Author: Sarah A. Hoyt

Allowances

I know I’m a killjoy and probably a horrible woman, but I blame a part of how Americans fail to get economics and how people expect something for existing on allowances.

It might be sour grapes, of course, because I didn’t get any.  My parents not only didn’t believe in allowances, they snorted at my “convincing” argument that it would teach me to handle money.  Either fortunately or unfortunately they also didn’t provide any way for me to earn money.  And they COMPLETELY failed to understand that science fiction books, along with air, water and food are one of the necessities of life.

I say fortunately or unfortunately because this led me to an ever more ridiculous pursuit of “ways in which a kid can make money” starting with the highly unorthodox – hand copied – neighborhood paper, escalating to (I think illegal) lotteries and eventually culminating in tutoring/teaching jobs and a summer job in a hotel in Germany when I was an adult.

I’ll confess I never did THAT to my kids, but neither would I allow my husband to make them an allowance.  Not being a killjoy, I allowed them to keep birthday/Christmas gifts up to $100 per gift, to do with as they pleased (gifts ARE a part of life, even as an adult.)  Anything above that got socked away in their savings account because well… I figure they’ll appreciate them as adults.

However, for everyday, can-count-on-them running expenses I gave them the opportunity to earn money.  

Part of this is that, being mostly libertarian (Rational Anarchist, she said) I didn’t approve of assigning the kids tasks.  Yes, they live in the house.  Yes, they get fed.  BUT that’s my duty for choosing to have them.  And cleaning and cooking are values for ME – unless what they’re cleaning or cooking are their own stuff – not them.  To force them to do tasks smacked of slavery.  I wanted to raise FREE men who don’t let others indenture them.  I wanted them to GET no one had a RIGHT to command them.  (Teach them, yes.  Which is why a smack on the behind is more honest than a time out.  It’s ‘yeah, you can do that.  But it will hurt.’)

Since mom – me – is a bum-ish writer and cleaning ladies and time are both expensive, these opportunities were usually of the “you’ll do this and get that” sort.  Older son had amassed $500 in $3 to $5 increments by 5.  Jobs like “Setting the table for a week.”  Or “Feeding the cats for a week” or “taking out the trash for a week” (when they were older.)  Also at around five “dusting the house” for $10.

Yes, I exploited them horribly, but you also have to understand they weren’t very good at it.  (As teens, for instance, they “cleaned” the house for two weeks without NOTICING that the cats had peed on a pile of books on the coffee table, doing so much damage the books had to be throw out and the table refinished. $20 for “cleaning” – meaning that there are no OBVIOUS piles of dust and mess, at least if you don’t have a nose – a whole house is reasonable in the circumstances.  As they became better, I paid them better.

As for spending money the rules were – and still are – simple.  Unless we decide to make the kid a gift (which we do, occasionally) or the thing they want is for eating, wearing or school (in which case it’s our job) then what they want MUST come out of THEIR earned money.  (It’s amazing how few games they want when they must pay.)

Mind you, I’m not going to say the kids are perfect about money.  Younger one still confuses “want” with “need” but by and large they understand money doesn’t grow on trees and “we can’t afford it” or “it’s that or food” never gets an argument.

Am I attributing the appalling lack of economic clue of the public to the allowance custom, something that has been going on since… well… forever?

To an extent.  While allowances were parts of life for the wealthy in Europe since probably the renaissance – children and adults alike got an allowance made by the head of the family – I don’t think it invaded middle-class western civ till the last few decades.

And if you think about it, allowances in a society based on family centralization AND land made sense.  You didn’t make your own money, and your prosperity and doing well depended on obeying/making the head of the family happy.  Allowances and their withholding trained you for that.  It does NOT train you for the free market.

And while I will agree that allowance or not is a small part of raising the kids in a free-market mentality, I want to warn you the schools won’t.  They’re imbued through and through with Marxist ethos and even the younger boy’s “economics” class had them take in account in “hiring a new employee” things like “where could you do the most good.”  (Which made me scream “to each according to his need????” a string of profanities and THEN “Sarah Smash!”) And as polluted as the “assumed beliefs” have become with “finite pie” and eternal redistribution (infernal redistribution!) ideas, even the kids’ first jobs might NOT give them a clue about producing something, or doing something people will willingly pay you for being the SOURCE of wealth in their personal, greedy little (in my boys’ cases, big) hands.

So, DON’T make allowances for your kids.  Make them earn them.  What do you have to lose?  The neighborhood cool dad award?  So what?  Your kids will be better prepared to survive in the real world.

Or, of course, I could be insane.  At any rate, it doesn’t seem to have hurt the boys.

I have this persistent day dream: I get to rent a small cabin in the woods.  Nothing but me, my wordprocessor, Dan with some computerthingy to keep him busy during the day, and a couple of books.  During the day I’d just write.  In the evenings Dan and I would walk to a small restaurant nearby and have dinner.

In my dream the cabin is somewhere like Oregon, so it drizzles, and there’s a fireplace.  (Hey, I grew up with drizzle.  Drizzle is comfort weather.)

Would I want the dream to go on forever?  Well, no.  Two weeks would be enough to get a ton of work done.  And by that time I’d be missing the boys and the cats and ready to come home.

Right now the chances of my dream coming true – EVER – seem less than one in a million.  Also, right now my life couldn’t be further away from that dream.

It seems like most of the time by the time I get up in the morning I’m already late for three or for things, and when I go to bed I have unfinished tasks still to complete.

Part of this is because I was already more or less fully booked and then I added editing stories and getting my back list ready to go up.  Now that has nowhere to go.  Plus the house has been falling apart a piece at a time, which, of course, also causes other issues.  (Money!)  To complete the circle, the stress is making my eczema go feral, which means I’m one LONG itch.  (Fine time I picked, to stop sniffing glue.)

Almost every writer I know has this sort of dream and most of us have a “for life” type of dream too, called “when I make it.”  “When I make it, I’ll have someone fetch me coffee, so I don’t have to get up.”  “When I make it, I won’t have to clean the house, so I can write all day.”  “When I make it–”

The problem is, face it, if we got our wish we’d probably go stone-cold-blocked.  Oh, maybe not right away. Or maybe we’d get over it, eventually.  I mean, when Rebecca Lickiss and I attended the Oregon workshop – twelve? – years ago, we had little kids.  We couldn’t understand why it was so hard to work in the workshop room, in the nice, quiet atmosphere.

And then we realized both of us were so used to being interrupted and to hearing the kids in the background at all times that after five minutes we got antsy in the “it’s too silent, what are they up to?” sense.

That didn’t exactly solve the problem, but at least it told us where it was coming from.  And these days I can too work without being interrupted by a childish howl every five minutes.

On the other hand, some part of my brain seems to only loosen up and get creative when I’m engaged in activities I hate.  My first saleable short story was written in my head while ironing.  A Few Good Men hit me between the eyes, voice and all, while cleaning the bathroom.  Walking isn’t too bad for ideas, particularly long walks in areas I know, particularly in bad weather.  Why in bad weather?  Fewer people out and nobody I need to make eye contact with.

Activities I find interesting, like, say, cooking, talking to my husband; drawing; visiting museums make me completely unable to write.

So… if this writer got her wish – would she be hyper productive? Or completely unable to write?

I look at Heinlein’s life where he lurched from health issue to personal issue to financial crisis for much of it, and I look at the stuff he wrote.  Would he have written better had he been healthy and stable?  (Assuming he hadn’t stayed in the Navy.)  Or wouldn’t he have written at all?  Did we lose great books by him?  Or did we gain them because he was tortured.

I don’t know.  All I can say is that right now I’d like to give it a try for two weeks and I promise I wouldn’t let it spoil me.

But since it doesn’t seem likely, I think I’ll go to bed early instead, and tomorrow I’ll see if I can change my writing place and I hope that will help.

Goodnight sun, goodnight moon.  Goodnight blog comenters.

Some time ago someone suggested I blog about a Portuguese word.  I think the one suggested was desembarancando (that c should have a cedilla and it’s read like ss) which is sort of “how to make do forward” i.e. how to improvise, elbow, scratch your way forward.  Desenrascando (no cedilla, the c is read k which as you can tell sounds more dire) is the more severe form of that, because it presupposes that you’re “a rasca” i.e. in serious trouble.

As any linguist will tell you when words like that exist in a language, it’s because they’re needed.  Portugal is, in its way, as unlikely a survival as I am – it’s the only one of the many tiny countries that once dotted the Iberian peninsula, which hasn’t been absorbed by Spain.  It has other things going against it, including a very long shore line (Portugal IS a long shore line.  I managed not to live by the sea, but most people assume I did), an inherited Roman political culture, where nepotism is not a bug, it’s a feature, and a kakistocracy who learn their bad manners in the rest of Europe and come home to exploit the land they despise.  (I don’t despise it and I never went back to stay.)

The end result is a country that is so far gone in the rules-and-regulations-no-sane-person-can-obey department that rule of law exists more in theory than reality.  Everyone works under the table, and the best way to resolve a traffic accident is NOT to call the police.

That said, things are much better now than they got in the seventies.  I often find myself nodding agreement when I read stories of Russian immigrants and how they procured things by barter, trade and devious means, because it was never a matter of just going to the store and buying something.

So, you see where those words would be needed.  And you’d see too – I suppose – how someone like me come from such a culture would have a terrible craving for security.  Which is why it’s so funny that I am, after all, a writer and at a time of no security at all.  It probably accounts for the panics too, and the stress which right now had my body in one long eczema eruption from the neck down.  (Yes, I’ve tried everything, prescription and non.  No, I’m not willing to have steroid shots.  When steroid cream doesn’t work, steroid shots are only going to complicate matters.  I know several people who’ve had these too, and if the cream doesn’t work, the shots don’t seem to also.  I’ve sent for the cream I used to use in Portugal and HOPEFULLY it will arrive soon and make a difference.  Until then I suffer and try no to rip my skin to shreds.  (Right now my right arm is in shreds.)  It doesn’t help that my husband’s job seems “okay” for ten months.  No, I’m not complaining.  In ten months tons of things can happen, and yes we know people who are much worse off.  It’s just for someone addicted to security it’s a difficult place to be.

However, both my craving for security and my Portuguese training in desembaracando and desenrascando are probably the only reasons I still have a “job” writing.

Think about it.  You’re ten years old and about to go to school out of the village for the first time, in the nearest (still small, but I didn’t know it) town.

In the village everything gets done very informally.  It has been known for kids to be signed up for school at the right age even if the parents forget, because everyone knows “so and so little so and so goes to school this year.”  But outside the village you come across the Portuguese love for form a in slot b.  And also the disorganization that makes it almost impossible to fulfill.  You march to the nearest phone booth and sob out to your parents “I need to buy stamp form c to sign up, and the paper store doesn’t have any.”  And the answer comes back, “Well, what can I do about it?  Desenrasca-te.”  

Turned out while I didn’t have money to bribe a secretary to pretend I’d given in the form and it had been lost, I had enough to buy the stamp paper off a kid who was not as interested in signing up.

Was this not excellent training for finding my first series dead in the water and shrugging and going “Okay, so much for literary fantasy.  Let me try historical mystery and urban fantasy and…  One of these doors go to open.”

The person who wanted me to blog desembaracando wanted me to explain how it is human wave.  Well… do I need to explain?  Part of what seems to be built into the dystopian sf is that people get stuff done to them and they just fold and die.  Guys, even people who have suffered horrendous dictatorships – Russia, China – find ways to cope with it, to escape, to still have hope for a future and to work towards a better day.  And that’s human wave.  If it had a motto it should be the Heinlein quote “The Future is Better Than The Past.”  Even if you’re not writing sf, that belief is human wave.  The individual can make things better.  Humans can overcome trouble and horror.  Keep trying.  Giving up means you already died.

And if trying means coming up with ever more inventive ways to forge forward through showers of shit and alligator attacks, then do so.  A human got to do what a human got to do.

(On what this human got to do, since she’s a rasca and the future is uncertain: I need to get a fundraising earc out and get the zazzle shop going.  Oh, and get an indie novel out too.  All of these are of the essence and should be done yesterday.  However, I’d like them done WELL.  Yesterday was lost to a doctor’s appointment – no resentment on that. I not only am not seriously ill but the annoying issues seem to have resolved – and today I deal with electrical (that oven vent thing?  Line to it went dead – long story – and it doesn’t seem to be wired through the breaker box.  Fun, uh?)  Then I’m going to Liberty con this weekend – if you’re in TN or NC or even SC and can come on down to Chattanooga, do.  It IS great fun. – and somewhere along there the revision needed for that e-arc will happen.  The way I’ll do THAT at least as a fundraiser is to set a “donation level” and a time and if you send it, you get that.  If you send more than that you’ll get a bonus story, and more than that, you’ll get schwag – hey, I have posters, t-shirts and a magnet on hand that I can send.  And then I need to set up the fun stuff shops.  And then Kate Paulk and I need to rewrite our stories from Valdemar – which are incredibly popular – and make them into novels set in our own world (yes, by contract we CAN use them as is.  No, we don’t want to.  In our own world, we can then continue in ways we want to.  So we have hammered out geography and history and Jem and Ree are going to get a new world and a FAR more detailed account of their adventures with some new stuff happening.) which Naked Reader has agreed to bring out.  In between and around that, I HAVE to deliver Noah’s Boy and write the 2nd Earth Revolution Book.  I’m not sure how I’ll find the time for all this, but hey, I’ll be all right, I’ll continue desenrascando.)

There is a style of story that is “We’re all rich and depressed and looking to forget how rich and depressed we are.”  Unfortunately I think it’s become not just a style of story, but a way people see the world.  Which, of course, is what stories are: a lens through which we see the world.  And this particular “heartbreak fo being well off and having kids and a house” way of looking at things is something that seems to have struck sometime in the late sixties as the “chic” or “cool” way to look at the world.  It informed much of New Wave SF and a lot of the “literary” fiction they were trying to emulate.  And it’s not that it leaves me cold.  Most of the time it leaves me rolling my eyes and wondering if we shouldn’t bring back the pillory.

I followed this link from Instapundit a couple of days ago and found myself facing another of those “we look happy from the outside, but our lives are a self inflicted hell and this is how everyone lives” stories.  And, quite frankly, wanting to slap everyone mentioned in it, good and hard.

It reminded me of reading Bright Lights Big City where the guy was supposed to be from my generation and everyone in my generation was supposed to be like this, because the editors buying books all knew my generation was self-centered and cared only for self satisfaction, unlike the sainted sixties people who were caring and against the war (or afraid to be drafted into it and self centered, but never mind that.)

Through their eyes, the fact we told them to put their sit-ins, and their love-ins too where the sun don’t shine and cut our hair and went to work – often at a very early age – meant we were sell-outs, establishment stooges and everything that was wrong with THEIR parents.  Now, of course, as they are afraid to slip off into irrelevancy they’re trying to claim everyone to sixty four was part of their generation, but I was born in 62, and I don’t have Alzheimers.  I remember being called selfish and self centered because I wouldn’t be a good little girl and question all authority that they told me to question.

Ahem.  Sorry.  As I said before I have a cold war injury, it only hurts when I laugh.  And the generation before mine is more likely to make me cry.

And before you people who are ten years older than I resent it – look, I’m not talking about the guy on the street.  I’m talking about the opinion makers, the entertainment leaders and everyone who crafted this “boomer” image.  (And those who are only ten years older than I are already at the end of that curve.  My brother was born in 54 and he always considered himself to have been born the last or the second to last year of the baby boom.  By that time they had precious little in common with post war babies.)

The bommer image is something else again, manufactured by the media, and, to believe Soviet archives, soviet agit prop.  BUT to the extent that has been swallowed whole, it is responsible to a great extent for the problem of the people in that article I read.

I don’t know how widespread this is, or if this woman who wrote it is completely insane.  BUT it is the “accepted narrative” for what it’s like to be young, married, with kids.  It has been that way since I was young, married with kids.

Supposedly the BURDEN of conforming and growing up is so terrible, you have to do dope on the side, or run around sleeping with everything that moves, or try to be young and transgressive.

Because being transgressive is cool, man.  It’s where it’s at.  All the hep chicks and cats do it.  We have to stick it to the man, and speak truth to Powah!

(Excuse me while I rinse my typing fingers in moliatic accid.)  If the previous sounds dated it is because is.  This is because the lingo is from the sixties.  However, it is still the prism through which school is being taught and enforced.  And it is still distorting our culture.

There have been several articles hailing the death of cool and the idea that life is supposed to be permanent teen rebellion.  But they’re missing the point.

At this point “cool” – sleeping around, doping, being a perpetual adolescent – is not rebellion.  It is what every generation from mine on was told they SHOULD do.  Rebellion has become conformism.  The pierced kids with multiple tattoos? They’re the ones doing what their boomer parents and teachers tell them.  “Rebel, stick it to the man.  Refuse to grow up.”

The pierced kids with multiple tattoos are the ones who are considered deep thinkers and “serious” at least if they come from the “right” families.  It’s the kids who write about how horrible the world is and how the entire thing needs to be run by government, or the ones who earnestly wish they’d grown up in their parents generation, who are considered “rebels” and worth listening to.  Instead, they’re the kids who, in the fifties, would be wearing a three piece suit.

There are other reasons for the horribleness detailed in that article.  The refusal to grow up is also anchored in a society too wealthy to punish it.  It is aided and abetted by guilt over material achievements which comes from having been taught fantasy – Marxist – finite pie economics, in which nothing is created, nothing is destroyed, everything just is endlessly redistributed.  And it is worsened by a child-raising ethos that requires the parent to be a combination empath and saint, capable of affecting behavior without even a swat to the behind.  (Yes, there are children who don’t need those.  And after four, mine didn’t.  We could reason with them, then.  Most kids do need it, however.  Not beating, but a swat to the behind.  Look, guys, all great apes spank.  While we’re not apes, we are too.  You can’t have it both ways and say we should never spank, but we’re creatures of nature and should behave naturally.  Well, you can, but it’s irrational and means you’ve swallowed the “noble savage child” whole.)  Requiring EVERY parent to control EVERY child at all times through mental ju-jitsu puts so much strain on the parents, that it’s a wonder more of them don’t crack.

HOWEVER over all that joyless “bad behavior” and conformist “rebelling because it’s expected of us” sounds like a serious case of having internalized a prior generation’s priorities which are no longer appropriate, if indeed they ever were.

I say rebel for real.  Love your husband.  Don’t sleep around.  Grow up.  Think of your husband and family before you think of your own little psychodrama.

When I was a conflicted teen, I found that concentrating on OTHERS’ needs and problems kept me sane and helped me grow up.  Maybe that’s something to do.  And maybe learn to enjoy hanging out with your family.  Maybe don’t do pot just to conform.  Maybe don’t get drunk and talk dirty just because it’s expected of you.  Maybe find out who you are for real and enjoy that.

It’s okay to enjoy being an adult.  A lot of us do.

Oh, I know, it’s not hip or cool and the entertainment establishment will think you’re hopeless.  Have you noticed those guys are not so important anymore?  In fact, you could say they were withering away, and old fashioned.

They are the man.  The man wants you to dope and fornicate and get drunk.

Don’t do it.  Stick it to the man.  Speak truth to power.

“It’s been a long time coming, but I know change gonna come, oh yes it will.”

My trip to the DMV was fruitful.  Perhaps I should mingle with people who live outside my head more often.

The most fruitful part of it, arguably, took place while we were standing in line outside. Robert was studying for his MCATS which he takes later this month.  Now, if you’re a creature built like the proverbial brick sh*thouse and about six one, reading about muscle groups in line, the people behind you – a very nice family with a young man probably 18 – are going to ask questions.

Robert told them he hoped to be an MD, and then proceeded to explain the process.  For those who don’t know it: he’s in pre-med.  He’ll have to try for admission to Medschool.  Right now, if you don’t have perfect grades and near-perfect MCATS you might as well not try.  If you have that you should be aware your chances are less than one in ten.

How do they pick once they have all these people with perfect grades?  Well, mostly by people they “like” so a certain amount of political correctness is involved (and hopefully I haven’t shot the boy’s chances, and G-d do I self censor.  You have NO idea.)

Why do they pick, you ask?  If the school record AND test are perfect, why not admit them all?

Because our medical student numbers are capped by Federal decision (I’m putting decision because I don’t know what drives it: law or exec order.)  They were cut in half under Clinton, and then again recently.

THEN, supposing you get into medschool, you have 50% chance of becoming an intern, without which you can’t practice medicine.  You have a medical degree, but you aren’t really an MD.  Not licensed.  This too is centrally planned.

But – the family behind us, who looked fairly smart – said “Why not have ALL the doctors?  Wouldn’t that make their services more abundant and therefore cheaper?”  And we said “you got us.”  We didn’t say “they want to keep the rewards high, so more people will study medicine” which I THINK is the idea, which makes it a bizarre piece of absurd central planning.

And it occurred to me that the point of this was FAR bigger than healthcare.

Look, the problem is that our society is complicated.  REALLY REALLY REALLY complicated.  Which allows pockets of utter irrationality to subsist because only the people suffering through them or under them know how absurd they are.  And they often cna’t speak on pain of not having a job any more.

Take publishing.  How long would it have subsisted had people known that the publishers controlled how many copies a book printed and what the distribution was?  And the distributors then entered these numbers in the system, and after that it ruled the writer’s life?  So that if your editor/publisher slated you for failure no one would even know your book EXISTED, no matter how good?

Well, people in general have great awe for “new york times bestseller” but would they still if they knew 99% of those are determined by the LAYDOWN?  (That is how much money the publisher was willing to spend to print a massive number up front?)  That it had nothing to do with how many books were bought?  That in fact, point of sale data only covers a third of the sales and no one really knows how many books anyone sells?  That being in good with your publisher was the fastest route to bestsellerdom?  That in Great Britain not so long ago they found a “bestseller” had sold exactly two copies, and that our system allows for the same absurdity?  That Terry Pratchett – a mega bestseller in Great Britain (and a real one.  They can’t keep his books on the shelf) was selling low mid list here until he changed – not his writing style, nor his subject but – his publisher and agent?

Most of what drove people to buy what was pushed at them was the assumption that this MUST be the best of the best.  If they’d known how sausage was made, given how bad or at least how bland the sausage had got towards the end (I was reading a book on Romania where before they kicked out their dictator, their sausage was mostly saw dust.  Like that.) and before indie upended things, do you think people would have bought even as many of the books as they did?  I don’t think so.

The same thing as if most people knew of the absurdity that is our doctor training process, and how much of it is dependent on being a good boy and playing along not just with the learning but with the superiors political prejudices and knee jerk reactions they’d go “But that’s ridiculous.  We need doctors capable of independent thought.  Also, wouldn’t have more doctors make it cheaper?”

These absurd practices exist in other places, I’m sure.  Places where I don’t know things as well and can’t speak with as much knowledge.  I CAN tell you that throughout the nineties the response to “IT company is in trouble” was ALWAYS “Fire the entire research and development team.  Hire more managers.”  I still wonder where that piece of nonsense came from.  Maybe a lot of ex-government employees teach MBA courses?

I can also tell you when I came to the US with a newly minted teaching degree from one of the oldest colleges in Europe (not Bob’s school of teaching) I wasn’t ALLOWED to take the teaching certification exam.  No one argued, mind, that my college didn’t have a good enough preparation.  Certainly no one would put it to the test by letting me TAKE the test.  They just didn’t give my college a number so I couldn’t take the computer-scored certification test.  Which meant I foamed at the mouth when someone talked of certification as a guarantee of quality.  Or for that matter when they talked about raising teacher’s salaries to attract professionals from other fields.  What good is THAT if the professional has to be willing to go back to college, just to be ALLOWED to take the test?

Why do all these counterintuitive, not to say daft “processes” continue?  Well, because the people affected CAN’T speak, and no one else knows.  Indie has unmuzzled writers, thank heavens.  Med students?  I don’t know.  Teachers?  I’ve said before, I’ll say again, that’s the next field innovation will hit hard.
Our society is really, really, really complex.  Strangely, this allows pockets of utter irrationality to exist – irrationality that affects both providers and consumers and which in the long run affects society.

What you don’t know CAN kill you – and bore you.  And make you ignorant.

A free society is ALWAYS a function of informed citizens.

Think.  Read.  Inform yourself.  And TALK.  We have the internet.  Use it.  Your first amendment is the best guarantee against needing to use the second.

NOTE: I’m continuing my interrupted timing workshop today at MGC — post will be up in a couple of minutes.

*don’t get excited.  These are awfully short chapters, partly because they’re setup and cuing, partly because the author has an awfully short attention span today.  I’m trying desperately not to get the death-flu again.  I THINK I’m just tired from yesterday (it really was an inordinate amount of cleaning and disinfecting)  I think I’ll take a nap before I look at rewrites.  Meanwhile, these are short, but should set up the coming action nicely.*

*This is the Fantasy novel I’m posting here for free, one chapter every Friday.   If your conscience troubles you getting something for free, do hit the donate button on the right side.  Anyone donating more than $6 will get a non-drm electronic copy of Witchfinder in its final version, when it’s published.
There is a compilation of previous chapters here  all in one big lump, which makes it easier to read and I will compile each new chapter there, a week after I post.  When the novel is completed and about to be edited the compilation page will probably be deleted.

Oh, this is in pre-arc format, meaning you’ll find the occasional spelling mistake and sentence that makes no sense.  It’s not exactly first draft, but it’s not at the level I’d send to a publisher, yet. *

A Ghost Of A Chance

Not al her equestrian lessons and prowess – and she was accounted a very good horsewoman by all her teachers – could have prepared Caroline for this moment.

Akakios had insisted she ride side-saddle upon his back.  Only there was no saddle, just her sitting on the horse back of this creature who was – strangely – a young man in the front.  In fact, he encouraged her – and blushed while doing so – to put her arms around his waist as she rode.  “If we had a saddle,” he’d said, with a smile.  “It would not be necessary to hold onto me.  Of course, if we had a saddle and I consented to be saddled, my father would disown me.”  He’d made light of it, and chuckled at the end an embarrassed chuckle, like one of the young men she met in drawing rooms who did not quite know how to address a lady.

After Caroline had arranged herself, as properly as it was possible on the back of a horse who was also a young man, he started walking at a pace, and they were quiet for a long while.

He spoke when she was just thinking that centaurs were very strange creatures and not at all as she expected because while he smelled of warm horse – impossible not to when he had a horse’s body and was moving – he also smelled of herbs and soap.  His mane of dark hair, tied back, kept touching her face.  They rode through a fairyland glade strewn all over with little yellow flowers.  The only path through them was a rocky, uphill way and Caroline wondered whether the grass and flowers wouldn’t feel better on Akakios hooves.  Then she noticed how careful he was not to step off the path and shivered.  One thing she’d learned, in fairyland, was that what things looked was not what things were.

And then he said, “You must not resent my father, Lady.  You see, he lost my older brother, his heir, in this mission.  Athanasius left more than a year ago, and we have felt his death.  So I have become my father’s heir and now my father fears losing me.”

“I do not resent your father.  In fact, I don’t know why I should. But what is this mission?  Helping me through fairyland?  Surely your brother could not have been doing this a year ago?”

Akakios shook his head, “No.  The real mission.  Saving fairyland and the worlds with it.”

“How can you save the worlds?  Save them from what?” she asked, but – before he could answer – something appeared on the path in front of them.

Akakios reared, like a horse.  She held on around his waist and screamed.  She could feel his body tense as he tried to suppress what had clearly been an instinctive movement – the way the body felt and the reactions built into it.  He put his front paws down with an appearance of deliberate force.  He stammered.  “Forgive lady– Forgive–”

But Caroline couldn’t think of what he wanted her to forgive, nor did she say anything, because on the path, in front of her, looking translucent and yet somehow very real was her Papa, and her papa had been dead for more than a year.

She wanted to say “Papa,” but as in certain dreams it seemed as though her voice was gone and she could not speak at all.  It didn’t matter at any rate, because Papa walked around Akakios towards her.  Though “walked” might not be the most appropriate word, since he seemed not to move his legs at all.  As he got close, Papa stretched a hand for her, but Akakios did something – Caroline wasn’t sure what, but there was a hand lifted, and the singing of magic.  What she could see of Akakios face was very pale, like strained moonlight, and his lips looked almost gray and open as though he didn’t have the strength to close them.  He too said nothing.

And Papa’s ghost spoke, “Caroline.  You must go and save your brother.  He has fallen in the most absurd trap.”

“Michael?” Caroline asked, managing to speak though her voice came out tinny and too high and sounding not at all like herself.  “I know, that’s why I– ”

Papa made an impatient gesture.  “Yes, yes, that’s why you and your mama came to fairyland, a ridiculous endeavor if I ever heard of one, but it is not Michael I speak of.  Oh, he’s in danger enough, but it will not kill him, or not immediately.  He’s too valuable to the king for what he can get from Michael.  No, it is your brother Gabriel who has just stepped into a great danger, and he’ll be torn limb from limb in no time, if you do not intervene.”

“Gabriel!” Caroline said, because her mind had been nowhere near her half-brother, whom she thought safe somewhere else altogether.  “Why would Gabriel be in danger?”  Somewhere at the back of her mind was the thought that, after all, Gabriel was half-elf, and who else could better cope with the perils of this place.

“Do not try to get past my defenses,” Akakios said, loudly, and put his hand up again, in between Papa and Caroline.  “I do not know who or what you are, but you cannot get to the lady past me.”

“I am the lady’s father,” Papa said, sounding amused.  “As for what I am, I am the Duke of Darkwater – or I was.  I suppose Seraphim has ascended, and I’m sure he’s a better duke than I ever was.”

“Papa!”

“You are not,” Akakios said, “corporeal.”  His body braced like Caroline’s pony when it was nervous, and Caroline, without thinking, ran her hand down his arm, seeking to calm him.

“No,” Papa said, a glint of amusement in his eye.  “I too fell in to a trap, much like Michael’s.  But fortunately they don’t know everything I know and it left me freedom of movement… as long as I don’t move my body.  But Gabriel won’t be allowed that.  He won’t be allowed to stay alive.  You will find him where you hear the hell hounds bay.”

A Friend In Odd Places

Seraphim looked in horror at Jonathan, and Jonathan looked back at him, raising an inquisitive eyebrow.  “I thought you were exiled?  I’m sure I heard something.  Not that I didn’t understand.  I’d prefer to be exiled than to marry Honoria, and I don’t say that just because she is my sister.  Damn rum family we would be if I married my own sister, I mean, but all the same, even if she weren’t my sister, I don’t think I’d like to marry her, because she is– Because she is–” he hiccupped loudly and said, in an ominous tone, “Damme if I don’t think I’m going to shoot the cat.”

For all Seraphim could imagine, it was quite possible Jonathan had come into the alley just for that purpose.  After all, it made perfect sense to choose a secluded spot to throw up.  But after a while the honorable Jonathan Blythe, the back of his hand pressed to his lips, seemed to steady himself.  “No,” he said, meditatively.  “Perhaps not.”

Meanwhile Seraphim was thinking furiously.  He’d known Jonathan since school, off and on.  They’d attended Eton together and often found themselves thrust in the same circles.  In such circumstances, it was impossible not to know a man’s vices, such as whether he was prone to being sodden drunk in public.  And that was not something he’d ever expected of Jonathan Blythe.  “Jonathan,” he said.  “Why are you drunk?  How have you got in this state?”

He turned around and looked at Seraphim and his eyes, so much like Honoria’s, yet had an animated expression to them that Honoria had never managed.  Jonathan’s eyes showed shock, surprise, and an underlying, “Tempting hell and the devil” sort of amusement.  “Why, I got in this state because I would much rather be drunk than think about where the old gentleman and m’sister are going to get themselves.  They think that they’re using Sydell, but Darkwater, I tell you, no one uses someone who is half-dragon-spawn.”

“Who is what?”

“Sydell.  Half dragon.  Raised in foundling home, till he was reclaimed on his father’s death.  Faith, didn’t you know?”

“I begin to think, Jonathan, that I don’t know nearly as much as I should.  Can we go to your rooms in town?  I believe we should have a good, long talk.”

And my neighbor seems to be running around her yard screaming.  I THINK she thinks she’s talking, but her voice cuts through walls.  And floor.  And sanity.

Dan refuses to kill her with a flamethrower.  He says that we can’t go around killing people because they annoy us.  Apparently he has moral objections to killing people who shriek while I’m trying to write.

You know, I think he should have disclosed this handicap 28 years ago.

(I’m joking, I swear.  Well, not about the neighbor.  Or about the fact Dan won’t let me open the window and scream “SHUT UP FOR THE LOVE OF HEAVEN.  I HAVE DUCT TAPE AND I’M NOT AFRAID TO USE IT.”  But about killing her.)

I decided to do sheets while I wrote.  This is a good thing.  Our basement is flooded with sewage.  It was completely dry last night

To explain the back history — when we bought the house, they told us we would have to rotto-root every six months.  This was okay.  But the rotto rooting was always… weird.  They told us our lines were actually fine, but we kept flushing baby wipes.  Guys, when we moved here, the boys were 8 and twelve.

THEN about four years ago, the city came and fixed the drains on the street. They explained we had a community drain (like a party line) and that it was that part that was blocking.  Since they fixed it, we haven’t needed rotto rooting.  And it’s never been THIS bad.  It looks like it flooded to the door of the laundry room during the night (about 200 sq feet.)  We used to have a little backup, not sewage up to the door.  What it looks like is like the drain was COMPLETELY closed during the night and filled with not-our-sewage.  The neighbors across the street are making a new basement, and I wonder if they’ve done something particularly creative. The city is also doing SOMETHING on the other side of the street.  G-d knows what the heck is going on.

Of course, this always happens when I’m backed up on laundry, so Robert and I waded in — literally — to move aside baskets of dirty clothes.  Rotto rooter says they’ll be here within two hours.  If they can’t solve it I’m decamping to a hotel with the family for the duration and billing whoever is responsible.

Given this, I can’t concentrate to do Witchfinder.  I’m sure y’all will understand.  Right now I wish I could take a shower and change my clothes, but that will have to wait till this is fixed or we get somewhere else.

Sorry for the postponement.

UPDATE: The rotto rooter man hit the blockage at 150 feet, but nothing to justify complete block.  It still opened up.  He thinks it’s on the city junction (we almost don’t have a lot.  Handkerchief sized lawn, so unless the drain is laid out in spirals…  And we need to call Wastewater and get them out here to check.  Honestly, the basement has smelled like dead meat for a few days and I wonder if one of my neighbors is doing something funny or — the rotto rooter gentleman suggested — a squirrel died in the line. 

NOW I’m cleaning the entire house because, well… tracked all over, right?

GIVE ME YOUR OPINIONS: We’re now up to around 4k of unexpected expenses this month.  We already paid for Liberty Con flights for the entire family, so I can’t back out — and I’d like to see Jerry Pournelle again, anyway, as it’s been nine years. 

I could do Project Jump Start for 10k for The Brave And The Free but I’m afraid I’ll get like 1k.  …  At any rate that will take a while.   I’m going to open a zazzle and cafe press shop for my-stuff-related merchandise, but I don’t think that will be enough.

The other thing I could do is work through the weekend and put together a collection of DST- universe short stories and/or novellas (They need revising, mostly) and then offer them here for sale in e-arc format at $5 (Probably 40k words?)

Or I could do all of the above.  What do you guys think?  It’s just that at this point we’re eating into our tuition-money and I just want to cry.

I’m still finishing my chapter of Witchfinder to post but I promised my friends at Operation Baen Bulk to post about it.

So, please, first view this video

WHAT is Operation Baen Bulk ??

OBB is a different kind of support for the troops. Instead of focusing on individuals, we support entire UNITS, by finding what they need, or want, and can’t easily or quickly get while deployed. . .and get it to them. In LARGE quantities. Think of it as the Warehouse Club approach to Soldier Support: we use the power of buying and shipping in bulk, to maximize the stuff delivered to our troops, out at the pointy end of the spear, and minimize things like waste, shipping costs, etc. And in the process, generally deliver a lot more to the individual soldier than normal “CARE Packages” do.

WHO is Operation Baen Bulk ?

Operation BAEN BULK started in the fall of 2009, when one of our founders got a 90-day layoff notice, and moved into the Layoff Pool.  With nothing to keep him busy, he corresponded with a few deployed GIs, and noticed that while they had individual requests, there were a number of things they mentioned their entire outfit needed or wanted.  And he needed a project to keep him sane while looking for a job with the economy going south.

And thus, was BAEN BULK born: a bunch of SF fans, all of whom read the military SF that Baen Books published, pooled our money and resources to insure the ZombieKillers (a training detachment somewhere in Afghanistan) could have some Christmas Trees and good coffee.  And him being kept busy and productive (and yes, he did find another job.  A BETTER job, in fact…)

Since then, we’ve provided for the oddball requests and creature comfort needs of several deployed units. . . and now, we’re trying a bit of a crowd-sourced model for raising funds, with achievement tiers so as soon as a threshold is reached, items will be ordered and sent off to the Ammo Dogs..

Then go here and read the rest.

I and three other Baen authors have agreed to do tuckerizations and redshirting for the operation.  And I’ll be donating also (though probably not today.)

I know the economy is terrible and times are tight, but they’re over there and in much worse circumstances than we are here.

So, go and read the whole thing and if you can do help.  As for me, I’m going to finish the next chapter of Witchfinder to put up.

Normally I eschew outright political posts, though to be honest the other one I had planned for today, and which I’m not compus mentis enough (when are you ever compus mentis, Sarah?  Shut up, you)  to do was about race, and that was probably going to get political too.  

However, today I have to take the younger kid to the DMV to get his driver’s license (which will then be mailed to him, in a week or two – you wish I were joking) and it is the sort of thing that puts me in a p*ssy mood where I do unreasonable things.  

Part of this is that the DMV brings back the worst aspects of my childhood and adolescence.  To do anything in Portugal you need to go to window A to buy the special watermarked paper, then take it to window B to get a license to go to window C which in turn…  At the end of the day, if you’re very lucky, allows you to approach window Z where you get whatever the heck it was you needed.  A lot of this bureaucracy is related to schools, which means I spent an inordinate amount of time in line to get a certificate saying I had completed course A and could now take course B.  (And more than once — once after I finished COLLEGE — they made a mistake and told me I had flunked ninth grade and drop out.  They’d got the wrong page in the records book.  AND THEN I had to stand in line all over again, because it was THEIR fault, but my problem.)

Perhaps this is the Portuguese version of a jobs program, but I have this theory if they abolished 99% of it the country might actually have jobs.  It’s a crazy idea, I admit, and it might not work.  I just think that it’s about time we gave it a try.

And speaking of giving crazy ideas a try….

Dan says I’m no longer allowed to call DMV employees prepotent incompetents, though the last time it didn’t go that badly, possibly because they thought prepotent had something to do with viagra.

Dan can set these restrictions on me because he’s my set of external brakes, to be applied when I’ve burned through the internal ones (by the time I was three, I think).  That’s his job.  He – among other things – keeps me alive and out of jail.

On the other hand you know what they say about pressure cookers.  You can’t make the pressure disappear.  You have to bleed it out.

Well, if I have to behave and not call bureaucrats names – which does not stop me from mumbling stuff in other languages, mind – it’s impossible to stop from thinking about other things.

The other thing that comes to mind is this: WHY do I have to spend my entire day waiting for other people to give my kid permission to drive a vehicle?  The kid has completed a course and has a certificate.  He has driven for fifty hours and we’ve filled the forms and signed them.  He has his driver’s permit now more than a year old as required.  So why do I have to go with him?  To verify address.  By which they mean, to make sure he lives with us, since he’s a minor, and he might have faked the certificate from a professional (and expensive) driving course AND the driving logs.  Sneaky these teenagers.  Also, extremely accomplished. Also, stupid.  If they can fake all that, why not scan in a license and fake that too.  

No, seriously. I have to go along to verify address.  And to be there.   Do you know how else they could verify address?  No?  Yeah – it’s right there on his driver’s permit.  You know how else they could verify address?  He could take two pieces of mail, one with his name, one with ours.  Do you know how else they could verify address?  He could take my driver’s license with him.  Do you know how else they could verify address?  I have an address listed in my driver’s license forms which they have on file.  You know how else they could verify address?  They could call me.

But none of those would require me to waste my entire day.

This of course led to other thoughts.  It’s never a good idea to get me thinking.  

In this case what I thought was: why driver’s license?

Before you say because vehicles are dangerous and we want to make sure people are qualified to operate them, let me tell you a story: I have a had a driver’s license for 28 years.  I’ve driven for 14.  Not only did I pass my driver’s test, I passed it with flying colors.  Then, first time driving on my own, I wrapped the car around a phone pole.  Why?  Well, mostly because I had undiagnosed astigmatism, but also because despite a driver’s course and a test, NO ONE SPOTTED IT. (And trust me on this, that is a minor inverse miracle.  I have BAD astigmatism.)  Also, because no one ever told me to slow down around turns.  (Which might have at least prevented the car being totaled.)

Am I alone in this?  Oh h*ll no.  Most normal functioning adults could pass a driver’s exam after a brief practice with a car.  Does this mean they’re safe drivers?  Um… no.  It takes years of driving for that.  (I am a very safe driver.  I’m just terrified of driving.  Why?  Because I imagine my characters behind the wheels of the other cars.  I still drive, but only when I HAVE to.)

In Portugal, at least, while I’m sure the function of driver’s licenses is the same as here – I don’t know.  To give you an opportunity to interact with the government?  Perhaps jobs program? – they make a better job of justifying it.  I.e. before you can get the license you complete six months of daily instruction.  (Or to be honest, that was the system when I was there, almost thirty years ago.  Might not be true now.)  I don’t know if it teaches more than we learn here, but it MUST because with their roads and the national temperament (laws happen to other people) if they went out as unprepared as we do there would be piles of cars and corpses at every corner.

But seriously, people, yeah, the car is a lethal machine. Potentially.  However, most people aren’t using it as a license to kill, because they don’t want to die which is a likely result of crashing into another car head on.  And those who are crazy enough not to care, also don’t care about getting a license.

So what purpose does the DMV serve?  Again, no idea, other than making Sarah almost comically mad, and I don’t think they’d create an entire department for it.  (Maybe they would?)

Why do free citizens in a free country need a license to drive?

Because it’s the way things are done.  Because we’ve never tried it any other way.

And don’t tell me there’s no other way.  Of course there is.  For instance the kid is more proficient at driving than the average bear (or his mother) because the insurance gives us a huge discount for his completing this defensive driving course with a professional driving school.   We have two kids driving, we need the discount.   Insurances could certify drivers, couldn’t they?  Why not?  They’re the ones with a vested interest.  The government’s driver certification program has no vested interest in your being a good or even competent driver.  All they have a vested interest in is giving you a license.  Why?  Because the process of taking form A to windo B to window C gives jobs to government employees.  And to do that, you MUST pass the driver’s test.

I’m just glad they haven’t thought of other things that could be lethal and that we do without a license:
                    
Do you have a license to buy gas?  Do you have a license to clean cat boxes?  (Ammonia)  Do you have a license to walk? Do you have a license to operate a chainsaw?  (I saw – okay, peeked between my fingers at – Texas chainsaw massacre.)  Do you have a license to cook?  (Trust me, I have three friends who can make it lethal.  Without trying.)  Do you have a license to rock and roll?  (You haven’t seen my brother dance.)  Do you have a license to mow the lawn?  (Machine.  Sharp.  Cuts.)  Do you have a license to run a stove?  (Hot.  Makes boiling oil.)  Do you have a license to hike?  (At least one Colorado fire was started by hikers.)  Do you have a license to write?  (You could give people dangerous ideas) Do you have a license to read?  (Nine out of ten mass murdering dictators wrote their theories in book form.  What if you follow the ideas?)  Do you have a license to travel?  (You could pick up terrible diseases.)  And last and most importantly, do you have a license to be Sarah?  (A Sarah is a lethal thing to be.)

No?  Then why do you need licenses to drive, buy guns, own a dog, or get married?

And why – WHY – would any person in their right mind want to expose me to bureaucracy?