Author: Sarah A. Hoyt

*Beneath is the weekly reader-pimping post from the oyster.  There will be a chapter later.  But first I need cofffeeeeeeeeeee (Imagine it said like braiiiiinz)*

This week brings a nice haul of new books and a couple of familiar faces for those of you who haven’t picked them up yet. Again, I should note* that I was involved in the production of A Difficult Damsel to Rescue, so you’re aware. So go, buy, read, enjoy, and especially remember to leave reviews! As always, future entries can (and should!) be sent to my email. Happy reading!
Jason Dyck, AKA The Free Range Oyster
Autodidactical Multipotentialite, Mercenary Wordsmith, and Purveyor of Braggadocio

* I do this out of my own ethics. The FTC can address its gestures of affection to my callipygian endowments.

Alma Boykin

Hubris: The Azdhagi Reborn (A Cat Among Dragons)

Two little genes can bring down an empire.

Maker Seeri promised to create the perfect super soldier: strong, fast, telepathic, and endothermic. Three generations later, the survival of the Azdhag Empire, and perhaps of the Azdhag species, depends on six Azdhagi and an undersized True-dragon barkeeper.

Lord Kirlin’s disapproval of genetic technology rivals his disgust with Lord Tarkeela. Tarkeela thinks the Pack Lords deserve the disaster they created. Tarkeela’s ears on the street, the story-catcher Cheerka, suspects the Makers and Pack-Lords know more than they admit about the surge in dead and dying juniors. When the truth boils out of hiding, Pack Lords and commoners must hunt together, reunifying the Azdhag Pack before all hell breaks loose and hubris becomes nemesis.

Also available from these fine sources:

• Barnes and Noble
• Kobo

Cyn Bagley

Smoke & Mirrors

There is an underworld that normals do not see with their eyes. They have lost the terror and the wonder that they once knew as children. In this short story collection there are eleven stories and one bonus story of ghosts, goblins, ghouls, and other nasties that live in our world. Read if you dare.

This is a short story collection.

Also available from Smashwords

TK Naliaka

A Difficult Damsel to Rescue (The Decaturs)

SWAT officer Enrique Vargas was smitten with exotic Chlotilde Decatur from the first glance. Helping to save her brother’s life got his foot in the door, but the tough young cop faces new challenges when it comes to courting the irrepressible daughter of the Decatur family.

Young love is never easy, and dating a Decatur brings dangers far beyond romantic drama. When their first date ends with a brutal shooting, the young couple’s courtship is off to a perilous start. As spectres from both their families’ pasts assail them, Chloe and Enrique must lean on each other and their loved ones to survive. Love, danger, and betrayal carry them from the Mountain West and Florida to the tyranny of Cuba and, ultimately to the brutal, lawless desert of the Sahel, where dark promises will be fulfilled. Joining the Decatur family can be a dangerous proposition!

A Difficult Damsel to Rescue, the second book in The Decaturs series, continues the high-stakes adventures of the Decatur clan. Love. courage, and determination go head to head with greed, hatred, and lust for revenge in this roller-coaster of adventure, and unlikely romance. This gripping novel was inspired by the likes of Louis L’Amour, Alistair McLean and the heroism of Stephen Decatur.

Michael Kingswood

Passing in the Night

Prelude to The Pericles Conspiracy.

A year-long shift in the middle of the interstellar void can get pretty boring. For the Fourth shift crew of the starliner Pericles, enroute to Earth from one of the colony worlds, the passage could best be called routine.

Until the forward sensors detect an unknown and unexpected object ahead. What they find there, in the endless night of space, will forever change the universe, for them and for all mankind.

Assuming they survive to tell anyone about the encounter.

Also available from these fine sources:

• Kobo
• Barnes and Noble
• Smashwords
• iTunes

The Beast And The God-Woman

The greatest terrors come from within.

Yili never questioned the Gods’ decrees, as handed down to the people from the elders. Do not tarry long on the beach, for there lurks the Beast. Do not venture beyond the breakers, for the sea holds nothing but death and man lives on the island alone.

Until the day a strange object approached the island, borne by the wind and waves toward Yili’s home until it broke apart on the reef and deposited a woman and a man, who could only be Gods themselves, onto the beach. The Beast wants to destroy them. The elders distrust them. And Yili finds himself helplessly drawn to the God-Woman, at the risk of all he knows and loves.

The Beast And The God-Woman is a 16,500 word novelette, about 75 pages in length.

What Lurks Between

From a place beyond reality, it comes to consume the world.

For Barry, getting a transfer to a new position as an electrician aboard the Ketcham Space Station summed up his professional life perfectly: just one dead-end job after another. Little did he know that job put the fate of the world in his hands.

Waking up at home with no memory of how he got back from the Station, Barry soon finds that he brought something back with him. Something hungry. Now he has to stop it. Somehow.

Walt Pimbley

Forgiving Michael

“Mikey, what trouble he’s been!” thought Grandma Liu. “Why do we wish for smart children? Mikey’s so smart, he melted the basement and made us all run. Not on purpose, he’s a kindhearted boy. Except when he’s sending dirty pictures to his friends on the Internet and getting my children killed!”

A school project gone wrong. The secret to a doomsday weapon in a teen’s head. Michael’s wanted alive in Moscow, Peking, Tehran. Wanted dead by Tel Aviv! Even Washington’s grown a little peevish with this All-American boy. With sinister spies and comely assassins on the prowl, can Mike’s family find a way to safety?

Cesar Sanderson

Pixie Noir

You can’t keep a tough Pixie down…

Lom is a bounty hunter, paid to bring magical creatures of all descriptions back Underhill, to prevent war with humans should they discover the strangers amongst them. Bella is about to find out she’s a real life fairy princess, but all she wants to do is live peacefully in Alaska, where the biggest problems are hungry grizzly bears. He has to bring her in. It’s nothing personal, it’s his job…

“They had almost had me, that once. I’d been young and foolish, trying to do something heroic, of course. I wouldn’t do that again anytime soon. Now, I work for duty, but nothing more than is necessary to fulfill the family debt. I get paid, which makes me a bounty hunter, but she’s about to teach me about honor. Like all lessons, this one was going to hurt. Fortunately, I have a good gun to fill my hand, and if I have to go, she has been good to look at.”

Dave Freer, author of Dog and Dragon, The Forlorn, and many others, says: “To those of you who thought there was nothing new worth reading in Fantasy: Cedar Sanderson’s Pixie Noir proves that you are wrong. The author plainly knows and loves her setting and characters, and this carries through to the reader. The pace picks up throughout, so save this book for a weekend, or you’ll be complaining about a lack of sleep at work. A very good read!”

This post will have a lot of typos.  No, this is not because I’m trying to make them, but because I have a blinding headache due to allergies.  Par tof this is that we’ve been sorting/culling books to get rid of.

Because of that, and because of my finally sending out Witchfinder to Subscribers and being mid setting it up to print, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to how things change.

One of the sets of books I’m getting rid of (a lot of them low-value and going to thrift shop) are books on a certain time period.  you can go through my research bookcases and find piles of books on the Russian Revolution, for instance, because this was something I read a lot of for a while.  or about ancient Rome, or about…

My younger son said, “Why did you buy all these books if you weren’t going to write something set there?”

Well, part of the reason is that I didn’t know what I was going to write.  As a young writer and very interested in historical stuff, I was reading to see if some place interested me ENOUGH.  I started my explanation to him with “Imagine a time before the Internet” which, of course, was a joke, but on the other hand wsn’t.  nowadays if I’m just trying a time period on and considering whether I might, maybe, eventually, want to write something set there, I just go on the internet and, for the more recent times, get bios from gutenberg (which has them going back to the seventeenth century.)

What that means is I suppose that new writers won’t ruin themselves on books they will read but never use. And what it means for this one middle aged writer is that I have a ton of books to get rid of.  (which probably doesn’t help the allergies, because of all the dust.)

But these are macro changes.  There are others.  As Witchfinder nears publication, I’m looking at how THAT changed markedly.  The more I look at it, the less I’m going to put it up for 9.99.  Yes, it’s a massive book and the trade paperback is going to be extraordinarily expensive — for those of you who insist on reading on paper.  On the other hand, accessibility to the book seems to go down when you go over 6.99 and this being my first indie publication in novel form, I’d like to reach people.

Of course, I had planned on 9.99 because that’s what the traditional publishers were doing and I wanted this novel to blend in with my other ones.  Well, that’s different now, so it will be 6.99.  Which means the ones who subscribed ahead don’t get as much of a price break.  On the other hand, most of you crazy people sent me up to ten times that amount — and I thank you — so it’s not as though you were doing it for the bargain.

But that’s how fast things change in indie.  One year and it’s all different.

I have everything set up to take it live paper/e on the fifth.  Until that time, if you send $6 you save a buck, and I get more money.  Just use the button on the side.  (You’ll also get two versions, earc and final.  I don’t know how much difference there will be but I garantee I’ll find typos.)

Okay.  I now am taking my aching head on a quick clean of the house.  Rogue Magic tomorrow, and I promise to get some stuff in the subscriber space soon.  As soon as I catch up on the deadlines, I WILL update that regularly.

Now to do cat boxes and vacuum until the aspiring has time to attack the headache.  Sorry for short and odd post.  (But then I’m short and odd!)

I have sent out earcs for Witchfinder (I’m calling them that, because, I know you (and love you) and know that despite the fact it’s gone through 3 copy-edits, you’ll find some typos and send me lists, and so I’ll have a cleaner version later.)  I’m hoping to have the official release on the fifth of next month, paper and ebook.

Until then two things: if you paid for it or are a subscriber and didn’t get a copy send me an email at goldport press at gmail dot com — no spaces, and the usual replacements.  I couldn’t figure out how to build the mailing list so I did it manually.  This means some of you lucky people will get three emails and some none!  Also, it’s been so long your email might have changed.

Also, if you didn’t pay for it, but are a subscriber, you’re getting it anyway, because well… really, I haven’t been giving you any free stuff recently, and you really should get something for your trouble.

The last year wasn’t planned and … well, it’s getting better, right?

Another post tomorrow.  Right now my eyes are crossing from copying emails.

Come closer. Yes, you. Come here. Listen to me. Do you hear what I’m saying? Do you understand it?

I bet you don’t, or not quite as I mean it.

Look, a recent alleged science fiction read had nanocites that adapted people to speak a universal language.

Why is it that languages get no respect when it comes to world building and future projection? Oh, it’s not a science in the sense it’s not predictive. (No, I don’t even care if some colleges consider them almost a science – mine did) but it’s a science in the sense of analysis collection and observation.

Is it because we don’t have math? (We do, you know? It’s just weird and done with different symbols.) Or is it because to paraphrase Pride and Prejudice “Any savage can talk?”

I do understand the unique difficulties of writing future language or past language for that matter. Since our goal is to tell a story and attract readers, we really shouldn’t make the language itself an opaque barrier between ourselves and the reader. To an extent I did that with Shakespeare (unwittingly, though over-immersion.)

I understand the … convenience of things like the Star Trek universal translators, or the nanocites that give you competence in language.

It also – unless you posit some way in which to decode the brain itself, and even then – is one of the most impossible things ever.

I’m tired of stories where you get a universal translator. Or even stories where you get some sort of injection that suddenly makes you understand and speak the other language.

You can do that – sort of – in a magical world, because if you have people who can conjure stuff out of nothing, and people who can change into dragons or lions, there is absolutely no reason you shouldn’t be able to also to get to that space behind the eyes and change people’s definition of this or that, or affix new words to it.

But in a scientific world… well…

Most of us don’t consider language anything special – at least not in terms of being able to talk. We started doing it too young to think of it as a great achievement, or to remember the process of it. In fact, unless you have learned a foreign language after ten, you probably have no idea how involved a process it is.

What you are learning is not so much new words to affix to the definitions you know but new definitions to go along with them, and also – due to the subtle miracle of syntax – new ways to manipulate the symbols that those words are into new thoughts, that sometimes could not be thought in any other language.

David Pascoe incidentally, while blogging about his grandfather’s passing mentioned calling him by the Swedish word Mofar – mother’s father. Part of the reason for this – correct me if I’m wrong, because I haven’t used Swedish in 30 years, and when I last did use it it was to translate instructions for assembling and operating big industrial weaving machines (which is why I learned it, since the area I come from is heavily textile and imports machinery from Sweden.) – if I remember correctly is that Swedish has no word for “grandfather” or “grandmother” as such, so it creates port-manteau ones. (In the same way, if I remember correctly, just like in the English of Shakespeare’s time “grandchild” is the same word as nephew or niece.)

The lack of a word or agglutination to another group changes the symbol in the head. In English you can say you have four grandparents but not so in Swedish. And if you go into the English of Shakespeare’s time, a man might have felt greater affection for his granddaughter than his niece, but he would have trouble thinking of them as different categories.

The other day (okay, three years ago) while cruising ebay for a gift for a friend who loves the “old style” Portuguese towels, (which I think are here called guest towels) which are made of linen and heavily embroidered, I came across a listing for “Portuguese towel” “Linen” and “embroidered” and I thought “Well, that’s a little pricey but not crazy” then looked at the dimensions. It was 3 meters by two meters.

At which point I burst out laughing and sent the seller a note, “You mean tablecloth, not towel.”

You see, in Portuguese the two are toalha. Possibly because when such niceties as household linens were introduced, they were both lengths of embroidered cloth, and the use they were put to might vary. The answer I got back was a frustrated “We did that? DUH. No wonder it’s just sitting.”

I told them not to feel bad, because when I’m really tired, I will do that too. And I don’t actually think in Portuguese and translate. (I haven’t since my second year in English class. You can’t speak a language competently while you do that. I did use to think in five or so languages concurrently, flipping from one to the other depending on what I was doing. But I broke that habit – forcibly – so I could write more fluently in English. Yep, the things we do for love.)

But the problem is that somewhere on the very back of my mind, the first time I heard the concept of something that could be used to wipe yourself and/or to lay on the table while eating, the concept was fused under the same word and the word resembles towel. In the same way I’ll spell English in a phonetic LATIN way when I can’t even see straight as far as the screen, from being so tired, I’ll flip to a united concept of household cloth stuff. And let me tell you, ladies, gentlemen and microbes, there is nothing – absolutely nothing – to compare to the expression on my son’s face when I tell him to go put the towel on the dining room table while getting ready for a holiday dinner.

Which brings us to the nanocites someone had injected into her character to make her understand alien – not even human, but alien, languages. Pfui. That’s all. Yeah, the nanocites could, if we grant the usual sf-stretch give someone basic and obvious concepts that all humans share. Things like fingers and toes, and house and food. Maybe. Those concepts, even among humans are capable of more or lesser parsing.

For instance, another thing I tend to do if caught off guard is tell people I have twenty fingers. Why? Because fingers and toes are all one word – dedos – in Portuguese. You add the distinctions with a phrase. Toes are “dedos do pe” and thumbs for that matter are dedos polegares. (This is why I sympathized with FoxFier’s statement that she has five fingers and a thumb. It’s the type of thing I’d like to do.)

On the other hand, Portuguese will have words for things English doesn’t. No, I can’t think of any of them off the top of my head, but that’s because I rarely think in Portuguese anymore, and also it’s early and I’m on my first cup of tea. Get me in Portugal and serving as translator for my husband and kids, and yeah, I’ll stumble on a thousand of them.

By the way and as an aside, this is as good a place as any to dispose of the myth that English is the most difficult language ever to learn or that it has the largest vocabulary, or even that it’s the only language that borrows words. I beg you please to give up on that before I rolls my eyes so hard that they become cat toys again. I’ve heard the same boast made by native speakers of every language on the planet. And every language on the planet borrows like mad. Unless you come from a small and very isolated, and very culturally backward linguistic group who hasn’t had any contact with anything since hunting-gathering, your language will be 90% borrowed and clobbered together from spare parts. Once, after I’d said this in a writers mailing list I used to belong to, someone came back with the clincher that no, English has MORE words than any other language, and more of them are bothered. First, they were assuming that the difficulty in learning a language is vocabulary and not structure. Maybe it is for some people. It certainly never was for me. Second, and more importantly they are confusing a refreshing lack of linguistic chauvinism with having more words. Yes, English will unabashedly add the words to their dictionary once they’re in use. Foreign speakers will borrow English (and other) words just as much. They just don’t admit to it. They’re too proud and old to admit to petty thieving, so the word will be used with abandon but will never make it to the formal language or the dictionaries. For instance, my dad tried to explain to me a highly technical plumbing term he called beepash. It took me a second to figure out what he was pronouncing and then I assured him I knew what a bypass is. He didn’t believe me. In Portuguese it IS a technical term of plumbers and surgeons.

Now I know France is like this too. I don’t know enough of the culture to swear to German or the other more recondite languages – but in Portugal you have generations of these “bastard words” that everyone uses but which are not in any language. It can amount to a whole different dialect that changes from village to village and at a greater level from region to region. Suffice it to say that when I went to elementary school, I had to learn my first foreign language, since the teacher didn’t allow dialect in the class. And it means you could learn Portuguese for years, but if you’re dropped into a region where people aren’t aware you’re foreign and trying to speak standard language for your comfort, you might not understand a single word. My Italian teacher said the dialect of my village reminded him of the Italian of Milan more than it did of straight Portuguese. I think he was trying to be insulting.

Now, given all of that in linguistic confusion between humans and often between humans whose language comes from a common ancestral language… How can there be a “universal translator” or even nanocites that change the way you understand languages? Considering how difficult it is for me to step back and think in Portuguese – it feels exactly like going mad. The thought moves in circles – I think the later would be an excellent way to drive someone insane. (Um… I smell an Analog story.)

Yes, I can see where it would be an excellent device to get the language to move along and not hang up the story. But if you’re going to use handwavium, then the universal translator is better than something that will actually mess with the brain. Just be aware you’re using something that is as unlikely as FTL and maybe more, because it involves messing with the space behind the eyes, where the prototypes of the world exist. And throw in an error or two just for fun.

Months ago, in a moment of boredom, my husband and I amused ourselves by playing with Google translate (which btw is miles better than the preceding Altavista, where the woman who did the hardcover cover for Draw One In The Dark ran my proposal to decide to draw a cover about a zombie who wore a seashell (I’m going to guess pearl of heaven has something to do with seashell in Spanish. I don’t speak Spanish, though I can of course understand vast swathes of it) and fought dragons in Dracula’s castle. I mean, judging by the cover.) to translate something simple like “Hello, good morning, would you like breakfast” into Portuguese and back into English. What we ended up with was something like “Good Morning, you are breakfast.”

Now, I’m just going to guess this type of error might cause some diplomatic trouble for aliens communicating with humans.

Good. After all we’re writers and we thrive on, as older son puts it, hurting imaginary people.

You know what they say – okay, they don’t but they shouldn’t – if you can’t fix it, hang a flag on it and call it art.

But do stop talking about learning languages as if it were something as easy as a contact lens to change the color of your eyes. In humans at least, language is not an organic process. I do realize in the States languages are taught badly enough that it seems you have to be born speaking a language to ever be fluent. Trust me, you don’t.

Now stop making me roll my eyes. It always comes up snake eyes anyway…

Writing something so that it is understood as close to my thought as possible requires more than translation – it requires simile and image and attention to the sound to create a mood and a cadence, so that you can feel/see what I saw. That’s the art of the novelist.

Granted, most people don’t think of word use as art but that’s a rant for another day.

I’ve spoken long enough. Let those who can hear understand me.

Stop short changing language. It’s more complex than you think.

I’m tired. It’s been a long day, and I was writing and doing battle with formatting, and I’m exhausted.

If we’re going to cast this blog post in the context of yesterday’s example of a really cool status report, the forces of evil are definitely in the ascendant this week.   Oh, I’m battling them and getting work done, but it’s taking its toll on me.

This being spring break, on Monday we went to see the elephant – no, nothing metaphorical about it. I took older son to see the elephant. He likes elephants. I think they’re related or something.

It was cold and a little strange, because all the animals were either asleep or eating. But it was fun because it was the first time in… oh, a good year, that the Hoyts were out all together, all at the same time. There is nothing that isn’t fun when we go out anywhere. Our life tends to take a really odd turn when we start talking. What I mean is, I sometimes think our kids view life upside and sideways and we… we aid and abet them.

When they were very little, they used to play a “spaceship game.” Being the children of science fiction writers, their game was a little more coherent than the average children’s game. That is, as older son conceived of it, and younger son added to it, when he started talking, there was an actual bit of world building, and they kept logs or our expeditions.

The conceit was that the house was a spaceship, piloted by a family (ours) which, with a lot of other families, went out and explored new planets and reported back to an explorer corps.

If you can’t see how this made every day life a continuous adventure, you’re not my kids.

If we were under a severe ail storm, it was fire from the native planet the spaceship was orbiting. The car was the away-pod. Trips to the grocery store were sample collecting. Trips to museums/parks/amusement parks were formal visits to other planets.

Our writers’ group meetings were encounters among the explorer families.

And there was a pseudo military structure and a path of promotion. I suspect Robert still has – somewhere – a list of every rank and the colors associated with it. Sometimes I was informed I’d been promoted or disciplined, but mostly we just went about every day in a cloud of the kids talking about the strange and exciting other world they created where we went.

Sometimes I wonder what other people thought was happening – but I didn’t care, because, unless I was driving and they got in a fight over something stupid – I enjoyed the stories they told.

When we moved out of our last house, they wrote decommissioning papers for the spaceship and stuck it through a crack between a closet and a wall. I wonder if some future remodeler will find it and be utterly puzzled.

The game died shortly thereafter, because they were when we moved 8 and 13 and starting to write, and well… living in a live role playing game gets old, I guess, even if it’s your family.

But we still can’t go out without coming up with ten ideas for stories.

It’s an odd way to live.

Sometimes I feel a little guilty. I wonder if we’ve twisted them out of all normal intercourse. We weren’t trying to. We were just living.

And sometimes… sometimes I think that there is an innate need for a rich fantasy life in humans, and that it’s the other people, who can’t create their own, who are deficient. Those of us who can live half-immersed in dream rarely feel a need to destroy other people or tell them how to live. We can make our own music.

The bad side, of course, if that – as they’ve found – there is an edge between dream and reality. For the kids to become writers – or really active in anything – they had to leave the Live Rople Playing Game behind. I miss it, and I know the do too, but the imaginary world intruded on the real world, and as they wanted to learn about the real world, they had to push the imaginary one back and make it less prominent.

Weirdly, a lot of the people I find who are truly embittered or who feel like the world is totally unfair, have never to that. Not really. They live in the world as they wish it were, superimposing it on reality by an effort of will, and if reality deviates, it is reality that is wrong and must adapt, not them.

I feel a lot of what we see, particularly weird arguments – I read on a blog that China is not socialist. It’s a mixture of communism and capitalism. In other words, hot ice and strangely warm snow. (Rolls eyes.) China is of course socialist with a strong component of state-capitalism. Or in other words, fascist, which is a crappy regimen but marginally more stable than communism. (They go poor slower. Though since China like Germany has a racial component… never mind.) – and defensive maneuvers including calling someone the worst person in the world for not agreeing with them, it’s an attempt to keep that game going, to keep the imagined world safe and cozy and unmixed with any harsh reality.

The thing is that it’s possible now – more than at any other time – for large portions of the population to live in that sort of dream. It’s not just that all their friends believe the same but that we’re a rich enough society that a vast part of it is insulated from the realities of life as expressed by Heinlein “Root, hog or die.”

Or even from the reality that the balmy lack of wars we’ve been experiencing these last 50 years or so (we’ve had little wars, but no world wide conflagration) is a result of the Pax Americana, and of us being the major superpower. The idea that the rest of the world will be peaceful and happy the moment we withdraw is more of a fantasy than my kids’ old space game. (This doesn’t mean I advocate foreign adventurism, though at times it is inevitable, but that I believe we should be bolstering our defenses, not tearing them donw.)

Or from the – harsh – facts that books, games, stories of all sorts, even reports of news are not a way to “change the world” or “make the world a better place” (which at any rate brings up the questions “change into what?” “Why?” “Make it a better place for whom?” “how?”) but ways to entertain people and to provide them with the sort of ludic interludes they enjoyed as children.

Looking at both economic and international news, I very much feel the need to escape. And I know I’m not alone.

Will some of these things have a component of utopia or prescription? Almost always. We write what we are.

BUT would following sf writers’ ideas lead to a “better tomorrow?” Oh, please. Sometimes I think from the UN to nuclear disarmament, to Obamacare and not forgetting both the new ice-age and anthropogenic global warming, the surest way to make a good decision is to go against what my people advise.

This is because what makes a good book, or a good immersive reality, is much simpler than the real world. If you factored in everything that works in a real world, you’d not have a novel, you’d have soup.

Take the kids space game – it was lots of fun, and I liked hearing them – but who was that central authority? And why were they dispatching families with kids to dangerous areas. I don’t think it was an utopia, Toto.

So it’s easier to simply, to fasten onto an idea as a plot device.

The problem is that a lot of my colleagues, and a lot of the fans, and a lot of people who live in the world of ideas become blinkered by the fantasy reality and unable to see the real world.

Even I have to fight against it, to remind myself that no, unlike the Bradbury story Almost the End of The World, a collapse won’t take us back to a simpler time, and simpler abilities won’t be in demand. Collapses don’t usually subtract tech, they just make the real world unreliable.

And are we headed for one? Almost for sure. What I mean is, the way we’re printing currency, we’ll pay for it.

OTOH something could happen. A miracle. We could discover the equivalent of Heinlein’s shipstone, that is, free, unlimited energy. Or… something else. History could take a side turn. And we might escape the worst.

We can’t tell. This is why making predictions about the future is so difficult.

And why the dream is so easy.

The dream is fine, as an amusement, and I depend on making a living from it, and I read for escape, just like the rest of you.

But it’s not real.

Sometimes, like Terry Pratchett’s Tiffany Aching, you need to open your eyes, then open your eyes again, and make an effort to keep seeing reality, even when it hurts.

It’s not a comfortable thing to do. But it’s the only way to stay one step ahead of the future and survive it.  More importantly, it’s the only way to make sure we have some control over our own fate and the fates of those we love, instead of letting things come out of nowhere — like my promotions and demotions in the space game.

It’s very important to remember what’s reality and what’s fantasy, even when we feel the need to escape to stay sane.

*Oh, this will tell you how sleepy I was when I wrote this two hours ago — I forgot to announce — A Few Good men is one of five finalists for the Prometheus Award.*

Years ago my husband worked for a company where the maintenance department put out the most hilarious weekly reports I’ve ever read. I don’t remember what the department is called but let’s say it was Systems Engineering. The reports were called Systems Engineering Versus The Forces of Evil and then had subtitles, along the lines of “The Week We Were Almost Eaten By Dragons.”

Then the entire report was written as though it were a superhero adventure and usually finished with the line “and so, holding hands and skipping all the way we defeated X” with X being whatever the menace for the week was.

Needless to say, being possibly the world’s least techy person, I had zero interest in the actual technical issues of the company, but I loved those reports. They were written like a rousing adventure story and – more importantly – they told the story of a team fighting continuous menaces and prevailing.

Besides the fact that this teaches us that writing is not a matter of “come up with a good story” but of how well you tell the story you have, even if normally it would glaze the eyes of an hyperactive dragon, there is another thing there: the idea of the team that works together against a well-nigh insurmountable challenge.

Which is a prevailing myth and desire of mankind.

Leading to us getting people in here telling us that “socialism” is any cooperation/group work and therefore extolling the virtues of a system that at best leads to the sort of soft/slow decay we see in Europe and at worst… well, at worst it fills mass graves. (It needs only for them to say that socialism is just another name for the things we choose to do together – I’m sure they believe it, which is why it’s important to set things straight.)

In between lies the enforced group work of schools which is in fact more akin to socialism than voluntary cooperation.

I’m tired of the confusion between voluntary teams and forced teams (including but not limited to government-enforced and school-authority enforced.)

I was about to say the two are as akin as ice cream and spackle, but it’s worse than that. The two are as akin as lemonade and anti-freeze.

In all the years I had to do group work in school, it worked exactly once. I was in a form where I had four friends, and where we were more or less inseparable. We were also the sort of dream team that companies, governments and, yes, schools, keep trying to assemble, in that one of us was good at math, and one at art, and one at writing, and one at real-world horse sense, and one at presentations.

Now, we were all fairly good at all of those – it was that sort of form – but each of us, naturally and by inclination, preferred one of the other of the specialties. When group work was announced we immediately claimed our group as a group and we were well known to be an unit, so teachers rarely tried to break us up.

Was that work more fun/less onerous/better results than learning individually? You bet. We routinely astonished both the teachers and ourselves with what we could achieve in terms of both content and presentation.

Kind of like the department at my husband’s company, we faced the forces of evil hand in hand and skipping all the way, and we won every time. (BTW, that department, not coincidentally, had hit one of those happy situations, where everyone got along.)

Beyond those two happy years, after which my friends and I fell apart/left for different courses, etc, before and after there were “tolerable” group works. This is where you all have roughly the same goal, and you are more or less evenly matched, and so you can pull in the same direction, give or take a few inches either way.

This work is rarely more efficient than doing everything on your own, but to be fair it’s not less efficient. And if you’re a gregarious soul, or at least if you don’t dislike your team mates, it will be pleasant enough. I think all of us have been in teams like that, in school and work. It works. And sometimes you keep the friendships for years after – but it adds nothing to the product over just having each of you break out a piece of the project and do it on his/her own.

And then there is what most group-work/socialism is. An authority set above you will assign groups, sometimes according to the authority’s idea of what you can/should do, and sometimes utterly at random.

One favorite method when I was in school was to go by alphabetic order. As in socialism, you are not allowed to say “No, thank you, I will undertake to provide for myself if you stop stealing my time/property/individual effort.” You have to play.

Often too, just in socialism, teachers do it with an eye to redistribution. If you’re the class’s best pupil, you find the teacher’s “random” assignment sets you in a group with dullards, laggards and incurable bums. And since their result is yours, you have to work three times as hard so that the result is what it would have been if you’d all pulled. In the end you feel like Horse in animal farm, and should just be glad that they can’t send you to the glue factory.

It is from this last method that most smart/hard working students learn their “group work” method, which is to say “Please don’t help me. I’ll do the work, we’ll divide the results.”

Of course, this often leads to resentment, because humans are like that, and you often get the least capable student trying to “help”—by which you should read wresting the project in the most moronic possible direction.

But none of this equates state-imposed group work, aka socialism. Since societies don’t have teachers, whether benevolent or malevolent, and since politicians tend to be people who rarely have the ability to do anything else, we end up in a situation where the state has the vague idea that groups are good and that cooperation is good and that we should all look after each other. And then it tries to assign it, just like the teacher with a political agenda assigns group work by combining the hard-working and the incurably lazy in one group.

Oh, sure, it might start out – often does, and in Scandinavian countries this sort of worked for decades – with the most capable saying “Here, let me do the work. Just get out of my way.”

But first that is as akin to true cooperation and the benefits thereof as … poison is to food. And second, the most capable members sooner or later get tired of pulling the whole load. On top of which that resentment that the least capable members of the group feel? Yeah, in a society-wide group that becomes a true resentment. Even if the material difference is very little, those who are willing to work hard can make much out of that little. They will use their resources better and live better lives. And the resentment explodes into envy. There is no socialist state that ever achieves perfect “equality” and therefore class strife can always be invoked to bring about more “equality.”

What is broken here (and in the work in assigned groups, incidentally) is treating humans as interchangeable widgets. Since humans aren’t interchangeable widgets (they can be equal in dignity and before the law – and imho should be – but they will never be EQUAL. Even my sons, children of the same mother and the same father, with the same rough education, have almost diametrically opposite abilities and very divergent interests) this comes to grief, over and over and over again. Inequality is always present because humans aren’t perfectly equal. And when you hold to the ideal that all humans should be alike and work in this homogeneous group, you are making envy a virtue. Because if we’re all supposed to be alike, to be envious is to “resent inequality.” You are justifying the most vile feelings in a human being and, incidentally, removing all incentive to do better.

Just as in group work, when you pair people of widely different abilities and expect each to do an equal share and thereby you justify the “hurt” feelings of those who aren’t allowed to contribute their “idea” – I once had to fight tooth and nail against a group member in a class translation project, who not only refused to believe the term for fried sticks of potato in the US is French Fries, but who had decided to die on the hill of calling them “Friend Potatoes.” (no, not fried. Friend. Because it was his opinion, and his opinion was as good as mine, and it was far less ludicrous sounding than French Fries, and never mind if I had lived in the US for a year.) – in socialism you justify the “hurt” feelings and the feeling of exploitation (enhanced by the whole concept of finite pie) of a lot of people who don’t know how to utilize the resources they do have.

The surprise is not that it ends in soft decay. It is a testimony to the essential goodness of mankind that – at least in this more benign and less authoritarian form, what I’d call smiley-face socialism – it doesn’t always result in open and violent massacres, at least until it slides one way or the other into authoritarianism. (The least said about the soft massacre of denied opportunity, of destroyed lives, of dwindling resources and of denied treatment for less useful members of society, the better – but one must admit it’s much better than the shot in the back of the head and the mass grave.)

But at the heart of it, it is a dehumanizing ideology which bears no resemblance to voluntary cooperation. In voluntary cooperation, even if your skills are widely different, or at vastly different levels, each member chooses to come in and do the best he/she can. It is assumed they’re not all going to do the same and they’re not interchangeable.

And the results are often sublime. And can’t be forced.  No matter what teacher, bureaucrat or petty tyrant thinks they could and should be.

Friends Don’t Let Friends Abuse Science — A guest post by Kate Paulk

The weekend before last was Lunacon, where one of my panels was about science, ignorance and power. It turned into a fascinating discussion of the issues raised by the often breathtaking ignorance of science in this country (the USA if anyone is asking) as well as suggestions on improving the situation. The latter were few and far between because, well… it’s systemic.

Some of the problems include teachers who know next to nothing about how science works, a near-complete lack of a requirement for teacher trainees to learn science, journalists who are equally misinformed so any reporting reads more like the Hollywood version (and the ignorance there is equally impressive), politicians who are damn near universally lawyers and have no problems lying to their constituents to keep getting elected and of course bureaucrats who are much more concerned with keeping their position than with anything related to science. Not that this is a complete list. There isn’t space for that in a single post.

As for solutions, well, buggered if I know. And I am a scientist, if rather out of practice (geologist, if you’re wondering, although technically my software engineering degree also counts. I’ve had an… interesting worklife).

See, possibly the biggest problem isn’t the obvious one. It’s that scientist use words everyone else uses, but they have their own special meanings for them. Or – and this is more common – the scientific meanings got broadened into other things when they leaked out into general use. This isn’t a bad thing per se. It’s going to happen in a living language. But it means that people have to be taught how to translate between science-speak and regular-speak.

Simple, yes?

Well, no. See, there’s a hell of a lot of people claiming to be scientists who don’t act like it, because underneath everything else, science isn’t a body of knowledge or a set of defined facts and rules (although of course science has plenty of those and they’re important). It’s a way of thinking and one which both heads of the power-hungry hydra that is the modern American two party system abuse shamelessly.

The first important thing is that science is never “settled”. Science is about observing facts, searching for patterns, making predictions from those patterns and then trying to disprove the predictions. If – to take an example – the pro-Global Warming faction was actually engaging in science, they would be searching for data that disproved their theories.

Oh, and a “theory” in science does not mean the same thing as a theory in general discourse. To be a scientific theory, it has to be mathematically rigorous and disprovable. Otherwise it’s a hypothesis (aka educated guess). Scientific laws describe behavior that is sufficiently well understood nobody expects to ever see it disproved – although since Einstein published the Theory of Relativity, it’s become clear that laws need to also specify the environment in which they apply, since Newton’s laws break down under conditions that you won’t find in normal life.

Of course, this is an idealized view, but it’s the ideal that all scientists should be aiming for. Government money – particularly large amounts of Government money – tends to shut down the desire to reach the ideals. So does corporate money, but corporate entities usually don’t have the amount of power a government wields. At the same time, this stuff is expensive, but without it you don’t have things like antibiotics, flushing toilets, internets and so on. It’s not particularly glamorous either, and usually doesn’t look at all like you see on TV. It’s more like Dirty Jobs visiting Mythbusters (the Mythbusters team does good, sound science, but they don’t show the hours of tedium that goes behind what they do screen).

So… some of the science abuse I’ve seen from politicians of all stripes:

• cherrypicking while claiming to be “reality-based”. This happens a lot and all of them do it. There are leftist politics who mock conservatives who deny that evolution is possible while ignoring the very real biological differences between male and female and between various ethnic groups. There are rightist politics who have no problems with antibiotics and flu shots while claiming that evolution is impossible. And a whole range of equally ignorant nonsense.
• ignoring evidence that doesn’t fit the favored theory/ideology. Again, all the bastards do it. Repeatedly. Of course, they do it with everything else, not just science – probably because they’re mostly lawyers, and that’s part of what lawyers are supposed to do. Unfortunately, it means that instead of any kind of sensible behavior our political wannabe masters lurch erratically from idiot position to idiot position making total asses of themselves. Not that they care as long as they get reelected.
• faking the evidence. Of course this is another traditional lawyerly activity, since the goal is to win without getting caught (yes, I’m a little bit cynical. Deal.)
• mathematical illiteracy. Dear god the mathematical illiteracy. We have a Congress, a Senate, an Executive, and a Judiciary stuffed to the gills with people who do not /do/ math. Is it any wonder they can’t tell the difference between debt and deficit? And of course, with all the branches of science, math underlies it somewhere. The relationship is pretty clear with physics, but there’s plenty to be found in geology, chemistry, biology, and such. You just need to know where to look. (Here’s a clue. If it gets called a science and the most important parts don’t have any math? It’s not a science no matter what it calls itself. Ditto if there’s no observation or extrapolation and testing against predictions from observations.).
• selective blindness. This isn’t quite the same as cherrypicking – it’s more ignoring certain areas because they’ll be too controversial. This is, for instance, why there is buggerall real research into ethnic group IQ score differentials. Those concerned (and again, all sides of politics have failures here) are terrified that they might find something biological in the difference and that would be raaaaaaacist (no it wouldn’t. Facts are not biased. They are what they are. If there is an ethnicity based component to intelligence, then that’s how it works). This particular example is a long and controversial post all by itself, so I’ll leave the matter there, but remember, that’s just one area of selective blindness. There are many, many others.

So. What to do? The politicians and their media friends need to be called out on their ignorance and abuse of science every time. No matter what. Mock them. Show them facts. Hell, shove the facts up their noses and down their throats. If they choke, so much the better (metaphorically speaking. I don’t advocate actually choking the bastards. You might get a worse one as a replacement).

*No, not abandoning Elf Blood, but I might have to take a week, after I finish Through Fire, race through it, write it through, then post it in installments — I might even be evil and offer you advance peek for a couple of dollars ;) — I find that writing a novel in my work a day and two chapters of two different novels a weekend is driving me NUTS.  It’s like having one arm too many, if that makes any sense.  Anyway, I don’t expect to be absent for more than a week or two, but DO indulge me.*

Yesterday I answered a series of interview questions for Literary Lunes Magazine. This happened with a lot of other “business catching up” which had to be done before I go to Portugal, since there I’ll only have intermittent internet access, when I visit my brother’s house. My mom appears to think the internet is the work of the devil or something.

Anyway, among those interviews there was one I’ve never been asked, and which UTTERLY baffled me. “What is you muse?”

I had no idea how to answer that, so I went flip – which, you know, is what I do when I have no clue what people are talking about. I said if I had a muse, she’d wear a toga and lift aloft a clothes iron, because I do most of my ideation while ironing or doing other boring, routine tasks.

I’m still bothered by what they mean. Perhaps they asked “who” (I don’t remember) but that only makes it more baffling. When I wrote poetry, this was easy, since I usually wrote series of poems to someone, normally my crush of the time. (Sigh. Time is the enemy of us all. The young man I wrote 200 sonnets for between the ages of 14 and 18 is now completely bald and looks… well, nothing like he used to. This hurts more than aging personally. Who was it who said something about time making a mockery of our loves?)

But I don’t write poetry and I don’t write straight romance (I don’t write gay romance, either – I mean, as you know very well that I don’t write romance on its own, not as part of a bigger plot.) So the question of a muse doesn’t arise. Or does it?

Of course I fall a little in love with my characters, but not that sort of love. It’s more the love of parent for child, or the love of creator for creation.

Sometimes a book does center around one character, though. It’s not – I think – so much a matter of “love” or even “muse” but more a matter of following the pain. I write to the pain. I go where the pain is.

I think this is because I write to resolve pain – to resolve conflicts within myself that can’t be resolved any other way, starting, inevitably, with the fight between mind and body, but twisting to a lot of other things. And if you’re scratching your head and wondering what I mean by pain – to take an example, I know that I’m not the only one who left her native land behind. Half the members of the Mad Genius Club have. And I’ll admit I wanted to be here, and I’m happy where I live and with my family and friends here. But at the same time, every time I go back, I remember I severed a piece of myself and left it behind – a whole parallel history that was more likely to happen, the person I’d be if I’d married someone there and lived there. It hurts a little not to be able to be in two places at once, no matter how much you love where you are.

But I’m not alone. Even if you never left your birth place and your birth family, I bet the world has changed so much around you that your childhood is as irretrievably lost as my own. It’s part of being a physical, mortal creature caught in the coils of advancing time. No human being deserves that, and all of us live through it. And there’s no way to resolve it, to come to terms with it. Except through art. At least for me. And my art is mostly my writing (the rest being on the lines of a hobby.)

So I go where the pain is. I find the pain in the character, the situation, the world, and the tension that comes from that pain, and I go in and wind the plot around the pain till catharsis happens.

This is the closest thing to a “muse” I can admit to, and it makes me sound like I keep a closet full of whips and chains. (I don’t, though the cats sometimes make me wish for a whip and a chair. Yeah, I know they’d just play with the leather strips.)

So what do you think they meant by “muse”? It made me feel completely out of step, like there was an entire world of writing out there that I not only didn’t know, but couldn’t fathom. After twenty six years of writing, that is a pretty scary idea.

Does everyone but me have a muse? What is a muse in this context? Do you have one?

*Crossposted at According To Hoyt *

*This post of course should have gone up yesterday, but the mollusc tribe had a medical emergency (an unfortunate lot of that going around.  Please, if you’re the praying kind, say a prayer for the health of the molluscs.)  And then last night I mentioned to the husband and kids that the Keira Knightly movie that calls itself Price and Prejudice was not actually the worst violation to canon.  Of course I had to prove this — so we watched the 1940s version with Lawrence Olivier who, mind you, made an admirable Darcy but the plotcostumesaccentssettingdialogue!  Oh, NO!  I’m not sure older son will ever forgive me making him see it.  (He’s almost as much of a Jane Austen aficionado as I am.) So, of course, the Chattering Hoyts TM were talking to the wee hours, I didn’t put promo post up, and I woke up late this morning.  Eh.-SAH*

Greetings, oh mighty Huns! My deepest apologies for the delay. In contrition, I bring you a collection of marvelous adventure stories this week! Accompany super heroes, lawmen, and soldiers as they protect truth and justice and their creators try to make a buck! In the interests of full disclosure*, I should note that I was involved in the production of In Time of Peril, though I am not the author. As always, future entries can (and should!) be sent to my email. Happy reading!
Jason Dyck, AKA The Free Range Oyster
Lord of the Oysterhaus, Mercenary Wordsmith, and Celebrated Healbot

* Once more, the FTC can bite my shiny metal tuchis.

C.J. Carella

New Olympus: The Armageddon Girl Companion

Welcome to a world where superheroes are real! Venture into Earth Alpha, the alternate history first featured in the novel Armageddon Girl. New Olympus features eight short stories set in different times and places.

“Deguello” – an American volunteer in the Spanish Civil War is caught between two dueling Neolympians.
“Visionary” – in 1938, a budding super-villain threatens the city of New York and only the efforts of several legendary heroes (and one pesky reporter) can stop him.
“The Red Baron’s Last Flight” – set during the last days of the Third Reich, Neo pilot Manfred Von Richthofen undertakes a desperate mission against the Allies.
“Golden Horde” – a group of young and inexperienced Neos find themselves cut off and surrounded during the First Asian War.
“Tripping” – four counterculture druggies go on one really bad trip.
“Hungry Love” – wherein college dropout Patricia Dark and the Lurker meet and conceive the future Armageddon Girl.
“Freshman Class” – a group of candidates to the Freedom Legion face a deadly threat – from within their own ranks.
“Death At A Con” – a fanboy, a secret agent and a HeroiCon 2010 Guest Of Honor face a deadly Neo with the power to kill with his mind.

In addition to the stories, New Olympus has a history of Earth Alpha, an overview of the world, and notes on using the setting for roleplaying games.

JL Curtis

The Grey Man: -Vignettes-

The Bad Guys Don’t Stand a Chance
Texas rancher and lawman John Cronin knows what it means to be tough. A decorated Vietnam vet with connections to law enforcement agencies all around the world, he’s thwarted smugglers and drug plots across the globe with more than a few narrow escapes. Whether it’s a sniper competition or teaching the feds a thing or two about police work, Cronin doesn’t hesitate to pull the trigger. Of course, this slow-talking lawman’s biggest challenge yet might be when his granddaughter Jesse falls in love with a Marine. When drug smugglers stir up trouble in Cronin’s backyard and try to kill Jesse and her new beau, all hell breaks loose, and Cronin and his granddaughter are just the people to set things right.

T.K. Naliaka

In Time of Peril (The Decaturs)

Raised most of his life in the challenging expanses of West Africa, young Chris Decatur has returned to the United States for college, leaving behind dunes and nomads for the quiet halls of academia. Studying the American Revolution, Chris and his classmates embark on a reenactment trip to Upstate New York and New England. A week of hiking and learning, accompanied by a few reenactment volunteers and Chris’s knowledgeable father, Robert, should be an entertaining excursion.

But even the backwoods are no refuge from the dangers of the world. The group stumbles on a terrorist plot in the works and the students are taken hostage as the mysterious plan unfurls. As Chris faces an ordeal of brutal fighters, uncooperative classmates, deadly threats and a battle of wits against ruthless foes, Robert Decatur risks everything in a daring pursuit to rescue his son from the hands of evil.

In Time of Peril is a face-paced tale of adventure, loyalty, faith and courage, and is the first in a series of fiction novels following the adventures of the tenacious and unconventional Decatur family. This gripping novel was inspired by the likes of Louis L’Amour, Alistair McLean, and the heroism of Stephen Decatur.

*Sorry to be late.  WordPress kept crashing while I was trying to put this post up.*

The prequel to this — Witchfinder — has been removed.  I do promise to go through the copyedits as soon as humanly possible and send the advance copies to those who pre-ordered.  You’ll know when that’s eminent because I’ll remove scattered chapters from this blog.  I do hope to manage it next week, but I’m not promising as I’m still finishing a novel under contract to Baen. Meanwhile, if you donate $6 and note it in the field, you’ll get advance-subscribed to this novel.  I do, however, understand it can be a long time to wait, and if you want to, do so.  I will continue to post chapters here, roughly one a week.

NOTICE: For those unsure about copyright law and because there was a particularly weird case, just because I’m making the pre-first draft of my novel available to blog readers, it doesn’t mean that this isn’t copyrighted to me.  Rogue Magic as all the contents of this blog is © Sarah A. Hoyt 2013.  Do not copy, alter, distribute or resell without permission.  Exceptions made for ATTRIBUTED quotes as critique or linking to this blog. Credit for the cover image is © Ateliersommerland | Dreamstime.com

When It All Crashes Down

Wolfe Merritt, supervisor of Manufactories for Jonathan Blythe, Earl of Savage.

I didn’t like the looks of it.  Look, to be bluntly honest, if I had not been in fairyland before, I’d think I’d been plunged headfirst into hell.  Sometimes I wonder if the theological difference between the two is so much that it would admit of inserting a definition as thin as a paragraph between the two.

I read in an old book of my grandmothers that in the old days, before magic was properly systematized and rationalized, people thought that the people of the hills were same as the souls of the dead.  This to my purpose sounded about right.  Except that I hated to think of any mortal souls captured eternally in this land.  And also, considering how often humans – and I myself – mated with inhabitants of fairyland, it bore the unpleasant feel of necrophilia.

So I contented myself with thinking that while fairyland wouldn’t be hell, or at least not hell as we’d learnt about it in church, it shared some uncommonly uncomfortable properties with the mansions of the damned.  Among them that space could change around you while you stood perfectly still, and that the sane rules of reality you’d known your whole life were likely to change with no warning.  If you dropped an object, it was as likely to float up, or to hit you in the face as to fall down.  Unfortunately, it was equally likely to turn into a bird of prey and attack your nose.

I’d often thought that the reason the inhabitants of fairyland were stark raving mad – or appeared to be to humans is that this place was madness incarnate. It was in fact impossible to imagine living in this place for more than a few days and not going insane.  Which might be why it was said if you stayed in fairyland you’d end up belonging to it.  I’d always wondered if the eating or drinking the food of fairyland was any part of it, or if that was just a justification.  After all, if you stayed there long enough, you’d have to eat or perish.

None of which mattered, since on my last visit I’d been very careful to eat and drink nothing, and on this one and I had no intention of eating or drinking anything at all.

But as I stood there, and the landscape moved around me, as though I were running down a road from light to dark, I confess I felt chilled to the bone.  And not just because what had seemed a sunny day changed to dreary overcast, then to snow, and then to a frozen landscape, the trees on either side of the road frozen like penitents, their bare branches stretched out to an indifferent ice-pale sky.

No, what put ice in my gut and fear in my heart was the realization that the last time I’d been here I’d stayed sane for one reason only.  I’d been here to get Jimmy.

I was fully clad in my paternal love and my paternal rights, sure it was not only my duty but my right to get my son back from this infernal place, I might not have made it out.

I’d had a clear purpose and kept it mind, and that had seen me through and out the other side.

But now… I was here against my will and looking for nothing except to get out of here, and to get the lady Helen out of here and safely too.  What her brother would say…

I could imagine that in vivid detail, having been privileged to hear his grandfather rake a tenant over the coals, once.

And on cue, at my thoughts, I heard the lady Helen cry from the roiling darkness beneath the frozen trees, “Save me… Oh, save me!”

I grit my teeth.  You’d think a man my age would not be such a gudgeon, would you not?  First, it was unlikely to be the real Lady Helen, because it had come too pat on the wake of my thoughts about her.  And second, if it were the Lady Helen, how could I save her if I left this path.  More likely to be taken myself.

The path in the fairyland realms is a thing of magic, and it’s not so much a road as a protection.  You can be transported other places, or at least you can be made to believe you’re in other places.  But if you don’t step out of the path willingly, fairyland can’t touch you.

I remembered that and grit my teeth, even as a wind with grit in it blew all around me, ripping my clothes to tatters and abrading my skin.

“You dare intrude again, son of Adam?” a voice asked out of nowhere, a voice that was all breath.

The problem was this: even all breath, even without sound behind it, I could tell whose voice it was.  My wife’s.

“Feidlimid!” I said, which was a bad idea.  I can only say that after being pulled about by magic for so long I was not in my right mind and could not tell what I was doing.

The wind that had been rushing about me, rushed faster, and now the grit carried by its movement was ice crystals, chilling me to the marrow.

My eyes felt abraded and frozen.  I could not keep them open, so I closed them.

And suddenly the wind stopped and I was touched by a warm breeze.

I opened my eyes.  Feidlimid sat in the middle of an airy terrace, with columns all around.  Through the columns, I could glimpse a wide and silvery ocean.

Feidlimid wore a semi-transparent shimmering tunic, and had her wheat gold hair down her back, streaming lightly in the wind, while she combed it with a golden comb.

It was an image out of legends, but if she’d looked like that when I’d first met her, I’d never have brought her home.  It was her pitiful soaked state, under the rain as if she knew not how to shield herself, and the lost look in her wide green eyes that had been my undoing.

If she’d smiled at me, as she did now, then I too would never have been at danger.  Yes, her smile was sweet and beautiful, but she opened her mouth a little and I could see the sharp teeth, like a mouse’s.

“Hello Feidlimid,” I said.

She looked at me.  “Have you come to plead, mortal?”

“Plead?  What for?”

“For your fancy lady’s life.”  She smiled.  “Give my son to me, and I might let her live.”