high. Papa said it was just like the games, point and click.

Juan wanted to close his eyes, but he knew that if he did he’d miss, so he turned and fired, center mass, only he kept the beam on and cut straight across. He had the impression of cutting two bodies in half, but he didn’t stop to look.

Angelita had started crying and squirming. Papa used to joke she slept through everything, but judging by the smell, she must be dirt. He murmured soothing words he knew wouldn’t help, as he ran and hoped no one looked out the windows to see where the crying baby was.

He came to the dumpster and turned, in the almost blind dark, and ran. This alley was shorter, and it ended in a brick wall. There was ivy growing along the wall, and, fortunately, Juan was light. Fortunately, too, he’d always liked climbing.

Even so, Mama was right, and it was difficult. It was very difficult to hold on and not to squish Angelita against the wall. Particularly, since she was crying.

At the top of the wall, he hesitated. There was a man with the dog in the enclosure. He was old, about Papa’s age, and he had a pipe, and a little yellow puppy playing at his feet.

He looked up, as Juan sat there, and Juan didn’t want to kill him, because he didn’t think he was the authorities, but he had to go up and give the message… He had to.

The man blinked at him, in confusion. “Hello, there. What is wrong?”

The last was said in a tone of concern, as he looked from Juan to the baby.

“I must see my uncle,” Juan said. The idea just came to him. Anyway, at the great fall festival, when people gathered in some secret place to eat and trade stories, the kids called every older man uncle and every older woman aunt, so, it must fit. “James Remy.”

The man’s face froze. There was a long silence. He opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again. He looked kindly, with pale hair streaked with white, and grey eyes, and he said, “I see, you must be my nephew, Jimmy.”

“No. Juan,” he said. “Juan Johnson.”

“Of course Juan. Sorry, I got confused with your brother. Here, let me help you down from the wall.”

There was a bad moment, as the man reached up and took Jimmy’s hands, and helped him, till he was holding him and Angelita in his arms, together, and Juan thought he would hold him and not let him go, and then Juan would have to kill him. But the man must have sensed Juan’s discomfort, and put him down. “We can’t talk here,” he said. “We’ll go on up to aunt Mary, shall we.” He whistled for the puppy, “Come on Pie.”

“Pie?” Juan asked, as he noted they were going in through the back door and trotting up the stairs Mama had described.

“Pumpkin pie. My daughter Jane named him. She’s very silly.”

The puppy followed at their heels, as they got to the top of the stairs.

The shock when the door opened was almost too much for Juan. He’d been living a bad dream for the last hour? Eternity? But here was normal life, just like it had been at home before that knock on the door. They had a Winter Holidays tree set up, all decorated and lit with lights, and presents under it, and there was a smell of food, and there were two kids, just older than him, and a baby, and a large blond woman, with a kind face, who looked at the man he’d come in with, and then at Juan, with Angelita, and said, “Now, Jim, what?”

But the man was walking past her, and telling the two children, “I think this is bugout. You know what to do. Go.”

The woman said, “Oh, no. Can’t be. They’ve eased the restrictions on religions. We can even have trees if we don’t call them—”

But the man turned to Juan and said, “Son, what is your message?”

“Paul sent me,” Juan said, feeling like he would cry, and he wasn’t sure why, repeating Mama’s words. “Treason.”

The man said a word. One of those words Papa said when he cut himself with one of his tools. And then took a deep breath. “I’ve been wondering. First the Christians, then us. Anything that might stop the state…” He looked at Juan’s uncomprehending face.

“How do we know?” his wife said. “how do we know it’s not a trap so we reveal ourselves?

The man looked at Juan and said, very softly, “In congress, July four, seventeen seventy six—”

Juan nodded and answered with the remembered words, “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires—”

“Enough, son. He’s one of ours. Mary, I’ll pack, you change that baby and give this young man something to drink, and maybe something to eat. I think he’s been through hard times, just now.”

The big blond woman took him by the hand. She felt like Mama, even though she couldn’t be because Mama was small and dark. Presently, she was giving Angelita a bottle while Juan ate a bowl of warm oatmeal with cream and brown sugar and told her what had happened. Her eyes got misty when he talked about Mama being left behind.

Juan had been thinking, he said, “She’s dead now, isn’t she, ma’am?” It seemed impossible, and yet he was sure of it, in a way. “Papa said if you died defending the Usa, you’d be born again in a land of freedom, is it true? Do people live more than once?”

The woman’s eyes misted, blue beneath a veil of tears. “Some people think so. Some of our people. But my husband and I we’re Chri– We believe in another religion, too, an older one. We just think there is a better land, and your mama and papa are already there. You should call me mom now. It will make things easier. Your name is Juan? Maybe we should call you John.”

“Juan is the name on my birth certificate,” he said, “But Papa said my real name was John Adams. And Angelita is Martha Washington. Johnson.”

“Let’s forget the Adams and the Washington. We need to be even quieter than we’ve been,” the father of this family said, as he did things around them. Juan wasn’t sure what the things were, but he was bringing small bags from inside, and checking burners, as though to make sure they were okay, then setting them atop the bags. “Your name now is John Remy, can you remember that? And Mary is your mom and I’m your dad. And Angelita is Martha. Just Martha. I think we’ll call her Marty, shall we?”

Juan was too tired to protest. The oatmeal had hit his stomach and somehow made him feel warm and really sleepy.

“You go with your brother Jimmy and mom,” the man he was to call dad said. “You know where to go,” he told his wife. “Take the baby. I’ll take Jane and go the other way after I pass on the alarm. We’re just a normal family, going to visit relatives. If you run into trouble, send me signal. I’ll try to retrieve you. That message – someone gave away our enclaves and we don’t have very long. I’ll pass on the codes, and then I’ll join you.”

“Where are we going, sir—uh—dad?” Juan said.

“Olympus Seacity. We’re not forbidden there.”

“Yet,” his wife said.

“Yet, but we’ll survive this,” her husband said, and kissed her. “You can’t erase the idea of the USa until you kill every one of us. And they can’t. We’ll move on. We’ll be secret. We’ll keep going. And someday, someday, we’ll be free to be and to believe again. The idea of freedom and equality we hold might be small and frail compared to the will to power of the tyrants, and the idea that our betters should always lead. But once it had been kindled in human breasts, it is unquenchable. We’ll go to Olympus. We’ll start again. They always need skilled people. And if we should fail and if we should fall, someone will go on, someone will believe. Maybe one of these children.” He kissed his wife again. “Go on. Jane and I will join you and take Pie with us.. And you too, Johnny, go on. Your Mama and Papa and you saved a lot of people tonight. And you might have saved the hope for a future in freedom.”

Juan didn’t understand it all, but as he went out into the night again, this time held in the arms of his adopted mom, he felt somehow that he’d accomplished something big, something that would be remembered. The young man, Jimmy, was carrying Angelita, who was asleep again.

They walked down the street, in the muted street lights. Above the moon shone with a bright, clear, silvery light.

And it seemed to Juanito that up there, somewhere, Mama was watching and smiling. Perhaps he’d saved many people, but he’d only done what she wanted.

That was enough for him.

She’d believed that the words he’d been taught, the beliefs she held, would one day make the world better.

He didn’t know if she was right, but she was Mama. Dead or alive, he’d follow her beliefs.

“Life, liberty,” he whispered to himself.

“And the pursuit of happiness,” his new mom said. She kissed his forehead. “And we will pursue all three, little one. We will. However long it takes to attain them,There are dreams so big you must keep chasing them, no matter how long it takes.”

Juan only half heard her.  He was falling asleep, slipping into a dream where the great summer high holiday was held in the open, in a park with green grass, and there were red blue and white streamers floating in the wind, and fireworks, like what dad had told him about in the old days.

Mama and papa were there, holding hands and looking up at the fireworks.  And in their faces was the most radiant happiness he’d ever seen.

It was a terrible and beautiful sight, which he would never forget.

It Came Upon A Midnight Clear

The pounding on the doors, the words, “Open up in the name of the law.”

Juan Johnson who had been lying in the dark, in his little bed at the back of the house, half asleep, retained only a sense of explosions, a smell of something burning, papa up front saying he didn’t know anything of these Usaians and besides, he was a honest carpenter and what could they—

And mama! Mama, who had never left dad alone in any difficulty, Mama who rarely left the house without him and never at night, had gotten Juan and Angelita out of their beds, in the dark, wrapping the baby and putting her in a sling, and dressing Juan, fast, so fast that she’d put a sock of each color on his feet.

This still bothered him, as they ran down the alley in the night, and then up another alley, all staying away from the police.

Juan could hear other pounding and “Open up—”

And fragments of other sentences, too, “Forbidden,” and “Dangerous elements” and “Seditious ideology.”

Juan knew what “dangerous elements” were. He was only ten, but Mama and Papa had taught him home and he’d been allowed to read a lot of dad’s old books, the sort of thing they no longer taught in the school. Dangerous elements were things like Uranium and other things that gave off radiation that could kill you. Why the police would be looking for it, he didn’t know.

He did not however have any idea what Seditious ideology meant.

He repeated the words to himself as mama stopped in a dark alley, by a flyer. It wasn’t their flyer, but then Mama rarely drove their flyer, and she certainly never burned its genlock clean off, reaching in before it could do more than emit a bzzzt and burning something else, murmuring to herself as though to remember a list, “Alarm off,” Then went in, leaving Juan alone at the entrance for a moment. She came back and threw something to the floor. Juan didn’t know what it was – pieces of something electronic. “Tracker,” Mama said.

She pulled Juan in with one hand, and closed the door, then sat him in a seat, and – strangely – put the sling with Angelita around him. The baby was only three months old, but Juan was a slim boy and the sling – and the baby – very big and very heavy. He thought of protesting, but Mama looked as though she would start to cry, so he said nothing. He let Mama put the harness over both of them, and saw her consult a paper in Papa’s handwriting as she sat the coordinates.

Moments later they were in the air, and Juan might have dozed, but he woke with the flare of explosions, and the shaking as Mama sent the flyer careening side to side.

“Mama!” he said.

“Say it, Juan, say it, my little Juanito.”

“I pledge allegian—”

Mama made a sound. It wasn’t quite laugh and not quite a cry. “Not that one. The other one. The human events one.”

Juan blinked. He’d learned all these from as soon as he could speak. The only time dad was really strict was in making sure he remembered everything, every single word. And the meaning. All the meaning. “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God—”

An explosion came very close, making them shake and showing Mama’s face, very pale and marked with trails as if she’d cried a lot. He hadn’t heard her cry. How could she cry so silently.

“Nature’s God?” Mama prompted.

“Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness—”

Mama sobbed then, but didn’t say anything but “Go on,” so Juan did, as explosions rocked the small flyer, and Mama, finally, just took them really low, and did something, and pulled Juan out after her, but never took the baby sling of him, and she pushed him against a wall and put her hand over his mouth, while the flyer lifted off again and flew a programmed course.

“It was only a second,” Mama said. “Only a second. Maybe they won’t notice.”

But then she was pulling Juan, and running down an alley, and then another.

Juan heard heavy boots after them, and was surprised when Mama pulled out a burner and shot a man down. Juan didn’t have a very clear idea of what happened then, save the man fell, and mama pulled Juan after her again.

…….. Story to continue as soon as the author has slept a couple more hours and can see the screen. Maybe now it will let her sleep. MAYBE.

UPDATE: I still had to fight to sleep, but I couldn’t write with my eyes crossing. I am going to get some coffee, and then I finish it.  I’m thinking of opening this to the fandom with the future history and “Usaians” anthologies.  The stories of those keeping the faith in dark times.  Okay, coffee now.

*blows dust off of computer* Oh look, it’s still here! I was afraid I’d left it in the Diner and Rex had gotten ahold of it! Let’s see, where do I… Aha! Welcome, welcome, O Huns, to the Pre-Christmas Promo Post! We’ve had a bit of a drought of submissions the last few weeks, and I ended up saving the trickle I had (with one colossal exception) for this post. I hope you’ve all just been too busy reading, writing, and feasting to send things in! I do want to publicly apologize: our own Mary Catelli has finally put some of her stories up for sale, and sent me over half a dozen last weekend. Since I was in a rush, I didn’t look closely at what she’d sent, and so skipped posting last weekend for lack of material. *ducks head in shame* Lesson learned! In order to avoid swamping this weeks post, I’m only including the first half of the list; there are more out there! So please, go enjoy your weekend with a new book, get some entertainment, and help our resident authors become filthy rich take a Caribbean vacation pay their bills buy dinner feel a little better about their lives. As always, future entries can (and should!) be sent to my email. Happy reading, and a deeply joyful Christmastime to you all!

Jason Dyck, AKA The Free Range Oyster

Code-slinger, Healbot, and a chouse quarrons in the Rome pad

Alma Boykin

A Cat for Christmas

A Cat Among Dragons Short Story

A meter-long catnip mouse?

Major Rahoul Khan is back from Afghanistan, rejoining the 58th Regiment of Foot in time for Christmas. But Afghanistan doesn’t want to let him go. His old friend Rachel Na Gael may hold the cure for what ails him. Or she may take him farther than he ever imagined possible.

Sometimes, the little gifts mean the most.

Wesley Morrison

Broken Eden

Films That Never Were Book 2

After seeing his entire unit die in a failed black op, Brahm Tanner retreats from the military and even his family. Now running a freelance hostage retrieval unit, life – and business – are good. At least until the President of the United States insists on hiring him.

A covert, underground facility has gone dark, apparently taken over by its own commander. Why the military of the most powerful nation on Earth is now standing down, however, and who the partners in this “shared” facility truly are, the President refuses to say.

Every instinct tells Brahm to walk. And every experience says that he and his current team are being set up as scapegoats.

Then the President names the commander of the base: General Benjamin Tanner.

Brahm’s father.

Joseph Francis Collins

The Black Hand: Sniper

Modern Day Assassins

The Black Hand – a shadowy organization that recruits, trains and supports assassins specializing in very specific murder techniques.

A Father’s legacy

Max Jennings was trying to put his traumatic childhood behind him when he discovered that he had not only inherited his father’s shooting talent but by default, his father’s job as a professional killer. Both changed the path of his life.

The Final mission

Max knows what he has to do to escape the trap set by his destiny… but will he live long enough to carry out his dangerous plan? With the help of an unlikely ally he might just survive his time in…

The Black Hand: Sniper

The Black Hand: Poisoner

A Talent for Murder

When Jill Ringler learned that her uncle was abusing his young granddaughter, she put an end to it knowing that her family would close ranks around him and never suspect a precocious teen of murder by poison.

A New Career

After college, Jill should be looking forward to mastering her own life but, instead is blackmailed by someone from her past and forced into killing for The Black Hand. But she finds that she enjoys the work, the thrills, the money and making her own way in the world.

The Future

She learns the truth behind the accident that killed her parents and formed her future. Now her life rests on the action she takes. With luck, skill and determination, she might just survive her time as…

The Black Hand: Poisoner

Mary Catelli

Witch-Prince Ways

Widowed, caught between two feuds, Katie was desperate enough that the Witch Prince witched her wits away, so that she let him steal her baby.

Then there was no reason for him to not let the bewitchment fail. What, after all, could she do against him? Even the witching woman would tell her that defying the Witch Prince was beyond her power.

And tell her again, when she will not listen.

Also available from these fine booksellers:

• Barnes & Noble
• iTunes
• Kobo
• Inktera
• Scribd

Mermaids’ Song

Whoever hears the mermaids, singing, will die.

So Nicolas has heard — before, and after, he hears the song.

Also available from these fine booksellers:

• Barnes & Noble
• iTunes
• Kobo
• Inktera
• Scribd

The Book of Bone

A novelette of curses and journeys.

Avice’s dreams of settling at Clearwater are dashed. The lawsuit had ended, and the lands were made over to her, but a bone wizard lays a curse on the land, and blight begins to spread. All will die before the curse as it spreads.

Neither her family nor her king are willing to help. She is left alone with only the knowledge that the mysterious Book of Bone may have the lore that she needs — if only she can find it.

Also available from these fine booksellers:

• Barnes & Noble
• iTunes
• Kobo
• Inktera
• Scribd

The other day, someone got me mad on Facebook. I know. How shocked are you?

Except that the person didn’t intend to make me mad, and what made me mad was a slow burn before I realized what was upsetting me, and also what the person thought he was doing was sharing a nice and encouraging meme on “yay, women.”

This was one of those “Ten women influential in technology” things. There were apparently the usual collation issues. Some people were given extra attention who didn’t deserve it, and others were shafted who were much more important. That sort of thing.

But I didn’t know enough of the history of tech for it to really upset me. (Except for not having Ada Lovelace in. If I had a daughter and Dan had won the arm wrestling match for the naming, she’d probably be Ada Lovelace.)

So, why was I all bent out of shape.

Let’s start by establishing that I want what every sane person wants – thereby excluding sex-supremacists of both types and gender/orientation supremacists of all stripes – I want a society in which individuals can do what they want to do for a living and attain the maximum results possible, regardless of what’s between their legs and whom they choose to sleep with. (The minimum standard on that being of consenting age and ability. After that I really couldn’t care less.)

I realize too that my dream will never be possible. Maybe what would make me really happy would be becoming starship captain, and that’s simply not an option in the present year of our Lord. And maybe some little girl in Portugal right now would like to write for a living, which is not possible, in Portugal giving the structures in place. Even if everyone in Portugal bought your book you’d still starve. And there is not much penetration to other Portuguese-speaking countries. Maybe indie will change that. So she’ll end up as a teacher or a diplomat or a translator. Could have happened to me.

What I mean is that you’re circumscribed by circumstances other than what’s between your legs and what you find a really cuddly bundle. That’s fine. That’s all right. It’s what it is. Life is only fair if you’re a child or a prisoner, and your life is controlled by others and their idea of fairness.

But I don’t want people to be held back by anything that doesn’t relate to execution of the job. Got it?

I don’t think we should lower physical standards, for professions with a physical side, just to have women in. In the same way, I don’t think we should lower multitasking or pain endurance standards for professions requiring such, for men to be able to do them. (I don’t know about the later, though it might be important in the future, but son is now in a job where he’s having to run three times as hard as the women who multitask as easily as they breathe. And for a man he IS a multitasker.)

Of course no one tries to push men into women’s jobs. That’s because the woman jobs have low status traditionally. Now the question is why.

Most of the “feminists” (truly advocates of turning females into ersatz discount store males) we’re afflicted with think it’s “because penis.” They think the penis has special powers that confer status. (Oh, heck “By the power of the penis I thee command” now wants to appear in a story. Save me.) Hence their grand plan is to have women imitate people who have penises. Hence the push to have women not look after kids, not have kids, and push into al male professions. This just might be crazier than a rabid dog wearing a pink tutu, but it seems to be their program.

Because I think that female professions have lower prestige because females traditionally didn’t give them even a fraction of their attention – which in pre-contraceptive days was taken up with minding the kids for most of a woman’s adult life – and thus the professions weren’t in general developed to a high degree of specialization, I don’t care.

I figure we haven’t adapted to contraceptives and their effect yet (such things process very slowly in society) and my great grandkids MIGHT see men trying to break into female professions. (Don’t tell me there were contraceptives just as good before the fifties. The first one of you to blurt about herbs gets the back of my hand. Yes, there were ABORTIFACIENTS, perilous to both mother and her intended aborted fetus. Yes, I know the fantasy novels all taught you otherwise. Do nah care. Contraceptives before the mid twentieth century were of the “Swallow three tadpoles every morning; if that doesn’t turn you off sex, nothing will.”)

Anyway, so people being able to perform the tasks, they should be able to enter any profession they want. There are some women capable of carrying a grown man over their shoulders. They have the advantage of – be it in combat or firefighting situation – most men wouldn’t look at them with lustful eyes unless they’d been lost at sea for years. (Seriously, guys. Hormones have consequences.)

I’m cool with that.

So what problem do I have with “giving women a self esteem boost.”

I’ve had this problem since the eighties when some education major, desperate for a project, decided girls lifted their hands less and therefore had to be given more attention in school.

A lot of you who are my age or maybe ten years younger will say something about how all the boys are good at math, but the girls get told they can’t be good, and blah.

Maybe. I have no idea what in heck you were told in elementary. I know what I was told and that was that girls had no business in school past nineth grade. Their job was at home learning to be good housewives. And it wasn’t just some anonymous teacher telling me this. Oh, no. Mom told me this. In fact, she wanted to pull me out after fourth grade, and probably would have if dad hadn’t put his foot down. See, I didn’t have a face to catch a man, so I was supposed to learn housekeeping and needle arts. (Turned out I captured him with storytelling and science fiction and mastery of English. Who knew?)

So… did that discourage me? Of course not. I simply couldn’t see myself marrying anyone and I certainly couldn’t see anyone I might marry in Portugal putting up with me for more than a few days. Maybe less. And besides, I fell asleep over sewing (true fact, stuck a needle in my eye that way. Fortunately the white part. The drops for it still hurt like heck.) I was not very good at cleaning (until the advent of ebooks, which keep me from rushing through to find something more interesting) and I WANTED to write for a living. (Well, I wanted to be a mechanical engineer, but mom had already pronounced on that to the extent that she’d trust me with a room full of female-deprived males when h*ll froze over. I still have no idea what her idea of engineers was.)

So I kept on. I kept on even though through seventh grade (after that, I was in an almost all-girl school through 11^th) every teacher treated girls like they were mildly mentally retarded. Until they saw the first tests. And then they treated me like a competitor for top honors. Which I was.

This is not bragging, just part of my illustration that “if you really want to do something, you’ll do it.” I don’t need a hand up or a hand out, and these memes on “the best women” just make me feel like I’ve been patted on the head and told “you’re pretty good for a girl.” I don’t take well to that.

And that’s the main problem. Making these lists of “top women” sends the subconscious message that women can only compete against other women.

And having half of these be non-entities (have to be because pre-contraceptives few women made it to the top in any scientific field. Few men too, but relatively fewer women, so it was hard to find truly exceptional ones. Intelligence distribution must hurt here too. Look, most women cluster in the center. Men have relatively fewer representatives of average intelligence (though of course still most.) They have a lot more geniuses. They also have a lot more morons. Which means by average distro only, you’re going to find a lot more male geniuses. They pay for it in morons.) helps no one’s cause.

If I were a young woman about to go into science, those memes would disquiet me as outright discrimination wouldn’t. Discrimination would just make me want to fight. Those memes though would say “this is the best you can aspire to. Being the best of not very good people.”

I’m of the “go all in or go home” type, and that would discourage me more than (overt, this is covert) sexism.

For those of you who are saying “but women need help. There are fewer women in STEM.”

Yes, there are, and what I think needs to happen is that people need to stop “helping” them.

Let’s establish first that studies have proven the best way to teach adollescents is in gender-segregated schools. Now, I’m the first to say that has social issues. I attended one of those schools and after three years men were mysterious beings I wrote sonnets to. But that can be solved as my elementary school (1 through 4) was: two schools side by side, sharing a play ground and recess, as well as excursions and social activities.

OTOH on academics, there is no doubt that gender segregation through high school gives the best results. And at this time with most teachers being women and of the “feminist” (read female supremacist) type, I don’t think we can say men would be better taught. (Well, actually we could. Most of those teachers are as rational about everything else as they are about sex. But so are male teachers. Teacher education delenda est.)

But they don’t do that. Because discrimination or something. Instead, they try to make the learning style better for women, and to encourage women and to… And to completely drive men insane. Which is why women are now a majority in colleges.

You say “But Sarah, women are still a minority in STEM.” NOT precisely. Older son majored in biochem and there the majority is very much female.

Younger son OTOH is in Engineering (Dual – or perhaps triple, since Aerospace engineering is his minor – degree, with minors in math and physics.) He says THAT is a “sausage fest.”

It’s not how it started, though. It started out three quarters female. It also started out with amphitheater classes in the hundreds.

Now for Electrical, at least, he says his class is 45 people and maybe a dozen are female. The others, male and female alike, ran screaming from the “designed to fail” freshman classes in calc and physics and thermo. Mostly they ran to business and journalism.

Relatively, of course, disproportionate numbers of girls ran. Why did they run.

Please, please, please, don’t tell me “lack of encouragement.” You’d be out of the water. The top students who get prizes, everywhere before college are women. Even when they’re DEMONSTRABLY inferior. (Uh? What? Well, wayyyyyy back in this blog you’ll find comments from when my blog was invaded by my son’s eleventh grade class for English. One of those commenters was the valedictorian. She had As in English in 11^th grade. My son wrote better than that in 3^rd grade. He was also a published (professionally published) author by then. He had a C+ I think, which was the first time he had less than an A for English, but required so that the top students could be female. This teacher achieved it by downgrading him on using words she didn’t like. Like “show” “I don’t like show because it reminds me of flashers” was actually written on the side of his essay. No, seriously. I suppose nowadays she’d have demanded trigger warnings.)

More than that, on the encouragement phase, when I volunteered in the kids’ classes, if the teachers had said once more “girls can do anything” or “girls are GREAT at math” they wouldn’t have time for anything else.

Younger son was in robotics. Most of his friends are still the kids he met then. (I enthusiastically recommend First Robotics to any parent of any kid who won’t hate it.)

That said, his classroom for the robot assembly was strewn with magazines: Women in Engineering, Women in Stem, Women in Physics, Women of Wrench (okay, that’s made up.)

I often arrived early to pick him up and found NOTHING on “Men in Engineering” or even just neutral “Engineering Careers.”

So, given all this encouragement, why did they run?

Well, if you want to do something badly give it to a quasi governmental institution. The school has to show they’re encouraging girls. There are goals. What that means is that these girls got the same as that meme. They’d get A for being “Good for a girl.” (I’d have hated it like poison and probably spent the entire school year trying to make the teachers look like fools. Okay, fine. I did that anyway. I have a leetle problem with authority. But I’d have done it MORE.)

Then they went into college. And in college in the first year, results count. They don’t want to invest time and instruction in you (and run up your bills) if you’re never going to cut it. So they squeeze and run of everyone who is not absolutely determined.

Most of these women had been acclimated to a regime of praise for very little. They wanted to be engineers sure, but they didn’t want to work THAT hard. The boys, otoh, who’d been kicked in the teeth since middle school, stuck it out. (In greater proportion than girls. A majority of boys and girls were run out, mind.)

Some of these girls might have done fine if they’d been made to perform like everyone else from elementary on. Some were just there because GRRRL power and should never have been there if idiots hadn’t convinced them there’s a virtue in invading traditionally male areas. The REALLY good ones stuck it out, anyway, but I suspect another half of them could have made it, if they hadn’t been mollycoddled, lied to about their abilities, learned that they could get As with no effort because vagina, and been told they were always better than men at everything because Vagina!

Now, I’m a hard woman and without mercy and I say “if the best ones are in there, good.” But in a society that needs every even decent tech brain we’re ruining women for science with all this cotton wool. (And again, if you’re my age or older, or up to ten years younger, foggeht about it. You don’t know about the “affirmative girl power” going on since the eighties at least in our schools.)

Were girls discouraged before? Probably. They were in Portugal. But the solution is not to ENCOURAGE them. It’s just to stop discouraging them. To let it be known that we don’t care what’s between your legs. We care how much you want to make machines that fly to Mars.

Another further intervention might be needed, but that’s more difficult. A lot of younger women report a culture of the “crab bucket” among young females. I dimly remember this, but not very clearly because I was competitive as heck and most of my friends were (and are) male. But I seem to remember if you were “too good” you were a show off, and that the goal was to fit in with the general mediocrity. There are evolutionary reasons for this culture among females. Group cohesion is more important than excellence, because gathering was done in groups and child watching was done in groups.

So it will be hard as heck to break up and the only way I can think to do it is to stop schooling kids in groups, and stop socializing them by age group. We’re going that way, but not soon.

Or not soon enough.

Until then stop with the “self esteem” building exercises and memes for girls. They already have enough unearned self esteem. Which, as studies show, is paralyzing. If you don’t know why people are telling you you’re so great, you’ll be afraid of failing without knowing why you failed. This has been proven.

Stop treating our girls like morons and special snowflakes. Teach them to earn their accolades.

Will this make their numbers in STEM the same as men? Who knows? More importantly, who cares? Humans are so different from each other, on every facet from sex to upbringing, instincts, inclinations, that equality of results on any axis you choose is not proof of anything except that someone is tampering with the selection mechanism. Let girls be girls. Let boys be boys.

And let us have good, competitive and competent scientists.

We’re going to need them.

And anyone patting me on the head for being a “pretty good writer for a woman” will withdraw a bloody stump.

They say people in the arctic have a hundred words for snow. Maybe they do. I’ve also heard that debunked, which is the times we live in.

What is probably not immediately obvious to non-linguists is that word drives perception. For instance, while learning Swedish I learned there was no word for (I think – it’s been over thirty years) “orange.”

If that’s true and I haven’t remembered wrong, then Swedes won’t SEE orange, not as an individual color. They’ll see it as a funny reddish yellow.

Of course in the realm of colors, that’s not a big difference. Orange will continue existing, whether humans call it that or “funny yellow.”

In the realm of emotions and other things that exist only in a human’s head, things are a little different.

This is prompted by the fact that I’m writing a very strong, somewhat protective (in both directions) male friendship in Through Fire, and working VERY hard to make sure people get it’s not sexual. Yes, part of it is my characters and the fact I do write gay characters. But that’s not all. Even if I wrote nothing but straight guys, I’d have to work extra hard at this bit because in our society we assume the sort of close, almost romantic friendship that has existed between men through the ages (women too, but not as often, and usually women who had strong male influences in their lives) is at the very least “sexual love manqué.”

Now, I’m the first to admit some pairings are slashable, but honestly, it would never occurred to me to slash the original one of those, Kirk/Spock.

I came from a culture in which male non-sexual friendship with attachment and values close to romantic love (note how many words I need to use for that) was common, and I recognized the Kirk-Spock bond as one of those.

It exists in literature throughout the ages, take the three musketeers. They’d die for each other, but there’s nothing going on under the covers.

Of course, sometimes there was something going on under the covers. Take Robin Hood, in so far as he might have existed, (it’s messy research.) With him and King Richard, well, there was something going on, so who knows what was up with the Merry Men.

And that was the bit that the sexual revolution seized on. Let the love speak its name and all that. Fine and dandy, except that the sexual revolution seems to have robbed us friendship across the board: friendship among people of the same sex; friendship between men and women. All of it was reduced to one type of love, what the Greeks call “eros.”

This is mostly because of the idea of sex not only as a good but as an imperative. If you’re not sleeping with everyone you could be sleeping with then you’re “repressed.”

Friendship has lost dimensions. It is now a bastard child of acquaintance and it seems to mean “someone I run into a lot, but for whom I have no deep feelings.” Because all deep feelings are confused with eros. Or it’s eros-manque. You really have a man-crush or girl-crush on your same sex friend, and you don’t act on it because you have hangups, or because you’re in a relationship, or whatever. It’s not that you deeply love someone and feel loyalty and duty to someone that you’re not in the slightest bit attracted to physically.

If you think I’m blowing smoke, go read the musketeers, take any of the speeches in which they declared their bond, and bring it to present day and see how it strikes you. (There are other friendships of the sort in history and literature, it’s just early and I’ve only had one cup of coffee, and my mind is in the fiction, so this is the obvious one.) Well, except the speeches of Athos to D’Artagnan which transposed to the present day are frankly creepy.

But the fault is not theirs. It’s ours. Post the sixties we’ve lost that dimension.

Part of me wants to say we lost it particularly because it’s a male thing.

Oh, sure, women have that type of friendship – I do – but it tends to be more women who were raised with men (my brother’s circle) and therefore socialized as males.

Female friendships, as far as I can tell from outside, and as far as I’ve got caught in a couple that weren’t what I thought they were are not … romantic. Romantic in the sense of mutual loyalty affirmed, romantic in the sense of – like an old marriage – taking the friend’s flaws and rolling with them. Romantic in the sense of lasting forever.

I could be wrong here. I don’t fully understand women, having been raised in a rather male environment, except for grandma and in many ways she wasn’t particularly feminine either. I’m talking from books and movies and observed stuff. Women have more “friends” but the relationship is either shallow or familiar. In fact, I’ve adopted my best female friends, now, to get the idea right. Women can have sisters as friends, and friends as sisters, but “friends” tends to be a far looser association which doesn’t entail the same level of loyalty. It is at once more intense and shallower than male friendships. Your female bff will come over and bring you Kleenex when you’re sick, and will listen to cry through the night about your unhappy love affair, but she’ll break with you when someone said that you said that she said that you were a poopy head. Your male bff will make fun of you if you get all sentimental over your lost love affair, but he’ll still be there, teasing you and telling you you’re not as unhappy as you think you are when you’re eighty.

I’m explaining very badly, because we don’t have a word for it. The Greeks don’t have a word for it, either, weirdly. Male friendship as I’ve observed it in real life is somewhere between Agape and Phillia. Perhaps Agape with a Phillia public face.

Where I grew up, perhaps because I was raised among men and because in Portugal the sexes are still more segregated, this was still very obvious. Being friends, for men meant something. For women less so, as a woman’s primary loyalty is to the family. You were “whispering mates” (comadres, literally means “co-mother” and it means you’re the godmothers of each other’s children, but the proverb “zango-se as comadres, sabe-se as verdades” (When comadres fight, we discover the truth) give it more the meaning of whispering mates or perhaps co-conspirators.

And perhaps it goes back to the evolution of humanity. Women were co-conspirators and manipulators of the social order, all in search of greater status among the berry-pickers/foragers. Those with higher status got their children better watched. Social manipulation is a female game.

The hunting parts were hierarchical. I assume there was someone calling the shots. BUT they were hierarchical in a male “Something accomplished, something done” way. Meaning that the hunter who got best results got to call the shots. And there was a hierarchy. But it also meant there was less… politics. Had to be, because when hunting is not a good time tof find your bff is stabbing you in the back, right?

Mind you, this is all imho. I don’t even know if the form of male friendship I observed in Portugal REQUIRES a more segregated (by sex) society. But I do know the ah… “texture” of friendship is different within the sexes. And between sexes too.

And I know we’re losing that dimension. We’re losing the subtle tints, and reducing everything to the bright red of sexual passion, even if sexual passion denied. “Friendship” is becoming denatured into “acquaintance” and “passing alliance” and “sexual frustration.”

All of which make it a ghost word, and it’s a pity, because friendship, in and of itself – particularly male friendship – was a great part of what built civilization.

All of which still leaves me writing this friendship that is more Agape than Eros, with a good dose of Storge thrown in, because one of the friends is much older than the other and the other, frankly, needs a minder.

If I do it well, there won’t be a bunch of slash stories on the net.

If I do it badly… the book will probably sell better – hey, a woman got to eat – but I’ll have failed somehow.

For the rest of us, I think one of the things Human Wave needs to make sure is depicted and exists, is the love between friends who would not dream of jumping into bed together.

Because if we lose the concept it won’t exist anywhere.

And we and society will be the poorer.