Author: Sarah A. Hoyt

Not literally the baby, though I have always been fond of the passage in Agatha Christie’s The Moving Finger where Megan says cats eat the babies they don’t like, and she wishes that humans would do the same because it would be more honest.  No, I don’t approve of eating babies.  But when I read it first I was a rather unhappy teenager and that sentiment felt very true (if not a  good or sane idea.)  Actually, I like that entire character because I was a lot like her, though at a much earlier age, and of course the romantic subplot is the perfect Cinderella story.

Which brings me past my usual nattering and to the main point of this post.  How come I can still love the same books I loved at 12 – Christie, Heinlein, Simak, etc – and be unable to read anything of mine more than five years old without cringing?

It makes no sense, does it?  A good story is a good story and good writing is good writing, and I’m not even one of those people who think that there’s only one way for writing to be good: I read romance and hard science fiction and non fiction and everything around it.  So even if my writing has changed, it shouldn’t make me cringe.

Mind you, most writers are perfectly capable of maintaining in their heads, at the same time the notion that their stuff is the worst dreck that pixels ever died for, and the best piece of writing since Shakespeare went to his just reward.  It’s one of the many things we don’t tend to talk about to non-writers in case they decide that whether it results in stories or not, our condition is serious and we need treatment.

However, sometimes, the scales of “hate” tip deeper, and for me it can happen in a variety of circumstances.

Sometimes I “hate” a book of mine as soon as I finish it, because of the writing process.  Heart of Light, for instance, suffers from having been started eight years before it was finished, which means when I came to finish it, not only the wording and the plot I’d planned, but also the various ideas embedded in the novel belonged to a younger and much more naive writer.  But the book had sold, and I needed the money – particularly since it was a trilogy – so I wrote it.

Have I noticed it selling worse, or any other problems of the kind?  Other than reviewers accusing me of anti-white racism – what happens is necessary for the story arc.  Also, I’d never have SOLD it otherwise, in the publishing world as it was then – it didn’t do any worse – and might have done slightly better – than books I loved a lot more.  I have a bad tendency to recommend people just read Soul of Fire first, but that’s because that was one of those books that turned out unexpectedly well.  (Or at least I think so, but I haven’t cracked it open in 7 years.)

Then there are in-mid-stride books: books written when I felt as though my technique, style and… well, the way I DO writing, was changing.  This is an odd feeling, impossible to describe well enough that someone who never felt it will understand, but possibly recognizeable to those of you who have felt it.

You develop habits – ways of doing things – in writing, the same way you develop habits in everything else.  I tend to try to become aware of those habits, so that I don’t let them become short-cuts that someone not used to my writing will not “get”.  

Now, for instance, when I was very little, my mom lived in a shotgun apartment with no running water inside.  You had to cart the water for washing up from the outside faucet.  Doing dishes was a three-part process: warm up the water.  Fill one basin with about 1/3 of the water and detergent.  Fill the other basin with the other third of the water.  Start the dishes with glasses and other non-greasy things and end with the cooking pans.

When I was seven we moved to a perfectly modern house (except for not having built in heating, but no Portuguese house of the time did.) and she had hot and cold running water.  Yet, except for heating the water on the stove, she did dishes exactly the same way.  Not only did she disapprove of the way I did dishes – under the running water, though I did use cold-only for rinsing, but some of our greatest fights were over it.  And it took till I got married and left the house for her to start doing it that way.  (And for those who are parents and are thinking “the water bill” – our water came from a well.  It’s actually bought-water now, because the well got polluted by a nearby factory, BUT now she does dishes under-running-water.  It was a process thing.)

Now imagine the same thing going on but just within the writer.  There’s the way I’ve always done things – written action or plotted a novel – and then there’s the way that wants to impose itself now.  And it’s telling me it’s more hygienic and faster, and I’m threatening to ground it until it’s thirty.

It’s the oddest feeling, like you’re not sure which leg to move next.  These books can be surprisingly good and break you through to a new level of sales.  BUT they’ll always feel like there’s something odd about them, that you could fix if you could just go back and re-do it.  Don’t do that.  Those books might not be quite as good as their younger brothers will be, but they often have a unique charm of their own.  Gentleman Takes A Chance is one of those for me, and I had to be calmed down to actually send the poor, long overdue thing out – but I re-read it (to try to recapture the feel for Noah’s Boy) and it reads clean and funny and quite decent.

And then there are the books that are unfortunate enough to be decent enough books for which you did the best you could…  Written just before a book that’s a major breakthrough in your style and ability.  Maybe you guys will get lucky and your development will be gradual.  My development is saltational.  I’ll poke around at a certain level for months or years, then suddenly the style/voice/ feel – my internal feel of what makes a good novel – will change in the space of weeks (and usually mid book.)  This means, one book later – sometimes mere weeks – you can look back and feel like the “book before last” was trash.  

This is not “real” and it won’t affect the readers that way, mostly because they won’t be reading your books backwards.  Even if they do, they won’t hold it against you that one book is better than the other.  I’m completely capable of reading Pratchett’s Night Watch and then the early Rincewind books, and I don’t think Pratchett was a total idiot with Rincewind.  Rincewind was good enough (given the limitations of a plot based on running away), Night Watch is better.  I don’t know if Pratchett would be one of my favorite writers if he’d never gone past Rincewind – probably.  I was scouring bookshelves for him even then – but I’m glad he’s moved past that.

So that feeling you have that you should have done better in book-before-last?  It’s all in your head.  Yeah, you can do better now, but it doesn’t mean you could do better then.  And you couldn’t have written the last book if you’d never written the book before last.

Then there are books you hate because something in the editing – the way you changed it on an editor’s suggestion (and I’ve done that too) – makes the book feel wrong.  Look, if it feels wrong there is a chance it is, no matter how much more “technically perfect” the book is with the change.  go read Kris Rusch’s post last week on perfect in writing and the definitions of perfect, and if you realize a change bothers you that much, consider not doing it.  Explain to the editor how it makes you feel.  A good one will “get” it.

When I was a teen I had a ton of pen pals all over the world – partly to practice English, partly to expand my social circle – and one thing the instructions these services sent you – and which I learned was true really quickly – is that the mood you’re in communicates itself to the letter, even though you don’t realize it.  So when I was fuming at something else and wrote a letter, the pen pal would write back “hey!  What did I do to make you mad?”  No matter how polite and nice I thought I was.

I’ve seen a similar process with books.  Not to the same extent, since they’re not written in one hour or so, so your mood will vary.  BUT a similar process nonetheless.  So, if you’re doing edits you resent (even if logically you feel you shouldn’t) this will communicate itself to the book, and the readers will pick up on it.

And finally there are the books you wrote years ago.  Dean Wesley Smith says never to re-read your writing.  Or as he put it “Why would you?  You know what’s in it.”

He’s admirably right but when, like me, you’re juggling three or four series with very different settings and feels, it becomes necessary to read the last book, sometimes written years before, to remember the minor details and try to get back in the style.

And when you do, you’ll cringe.  Even Darkship Thieves makes me cringe now.  But you know, part of it is not how bad it is.  A lot of it I think is this: Writing is, as someone said in the comments, an act of mental and moral strip tease.  If you’re a natural introvert, you have to brave yourself to go out there and take your clothes off.  And you have to do it – you have to reach the part that you cringe from – for the book to be good (trust me on this.)  You can do it and run at it, and get it done.  BUT then years later when you review the experience, it’s impossible not to cringe.

Most of what made me cringe in DST was “OMG, this is so dramatic.  Why am I not keeping a stiff upper lip?”  And “Did I have to have that happen?  Good heavens this man is always getting injured.  What will people think?”
Yes, there will also be wording – particularly for me, who am still and forever in the ongoing process of forging three dialects of English into my own unique mess – that feels unnatural and contrived and things you’d have smoothed, but be aware most readers don’t ever notice that unless it’s bad enough to stop them cold.  Most of that stuff doesn’t even come close.

BUT most of what you’ll be cringing at was how much you “revealed” of how your mind worked at the time.

Don’t cringe.  And don’t read your stuff if you don’t need to.  Dean Wesley Smith might be right on that.

You know, you’ll still need to strip your clothes tomorrow (and tomorrow, and tomorrow) – reviewing how you took them off last time will do nothing but make you self conscious and stop you cold.  And you still need to achieve that same level of “nakedness” or the book will be no good.

So what do you do when you hate the baby?  No idea.  Didn’t hate either of mine.  I did hate one of my cats as a kitten – for good an sufficient – but I raised him the best I could and he grew up to be a magnificent b*stard, still evil, but also still missed now when he’s been gone 11 years.

So what do you do when you hate the book?  Nothing.  Particularly if it’s selling well enough.  You learn that your perspective is NOT the reader’s perspective, you learn that you’re not the writer you were when you wrote it, and you forge ahead as best you can.

The past is not only another country, your past self is a foreigner into whose mind and works you do not have the right to meddle.  Impossible to recapture, and far easier to make a mess of it.

Finish the book, send it out or put it up and then write the next one.  And let it go.  Even book-children grow up and leave the nest.  And you shouldn’t call them back.

I don’t like doing open threads — partly because they tend to crash the hits on the blog, partly because  it feels like I failed in my commitment to write a post a day, which is why you guys check this every day, right.

However — possibly because we’re still in a recovering city, possibly because our utility company is like that — I’ve been without power for most of the early morning.  Because the batteries have cr*pped ou–  er… gone off on all the laptops, I couldn’t even write a blog post to put up as soon as it came up.

And now, I don’t feel like it.  I just don’t.  Also, whatever idea I had for a post seems to have vanished in the mists, leaving only “What the heck do I write about?”

So, I’m throwing this out there for you.  Because last month was crazy, between health and local issues, I’m coming up completely dry on what to write during the week.  (And usually I have AT LEAST) a list of possible topics for the week, to guide me, in case (fifty percent of the time) I don’t write the post before bed and must face it in the cold light of morning, unwashed and uncaffeinated.

So, give me suggestions for things to write about next week.  (And please no “What kind of ice-cream do you like?”  Last I checked I wasn’t (alas) Miss America or (thank heavens) a favored presidential candidate.)

I’ll be by to answer and engage (and tease, and annoy you) in between the stuff-that-must-get-done-before-Monday-morning.

If I had a dime for every time I’ve read that “every baby should be planned” and that “every puppy should be wanted” and that “everyone should have a fulfilling occupation” I’d have too many dimes to be contained in the universe.  But the question is: would every dime be shiny?

What are you getting at Sarah?

What I am getting at is that many people seem to have completely lost track of the distinction between ideal and actual.  Let me spell it out for you: ideal exists only as a perfect thing in your mind.  Like the battle plan not surviving contact with the enemy, it will never survive contact with reality.

That perfectly planned child will suddenly become unplanned when it turns out to be a girl, rather than a boy, or a boy rather than a girl.  Or when he/she turns out to have a personality completely different from what his parents’ expected.  While IQ might be broadly inheritable, at least in components (mostly from the mother, interestingly enough) the way it’s expressed isn’t necessarily.  So you’ll have the bookish parents with the mechanically gifted child, or vice-versa.  Planned?  Who told you you could plan a chaotic system?  It’s sort of like planning your day tomorrow – you’d best have three layers of plans in case it rains, in case a wildfire comes through, in case it’s fine and beautiful.  And even then, it will find a way to surprise you.

And the puppy who was so wanted?  The family that adopted him will get sick and have to give him away.  They’ll unexpectedly lose their jobs.  The puppy will turn out to have a condition that’s not fatal but is a life-long drain and expense.  Or something else will happen you can’t predict.

But, Sarah, you say, shouldn’t we PLAN for the ideal?  Then we just adapt to less than ideal.

It depends on the plan.  There is a type of positive planning, in which you leave the route open to the wonder of the broken (yes, I’ll explain) and the negative planning, where you won’t take anything less than absolute perfection.  The negative planning is usually what you get when government bureucrats or do-gooding busybodies get involved.

It concentrates on NOT LETTING the less than ideal happen.  These are the people who think you should be licensed to have children, after you pass classes that say you’re an ideal parent in THEIR WAY.  The people who think every unplanned baby should be aborted or killed up to three months after birth (you only think I’m joking.)  These are the people who post on craigslist screaming at people giving away puppies and kittens that they are terrible people and should have had their animal spayed.

Let’s leave aside for a moment the fact that I think overpopulation is lies, damn lies and statistics and that in fact the current worldwide crisis is caused by population ALREADY falling.  (I confess the evidence is circumstantial and thin, but there is some and – more importantly – the evidence on the other side is dubious and suffers from wrong-process.)  That’s the subject for a whole post and one I don’t have the energy to write right now.  Let’s leave aside the fact that I think our obsession with spaying and neutering in fact can act (is acting?) as a sort of reverse selective breeding, pushing cats and dogs back to non-domesticated (no?  We keep the cutest/friendliest from reproducing.)  And also that in some areas of the country – here – you either buy a breed dog, adopt a dog who turned out less than ideal for someone else, or … adopt a puppy imported from elsewhere.  In Colorado puppies seem to come from Texas.  But in some places they come from abroad.  Cats are more abundant because… they’re cats and harder to catch and confine.

Let’s instead look at the other side of the coin, and why negative planning for the ideal and temper tantrums at people who don’t follow your version of ideal, are stupid: because broken plans and broken ideals often come as a blessing.

Sorry to use the religious term, but I don’t know how else to express it.  Sometimes the crisis-unplanned turns out to be the best thing you ever got.

Right after our cat Pete died, we found ourselves adopting Euclid because otherwise he was going to be euthanized because he had an uri and our humane society euthanizes those, so it doesn’t spread throughout the pens.  We had about twenty minutes in which to decide.  We had – G-d knows – enough cats.  But he would have died otherwise.  We adopted him.

Yes, Euclid is broken in interesting ways.  My son calls him a feline Woody Allen.  Only Woody Allen isn’t into extreme body modification, while Euclid chews off his leg hair and gives himself a poodle cut.  Also, some right b*stard trained Euclid to fabric before we got him, which is why we can’t have rugs on our floors, not till Euclid departs this vale of tears. (On the good side, Euclid doesn’t show any propensity to love on adopted daughters.  Of course, he doesn’t have any.  Um…)

But in the days after 9/11, when it seemed I could not stop crying, he was the cat who came and loved on me.  He’s the one who sits on you when you’re sick or worried, and purrs and reassures you all is well in the world.  And sometimes that purr is your only connection to happiness.

Or let’s look at how many not only unplanned but disastrously unplanned children go on and make the world a better place.  Right now it’s early morning and only Leonardo DaVinci – unplanned, illegitimate, broken in interesting ways – comes to mind, but I know there are scores of others.  (Yes, there’s also people like Hitler – but there is no indication that it was the fact they were unplanned that sent him spinning towards evil.)

A friend who had a terrible childhood once told me that she supported abortion unconditionally, because it would have been much better to be aborted than to be abused.  What she was missing was that her parents would never have aborted her.  She WAS planned and needed in the family: as a scape goat.  The kids that get aborted in that type of calculus are the ones whose parents are afraid they can’t give them the very best – just like the animals who get spayed are those whose owners fear that they can’t find good enough homes for the litters – not those that are born to be mistreated.

Part of this, I think, is that our life has become so good compared to that of our ancestors that we think we can push it just a little further and make it ideal.

Every baby will be wanted!  Every pet will be loved!  And there shall be no more tears and suffering!

Never works.  Ever.  There will always be people who need a kid as a scape goat.  And even if you certified parents there will be parents who are fine young, and then get some illness or some other problem and – there you have it.  Less than ideal.  And before you say “but then the kids can be taken away” think of strangers evaluating and deciding family life from the outside.

I was a disastrously unplanned child, born premature with all the problems that implies.  I had the world’s sickliest childhood.  Mom has health problems that make her less than an ideal parent.  (She knows this.  She never wanted children.  She ended up with two of us by accident.)  Were there rough patches?  Oh, sure.  Aren’t there in everyone’s life?  But my family has a shared sense of humor, which helped.  And I got to live and write, and marry and have kids of my own.  Would it be better if I never existed because I wasn’t wanted?  Or even because I would, of necessity, always be at least partly broken?

Some of the best pets I’ve had have been mutts or even feral babies whom I tamed.  Right now we have Havey-cat whom we found on a mini-golf course, starved and covered in grease, and with a broken tail.  He now presents and behaves as a Turkish van.  Is he?  At least partially, probably.  But he’s not less loved because he came to us when we were maxed out on cats and definitely not in the market for one who is a fuzz machine (we’re all mildly allergic to cats.)  And he is, again, one of those animals who can lift your mood, because he’s a born clown and still kitten-like after three years.

Oh, yeah, and through no fault of anyone, I never fit in Portugal.  But my askew childhood and youth – difficult as they were in living them – resulted in my falling in love with a stranger from a strange land, and finding home that way.

Will some percentage of children you give up for adoption be abused?  Inevitable.  A controlling system can’t prevent that.  No system can.  What it can do is keep children trapped in foster care or convince people to abort rather than put the kids up for adoption.  Will some percentage of kittens given away end up as snake food?  Inevitable.  No system can prevent that.  I doubt it’s as many as we’ve been led to believe, though.  Most cats throughout history have been pets and not snake food.  Most humans are predisposed to at least not mistreat pets.  Call it co-evolution.

Look at your lives: really look.  Could you have planned everything that happened?  Would your ideal life have been REALLY better?

Take my career: did I intend to have my first trilogy tank, trapping me in ten years of midlist hell?  Well, no.  But let’s imagine it had succeeded.  I’d now be stuck in the “literary fantasy” niche, which btw pays lousily and where they expect only one book every two years.  Worse, I found by my third book that while I can do it and even enjoy it to an extent, if I do nothing but I become horribly depressed.

But the trilogy failed, and I was broke, and we were paying on two houses and I was fixing the “old” house for slae, and I couldn’t find a day job.  Then Jim Baen offered me money.  Then Berkley paid me to write Plain Jane.  My heart was broken, I didn’t want to write anymore.  The dream was gone.

But I needed money, and so I wrote, and even through the hell of six-books-a-year the dream came back.  And now I’m facing the chance for a better career than I hoped for AND I have the skills of incredible amounts of practice under pressure.

Would I have chosen this route?  No.  Was it rough as heck at times?  Yep.  Would I wish it undone?  No.  I wouldn’t wish any of the books unwritten.  I wouldn’t wish what I learned unlearned.

There is no perfect upbringing – for man or beast.  There is no ideal situation that can’t be reversed.  There isn’t any reason to believe that wanted – animals or humans – are better.  There isn’t any reason to believe the most peaceful places or eras are better.  Yes, the fourteenth century was a terrible time, but it gave us the renaissance and, eventually, the enlightenment.

Taking the broken and doing the best we can with it is all we can do.

And sometimes it’s much better than the ideal could have been.

*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. *

Losing It
Seraphim came out of the basement with Nell, into the dark, soft night air.  There was a smell that reminded him of when he went to the Darkwaters’ home farm: rich soil and plants and something indefinable that said living things were growing all around.
He took a deep breath of the air.  There was something different too, something he couldn’t define.  He thought it was because this place was in the North American colonies.  Though Seraphim had always meant to see them some day, it required money.  Inside the world traveling to a different continent was hampered by matters of magic that made any jump across water difficult.  So it had to be done the old way, by ships, or the new way by carpetships, and either kind cost money and, more importantly time, which the head of his family could ill spare.
“You’re very quiet,” Nell said.  And he wanted to think of her as the royal princess, not the least because that would establish their positions firmly and help him discipline his mind and heart.  But somehow, slim in those jeans that he could never think were women’s attire, she seemed whimsical and young.  At some level, she reminded him of the Shakespeare boys playing girls playing boys.  Not that there was anything boyish about her rounded figure – or that he wanted it to be – but he thought she looked like a young girl trying to pass as a boy, a child playing comedy.

Hard to associate that with the court, and high birth and the pomp and circumstance of the occasions in which he’d met the royal family.
He said, in a contained voice, “Well, you’ll agree that there is an awful lot to think about?”

“Doubtless,” she said, but now she’d turned out to look at him.  In the dark, illuminated only by residual light from the windows of the house, and the far more distant moon, her face looked like something glimpsed on a crystal ball, when the image was just solidifying: there was the pure line of the jaw, the straight nose, her dark eyes looking up at him, anxiously, and her lips, a little quirked, as though demanding he account for whatever thoughts or plans he might have.  She frowned at him, gathering those straight dark eyebrows over her nose.  “But you’re too silent.  I wonder–” She paused, as if she’d cut her own thought off.  “Is it their arrival?”  She gestured with her head towards the basement.

The trained response, “madame, I don’t have the pleasure of understanding you” was upon his tongue, but he swallowed it, and instead said, trying to use the informal, almost familiar tone he’d been using with her before, “I’m not sure what you mean?”

“You’ve been easy with me,” she said.  “And not the duke, as you were recovering.  I wondered, you know, because I’ve always seen you– That is, I get the feeling there are two of you, the duke and who you really are.  And I think you’ve been yourself while you’ve been alone with me in the world.  I suspect it’s someone only your family knows, and probably not all of them.  Now you’re the duke again.  You’ve gone elsewhere, closed yourself off.  I can’t read your thoughts in your expressions.  Is it because they arrived?  Surely it must be Mr. Elfborn’s arrival, because your brother… he’d know you.”  But she hesitated a little when she said it.

And Seraphim realized that she was right.  After thinking about what he hadn’t done and what he must do, out there, in the underground room, he’d come to believe he must indeed act as the Duke of Darkwater and the head of his family.  He cleared his throat.  “No, it’s just…”  He took a deep breath.  “I realized I’ve been a fool, letting myself get pushed around by circumstance, and never, never doint anything to find what is at the bottom of all this.  I’m a witchfinder.  That’s what my father called what we do.  We find the witches and the shape shifters before those who would harm them do. And here, like an idiot, after all this time rescuing people from just the sort of thing that has been visited on me and my family, I’ve let myself be caught in a trap, and I never tried to fight it.”

She narrowed her eyes at him.  “To give you your due, Your Grace, you were wounded and only half conscious through most of it.”  Then she smiled, taking the sting from the formal address.  “Not that you’d ever accept it, would you?  I think you’re one of those who drives yourself harder than anyone else could drive you.”

He made his features impassive, because if he didn’t he was going to tell her just how hard it had been, just how early things had fallen on his shoulders.  Instead he said, “Father was never truly reliable.  I think I– No.  perhaps I do him an injustice.  At least half of his persona was to hide his work as witchfinder.  But there might be more to it.  I think his personality– He was very sociable, very… very joyful and full of life.  The problem is that he was neither cut out to be duke nor to be a father.  Oh, he was a good man, I think, in a way, in the sense he cared for those in the family, and he was forgiving of weakness, which he would be.  But he was not…  Good at sustained effort.  I think I took over the accounts at fourteen.  Just watching the money flow out.  And the loans Father took for carriages and horses and clothing…”  He shook his head again.  “And gifts for his mistresses.  I remember being very puzzled at all the jewels he bought, when mother never wore hardly any jewels.”  He shrugged.  “So you see, someone has to drive me hard.  I have to be reliable, and I have to be dependable, because there are people depending on me.  If I let myself go, I could easily become like my father.  I’ve let myself go in this whole matter, and look what a mess I made.”
“I don’t think you could become like your father,” she said, and her voice was soft, looking up at him.  “Truly, I don’t.  Not if you mean his being irresponsible and letting go of things enough to hurt his family and let his duty devolve on you.  I do think you could be easier, and take more joy in life, but I think you’re also afraid of it.  You shouldn’t be.  The duke is well enough, and I’m sure he’s a fine man.  But I rather liked Mr. Ainsling these few days, getting confused about how to use stoves, and struggling with safety razors.”

“You like me incompetent?” he said, only half teasing.

“No.  I like that you can laugh at yourself when things go severely awry.”

He’d never be able to justify it.  There was no justification.  He was the worst of cads, the lowest of rakes, the most profoundly dishonorable of men.  But what was flesh and blood to do, when he she stood on her tip toes, and put her hands on his shoulders, and kissed him?

It would have been well enough, he thought, after all, if she’d just kissed his lips.

Or just kissed his cheek.  But the thing was, first she kissed his cheek, an hesitant peck and quite appropriate even between cousins as distant as they were.  So he relaxed a little, as she looked up at him, her eyes dark and deep in the moonlight.
She said, in a little raspy voice, “Don’t go indulging in any heroics, please?  Not without me, at least.”

He laughed a little at her rider, thinking that if he was going into danger, risking taking the royal princess along was like dragging a tasty lamb with him, while going to hunt wild wolves.  He was still laughing when she said, “Oh, I like you like that,” and stood on tiptoes and kissed his lips.

It was akward.  Odd, his lips still being parted in laughter and his being caught by surprise.  He’d kissed women before, albeit not many.  He’d kissed Honoria, very properly, when she’d accepted his proposal.  This was all different and difficult.  But when her lips touched his, his body had ideas of its own and before Seraphim could make use of his not inconsiderable will power, his arms had surrounded her gracile form, enveloping her, and pulling her against him so hard that she let out a little squeak.  Even that didn’t stop him, nor hitting her nose by accident as he drew her closer.  His lips still found hers, and her lips were warm, with just a little edge of cold from its having been colder in the basement room.
She tasted of vanilla and tea, and when their mouths met, it was not as though they were exploring, but as though they’d kissed already a thousand times, and now he’d come home, he’d found his proper place, and kissing Nell was where he was supposed to be, and what he was supposed to do, lifting her off her feet by the strength of his arms and feeling her heart beat frantic against him – or his heart beating madly against her.  It was as though they were not separate anymore but one.  More, it was as though they were always supposed to be one.

And then the light came on, sudden and harsh.

They jumped apart so quickly that it felt to Seraphim, much as being lifted out of a full dream into the awakening light of day.  He stood where he’d been, or a few feet away, cover his mouth with the back of his hand, at the same time wanting to preserve the sensation of the kiss, and to hide it from other eyes, as though the kiss were a physical thing, there to be discovered, and turning in startled alarm to see…  Nell’s grandmother in the doorway.

“Are they settled,” she asked.  “Did you solve the problem?  Who are they?”

And Nell, looking ruffled, her hair all on end, saying, “yes, yes.  They’re the duke’s half brother and… and a friend.  I’ll tell you all about it,” and starting to walk towards the door.

Seraphim was going to burn in hell.  He was going to burn in hell for taking advantage of an innocent, which she was.  Oh, he had few illusions about her relationship with Antoine, but that had been different.  She had thought herself a woman of Earth then, and the rules were different.  The same could be said for her lack of shock at Gabriel’s and Marlon’s relationship.  Seraphim hadn’t yet decided if he liked that or hated it.  After all, a wife who didn’t swoon at the meniton of the more carnal parts of existence might be very useful when it came to discussing things men dealt with every day.  It might even keep a man from straying if his wife was his best friend, and if he could discuss everything with her.

But there he stopped short, because that was where he’d earned hell.  He was thinking of Nell and wife in the same breath.  But she was not his wife.  She could not be his wife.  She would not be his wife, even if he got his heart’s desire.  Future queens don’t marry penniless dukes.  They can’t, particularly not in days when the health of the kingdom is at stake.  PARTICULARLY not when the queens have been raised abroad and therefore must be more perfect and unimpeachable than ever normal princesses were.  Any idea of love between him and Nell was forlorn and he should never have encouraged it – and to give him his due her kiss had taken him completely by surprise.  She must already have perfected the princely art of showing nothing in her face of what she felt.  Either that or, of course, she was quite oblivious to the arts of flirting in Avalon and therefore had neglected to give him the right signals.  He considered that a moment, then nodded.  Most of what she did, normally, would brand her a desperate hussy in Avalon.  Only she had not behaved that way in Avalon.  But one thing was knowing what to avoid, and another what to show to ensnare someone.  And that last, he’d bet, she knew not.  And it was as well, since the marriage of future queens was not a matter of romancing, but a matter of state craft.

All this came across his mind, as Nell went towards the door, up the creaking porch steps.  He was ready when she turned back to look over her shoulder at him and said, hesitantly, “Seraphim?  Are you–”

“I need to go up to my room for a moment,” Seraphim said, and it was even true, curse Earth clothing.  He needed time to compose his mind and calm his racing heart, before he could face Nel and her grandmother, and answer any questions the older lady might have – no, would have, if he had grown to know her inquisitive nature, and he had.

He walked past them, up the stairs quickly, refusing to look and see if Nell’s grandmother was staring narrowly at him, though he suspected she was.  He tried not to hear their conversation either, though some of the words reached him.  Fortunately they made next to no sense.  He didn’t think that Marlon and Gabriel were particularly happy – and what did their state of euphoria have to do with anything?  Or be said with such a tone as though it explained anything.
Down the hallway, into his room, and Seraphim closed the door, then took deep breaths.  No, forget going back down and explaining things.  If he saw Nell again, he might lose control of himself yet again.  It was the oddest thing.  He’d never even felt like losing control with Honoria.  No, perhaps that was not strange, since Honoria was an arranged match.  A match he’d thought his father wanted.  But he’d not felt like losing control with that opera dancer that he’d met while he was still at Eton, and whom he was sure was a prime article of virtue.  Oh, he’d kissed her, and he’d have done more, if he’d had more money and not been a callow school boy whom she indulged in a kiss for a lark only.  But he’d not felt as if he were plunging into the ocean, and over his head, and not in control of events.

Seeing Nell again might not be a good idea.

And then there was the crazed Earth code.  Nell would think she was supposed to go and brave danger alongside him, missing the fact that by being female she was more exposed, more vulnerable, and despite how much she might have worked for Sydell – Sydell was definitely on the list of people that Seraphim would like a long talk with – not as equipped for magical battle as she might think.  And yet if Seraphim gave her half a chance, she’d insist on doing as much as he did.  If not more.

His breath was now calm, and his mind clearer.  He looked around the room.  He couldn’t take more appropriate clothes, because he had none.  In a way, his very clothes would proclaim he’d been out of world, but he couldn’t go gallivanting around Avalon in a dressing gown, either.  He’d take what he had on, and steal beg or borrow more appropriate attire once he got there.  If he read the situation aright, he was already so deep in trouble that he would hardly get in more.

He considered the pocket watch that had been his father’s, and bit at the tip of his tongue.  He was starting to think there was some spell or tracking attached to that watch.  For a year it had told him whom to rescue – at least if he used other instruments for more precise tracking.  But recently it had sent him on wild goose chases or led him to traps.  He thought someone must have sneaked in a spell beneath the reliable shell of the watch.  How anyone could do that, who didn’t have Darkwater blood – the watch being wrapped up in the family and the blood – he didn’t know.  Then again, if the rumors about papa were even half true, Gabriel was just the only half brother who lived with the family – not the only one, or even rare.  No, Darkwater blood might not be an obstacle, and magic didn’t distinguish between legitimate and not.  Only human law did that.

He pursed his lips, then thought that here, in this house, in the heart of a world most magicians couldn’t brave, the watch would be safe enough.  He’d leave it here, and come back for it.

It was going to be hard enough to transport without taking a possible tracking device along with him.

Carefully, he built his spell.  It was doubly difficult because he was transporting from the madhouse, and because he must keep it from the notice of the other magic users in the house.

Slowly, carefully, he stacked the symbols and the thoughts, the links and the power.  Sometimes he felt as though he were trying to move a mountain.

By the time it was ready, his shirt was glued to him with sweat.

He closed his eyes and stepped into the portal.  It seemed to him at the same moment an explosion shook him, but when he stepped from inbetween, he was in an Avalon street – or rather in an alley which felt and smelled like London.
Just ahead of him, someone turned to look at him, and for a moment he thought it was Honoria.  Same pale blond hair, same oval face.  But then he realized that the face facing him, in total astonishment, was male.

And as the person tried to focus his eyes, with visible effort which – judging from the smell coming from him was due to gin – Seraphim recognized him.
“Damme, Darkwater,” Honoria’s immediately older brother Jonathan said.  “Where did you come from like that and scare a man like that?  And why are you wearing such odd togs?”

I shall be writing the chapters of Witchfinder once I have had enough caffeine.  (Yes, the beep beep beep IS the tanker truck backing up to my house.)

Meanwhile, if you can’t live without me, R D Meyer interviewed me this week — though honestly I was JUST coming up from the death flu, so if I sound odd(er) than normal, it’s not RD’s fault.

Where does time go when you lose it?  Does it fall behind the sofa cushions?  Accumulate, unnoticed in your desk drawers until you clean up and then go “oh, that’s where all that time went?”

I love the way Pratchett explains this, through the monks of time and the procastinators, winding time, and patching time, and repeating bits of time.  It matches observed reality, including the repeated history (ours and others,) the days that go by in a blink, the times when nothing gets done.  NOTHING.  And then the two hours or so when you write an amount that should be physically impossible.  Or the three days in which I wrote Plain Jane.

I’ve always been fascinated with time, and I love stories of time travel.  More importantly, I’ve always been fascinated with those crucial minutes: the minute before the car swerves.  The minute before you fall and do yourself permanent damage.  The minute before the bullet hits.  It’s just a minute – it’s a tiny slip.  It shouldn’t be permanent.

That’s probably the hardest thing to accept.  Instinctively, at a gut level, we all feel time should be rewindable.  We should be able to travel either way on it.

Possibly my favorite story of time travel and the consequences thereof is The Man Who Murdered Mohammed by Alfred Bester, which I – weirdly – first read in a French magazine, so I always remember it in French.  Possibly part of the reason it’s my favorite story is that I’m married to a mathematician.  (Though I’d never tempt him to go through a murder rampage through time.)  The idea that a mathematician, given enough incentive can assemble a time machine on the fly is absolutely believable.  (The thing is they’re theoretical people and most of the time they don’t care about reality, but if I came home and Dan said “I was bored, so I built a perpetual motion machine” I wouldn’t even be surprised, much less shocked.  When Dan and the younger boy get to talking and playing with numbers they’re downright scary.  The only thing saving us from a very odd future is that most mathematicians JUST don’t care enough to dabble in stuff like that.)

I’ve been thinking about this lately, because here we are in July and I’ve got just about nothing done this year – or (because it has more flavor) I got bupkis done all year.

First there were rewrites for Baen, which, of course, take precedence.  Then there was health.  Then there was the kid’s graduation and applications to college.  He hates bureaucracy more than his mother does, so I paid for my sins of making my dad sign me up for things.  We ended up getting him to complete ONE application properly.  The other ones sort of went in limbo. Thank heavens his record was good enough to be accepted in that one college.  (Might it have something with his not being ready to move, yet?  Who knows?  Devious is the mind of the kid.)

Then there was, since early May a series of illnesses.  Now, all along we’re dealing with odd hormonal issues.  After years of doctors assuring me I was menopausal (starting at 38) a doctor finally figured no, there is something hormonal wrong.  What it is, though, G-d only knows, and so far no treatments have been really effective.  (There is a suspicion I’m not human.)  This might be genetic.  I have a little cousin who has similar issues, including the infertility and the auxiliary side effects (you don’t want to know, but one of them is weight gain) and she’s been told it’s a defect in some chromosome.  What I know is that as I get older it becomes even odder and harder to cope with it, and there might now be other issues (there is at least one resulting from the very bad caeserean that gave us Robert – am I complaining?  No.  Just a fact.)  Anyway, not getting into TMI, this stuff might be at the back of the knocked out immune system and – annoying isn’t it – hormonal balance definitely affects the ability to write.

Then there was the death-flu.  And then for the last week the fires.

I’m starting to wonder if there’s a conspiracy to prevent me from writing.

Of course, when I look back, it’s the writing that counts.  How many books did I finish?  What did I research?  What did I publish?

Unless I look back ten years, and then other things count too: kids, house, moves, the friends we made, how happy the years were.  (The nineties were VERY happy.)

Of course, me being me, I always feel guilty about time “lost” and “wasted” even though it is usually time in which OTHER things were getting done – things that weren’t writing.

Having read Heinlein’s bio, I realized I’m far from unusual.  The man spent a lot of time being ill, or traveling, or politicking.

What did that mean?  Who knows?  

Perhaps his illnesses and struggles, the time he spent gardening and/or moving cost us another The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, three Puppet Masters and four If This Goes On.  Or perhaps without those times engaging in physical labor or dealing with the non-writing world, he’d never have written anything worth reading.

Is time lost?  Or does it just hide?  It slides by and leaves us changed.  Attempts to hoard it or channel it always fail.  The best we can do is try to do the best we can at every moment.  And let the rest slide.

Unrelated and personal update: Fire seems more or less stationary, at least the part in town.  Our guest will probably go back home tonight, after we make sure he has a means of contacting us in case of need.  Has to, his cat isn’t eating.  Due to the vagaries of wind, not much smoke out there around me.  I might take the opportunity to do some outdoor work.  The car stays packed, of course, and the other stuff ready to go until the fire is out.  I do bear in mind that fire is unpredictable.  Postponed doctor’s appointment is now for the sixteenth of July.  And today (maybe after a little light outdoor work) I get to write.

It’s funny that I started writing this post about how unrealistic most books are about widespread disaster and apocalyptic events before the fire started near us.  Of course, it’s now completely different, because I can start from my own situation.

First, for those from out East, Colorado Springs – and most Western cities – are very widespread.  They’re not all clumped together as in the North East.  We have friends within the city that are more than forty five minutes away – without traffic jams.

That said, the evacuation line – though not the fire line – is now about three miles from us as the crow flies and has overtaken the highschool my son just graduated from.  That’s a bit close for comfort, but it’s still on the other side of a six lane highway, which is twined at that place by a rocky, treeless creek bed.  It’s a very impressive fire break.  So far the fire hasn’t jumped i-25, which is a FOUR lane highway.

On the other hand, when the weather shifts in Col Springs (and it seems to be shifting) we tend to get hurricane-strength winds, which could jump that fire break in no time.  It’s still unlikely to blow in our direction, but of course, there are no certainties.

So, what to do?  Having heard stories of people who had too short a time to evacuate and had to leave pets behind, we are packing both suvs so that at the last minute we can grab the “small valuables, electronics and pets” and bug out in a few minutes.  (We have the drill of boxing cats down to ten minutes.  Vet trips.)

It honestly feels like we’re over dramatizing.  It really is UNLIKELY to get to us, certainly unlikely to get to us in the next few days.  On the other hand, this fire is now a firestorm and therefore not predictable.  It still feels like we’re overdoing it, and we go about sheepishly, with a suspicion we’re being dramatic.  On the other hand overplanning is survivable.  Under planning isn’t.

There are reminders of doom all around.  We have friends who’ve been burned out of their homes.  We have standing requests not to use the cell phones, to leave them clear for emergency work.  Planes flying overhead, to help fight the firs are a frequent reminder.  The air is filled with smoke (though not as badly as last night.)  The construction work across the street is stopped.  My doctor has postponed an appointment that’s already been postponed and which I’m anxiously waiting for because it might be at the back of the knocked out immune system.  It might be really bad.  OTOH it might be nothing.  I can’t know till I have that appointment, but the technician who operates the equipment is evacuated, out of town, and they don’t know when she’ll be back.  So, the appointment is now mid-July.  ALL hotels in Denver and Colorado Springs (Away from the evacuation zone) are booked solid.  Our planned weekend away in Denver might be dificult to book, if this gets any worse – and if we have to evacuate, we literally have nowhere to go, so in packing the cars, we’re planning to live out of them for a while, including large kennels to put the cats in.

This is not the first emergency I’ve lived through, though it’s never come closer than it is right now, except once.  When I was a kid in Portugal, a fire came to the other side of the train line, a block and a half from my parents’ house.  There was no evacuation, so I was on top of the garage, tracking the fire progress.  If it got to our side of the train line, we were going to run.  Fortunately the wind went the other way, so it cost us a night fully awake.

Before that, there were revolutions in Portugal.  After that, there was Hurricane Hugo in Portugal Charlotte (Apologizes to Geography) and there was of course, 9/11.

I’ll use 9/11 if I may, because most of us got that it was an event of terrific proportions.  I spent literally two days on line, tracking friends who were en-route through the country and stranded, seeing if we could offer help.  And since Dan was working in Virginia at the time, our friend Alan and I went out to meet him.  Our meeting place kept changing, depending on how far Dan had got, until finally we were in Hays Kansas, where Alan and I got out, at the airport, where Dan was going to hand in the rental car, prior to coming home with us.

And there we met a local.  “Do you know why they cancelled the air show?” he asked.  “Is it because of that problem in NYC?”

The way he talked about it, he made it sound like a minor incident that really only mattered to people from NYC.

And that is ultimately how the world ends.  Catastrophic events happen, not all over at the same time with the same intensity, but in pockets.  A neighborhood will be in chaos and ruin, and next door life will go on as usual.  There’s construction going on up the street a bit.  The grocery store is operating as normal, and I feel guilty because I’m not out there, painting the porch.  (And how do you KNOW that the deck chairs on the titanic DIDN’T need dusting?)

For those of us raised in societies where a stiff upper lip was a virtue, too, there’s the feeling that we shouldn’t over dramatize.  Some of our friends and neighbors are in real distress.  We?  Oh, we’re fine.  Live is perfectly routine.  Except we’re packing the car to bug out, and that’s probably overreacting.

In the middle of apocalyptic events, people still cook, still gossip, still change babies and do litter boxes.

This is the way the world ends – sporadically.  Erratically.  With normalcy amid the emergency.  And we, mere humans, try to soldier on through it all.

Which is why the world doesn’t end totally but always partially.  And then a new world is born.

Update early morning Wednesday: I’m all right.  I’m going in search of caffeine and checking the news.  I checked last at four am and the fire remained safely on the other side of I-25

Just a quick update.  First, so far my family and I are absolutely in no danger.  For the fire to get to us, most of the city will need to be burned down.

HOWEVER it’s hard to believe that, when you have falling ash, a visible smoke cloud outside, the entire town smells like a fireplace, and you can see the smoke plume and associated redness from your house.

There is an apocalyptic feel to the landscape, not playing well with my slight depression after the flu.  (I am now perfectly all right, btw.)  To counteract it, I spent most of the day outside starting the long overdue and desperately needed yard overall (in itself a feeling of the apocalypse ) and I bought a new American flag because flying the flag in front of the house ALWAYS makes me feel happy inside.

Meanwhile, the doctor with whom I have an appointment together (unrelated to the flu, though the problem might underlie the general weakness) has called and I wonder if they’re cancelling because they’re ON THAT side of town, and well…

It’s very odd to have places where our friends live and where my husband used to work being evacuated.  Odd to see my son’s just-left high school as a staging area for the media.

Let’s hope it rains.  Let’s hope it rains hard, but without one of those high-wind nights that often heralds weather shifts in Colorado.  I don’t think we can have the wind.

Those of you of a praying turn of mind, pray for Colorado Springs.  To paraphrase Don Camillo, if the houses of decent people were fireproof, I’d ask that the fire tear through the town.  But since the houses of good people are made of the same material as the houses of scoundrels, I hope we’ll be spared, yet this time.

(And Boulder is on pre-evacuation orders, because of yet another fire.)

It is now confirmed that Flying W Ranch has burned to the ground as have several houses in the Mountain Shadows subdivision.

I’m checking more or less continuously for updates on the fire.  A grim game of “Where Is Waldo.”

I just woke up from the weirdest dream.  In my dream, this choir of sweet-voiced children was singing “If you are right and we don’t belong, we’ll fall, don’t fret.  It won’t take long.”  There were other verses, but as I woke up most of it vanished, leaving only this and “If you are right and it’s beneath that we belong, if we are wrong, it won’t be long.”

It was such a vivid dream – let alone I don’t often dream of people singing – that for a moment or two I thought “wow.  I must find a site with those lyrics and post them on the blog, because that is totally the theme song of indie.”

And then I woke up and realized the song was sung to the lyrics of “Love lifts us up where we belong.”

And I realized the song didn’t exist and my post would be slightly different.

So, let’s talk about fate and duty and striving.

I grew up in a culture that believes strongly in fate.  I was rocked to sleep to songs about fate inexorably pulling people to doom or triumph as well as to songs about your fate being scripted all ahead of time and there being nothing you can do to escape it.

So I suspect this problem is more mine than other people’s.  But I know it’s other people’s too.

Nine times out of ten, when newbies approach me and stammer a question, it is a variation on “do you think this is what I’m supposed to do?”  (Why is it that the ones who instead TELL me “this is what I’m supposed to do” are ALWAYS the ones who truly have no aptitude and who ALSO aren’t making progress because they think they’re wonderful already?  No, don’t answer that.  Because G-d is an author and this is a funny book, I know.)

This question tortured me for years.  It still does.  The sense that I owe someone a life, that there is something I’m supposed to do, and that “is this what I’m supposed to do?”  “Is this the life I should be living?”

(In my case, it is complicated – of course – by my being religious and therefore believing that there is a part I should be playing.  But if you interpret my life in that way, He’s been plying the divine two by four against my thick skull since the sixties trying to shove me this way, while I bleated “should I be doing this?”)

Even for those who aren’t religious; even for those who didn’t get saturated in fate with an extra side helping of fortune telling and talismans to avert an evil fate, there seems to be this sense “am I making the best possible use of my life?  Is this what I’m supposed to be doing?”

This is possibly because humans are crazy apes, aware of our own, personal mortality, a thing we presume other animals aren’t.  (Presume perhaps wrongly.  I suspect cats know.)  So we know our time is finite, and we look at it as an asset to be used.  Hence we get young people wanting “meaningful” jobs and “to do something that matters.”

Writers are particularly prone to this sort of doubt, because we get hit on the nose early and often.  Unlike other skilled crafts, we don’t – most of us.  There are exceptions – get tutored by a master in the craft and then released into the world knowing we’re at least somewhat good.

No, even those of us who have worked and practiced and think – from what we’ve seen and what we read – that we can’t be wholly bad, can’t be sure.  And in the days before indie it was entirely possible to spend a lifetime being rejected by EVERYONE and never breaking in.  Particularly as we went towards the nineties and you had to go through an AGENT first.  “Get pre-rejected” as it were.  Look, if I didn’t write as fast as I do and not been as stubborn as I am, I might not have made it here.  I wrote eight – EIGHT – novels, one of them a goat-gagger and got them rejected by EVERYONE before one of them found an agent. And then she claimed she couldn’t sell it and didn’t send it out.  And I wrote a ninth, which sold.  Two of those books rejected everywhere have now sold.  One has done rather well for me.  Others were a case of my biting off more than I could chew and/or of trying to cram too much story into too few words because I thought I was supposed to do.

Writing books used to say things like “know when to give up.  If it’s affecting your life, breaking up your relationships and devouring your sanity and you’re still not published, it might be time to walk away.”

I suspect the indie path won’t really be any easier.  There will be stories you put up that sell barely a copy.  Some of these will be your heart’s darlings.  Some of the stuff that you put up almost cringing will sell and sell and sell.

And this is not even just for writers, but for everyone who ever tried to do something difficult and tried to reach beyond what they thought they were supposed to do or what they thought they could aspire to.  (One of the videos that came up for Love Lifts Us Up Where We Belong was of An Officer And A Gentleman.  It’s been a long time since I’ve seen the movie and I don’t remember whether the song was in it.  BUT the story is the quintessential story of reaching beyond what you thought should be allotted to you.)

So you’ll try – whether what you want to do is writing or something else you think would be wonderful and which seems just out of reach – and you’ll fail.  And you’ll try again, and you’ll fail, and you’ll start to get discouraged.  And you’ll lay awake at night, the thought rounding on your mind, like starving wolves outside a village during a killing frost “What if I’m not supposed to be doing this?  What if this is not what I’m supposed to do with my life?”

It is human, I think, to want to avoid pain.  I think that whole question is a way to allow you to walk away before you kill yourself trying for something.  After all if your ancestor Grog hadn’t limped away from the big mammoth he was trying to take on his own, with his stone ax, you wouldn’t be here.

On the other hand…  On the other hand…  If he had taken that mammoth the entire village would have eaten like kings for a month and there would be other humans here who weren’t because all the village except Grog died of starvation.  (Grog probably ate them and survived that way.  This is why I don’t study genealogy.)  And that mammoth?  It turned out that Grog had already wounded it fatally and it died not very far away, after Grog had stopped following.

So, what am I saying?  Am I saying that there is no destiny?  No preordained fate?  That there is nowhere we should be?  Nothing we should do?

Well, I do believe there is a purpose to our life – but then I’m religious – but I don’t believe our fate is scripted.  I also believe that our purpose might be something that… fails to occupy our entire life.  There is an Agatha Christie story that illustrates this beautiful – unfortunately I can’t remember the title, but it’s one of the Harley Quinn stories – in which someone is about to jump from a cliff, and someone saves him.  The person who is saved goes on to play an important role in something.  The one who saved him had, himself, contemplated suicide.  It is hinted he had to stay alive so he would pass this isolated spot in the dead of night and thereby save this man.

Yeah, I believe you have a divine purpose, but your chances of knowing it or understanding it are minimal.  You have to trust that if you do the best you can, you’ll be there at that moment when you need to do what you’re supposed to.  (Also, I presume that G-d, like a good programmer has backup loops and you might get re-directed somewhere else.)

But that’s my religious beliefs – and other people’s belly laughs – and not fate.  I don’t believe in fate, no.

I believe in people who want something and who want it bad enough to do it.  I believe in people who think “So, what if it’s against fate?  The gods of fate can stuff it.  I’ll still climb that mountain and steal that fire even if there should be hell” or eagle “to pay.”

But shouldn’t you take heed of failures?  Perhaps you don’t have the natural talent?  Perhaps someone is trying to tell you something?

Look, natural talent has precious little to do with it.   If my younger son wanted to be a singer, I’d tell him it would be hard as h*ll because of his sensory issues.  I wouldn’t tell him it was impossible and that he could never do it.  Deaf people – who want it bad enough – can learn to sing.  There are ways to magnify the sound vibrations, so they can feel music and imitate it.

In the same way I wouldn’t tell even the most pitiful beginner writer “you’ll never make it.”  I’d give him or her some gentle hints on how to start improving, then leave it up to them to succeed or fail.  Because, as that sweetly singing in choir in my dream said, if they don’t have what it takes, they’ll fall… eventually.  (Or not.  It’s none of my business, anyway.)  If they want it, it’s their business to try.  If we want it, it’s our business to try.

I don’t remember the rest of the lyrics in my dream, but I have a feeling it said something about kicks in the teeth.
The other day a friend on Face Book posted a thing about “How do you get to success?”  Answered with “Fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail…….”

Make your own fate.  Climb your own mountain.

Your nails might be torn and bloody when you get there, and you might be down to one eye and one good knee.  BUT if you want it badly enough, you’ll get there.  If it’s a price you’re willing to pay, you’ll get there.  Don’t deceive yourself into continuing because it’s “fate” and don’t soothe giving up because “it’s fate.”  Make your own decisions, fate or no fate.

Yes, there might be hell to pay.  If you want it badly enough to pay the price, you can have it.  You can reach beyond what you were taught you could. The price is working beyond what you thought you’re capable of.  And to keep going after – by all reasonable thought – you should have been dead.  Sure, a man can take a mammoth down alone.  Even if the mammoth falls on him.  But what the heck, the village will eat well through winter.

You want the fire of the gods? Steal the fire of the gods.

And when the eagle comes to eat your liver?  Eat his.  Raw.

No one decreed it should be the other way around.  It’s up to you to make it the way you want it.

Of all the recent corruptions of language and forbidden subjects, those who have read me a while know that the one guaranteed to make me foam at the mouth is confusing culture with race.

I think it started, somewhere, in the entire Marxist subculture, where they believe everyone is full of secret thoughts and keeps conspiracy within himself, which is why we get the bizarre idea that people can have “false consciousness” that works against them.   It is a thing of mystery religions – and Marxism has always been one – to fold thought upon thought until it means something quite different from what the plain words mean.

I think it started at the top, or in the inner circles, in the sacredness of faculty lounges, and went something like this: if you criticize Islam’s treatment of women, you’re not really criticizing that because you’re a dirty capitalist pig (or an un-enlightened worker) so you can have no solidarity with these women (something reserved for Marxists.)  So, your outrage about making women going around covered in ill-fitting slip covers which hamper their vision and cause all sorts of issues, MUST really be raised by the fact that most practitioners of the religion are three shades darker than the average Englishman, or about the color of your Italian on a summer day.  Thereby, the appropriate answer to “I think the whole Burka nonsense has got to stop.  Sure, a woman can do that to herself if she wants to, but in these cultures, what choice do they have.  We should – at the very least – talk against it.” is “Racist!”

However, as other religions heavy on theology have found, what is decreed in the inner circle and makes perfect sense after lengthy discussion, is corrupted to a tautology among the foot soldiers.  The Catholic Church has long compounded with this and allowed the worship of old pagan gods under a Christian name because once the masses get something in their heads there’s no getting it out.

At the foot soldier level of Marxism – at the level that middle school assignments are written and news articles are spun – the whole justification behind responding to criticism of a culture with cries of “racism” was lost.  It might in fact not have made much sense to the every day man.  Well, think about it.  It couldn’t.  How is criticizing Islam’s treatment of women racist, but criticizing Italian Catholics morality rules not only not racist but strongly encouraged.  Having – more than likely – the blood of both in my veins, I challenge you to look at my younger son and tell me whether he has Greek features, Roman features, Jewish features or Arab features.  (Actually you could drop him into the middle of a New York City Jewish enclave and you’d never find him again.  But us living in the west, normally people think he’s Mexican, which goes beyond making no sense, but never mind.)  

People on the street have a way of seeing these things very clearly, not being educated enough to suspect themselves of heresy or to interrogate their own motives when the motives are plain as the nose on their face.

So, faced with the high-priests of Marxism which are also, for our sins, the high priests of our culture and education (I have great hopes this will change with the new media) and their absolute certainty that criticizing (certain) cultures is racism, they had to find their own justification.

The justification they found was the one that made sense.  The fact that it ties into very old prejudices and is IN FACT one of the supporting pegs of racism makes no difference, because to the people on the street, the high lords of culture MUST know better, so this must have been proven by studies or something.

And now, in schools and newspapers, I keep stumbling on this thing: culture is race and race is culture.  Culture runs hereditary in the veins; is transmitted through the DNA.

Sarah, you say, you got this by the wrong end.  It can’t possibly be true.  No?  Let’s leave aside for a moment the idiotic assignments that they give the kids in school, in which they are to write about their culture – by which they mean their ancestry.  (Don’t believe me?  Test it.  Have your kid write about his culture as an SF fan.  But most teachers make sure the kids know it’s their ancestry, in the written description of the assigment.)

As someone who comes from a different culture, I tell you that not a week goes by without someone asking me – in cocksure assurance they’re on the side of gods – whether I’ve taught my children their culture.  (The answer can get very interesting depending on how p*ssy I feel that particular day.)  By which they mean, of course, have I taught them Portuguese? (Actually I lie, given younger kid’s look and my accent, they mean have I taught them Spanish or Russian.  But never mind that.)  This despite the fact their father is of (mostly) Anglo Saxon stock with a few more exotic encrustations.

I think the two kids have spent – if you aggregate all the visits – a grand total of three months in Portugal in their entire life.  Usually in two-week installments.  Sure, they like my parents.  Sure, they like the monuments.  Sure, they’re horrified by the drivers on the roads.  BUT ultimately they visit Portugal like one visits an exotic location.  It is not their culture.  It will never be their culture.  Heck, after twenty eight years, it is no longer my culture.  I have nothing against Portuguese culture.  (I lie.  I do.  But that’s because I think it shackles its people, who frankly, deserve better.)  I have fond memories of growing up in it.  Some things – drivers education, (paradoxically), marriage (where civil and religious are strenuously separated) and teacher education it even does better than we do.  But, by and large I prefer America, which is why I made the choice I did.  HOW could this make Portuguese my KIDS’ “Culture” unless they believe it’s inherited?

There are other instances.  Considering “Hispanic” a race by government fiat is one of those.  Oh, sure, Mexicans are somewhat more distinct (though I’ve seen many a Mexican who could blend unnoticed with the peasants in a Portuguese village.)  HOWEVER (even if they’ve now rationalized it by making Portuguese also Hispanic, probably driven mad by the idea that Fernandez was Hispanic, but Fernandes wasn’t.  Or Marquez and Marques, or…)  your average Portuguese or Spaniard can – and in my case does.  Hey, do YOU have anything against discounts in ethnic restaurants?   I don’t.  I only have writer money – pass as Greek, Italian, Arab, and – in some circumstances – Russian.

This assumption is part of what is buggering up our – needs to be tossed out and start clean – adoption policy too: the reason that they try to place “ethnic” children with “ethnic” parents, even though there might be a hundred white yuppies ready to adopt them.  (No, the explanation is NOT that the child should look like the parents or horror ensues – if it were, then someone would by now have mentioned the hundreds of Asian children brought up by white parents who are Valedictorians in half the highschools across the land, and by and large as well adjusted as any of their generation.)

[I would like to blame on this the “put child with birth parent if absolutely possible, even when prospective adopter is healthy, wealthy and wise, and birth parent has three convictions for child abuse” but I’m afraid that’s just Rousseaunian stupidity.]

And then there was the genius who accused me of racism for writing a story in which China was full-throttle capitalist (parallel world.  Split around the fourteenth century) while the west was mired in communism.  Because, you see, the Chinese soul cares for other things than individual achievement, and certainly not for money.  They are communal and they– Sorry.  Gagged on a bit of irony there.

But Sarah, you say, there IS a correlation between race/sub-race and culture.  You can see traces of Germany in Pennsylvania.  You can’t deny that areas of heavy English colonization are British-feeling.  You–

Oh, my sweet auntie Mary.  Please.  Areas of colonization means entire groups of people who came here together.  Culture is a function of the group, not the individual.  Say instead of moving here alone, my best friend and her sister – the three of us were inseparable much of our growing up years – had married guys who went to school with Dan, and who found jobs together, and the six of us moved around in a mini-enclave.  THEN my kids would have Portuguese as at least a sub-culture.  Because it would be impossible for us, together, not to keep some of the behavior, gestures and attitudes we grew up with.  The kids would then get it.  It wouldn’t be their dominant culture, but it would be there.  (My best friend and her sister, in fact, married Frenchmen and live near each other, and their kids retain some Portuguese culture as a result.)

There have been estimates that some tenements in NYC were entire Italian villages.  Trust me, in those circumstances, the culture remains, at least as traces.

But take a person alone – particularly take an infant – and drop him into another culture, with no one to teach him to behave as his ancestors did, and he will simply learn the new culture as his.  There are countless examples, and not just of cross-cultural adoptions in our day, but of children kidnaped during tribal raids, or children-hostages taken very young, and becoming as much part of the host culture as anyone born to it.

There might be a very weak correlation between certain hereditary traits and certain cultures, but I doubt it.  Most cultures extant are simply not old enough for genetic selection to make any difference.  Take Chinese, probably the oldest, literate culture around, with a continuous history.  That culture has changed.  For certain regions and certain times, individualism (even if on different terms than in the West) was an esteemed trait (this is what I based my story on.)  And certainly the children raised in the US by American parents aren’t any less individualistic or competitive (!) than their peers.

Culture is a thing of the group, not of the individual.  As such we can and SHOULD be able to criticize cultures for their worst aspects – and that includes our own, but shouldn’t be limited to it.  I think for instance that burkas are a ridiculous and demeaning impairment on women (And please, please, please, hold your breath on how they are beautiful and a sign of respect.  I have an idea, let’s respect arab men too.  Let’s see how they like living under bed sheets.)  I think that Portuguese are a very capable people shackled to a culture that promotes – nay, encourages – sloppiness, lack of zeal and patronage (there are reasons for all of this in Portuguese history, ranging from the patronage of the Roman system – which is why it extends from Greece to South America, the same bizarre corrupt system based on nepotism and side-dealing – to the fact that at various times the area that’s now Portugal was occupied by alien overlords, be they Moorish or Germanic.  Sloppiness in fulfilling orders is only sense in that case.) And I think our own cultural confusion of culture and race is insane, and possibly suicidal.

Race can’t be changed.  What’s bred in the bone will come out in the flesh.  Culture can.  It can be changed at an individual level, when a culture is simply hampering a human being.  And it can be changed at a whole nation (or national group) level.  For instance, we now bathe everyday, something that would have horrified our ancestors.  And no longer is wife beating no longer acceptable, neither is child-beating.  (About child-slapping I’m somewhat more ambivalent, but that’s a subject for a whole other post.  I’ll just say I too disapprove of child-beating.)  These are major structural culture changes.  So you can change the culture without changing the race.

That is, if we are willing to stop playing Marxist games and assuming that the reason people disapprove of forced child marriage in Islam is that Arabs tan as dark as Italians.

If we’re not, the human culture that carries the torch of human freedom and improvement of human conditions will shift – possibly slowly – somewhere else – possibly India.

And whatever the culture is that promotes the most freedom for the individual, from private choices to wealth production will be the culture I’ll endorse, whether most of the people in it are white, black, purple, or striped like Zebras (well, you never know.  Aliens and Gen mod.)

You see, I am an unabashed culturist.  And when it comes to culture, the one I prefer is the one that allows each person to pursue his enlightened self interest.  None of them will be perfect, but I’ll choose the best I can.