Author: Sarah A. Hoyt

There will be another post later, but I’m finishing entering edits into Darkship Renegades and I wanted to have this post up ASAP – at any rate this post is needed as a follow up to yesterday’s and yesterday’s discussion of what Human Wave is.

Taking Martin S’s point into consideration, that we don’t want to limit so much as to set free, I decided not to express these as rules, but as “You might be a Human Waver if–” (Now if someone can come up with funny drawings…)

Some people LIKE writing grey mush and we’re not forcing them to join our movement or denying their right to write what they very well want, just telling them “That’s your way, that’s not our way” and validating OUR way of doing things.  For too long writing what we do has been considered verboten or at best “stupid.”  By revealing the philosophical underpinnings of our way of writing, we will hopefully convince some reviewers and critics to consider that our way is as valid as what has been accepted as expression in Science Fiction and Fantasy (and other genres as well, because at least some of these apply there too.)  More importantly, by codifying and giving our principles a name, we will free other people to try it out.  And by linking our blogs and cross publicizing, we will perhaps confer upon our congeners a little advantage that, in these transformational times, might be enough to – if not surpass – at least stand up well next to the establishment mode of writing.

First – who CAN be a Human Waver?
Writers, of course, but also critics, reviewers, people interested in the future of science fiction and even (just) readers.  In these days of distributed connections and influence, “mere” readers who consciously decide to highlight the parts of the Human Wave that attract them in their Amazon reviews, or even to refer to the author as joining the Human Wave movement can do as much to publicize and expand and – yes – legitimize the movement as any of the professionals.

Now…  If you’re one of those above

YOU MIGHT BE A HUMAN WAVER IF

– You like to write (or read) stories in which someone wins.

– You don’t think just making someone white, black, Asian, Hispanic, any other race or sub-race, alien, human, straight, gay, Western, non-western is enough to make him a villain.

– You don’t think just making someone white, black, Asian, Hispanic, any other race or sub-race, alien, human, straight, gay, Western, non-western is enough to make him a victim.

– You don’t think the purpose of a story is to deliver a message.  (The story can have a message, but that should be subordinate to the characters, plot, events, and it shouldn’t leave the reader feeling like he just read a very long pamphlet.)

– You think a great story can touch the chore of humanity and the human experience without being relevant to current political events or polemics.

– You think something should happen in a story.  Or something should have happened, the aftereffects of which are reverberating through the characters.  (It can work for short stories.)

– You think the writers’ job is to write and sell stories – not to (pick one) educate, elevate, raise the consciousness of the public, change the world, stop a war, start a war or any other quixotic, grandiose and unlikely aim.  (If you achieve any of those, great, but you won’t if you don’t sell.  And if you “just” sell a lot, the Human Wave movement salutes you.)

– As a writer, you are humbly aware that readers are sacrificing their beer money for your story.  As a reader, you don’t feel you owe a writer and have to read a book that’s a hard slog or no fun at all.

-Update:  You might be a human waver if you think Science, technology, guns commerce and even success are not inherently evil

(THANK you to Dave Freer for that last one which, yes, is important.)

– As a writer, reader, critique or reviewer, you do not sneer at success.  Yes, in the time when push worked, it was possible that a “mega block buster” simply made it because of distribution and access.  But barring that, if a book is selling, it is because people like it.  Congratulate the writer and move on.  If your wish is to tell people what they SHOULD like for their own good, then you’re probably NOT a Human Wave writer/critic/reader.

Okay, that should be enough to get you talking.  If one or more of you has problems with one or more bits, and can produce a convincing enough reason, I shall remove it.  If there’s a glaring omission not covered, let me know.

Things that remain to be done: getting some sort of aggregate site going to which people who identify with we band of brother… er… sis….  Er…  siblings can link their blogs.

Someone who will compile a list of reviewers or would-be reviewers who are willing to look at our stuff for the free books.

AND because every movement should have roots, perhaps a reading list of books of our writing forebears which writers/readers might be interested in checking out.  I’ll give my list in a comment later, but part of the reason I’d like this is that there are lacunae mile-wide in my reading.  Part of the reason I made do with French SF is that there was only ONE SF line in Portugal, it published one book a month.  Back list was notoriously hard to get, unless some friend’s parent happened to read SF and was willing to lend you his old collection (yes, I made friendships entirely based on that, like you wouldn’t!).  And at any rate, they didn’t translate nearly everything.  Which is to say, some of the names you guys bring up I’ve only vaguely heard of and never read.  For me and for the young as well as for those who will discover SF through us, a reading list of classics might be worth it.

Update 2 – I don’t think I’ll do another post today, unless it’s late at night.  Revised manuscript sent.  Chapters of Witchfinder to get in shape for human (and dragon) eyes.  Might happen, but I doubt it.  It’s too bad since I wanted to do a post on how to dissect trolls.

This is a manifesto.  I’m not sure what we’re manifesting, but it’s probably destiny.  Or density.  When you’re dyslexic, it can get confusing.  But in any case we’re manifesting something and it’s a patent manifestation.

The proximate reason for this is my post – here.  Or in other words, it’s another fine mess my mouth got us into.  (Okay, my typing fingers.  If you’re going to be nitpicky, you’re right out of the club.)

The purpose of this is to create a new “idea” in science fiction, a new way to look at the genre.  Properly observed (and I’ve observed it) I think the genre should be a way to play with possible futures, with possible outcomes, with possible ideas.  The wonder of science fiction lays in the open possibility.

When we have the list of what we’re sort of aiming for, we can start getting people who “subscribe” to those ideas, or to most of them
Once we have the list of who you are and your websites, we shall send enforcers to your hom…  No, wait.  That’s another list.  Oh, I see.  That’s the list the trolls left behind.  Never mind.

Once we have that list, we can we can have some large, linked aggregate, so we can help each other, and get more attention to the whole idea.

We should also en-list some critics and reviewers.  I know some reviewers but not much about critics in their native habitat.  However, someone else might.

Because we are rebelling against enforced conformity of style and opinion, of belief and ideology, this list is not “though shalt nots” but “You’re allowed to.”  It is also, in the nature of my nature (Okay, who let the copyeditor in?  Rent his robes and throw him to outer darkness, where there shall be wailing and gnawing of blue pencils) to know that this job is not completed.  Heck, it’s not even really started.  There will be discussion of this list at both According To Hoyt and Mad Genius Club.  Come and be heard, and let the discussion begin.

You are allowed to write escapist science fiction – or fantasy.  Sometimes we just need a good read.  If it doesn’t have a big idea but is enjoyable, it’s still a worthy endeavor.

You are allowed to write as much as you wish.  In the new limitless market we see no reason to artificially restrict your output.  Anyone who thinks quality depends on how long something took to write has never known either professional writers or struggling middle-graders.

You are allowed to write first person.  You are also allowed to write second person, third person, and in persons yet to be invented.  As long as your work is entertaining, we hold you harmless in matters relating to verbal malfeasance.

If your world building holds internal consistency, at least according to the buying public, anyone objecting because it doesn’t conform to his or her idea of a future shall be pelted with soft boiled eggs and wear the yolk of shame.

Your objective is to sell books.  Writing is communication.  Your objective is to communicate with as many people as possible.  Or at least to amuse them, distract them, or make the burden of life less burdensome for a while.  Wishing to feed your family is also an acceptable goal.

You can write male heros.  You can write female heros.  You can write alien heros.  You can write human heros.  You can write western heros.  You can write non-western heros.  You can write squirrel-heros (but you have to know you’re weird.)  You can write it in a boat, you can write it with a goat (but which end do you hold on the paper?) You can write it in a moat (but it will probably drip) and you can write it on a stoat.

You can have a happy ever after.  You can have a happy for a while.  You can have a fleeting happy.  It’s your happy and you can have it if you want to.

You can write action and plot oriented books.  (Who will stop you?  You’ve researched fighting techniques, right?)

You can write sex.  Or not.  It all depends what fits the plot.  You can even write sex with a robot.

You can write politics.  You can write them from the right, from the left, from the middle, the top, the bottom or everywhere at once.  Just remember to make them fit the plot.  And remember not to infodump.

So do we have no principles?  No guidelines?

Oh, it’s guidelines you want, then?  Well, I was manifesting.  But fine.  I’ll throw out a few simple rules:

1 – Your writing should be entertaining.  If you’re writing for the awards and the literary recognition, you’re hanging out with the wrong crowd. (Does the other crowd have a tiny racoon in a kilt?  Or even a quilt?  Think!)

2 – Your writing shouldn’t leave anyone feeling like they should scrub with pumice  or commit suicide by swallowing stoats for the crime of being human, or like humans are a blight upon the Earth, or that the future is dark, dreary, evil and fraught with nastiness, because that’s all humans can do, and woe is us.

3 – Your writing should not leave anyone feeling ashamed of being: male, female, western, non-western, sickly, hale, powerful, powerless.  It should use characters as characters and not as broad groups that are then used to shame other groups.  Fiction is not agit prop.

4- Your writing shouldn’t be all about the message.  You can, of course, have a message.  But the message should not be the be-all end-all of the novel.  If it is, perhaps you should be writing pamphlets.

5 – You shall not commit grey goo.  Grey goo, in which characters of indeterminate moral status move in a landscape of indeterminate importance towards goals that will leave no one better or worse off is not entertaining.  (Unless it is to see how the book bounces off the far wall, and that has limited entertainment.  Also, I’m not flinging my kindle.)

6 – Unless absolutely necessary you will have a positive feeling to your story.  By this we don’t mean it will have a happy ending or that we expect pollyanish sentiments out of you.  Your novel and setting can be as dystopic as you want it.  In fact, your character can die at the end.  Just make sure he goes down fighting and dies for something, so the reader doesn’t feel cheated.

7 – You will write in language that can be understood.  You will have an idea of what your story is about, or at least of its beginning, middle and end.  And so will your reader, once he reads it.

8 – You are allowed to write scientific speculation that counters “currently established fact” – just give us a reason why that makes sense in your universe.  (For some universes it can be highly whimsical, for others you’ll need serious handwavium.)

9 – You will not be boring.  Or at least you’ll do your best not to be boring.

10 – You shall not spend your life explaining why your not-boring is better than your fellow writers not-boring.  Instead you will shut up and write.

Comments, suggestions, goats?  Stoats?  Oranges?  Peanuts?  Lightly thrown chickens?  (What? I find thrown chickens humorous.  No, I don’t know why.  Oh, please, I’m a writer.  Like I have the money for a psychiatrist.)

Over the last few years I’ve taken part in more than a dozen panels in science fiction conventions where the question came up “Why is there no sense of wonder in science fiction?”  Or “Where have all the young people gone?  Why aren’t they reading science fiction?”

The excuses are always the same.  The foremost and most favorite is “The age of wonder in SF is between 12 and 14.”  The second is “They’re living in a science fiction world.  They don’t need to read it.”

On this I’m going to call bullsheep and oh, yeah, bullsheep again.

If the age of wonder is between 12 and 14, then YA SF should be healthy and thriving, right? Instead of non-existent in comparison to YA fantasy. And while there’s something to say for that, psychologically – I remember reading sf as a young kid and being filled with a sense of amazement, but actually my most fervent reading age for SF was between fourteen and about twenty five or so.  Partly because at 22 I came to the states, and I found a whole plethora of work that had never been translated.

As for the “they’re living in science fiction.”  Oh, PLEASE.  This is the part of the blog in which we say “your age is showing,” and also “Get over yourself.”  Admittedly the age at which sf/f was most popular was around the forties and fifties.  Not respectable, but popular.  Well, it could be far more accurate to say that they lived in science fiction, at least by their lights.  Most twenty year olds then, probably remembered a world where cars were very few, and where oil lamps and candles still had a place in many houses, but they were living in a world with an interstate system and electrical lighting and indoor plumbing, and the beginnings of computers.  Compared to that jump, the one from the seventies to today is nothing.  Oh, yeah, the computer is starting to make it different, but it’s not the thing that people DREAM of.  In fact, it’s so unromantic, and came on so slowly that most of us have trouble realizing how fundamentally transformational it is.

Recently two more excuses have been brought in.  One is “the boys don’t read.  They’re watching TV and playing games.”  We’ll go into this again later.  And one that is almost right (almost) which is “We had all these great things, but we didn’t pay up.  There are no flying cars, or moon rockets.”

They’re almost right on that one, but not quite.  The people saying this are ten to twenty years older than I, and they’re right that there’s a generation that is disgusted at this – but that’s my generation.  And those of us who still read sf tend to read off beat stuff, or older stuff, not the stuff that’s “pushed” or considered “high quality” by most of the houses.  (Baen, as usual is its own little world and therefore exempt from these discussions.)

The kids alive today don’t know about those broken promises.  Though I’m here to tell you they still get excited about going to space and the future.  It’s just that this is no longer what SF is about.  And (see what I did here) this means that they go play games, which do have mega fighting robots, and space colonies, and the other things that once made them read SF.
This is not even particularly important, except insofar as there are things you can learn from written stories that are harder to come by in games.  I think empathy is one.  And good reading skills is another.  Both of these are useful in life, and we’re shutting a generation out of them.  Beyond that, science fiction has the chance to make kids THINK about the future before it gets here, and also to have them try on new ideas.

So, who killed the sense of wonder?

You’ll forgive me, since I know a lot of my readers belong to this generation, but it was boomers moving into the publishing houses.

I understand WHY it happened.  I just don’t have to like it.  Boomers came of age at a time when population was supposed to keep expanding indefinitely (note to the brainless bunnies who commented on my war is Hell post, no it’s no longer doing that.  It might actually be contracting.  We only have highly dubious counts, from countries who get aid per capita to believe it is still expanding.  We also thought the USSR was expanding, until it collapsed.  There’s lies, damn lies and statistics.)  Youth was the way of the future.  You only have to re-read the Heinlein of the sixties and seventies to get this feeling.  The older people were kowtowing because they expected to be vastly out-numbered.  So between that and a bunch of other cultural things, that one generation grew up thinking they were something special and that they should make everything different.

Also for some reason and I honestly can’t think why, unless it is a combination of their parents’ experiences in WWII AND Soviet Agit Prop (yeah, I know.  I blame a lot of things on it.  But they were GOOD), the boomers thought that they could create a perfect world.

Unfortunately this meant that when they moved into SF, right after Heinlein had exploded out of the ghetto of crudely colored magazines, they decided it was their mission in life to make SF accurate, respectable and, above all RELEVANT.

This is when the problems came in.  They came in because every generation’s idea of “relevant” freezes at around the time they come of age.  The burning issues of the day get resolved and gotten over, but they’re still the ones that formed them.  And some of those issues weren’t even, really, issues by the time they came of age, but they were part of what was being struggled with while they were growing up.

When the boomers swept away the old order of SF and brought their stuff in, suddenly SF became obsessed with gender issues (mostly defined as a rather pat feminism), race issues (the burning issue of their day), and misunderstood economics (that to be honest is still relevant.  their kids fail to grasp economics in exactly the same way.)  The idea of being “cool” made them worship “literary” only since most of them wouldn’t know literary if it bit them in the fleshy part of the arse, “incoherent” “hallucinatory” and “pointless” had to do the turn.

Then came my generation who, btw, are not boomers, though we often get aggregated onto the end of it.  We’re also not gen xers, sorry.  Some people call us the lost generation, though we were mostly found – at work, trying to claw a space for ourselves while being told we weren’t cool or “socially conscious.”  We’re the band of kids born somewhere between 59 and 68 or so, though these things are fluid, and I’ve met “us” stretching all the way back to 51 and them stretching all the way up to 70.  A lot of this had to do with how old your parents were when you were born.  Our current president, for instance, despite being only a year older than I is very much fully integrated in boomer culture, being the child of a very young mother and raised mostly by her parents, and therefore more as her little brother than her son.  Also, for some of us on the cusp, we CHOSE.

I’m not saying all the boomers did was bad.  Largely I’d rather praise them than bury them.  But in SF they’ve been an unmitigated disaster.

Not as readers, as such.  Readers still wanted the same thing – fun.  Not as writers, so much.  Some of the still readable writers – Dave Drake, possibly Weber (I don’t know his age) and many others in the Baen stable ARE boomers.  Connie Willis is also a boomer.  I think so is F. Paul Wilson (though he looks about my age.) – are boomers, but as editors and critics and the people who set the culture.  Maybe it has something to do with the liberal arts culture of the time.

I didn’t notice, because my exposure to SF was limited by what was translated into Portuguese, what was going on until about five years after coming to the US – five years spent catching up on favorites’ books that hadn’t been translated.

And then after a while, I started realizing that these books were… odd.  The new stuff coming out, in the ever-shrinking SF shelf at the local bookstore in Charlotte NC, was… strange.  Not the SF/F I remembered at all.  Well, the fantasy was mostly quest, this being the mid eighties.  I can take or leave quest.  It doesn’t do a thing for me.  A lot of the SF was cyber punk which bored me.  The more serious works were… uh…

And by “Uh” I mean, I’d get to the end and either not remember the book at all or throw it against the wall.

And please understand that while in Portugal, in despair I had resorted to reading NOT JUST typical seventies SF of the “We all have tons of odd sex and then we die” or French SF (check out Pierre Barbet sometime.)  Or even French SF Romance (which was very funny, as it was written by people who’d never read SF.  the one thing I remember, for whatever reason, was the woman being showered by a floating ball-robot that sprayed her with water.  I’m still trying to figure out WHY.  World building was always funnier than heck, as tech made no sense.)  I even got hold of a mag called Panspermia which was French SF and I THOUGHT was devoted to the theories of Fred Hoyle.  Turns out I was wrong.  Who knew?  The fact it came in a plain brown wrapper should have given me a clue, but I was innocent.

So, my tolerance for bad is very high.

But these books were POINTLESS.  They either had meandering non-plots, or they had an endless repetition, of the hit-over-the-head type with … not even social controversy but social markers of that time and class.  You know “Women are better than men.”  “Every culture is better than Western” (or what I call Ashram anthropology… or more likely hashram anthropology.)  These were soon joined by newer and stranger talking points as boomers realized that the world was more difficult to make perfect than they thought, “The human species is a blight upon the Earth.” and “We should go back to eighteenth century tech and die out.”

Sometimes, rarely, you came across a book that bowled you over all the way to the end when, I guess in an effort to stay relevant or interesting, the author killed every character.

Like Amanda who talks about his over at MGC today, I thought that people simply weren’t writing the good stuff, anymore.  And then I wrote it.  And I sent it out.  Do you know the MOST common rejection for DST, back thirteen years ago, was that I had “illogical world building.”  No one could ever explain to me WHY this was so, but mumbled explanations ranged from the fact that “In five hundred years we won’t even be human anymore, and we’ll have all sorts of computer augmentation.” (Rolls eyes.  Why if we get better at bio?) And “it’s too cheerful” or “It ends well” or “The state will be far more efficient and everyone will be happy” or…  I SWEAR I’m NOT MAKING THIS UP, from my agent at the time, “Perhaps you can make it believable if instead of the Good Men, you have the Catholic Church rule the world.”  (WHAT?  No, seriously, WHAT?  I’d never talked about any religion to this man, so I can only assume that the Catholic Church was his own personal bete noir.  Who knows why?)  And yes, most of the time my sf was rejected by agent and never sent out because “no one wants to read that” and “you lack a big idea.”

At that point I did what everyone else seemed to have been doing since the seventies, and moved over to fantasy.  Only fantasy was even then falling victim to the same nonsense.  It seemed, for instance, that having heroic males was out.  And you had to have a certain amount of allotted whine per page about the evils of patriarchy or praise of the great goddess.

So I took refuge in the past and wrote historical stuff – fantasy and mystery.  I’ll note at this time both time travel and alternate history were getting very popular, I think for the same reasons.  But there’s only so much you can do in the past, and most people don’t want to work that hard (Regencies, arguably the most successful historical subgenre – of romance – aren’t really.  They have a few historical details, but, by and large, are modern people in costumes and following outdated rules.)  Also, well… going into the past might be a sense of wonder of a sort, but not the kind likely to appeal to young people.  Particularly since, with few exceptions (Frankowski, S.M. Sterling, Flint) people didn’t do Connecticut Yankee things in the past, making it modern.  Instead, they just struggled along there, and more likely than not died in the end.  (I’m not casting aspersions on Doomsday Book where the death is natural and makes sense and it’s NOT the main character.)

And Fantasy went the same way, till it became “unbearably long feminist screed on the evils of men.”  Look, I’ll take some of this.  Mercedes Lackey and a bevy of other fantasy writers of the eighties did a bit of this. The father was always wicked (eh.  I have that too :) Which is weird since I’m very close to my dad.)  There were some evil guys.  BUT most of the men were still decent, and even if the main character was female (and that wasn’t always) she would find either love or decent male friends.  But then that changed.  I actually had a book rejected for being “insufficiently female centric” despite the fact the main character is female AND she’s a take charge female (a police woman) AND she rescues her man (Think Athena’s little sister in urban fantasy.)  Why?  Well the explanation had something to do with her falling in love with a MAN.  (The horrors!  Shudder.)

And that’s when I started realizing what was wrong – though it took Amanda to solidify the thought into words – the thoughts we were getting for lack of a better word “pushed at us from the over culture.”  This was the way they wanted us to think, the way that not only were news stories slanted, and narratives framed, (the Duke Lacrosse case) BUT the stuff they were teaching our kids in school.

Was my biggest problem with it, then, that it was blantantly a-historical and counter-factual.  Well, no.  I lie for a living.  My morals are weak.

My problem with it was IN FACT that it was boring.  If I wanted to get these points pounded into me until I got sick, I’d read the newspaper, the advice columns, the fashion mags or watched sitcoms.  There was nothing new THERE.

Meanwhile, btw, TV and movie sf continued doing very well by bringing in much of the feel of the pulp era to the screen.  For instance, you couldn’t SELL Stargate (though I wrote a short story which even called them stargates back a year before it came out.  It’s okay, it’s a very bad story) as a book or a story.  Why not?  Not plausible.  We know humans evolved on Earth.  You can’t violate what we know in science.

Between the bands of political correctness, the bands of “relevance” and the bands of “we want to be literary” science fiction was strangled in the crib by people who didn’t care if sales numbers kept falling because, well “kids aren’t reading.  They live in science fiction.”  And their bosses believed them.

But this is neither a dirge nor a despairing article.  And I MIGHT write dystopian societies now and then, but my characters still manage, by and large, to fight through.

This is to tell you it doesn’t have to be that way.  Ric Locke’s book is full of the sense of wonder.  I haven’t read much else recently, because I’m busy trying to finish contracts so I can put some stuff up myself, but I have a feeling if there aren’t other books like his out yet, there will be.  I’m looking forward to being delighted, shocked and titillated (get mind out of gutter.  You’re leaving me no space) by heretical notions of human history, strange thoughts on human future, and fun rides along the way.

The readers now have control, and I think they want their sense of wonder back.  Do you have a space opera you wrote years ago, which got rejected everywhere?  Dust it off, look it over, unmuzzle it if you tried to make it acceptable to the establishment.

And then put it up.  The future is free.*

(*With the purchase of another future.  Said purchase, as all purchases of liberty might entail the pledge or actual payment of your life your fortune and your sacred honor.  You will only keep the liberty you’re willing to fight for.  The establishment is always the enemy of the future.  You have been warned.)

To my regular readers who wonder what got into me yesterday, I apologize.

While yesterday’s post was no more “political” than most of my posts are – I tend to analyze the psychological and psycho-social underpinnings of a situation, and I stay away from telling you who to vote for – it went RIGHT into the middle of a “slogan campaign” that has been driving me batty on Facebook.  To the extent that that slogan campaign is being pushed by a political party, my post was therefore political.

This is a break with not only my rule, but with the way we brought up our kids, since we raised them by the Heinlein dictum that only a fool or a sadist tells the absolute truth in social situations.  We also raised them with the dictum that gentlemen (and in this family the one woman – me – aspires to be a gentleman too by living by rules of fair play and social grace) do not discuss politics, religion and coitus in social situations.

So I feel guilty for coming out with the boxing gloves on in the middle of a social occasion which a blog – or face book – are.

I maintain however, that analyzing the deep underlying psycho-social underpinnings of people’s beliefs and of movements is part of my job, particularly the science fiction writing, with its component of future history.  I maintain too that any party or social movement that relies on endlessly repeated memes does not deserve your trust, and deserves to have its *ss analyzed and its motives investigated.

Also, the endless repetition of this one phrase (and a few others) is ringing my alarms.

To understand where I’m coming from you have to understand that I’m intensely – INTENSELY – political.  Not in the sense of swearing allegiance to a party – I don’t trust any large group of people – but in the sense of having a profound interest in political theory, political technique and what results from both.

I keep – or try to keep – those separate from my writing, except to the extent that what the author believes comes through in the book, particularly in the science fiction in my case.  I try to keep it separate because I don’t believe in slogans or in sloganising.  I believe insofar as science fiction writing has a function – as any literature has a function – beyond amusing the reader, it is to make the reader think.  Honestly, I don’t care if you read my books – and enjoy them, which I do care about, because I want you to buy more – but come to the diametrically opposite conclusions from mine.  Heck, sometimes (particularly with the early books which had heavy editorial influence) the openly expressed opinions are not my own, just bait to make you think.  Also often opinions expressed in books fit the time/the character/the morals.  (This is how I managed to be accused of homophobia because a regency lady doesn’t squee with joy at the thought of a potential suitor being gay.  Time and place, people.  Time and place.)

However, it would be nearly impossible for me NOT to be political.  You see, I was 11 in 74, when the Portuguese revolution happened.
I’m not going to defend the previous regime in Portugal.  Calling it fascist is a little simplistic.  Not because it WASN’T.  By definition it was a “state capitalist” system with a strong emphasis on the paternalism of the state, and therefore fascist.  However, fascism has become something else.  It has come to mean racial purity (which in Portugal would be a laugh.  Also, the leader of the regime had a converso family name) and swastikas and siding with Hitler.  (For those who went to American public school, no Portugal didn’t.  Like the sainted Swedes, Portugal was neutral.  With a little more justification perhaps, since in WWI it had sent barefoot soldiers with no weapons to die in the maw of the German war machine and at the beginning of WWII Portugal was even poorer and in greater disarray.)

It’s perhaps easier if you think of Portugal’s “old regime” as FDR’s if he’d succeeded in packing the courts and held power for forty years or so.  It had social security from cradle to grave and it was strongly, violently, anti-communist.  (That second, think on, was also time and place.  Spain, next door, was engulfed in civil war for much of the regime’s establishing years and Portugal’s existential fear is ALWAYS being engulfed by Spain.)

[Yes, it also had colonies, but anyone coming in and bleating about colonies and racism will get kicked hard where it hurts.  Both race and colonies in Portuguese history are “different” enough to make anyone’s head hurt and they don’t conform to any of the stereotypes you’ve heard.  Also, likely your perception of it came about through the media and was distorted because the colonies were coveted by the Soviets who brought their agit prop machine to bear on the situation.  They won too – for a long time the ex-Portuguese-colonies became Cuba’s farms.  And the population there suffered greatly.  Never mind, that’s all secondary.]

A lot of my family had secret “liberal” sympathies, even those who seemed to defend the regime.  I remember being very young and hearing my mom and dad making jokes about how “uncertain” the election was, since it was, of course, a one party thing with a “dummy” Loyal Opposition.

So when the revolution happened, the first reaction was guarded hope.  But in those early heady days, while watching the speeches, I remember my dad pointing out a guy in the “revolutionary generals” group and saying “He’s a committed communist.  In a year they’ll all be like him.”  I was puzzled at the time, because, well…  There were many of them and only one of him.  Then dad explained that when a bunch of people are vaguely uncommited, or committed only to “changing” things, it is the one with the plan that always prevails.  I’ve since seen this in action EVERYWHERE, including in business meetings in corporations.

He was right too.  Within a year the most extreme elements were in control.  And here I have to remind you this was a time without blogs.  What you’ve read in the media here was not only wrong, but very wrong.  Hell, even in Portugal, unless you paid close attention and/or if you happened to be in a calm area, you might have no clue.

I came here in 1980 and was surprised to find that Portugal was considered an idyllic place where the revolution had happened without a single shot, and where people gave each other flowers or something equally stupid.

The reality on the ground was quite different.  There were firebombings of any party headquarters that wasn’t far left (How far left?  At one point the socialists were forbidden.  They were running dogs of imperialism, or something. I, may G-d have mercy on my soul, marched in their support, because it was the only way to oppose the communists.)  There were cars and people attacked on the street.  There were peaceful demonstrations fired on from an upper story window (I KNOW.  I was at one of those.  No, it wasn’t reported in any papers.)  There were tanks on the streets of Lisbon, not once but more than once.  And – though this came out only after I’d left and I don’t know all the details, there were rumors beforehand – eventually there were mass graves found of people we thought had run off to Brazil or people who had simply disappeared.  Now, none of this compares – not even close – to places where communism got full hold of the population.  It never did, in Portugal, you see.  At most Portugal settled for a slightly redder form of euro-socialism, and it was saved from itself by the fact that AT HEART every Portuguese thinks that laws are made for “those other people.”  So Portugal lurches from bankruptcy to disaster, but is never very good at full totalitarianism.

What I mean to say is that between the local ferment of revolution and counterrevolution, the bigger spectre of the Cold War hanging over my head (in Europe, where all this seemed more serious than here) I didn’t have the option of picking one of two parties and treating it like belonging to a club, accepting everything from above.

The only knee jerk position I have is of rejecting both fascism and the red fascism we call communism.  Both of them are not only the way back to feudalism, but to a feudalism informed by an anti-human religion (which for all its faults medieval Christianity never was) which wants to make men into perfect creatures.  The end of that road is always mass death, misery and tyranny.  There is no appeal.

All my other positions are carefully thought out and painfully arrived at – which is the other reason I don’t talk about them much in social situations.  It is impossible to make clear how I got at things unless I use pages and pages.  Or I take you through the process in books, in the middle of stories.

I have at various times been accused of believing this or that because of my religion.  That was very funny, since in religion as in everything else, I have to think through things – I am a woman of very little faith – which means I’m at least evenly divided between two major religions (we chose one to bring the kids up in.  It remains to be seen if they’ll stay in that one.  They seem to have the same issues I have) and even then I have minor and major quibbles with BOTH of them.

In fact, this long circuitous route is to explain to you why I mistrust all slogans.  It’s because first I saw how people could repeat slogans and memes and surrender their capacity for thought.  Take “Equality” – is that equality before the law?  Because if it’s any other type of equality, it can’t be achieved, and it leads to death.  But people will repeat it, and assume it’s a good.  (In its more hilarious manifestations, it involved the class voting on one’s grade, because, duh, why should the teacher have more power than any ignorant middle schooler?)  And second, it’s because, as other revolutions happened through the seventies, I saw the same slogans and often the same symbols (red carnations were a symbol of the revolution in Iran, as well) appear around the world, almost every time in a revolution that benefitted the Soviet Union.

By that time, from personal observation, I’d come to the conclusion that both communism and its less forceful cousins in the socialism end of the spectrum, were REALLY good at slogans and propaganda (right until the end even our own CIA thought that the Soviets were far more prosperous and stable than they were) that bypass people’s minds.  What they were REALLY bad at was actually governing and that was because their principles could not and would not lead to a prosperous or peaceful society.  Not in the real world.  (I won’t go into that.  Read Animal Farm. The process of their sloganizing and of their lack of ability to govern without creating “enemies” is very well documented there.)

On the other hand, living in Portugal during the seventies left me very leery of discussing politics with anyone.  This is because I learned that otherwise decent people – by dint of repetition – believed the most appalling things, and that trying to reason with them about these things just led them to cut you off.  In that, they behaved like a religious cult, where the belief must be protected above all else: above family, above friendship, above love.

If I wanted to have a social life – and I did – I had to not talk about politics.  Of COURSE the path to power was to, instead, talk the “right” politics (which for most of my life meant the “left” politics), but having seen the naked evil that easy pap led to, I couldn’t.  I’m not absolutely sure – despite being religious, yes, I SAID I was a woman of little faith – there is life after death, but I am sure humans owe it to themselves not to KNOWINGLY ally themselves with evil.  There is something – if nothing else the ideal of being HUMAN – which should stop you from knowingly committing evil.  You still have to sleep with yourself.  It was fine for those who didn’t realize how evil evil was to just mouth the words, but I couldn’t.  Not and remain myself.  I’ve made my choice on that, and paid my price in career and in money.  I lament my choice only insofar as it makes my kids’ life more difficult and I can’t give them the things I wish I could give them.  On the other hand, it was the only choice I could make – I’m not complaining.

What shocked me when I came to the States was to find out the easy path to power here was the same as in Portugal.  If I mouthed slogans about women’s freedom, or about equality or about the evils of the rich, I would be lionized by those who had power in the areas where I could climb and achieve honors and riches through: academics, writing, the sphere of opinion-making.

Blame it on my contrary nature.  Blame it on having a conscience.  I could not.  Again, I knew where that led.  The best I could do was shut up.  And I shut up.  I wrote fluffy books.  I avoided public discussions.  And as a result we have friends – good friends, I always thought – from both ends of the political spectrum.

Again, there is often a vast gulf between the monstrous things people believe, and how they behave in private life.  In private life most of our friends were kind, generous, almost painfully loyal.  So I learned the gentle art of turning off politics (and occasionally religion) with a joke.  And we went on.

Until 9/11.  I still maintain this caused some sort of psychological split in our society.  Suddenly my friends on the left – it was always those on the left, yes.  The right can be appallingly crude, particularly in jokes about sexual preference, but they will let me turn it off.  Or they apologize and shut up when I tell them “no more.”  – didn’t want me to change the subject and demanded I endorse their ideas on the EVIL US that had brought this about.  (I believe thinking you’re responsible for the bad things that happen to you makes you feel safer.  That’s why abused children believe this too.  I wonder if people who believe that realize that they’re believing in US power more than any US apologist ever did.)

I lost some friends there.  Our writers’ group split up.  Not because I opposed them, but because I wouldn’t ENDORSE what they were saying.  And then things calmed down a little, and I learned to turn politics off, again.

I still have friends from every possible political color.  I have friends from every possible religious bend.  I love them for the people they are, and ignore their often nutty opinions.  IF they want to debate this or that, without the slogans but at a deeper level, we do, and often we find we agree.  They don’t seem to see that their slogans are in contradiction with their reasoned opinions, and I’m not their mother.

If you go into FB friends, I have an even greater variety, though most of my field is knee-jerk to-the-left-of-Lenin, formed by reading, by the media and by universities, which all inhabited that spectrum in their formative years.  (Also because misfits are ALWAYS attracted to totalitarianism.  I think out of some misguided idea that a sufficiently powerful government can make everyone accept you.  I’d like to remind all my misfit friends that the first thing totalitarian regimes do is destroy any type of minority.)

Because I’ve learned there’s no point in trying to argue with the semi-incantational quality of their slogans, I mostly just page past their political posts.  I don’t get in fights because there’s no point, and I don’t get in fights because I berserk.  (Curse you, Viking pirates on Portuguese coasts, who left behind your genes.)  This means that if I can’t take immediate, violent action and don’t have time to avert the anger before it starts, I make myself ill stopping the berserker fit.  I had the shakes late into the night last night and I am still halfway-wired and bruised-feeling.

But lately things have got worse.  Much worse.  My largely apolitical husband who is, furthermore, and has always been – as I have – a supporter of what we’ll call “marriage equality” (if you need an explanation of why, go here, and let me assure you I’m friends with people who vehemently disagree with me on this.  Some of them gay.  their points are cogent.  I just think they’re wrong.)  got himself baited into the middle of a kerfuffle over, of all things, a proposed boycott of chic-fillet, based on accusations that its owner donates to anti-gay organizations.  I know at least one of the organizations that this man donates to have put out some rather vile pseudo studies claiming that all gay males are pedophiles.

HOWEVER I’m fairly sure the reason the man donated to them is because the organization is Southern Baptist and so is he.  People tend to donate that way.  At any rate, the reason the guy on face book was posting was based on a supposed flyer supposedly distributed at NYU and saying the sort of things extreme liberals BELIEVE it’s how religious/conservative people talk among themselves.  (You can see this when depicting religious or conservative people on TV.  The echo-chamber writers can’t imagine anyoen disagreeing with them for principled reasons.  No, it has to be that the other side are evil moustache-twirlers.)

I’ll point out my husband is a mathematician.  He’s way smarter than I am.  HOWEVER each of our groups of friends think each of us married beneath himself.  This is because Dan – being largely apolitical – doesn’t get the whole slogan or demonizing thing.  He doesn’t GET irrationality or using emotion to manipulate people.  So, I’m sure he said some painful and weird-sounding things in that argument.  I didn’t go look, because I know he did.  He will just say the logical thing, and not realize he used some code word or other that will send the other person over the edge.  As I understand it, he decided the guy making a big fuss over the whole chicfillet thing was engaging in hate speech.  I don’t know what Dan thought the definition of hate speech was.  I guarantee it wasn’t the generally accepted, sloganized one.

What Dan was picking up on AND reacting against was this poster’s unreasoning hatred against someone who believes what he believes as a package deal in his religion.  That religion is not my path, and I can argue against this particular tenet of it but I (And Dan, in this case) don’t propose to BOYCOTT them just because of that.  Not unless the politics are an integral part of the business. (Mind you, neither of us eats fast food, so this is ALL academic.)

But something struck me, as Dan was relating this insanity to me.  Apparently the man posting this kept saying “If you love gay people, boycott chicfillet.”

And I think that puts its finger on the center of it, on the reason people get so upset if their slogans are countered, on why people love the slogans to begin with – none of this is rational.  Those slogans, most of them insane, or at best inane, soothe some inner need – some inner lack.  Women who are convinced there is a war on women get to feel purposeful and not to examine what they’re doing to the men in their lives and what they – collectively – are doing to the relationship between men and women.  Gay people get to feel they’re on the side of angels, and soothe whatever ache they have, from being a minority that sticks out and whom many people condemn.

The people repeating these incantations and getting all defensive over them want to be loved.  They want to be reassured they’re loved.  A phrase from Bill Patterson’s bio of Heinlein came back to me, how Heinlein taught the moral fundamentals to “a generation of children from fractured families.”  My parents stayed together, I grew up in a village.  But insofar as both my parents were career people and worked too much, insofar as the mechanics of education took me away from my grandmother, there is a lot I found I didn’t know about the simple basics of “how to go along in life” that Western civilization has passed along until just after WWII, when it all came unglued.  And I suppose it is worse for other people.

So we’re looking for validation – and family – in all the wrong places.  Worse, in a world where we can no longer hold on to tribal affiliations of any kind, and where religion is iffy, we’re clinging to political sub-groups, to ethnic groups, to … sexual-preference groups? As tribe, as religion, as the normative rudder of our lives.

This is not just wrong, this is insane.  You can’t find community there.  Not long term.  These groups are formed ONLY on a shared hatred or a shared fear.  That doesn’t build any society.  Any society that works that way ends in blood.  After the blood comes the tyranny which ruthlessly suppresses all minorities and anyone who is “Weird” which – for those of you who are science fiction fans – pretty much includes ALL of our community, writers and readers.  And I don’t care if the totalitarianism is red or black, and neither should you.  Dead is dead and in the silence of the mass grave no one cares if it was “the Fatherland” or “the People” who killed you.

So, step back from the abyss.  Stop looking for validation in putting up the same ridiculous slogans.  The whole War On Women thing is a good one to start with.  Women have never had it so good as in the US.  Are there pockets of problems?  Sure.  But a lot of them are in individuals’ minds, and you can’t dictate how other people think.  If a guy treats you badly, put him in his place, don’t try to get the government to do it for you.  And at the same time beware how you’re treating men.  Our children are innocent of the sins of history.  Punishing them does nothing but setup the next swing of the pendulum.  Remember women’s freedom ALWAYS exists at men’s sufferance.  If it comes to a physical fight, in aggregate, they are bigger, they are stronger, and they can dominate us completely (look to the Middle East to see how.)  If they’re willing to deal with us as equals, be gentlemen, ladies, and don’t take advantage of your situation of power.  At least if you don’t want it to be temporary.

(Oh, one way you know the whole War on Women thing is phony, is that the initial reason for outrage was that the churches wouldn’t give women free contraceptives.  When this didn’t fly – religious women! – it changed to things spewed from the ever uncontrolled mouth of Rick Santorum who manages to be both a moralist and a “social justice” economist.  Then it went on to some minor legislative decision in some state court.  Then…  There is no there there.  But by repeating the slogan and bringing up these ever more anedoctal justifications, they keep people repeating the slogan, till they believe is true.  When you see this pattern, no matter how good the slogan sounds, EXAMINE it.)

Stop demanding that people agree that women are teh awesome and that vaginas are the bestest thing yet – you just come across as insecure.  Stop whining that some man called one of you something or other.  I’ve called “bastard” to some of my best men-friends, and none of them started a crusade to defend his good name.  (This reminds me of when my blog was attacked by a middle-school class, who thought they could silence me by calling me a bitch.  Honeys, I’ve been called worse by people I still talk to.)

The same goes for other minorities.  I’m sorry, no, I don’t love gay people.  I love my friends who happen to be gay.  You know who you are.  I love you as much as I love my straight friends.  (And sometimes you make me want to scream, just like my straight friends do.)  I don’t give friendship lightly, and once I give it I undertake its obligations seriously.  If you’re my friend, I don’t particularly care who you sleep with (WHY should I, I’m monogamous and married!) or even who you fall in love with: you have a claim on my affection, my support, my aid in time of need and YES my (very platonic) love.

However, I also know gay people I wouldn’t cross the street to spit on.  I’ll grant you there’s a lot fewer of those in my acquaintance than there are straight people, but that’s because there’s fewer gay people in the population in general.

Anyone, anyone, who says that I should love their group, or that if I don’t agree with some cutsey little slogan “War on Women” “Hate is not a family value” (what makes you think people who disapprove of you hate you?) or ANYTHING ELSE I can’t be their friend anymore, should stop and think.  Do you agree with everything that slogan implies?  Do you know where that slogan originated or why it was everywhere at once? (Like the “the people united shall never be defeated” appearing in both Portugal and Iran and every other revolution in between fully formed.)  Ask yourself what will happen if the people who are pushing these memes get full control.

I enjoin you to contemplate “First they came for the Catholics.  I didn’t say anything, because I wasn’t Catholic…” and where that leads.  I enjoin you to wonder where the REAL power is right now, in government, in the media, in entertainment, and what opinions you have to espouse to get to the top, and then wonder what “power” you’re “speaking slogan” to.  I enjoin you to CONSIDER what you’re endorsing, not just what you’re getting away from.  And I enjoin to stop demanding tests of loyalty from your acquaintances.

I don’t love gay people.  I don’t love straight people.  I don’t love communists.  I don’t love Catholics.  I don’t love Southern Baptists.  I don’t love men (except one) and I don’t love women.

What I love are individuals.  I love my friends who belong to each of those groups (yes, even the communists.  If it helps, I pray for them) and who are by and large as decent as they know how to be.  And I like those other individuals in all groups who are decent, open, and fair-dealing, or at least try to be.  We’re all human.  We all have flaws.  But we have the qualities of our flaws. The friend who loses his temper on a dime is the same one who will distort his entire life in a matter of hours to drive you halfway across the country in an emergency.  Or at least, mine is.

IF we talk to each other without slogans, and don’t cut each other off in the name of slogans, perhaps we can forge a society all of us can live in, yes?  It won’t be perfect, nothing human is.  But we’ll live on, like the large, loud, fractious people we are.

Or perhaps you prefer to keep shouting past each other.  Next comes the blood.  And then the mass graves.  And after that there is no more dissension.  We will all be a great family. All the children who stuck out will be dead.  And in the grave, no one disagrees with anyone else. The silence is absolute and very peaceful.

(Crossposted at Classical Values)

I normally don’t post politics here.*  There’s always a first time for everything.  And the everything right now is the fact that half of my field would rather commit suicide than actually think.  Particularly when thinking involves not repeating slogans that are pushed at them from above with the implication that “all the coolest kids think this way.”

Again, blame it on us being misfits, and misfits’ own misfits besides.  We’d do anything to fit in.  Well, most of us.  I still prefer to stand by the side of the road holding both middle fingers up.

On my Facebook page I echoed a friend’s post of a Heinlein poster with a quote about how forcing a man to pay for a service he doesn’t want “for his own good” is the greatest tyranny.  This did not apply to any current controversy.  It applied ONLY to the general fact that – is this news to anyone? – I don’t like taxation.  I don’t think pacifists should have to pay for war, and I don’t think I should have to pay for stupid crony capitalism.

In minus three seconds, someone brought up that a worse tyranny than this was the “War on Women.”

Let me point out right now that if I hear that phrase once more I’m going to lose it.  No, forget that.  I’m going lose it right NOW.

Let me tell you what war is, okay?

War is where the enemy decimates your numbers – like, say in China where abortion is killing mostly females.

War is where you are kept from learning – like in most Arab countries, where women have restrictions placed on their education.

War is where your houses are burned, your children taken away into slavery, your goods looted, and you are dragged away in chains.

In the United States, right now, women have preferential treatment – by law – in any company that gets federal funds (which heaven help us, right now, is most of them.)  Women live longer than men.  Cancers that affect females get more money and more attention than those that affect only men.  Women have the right to be sole deciders on abortion, and if they decide to keep the child and make the man pay, he pays.  (This by the way is a complete reversal of the “penalty” of sex which used to fall mostly on women.)  And if he doesn’t pay, he goes to jail.  Divorce courts award custody to mothers overwhelmingly.  Oh, and in college campuses, women outnumber men.

If this is war it is war on men.  And I’ve had just about enough of everyone who claims otherwise.

And please don’t come back and say women have to carry babies and this is unfair.  Or that men are stronger and this is unfair.  Or that…  This is NOT kindergarten.  LIFE is unfair.  NATURE is unfair.  Civilization and society can only go so far to compensate for the basic inequality of nature.  It is not the job of nature or government to turn us all into neuters with the exact same aptitudes and abilities.  And I, for one, am glad.  If you’re not, consider your relationship with your own gender.  I suggest your war is mostly internal.

If you truly believe refusing to force employers to pay for birth control is a war on women, then you are fragile little flowers who deserve to experience life practically anywhere else in the world.  You are also unleashing a monster.  Get the government to force this and NOTHING is out of bonds.  Forget selling you the rope to hang you with.  The government will eventually force you to pay them to hang you.

I’d like to believe the comment is wrong which I read on some blog defining feminists as a potemkin village of bicycled fish.  But judging by how American women seem to be so completely embarrassed by their vaginas that they demand all sorts of compensation and affirmation of their specialness, I’m very afraid the comment was right.  These women have things like Vagina Monologues (Imagine, Penis Monologues could ONLY be a middle school play, but because it’s the FEMALE body part we’re supposed to be in awe of it.  WHY?)  and go on about how they’re powerful, but melt in a pile of hysteria because someone was less than respectful to them.

Meanwhile, real women need someone else to pay for their contraception or give them a hand up in school or business like a fish needs a bicycle and would NOT stoop to having special treatment lavished on them.  They meet men as equals and refuse to be afraid of them, or ashamed of who they are.

I know!  Let’s make war on men, and refuse to listen to them when they’re abused, ignore their claims to their children, take away their right to choose if they want to be fathers (and pay for it) or not, design the school system so it doesn’t fit either their learning style or their development and oh, yes, drug them so they don’t act like boys AND all the while scream that they’re the ones hurting us.

Which would be distinguishable from the present state of affairs, because….

Is that crickets I hear?  Oh, yes it is.

On behalf of all the women with male children; on behalf of all the women with male spouses, on behalf of all the women who are NOT ashamed of being women, and who DO actually like men – it’s time to stop beating on males and screaming we’re being hurt.

Make love, not war.

(oh, yeah, a public service announcement.  I’m continuing the Hooking Your Reader Workshop over at Mad Genius Club and I apologize to participants for being late with the critique this week.  I’ve been dealing with stomach flu, which means lack of sleep and general wooziness, which means this week was a loss for practically everything.  I’m going to do my best to send critiques to everyone by this evening.  Sorry.)

Having grown up in a village I, like Miss Marple, know all the wickedness in the world.  When I was a young woman who could scare away men by making passing comments on… osmosis (Hey, how was I to know it would scare him?  He was studying to be an engineer.  Geesh) I found out that, according to the old women of the village, I lived a wild and wooly life, fraught with excitement and sin.

Since about the most exciting thing happening in my life at the time was my translating a page through five languages then back to Portuguese to compare, the rumors fascinated me, and I started keeping track of them, mildly jealous of this other Sarah who got to do all this dreadful/amusing/strange stuff.

The rumors anchor in reality went beyond the tenuous.  Take the month I had dentist appointments (when I go to the dentist it ALWAYS becomes an involved thing.  I’m given to understand my teeth were ruined by fevers when they were mere buds) in the office above the coffee shop.  When I came out, I’d meet my brother’s best friend – whom I’d known since I was three and whom I ALWAYS thought of as an adjunct brother – in the coffee shop and wait the half hour or so till he could drive me home, because I preferred that to walking…  According to the old ladies I was double timing my then-fiancé with him.  And he wasn’t driving me home, not a bit of it.

Or take the fact that the summer before I got married I worked in Germany, but my husband is dark haired and not very tall.  I found out, shortly before my wedding, that Dan was an Italian I’d met in Germany.  Though a rival faction claimed he was a baker who worked in a nearby village.  (I saw that guy eventually.  NO resemblance whatsoever, other than dark hair and about same height.)

As I’ve said before, it takes a village to drive a child (OR particularly an adult) completely batsh*t insane.  In my case, instead of being shocked and horrified, I chose to be highly entertained, because, just like Miss Austen’s Lizzy, I dearly love to laugh.

I’m telling you this in the hopes that you will understand my fascination with Spam.  Spam is even less personal than those rumors – particularly now that it’s mostly spambots.  It can be almost outrageously funny.  It has gotten tons more sophisticated since I started tracking it, particularly since I started tracking it on this blog a year ago.

At the same time, as with the old ladies in the village there was the sick fascination with “this is meant to be believed.  Why is this meant to be believed?” with Spam there is “This must work sometimes.  WHY does this work?”  Every time I go through the spam I’m fascinated with both the ingenious nature of it, and the fact that it’s incredibly, bizarrely stupid.  (Yes, I know, that’s because they rely on a scattershot approach.  But all the same.)  I’m fascinated with how some of them sound almost real except for the post they’re attached to, for instance.  And I’m HIGHLY amused by how weird they can get.  So, below, there’s a best of Sarah’s Spam Filter and my answers which, no, of course I did not send back, but ran through my mind as I read it:

Beatiful layout! How have you get this design? – Variations on this are probably the most common Spam.  This one wins because it’s also grammatically messed up.  However, under the “incredibly stupid” considering I use a standard free layout, it’s a no sale.  Makes you wonder, though, if it’s irresistible for people with more elaborate setups to talk about how geeky they are.

I was curious if you ever considered changing the page layout of your blog? Its very well written; I love what youve got to say. But maybe you could a little more in the way of content so people could connect with it better. Youve got an awful lot of text for only having one or 2 images. Maybe you could space it out better? – since this comes with a shill for an adult casual sex site, I have to sort of assume they particularly dislike my lack of er… naked people images.  Considering the nature of my blog, I’ll do my best to have pictures of naked writing pens, naked keyboards and naked typing fingers in the future.  Would that do it for you?

Thanks for your input and I will use it for my college research that I am doing for this website. – yes, indeed, but why in heaven’s name is someone researching the page with the compilation of Witchfinder up till now?  Ummmmmmmmm

Heya! I just wanted to ask if you ever have any issues with hackers? My last weblog (wordpress) was hacked and I ended up losing a few months of hard work due to no back up. Do you have any solutions to prevent hackers? – Um no.  You know why?  Because I don’t visit that adult dating website you link.

I think animating may eliminate this concept. The pictures require person to visualize what exactly is occurring that will that will imagining is the thing that ends in the sense of humor. It’s being a complicated, complex ruse in the event you describe that, rather than enabling your audience “have itInch, that ruins the sense of humor. Every person’s an art overseer. – you might be a great penny stock trader, but I doubt it, given your unrequited love affair with automated translation engines.  Also, what DOES this have to do with … free novel Witchfinder?

Very good opinion, bye — on Witchfinder again – what am I doing to attract them.  You have to admire that in a blog filled with OPINIONS they manage to hit on the one page/post with fiction.  (rolls eyes.)

Hmm is anyone else encountering problems with the pictures on this blog site loading? I’m trying to figure out if its a problem on my end or if it’s the blog site. Any responses would be greatly appreciated. – No.  Could be because you link back to your live streaming porno cam.  I use a special format on the pictures in my blog.  They don’t load well for great big hos.

This really is the worst post of all, I’ve study – (on There Is No Glass Slipper) – really?  Then perhaps you don’t read much in blogs.  Or perhaps your English is lacking.  And what’s the psychology behind this?  Do people follow these links to try to explain themselves?

Must be because…

You simply copied someone else’s tale – also, on There Is No Glass Slipper.  IF that had been on Witchfinder it would still be odd but … possible.  I’ve had reviewers think something or other was “stolen” because you know, I have some common element like boy meeting girl.  Again, note the aggressive put down as a shill.  Um.  And this one:

You are the worst writer – I confess I was hesitant on this.  It links to an Italian translation website, and perhaps they truly despise my writing.  I sold a couple of stories in Italy last month.  So, it actually got me to look at the site – yes, I AM a Nail Biter, why do you ask? – and their account has been suspended.  Uh.  Who would have thunk it?  And besides, on calmer reflection, I might be the worst writer, but how would they know?  It’s impossible they’ve read every writer!

And now, for the win, arrived this morning, the champion of champions:
There are many ways to teach ESL/TEFL to children but one of the most exciting and rewarding ways to do it is by using
English games. English Games not only engage the children, but also teach through play – and most of the time the children
don’t even know they are learning until the time comes to show their knowledge! It truly is possible (and almost necessary) to
create a classroom where the students not only learn but also truly enjoy their time there.

Incorporating English games into the classroom can build interest in the class, put language in an interesting and
meaningful context, give students a break from the pressures of learning a new language while giving the break a purpose, teach
real world skills and, most importantly, build the student/teacher bond.

It’s in Late in Posting, and it goes on for a page or so.  I won’t sport with your patience.  The pay off?  It links to a ….  Poker on line site.  Because nothing builds the student teacher bond like teach winning all of the kids’ lunch money before noon.  I’m just saying.

I’ve said before that I’m a character writer, which is actually a misnomer.  I’m a character anchor.  In the troubled sea of non-existence, they reach out and there I am.  They can infest me and, through me, impose their presence on the world.

They come to me fully formed, accost me during my walks, wake me up from a deep sleep with the first line of their story running in my head, in their own unmistakable voice.

“I never wanted to go to space,” they say.  Or “History celebrates great prison breaks.”  Or  “Dead people shouldn’t send emails.”

Let me assure you, gentle reader, (and particularly you, yes, you, in the back row, ungentle one!) I’m not talking about full fledged hallucinations, be they visual or auditory.  It’s more… the feeling you have when you remember a conversation with someone.  And you have about as much control over it as over the memory of that conversation.  Meaning, you can remember it better or worse, but you can’t change what was actually said.

Sometimes a character seems out of tune and I walk around, kicking things, hurting the feelings of small animals (Okay, only Havelock-cat and he’s only “small” by an effort of the imagination as, despite high-protein, low carb food he’s fast approaching the look of that “fat cat” on poster in every vet examining room also you hurt his feelings every time you don’t pet him) moaning and vowing never to write again.

At least, I do all that if the character belongs in a book that was due yesterday (or three months ago.)  If not, I leave the character alone, and eventually at some later date he/she will come into full focus and start yammering at me.  Sometimes a decade later…

But here’s the thing – I don’t have much control over the characters, or who they are.  I can change how I present them to people, but I can’t change who they are and what they are going to do/how they’re going to react in a situation.  The situation itself can be tweaked, but not the general “feel” of the story.

Before you call the men in white coats, I DON’T think these characters have independent life.  I simply think all my character work happens at a very deep level.  My subconscious (for lack of a better word) knows what interests me most (people) and so baits me with that by making me believe they exist and have stories to tell.  Without that bait, it’s possible I’d never write, because the rest of the craft I’ve had to learn hand-over-hand and consciously, and it’s work.

But once I’ve met a good/bad/heroic/interesting character, I WANT to know more, and I want to figure out who these people are and become friends – after a fashion.

Now, I don’t always know if the characters are good or bad, particularly for deeply flawed, struggling characters.  (I’d say Marlon, in Witchfinder is somewhere between heaven and hell, between hero and craven coward, and sometimes both of those at the same time.  I struggle with him because he’s reserved, and won’t give me more than I need to know at any given time.  This means, indubitably, I’ll need to do a lot of minuscule adjustments to his part in rewrite.  Or not.  Sometimes it comes across perfectly, I’m just not used to characters who hold back.  Or rather, I don’t want to get used to them.)  But trying to force the characters into what they’re not always breaks them, and sometimes breaks the book.

Am I normal?  No.  As in the divide between the naturally confident and naturally terrified writer, there is no “normal.”  More women than men – in general – get characters this way.  More men than women get plots and then “audition” characters and discard those that don’t fit.  But that’s not necessarily a given.  I’ve known women who audition characters.  I’ve known men who get accosted in the back alleys of the mind by characters going “Hey buddy, want to hear a story?”

My husband auditions characters.  My son gets them yammering away in his mind.  My other son auditions them.

There is another level of character writing, somewhere more conscious than “audition.”  I didn’t meet that till I tried to collaborate with a writer who does this (Yes, yes, for those who know, that IS coming.  G-d willing this year, if my body will let me.)  That’s a writer who assembles characters like a police description chart.  “We’ll make him sociable like so and so.  He’ll have HER trick of speech.  And he’ll be good at math like HIM.”  The pick and choose among their friends and assemble chimeras.

I CAN do that (sort of) but the characters never come alive.  They just lie there, like Frankenstein creations, all their stitches showing.  So, I’m at the mercy of my subconscious.  Even if I have a great idea for a plot, I have to wait for the character to walk up and go “Let me tell you this story.”

Now, can I steal incidents, events, even utterances.  Sure.  My sons have accused me of selling their childhood in the Daring Finds books.  (And that’s only because they haven’t seen Orphan Kittens, yet.)  I use incidents and events.  I can also tuckerize people in walk on parts or relatively short appearances.  But don’t ask me to have you along from beginning to end, unless there’s an alternate of yours lurching around somewhere in character world who wants to approach me and go “Let me tell you a story.”

*Sorry to be so late.  This was very hard to write, partly because I want to slap Marlon.  I’ve never had a character so busily sawing off his nose (with a dull knife) to spite his face.  Also, in general I don’t approve of the events in these chapters, because I HAD other events planned.  I fought the book, and the book won.  I’m sure eventually I’ll find out why.*

*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. *

For previous chapters, look here:  https://accordingtohoyt.com/witchfinder/

All The Paths

No matter how hard Marlon tried, he could not open a portal into fairyland.  Gabriel watched him do it, and watched him exhaust himself and at some level couldn’t help admiring him for not giving up.  It was much like watching a man beating against a closed door long past his beating had become feeble and his voice had gone hoarse from shouting.

Circles appeared beneath the dark blue eyes, and the flame-colored eyebrows drooped, but Marlon kept trying.

But then, Gabriel reasoned, with a glance at Aiden, Marlon didn’t seem good at giving up.  After a while Gabriel slipped away to the kitchen, where he washed the tea things and made fresh tea and brought it out, and waited till a pause in Marlon’s incantations to say, “Tea.  With milk and sugar.  You need it.”

Marlon made a face.  It was a face that Gabriel remembered.  Marlon took his tea black.  But he ran a hand back over his unruly hair, making it more so, and shambled towards the tea table, his walk no more lively than Aiden’s.  “There is no path,” he told Gabriel.  “No way to… to get to fairyland.  There is nothing I can do.  It won’t open to us.”

“How not?” Gabriel said.  “Though I believe I was thrown out of fairyland with the specific injunction not to come back, I believe you weren’t even born when you were thrown out.”

Marlon set his cup down and rubbed at his nose between the eyes.  “It’s not like that.  Not… specific to us, I mean, but to any magicians of a certain level of power, particularly those of mixed magic.  And, Gabriel, I regret that I have to give you bad news.  Something I learned through my scrying of the paths of power.”  He did look sorry, his tired eyes almost as lusterless as those of his animated lover’s corpse.

“What?” Gabriel asked, and for a moment felt the dark, unremitting despair of waiting to have Seraphim’s death announced to him.  He didn’t think he could live with himself having allowed Seraphim to be killed, and his whole house lost with him.  “Tell me.”

“Your…  The dowager Lady of Darkwater and her daughter Caroline have gone into fairyland.  They were allowed, or perhaps trapped, into going in.  I don’t know what they mean to do with them, but it can’t be good.”

“Caroline.”  Gabriel discovered he’d put his own cup down, and that he was clutching frantically at the sleeve of Marlon’s shirt.  “For the love of God, we must go and rescue her.  She’s just a child.  She– I taught her some defenses but not nearly enough for what she’ll meet with there.”

“No,” Marlon said.  “And I did not mean to tell you until we could get in.  But I don’t think we can or at least…”

“At least what?”

Marlon’s face had acquired a pinched look, and Gabriel realized he was clutching the magician’s arm hard enough to bruise the flesh beneath.  He withdrew his hand and tried to compose himself.  “I beg your pardon, but–”

“No.  I understand.  They are your family.”  A pause.  “You know, I think part of what fuled my anger at you all these years, other than your incredible stupidity in alerting the authorities or your idiot brother’s insistence on fighting a duel with me, after finding me through magical means he shouldn’t be able to use–”

“Seraphim? He what?”

“Assure you.  Fought a duel with me.  For your honor.  As though–” Marlon shook his head.  “At any rate, more than any of that, what fueled my anger at you was knowing that you had a family, and I never did.  It was knowing you were loved by at least your father and not born of–” He shrugged.  “And that they counted to you.”  He looked up at Gabriel and gave the impression of being so tired he would presently sway on his feet.  “And that you mattered to them.  Foolish, I know to hold it against you.  It is not your fault I was not born in the same circumstances.  But I was envious.  Deadly envious.  And it distorted all my feelings.  It made me…  Never mind.”

But Gabriel’s mind was spinning dizzily over this duel, if it had happened.  “Seraphim fought you?  For my honor?  But… what did my honor have to do with your practice of necromancy?”

He got back a level stare.  “No.  Idiot.  Not the necromancy.”

“Oh.  But–”

“Don’t ask me to explain what goes on in his Grace’s mind.  I’m sure I couldn’t tell you anymore than I can bring the moon down to Earth.  I’m common as dirt, remember.  He informed me in no uncertain terms that if I ever had any other contact with you, next time the bullet would go between my eyes.”

“The bullet?”

Marlon pulled his shirt casually down, to reveal a puckered red scar on his shoulder.  “As you see.”  Then suddenly the tired blue eyes danced with devilish amusement.  “As soon as I’d recovered enough, I sent you the letter with my coordinates.”

Gabriel had to cover his eyes for a moment, because it was impossible to think coherently through the desire to laugh and cry at once.  “And yet, you’ll help me rescue him?’

“Naturally.  But for a price remember?”

“How could I forget?  Now to return to the paths into fairyland.”

“The famous Darkwater accumen returns!”

How could he, Gabriel wondered, at the same time admire the man and want to punch him unconscious within the space of less than ten seconds?  How was it possible that Marlon would both be willing to help the people who had mistreated him, and yet not be able to keep from mocking Gabriel himself?

“Indeed,” Gabriel said, keeping his own temper under control.  “Now if you please, to speak plainly.  You said there was no way in, only– Only what?”

Marlon sighed.  “Only there might be.  I get a feeling what is keeping us out is not a shutting charm.  I don’t think they could do that against someone of mixed blood anyway.  Those with blood of fairyland can ever go back, can we not?  I have the strong impression what is keeping us at bay is…  A cat’s cradle working.”

Gabriel poured tea for both of them again.  The cup he pressed into Marlon’s hands was picked up without comment, and then Gabriel himself took a sip of his tea.  The magical worlds – and Avalon was one of the more magical ones – all had lines of power which wrapped the world in a tight shroud of magic.  Into these lines of power smaller and more mobile lines of power were attached.  Each magic user had his own, and through his life he wove a pattern upon the surface of the world.  Those powerful enough changed the nature of the power with their design and those powerful and active could even move one or more of the lines and alter the nature of the world’s magic forever.  This was why necromancy was forbidden.  Because it could make the bright lines dark, and blight whole areas of magic.

A cat’s cradle working was managed with the lines of magic themselves, which were intertwined and twisted in such a way that someone with normal magic could not follow them.  “The major lines or the minor ones?” Gabriel asked.  To twist the minor lines was what was called a fate work, not savory, exactly, but often employed by village witches making love spells, or by well intentioned Hearth wizards making it so that a sailor would return from the sea or a soldier from war.

It wasn’t good magic as such, because it restricted the will power and actions of others, and it could be dark magic, depending on what fates you were twisting or why.  But to twist the major ones would take both an immense amount of power which would snap back at any moment, without warning, and it would probably cause a deformation in the magic.

If the Cinderella story were true – and Gabriel doubted it, because it was far easier to lay a spell on coachmen to take someone to a ball in a borrowed carriage than to spell mice and WHY pumpkins? – the change back in coach and mice would be what happened when lines snapped back.  The question though, was how long it would take to snap back.

Marlon squinted, as though thinking.  “Both I think,” he said.  “And before you tell me how dangerous it, remember I used to teach magic.  But it’s entirely possible it’s only minor lines that are involved, just so many of them and so strongly bound that it feels like major lines.”

Gabriel nodded.  “So you are saying, if we can unwind the lines of fate – all the fates – we can discover a way to get into fairyland.”

Marlon made a sound that might be laughter, or else it might be a cough.  “Indeed, but–”

“But?”

“The lines include those of the king.  And my father, and your brother, Seraphim, who is in this other world we might not be able to access.”

“Your FATHER?”

Marlon’s face went blank, almost wooden in its lack of expression.  “Indeed.  My very honored father.”

“But I didn’t know– That is, I know he never recognized you, which is why–” Which was why the official name Marlon used was Elfborn, the name of every bastard kicked out of fairyland, and attached to a certain stigma, to a definite untrustworthiness.  That he’d managed to get an education, much less to become a professor, despite all that, had been one of the things Gabriel admired about him.  And perhaps that was one of the reasons that Marlon had been tempted into necromancy.  If everyone assumes the worst of you at all times– But no.  Damn it.  He would not find excuses for the man.  Marlon had chosen that one dark path of his own accord.

At that moment, Gabriel realized the expression on Marlon’s face was ghastly enough that Marlon himself could have been many years dead.  The smile that contorted his lips was closer to the grimace of a corpse.  “Oh, but he did recognize me, Gabriel.  I made sure of it, though it almost killed us both.  Legally I have my father’s name.  For all the god it did me, since I had to go into hiding that same week.  I had hoped– Never mind that.  I chose not to publicize his name, though I owe him no respect and little gratitude.  I had to force his hand to recognize me, to threaten to reveal that what happened to my mother was not consensual but the result of dark magic and of entraping an elf and then–” He shook his head.  “My father would kill me, if he could.  It is a good part of the reason I’m still so fiercely hunted these many years after, and when my acts of necromancy amount to a ressurrection spell said two seconds too late.”

Gabriel looked towards the corner “Is that why–”

“Damn it,” for the first time there was fury directed at Gabriel in Marlon’s voice.  “What did you think it was?”

“But– But then why didn’t you–”

“Kill him again?  Don’t push Gabriel.  There are things you should understand without being told.”

And Gabriel, who understood nothing at all, could only take a deep breath, wondering what he should understand.  That Marlon couldn’t kill Aiden?  But surely Marlon could see that tattered soul attached to the not-quite-alive body?  Surely he could see its suffering?

Then suddenly he did see.  If what Marlon said was true, then the magician had been born of rape.  That meant his mother had gotten expelled from fairyland, as well as Gabriel’s mother had, but that she had never wanted to leave.  He’d never asked Marlon exactly what his mother was.  There were many creatures in fairyland, from elves to centaurs, from the high-powered and princely sovereigns and noblemen of elves to the nayads and dryads and centaurs that the Romans had mistaken for minor divinities.  Depending on what Marlon’s mother had been, she might not have lasted long outside of fairyland.  And, regardless of what she had been, she might very well have abandoned her human child behind and gone back, to face whatever punishment would allow her to be part of the magic lands again.  “Your mother…”

“Never met her,” Marlon said.  “Not consciously.”  He rubbed at the tip of his nose, and seemed to be oddly confused about the turn in the conversation.  “I was raised in an orphanage for magical children.”  He made a face.  “What does that have to do with any–”

But Gabriel’s mind was still following its own thought.  Orphanages for magical children ranged from the very good to the appalling and he wasn’t going to guess which kind it had been.  Marlon had survived childhood, so it couldn’t be one of the very worst ones.  Instead he pursued that thought.  Marlon had never belonged to anyone.  He’d had no family, no kin, and probably no friends either, because even weres were afraid of half-fey magic.

Gabriel thought of the fear that had met him in the eyes of the servants, the looks of dread, when he’d first gone to live with the Darkwaters.  He imagined growing up with that, living with that, your whole life, unremitting.

Then there had been Aiden Gypson, who had been– “You were friends with Aiden for a long time.”

A face.  “We were both charity pupils at his majesty’s charity school for magically gifted young gentlemen.  I think we were twelve when we became friends.  What are you getting at, Gabriel?”

Nothing, Gabriel thought.  Nothing at all save that your foolishness has epic proportions to it.  But then why should I be surprised?  Do you not do everything, always, larger than life.

“I think we should sleep,” Marlon said.  “Because unraveling these fates will take us off into each of the places the people involved are.  And you know, and I know that we’ll have to do a major working, which should not be undertaken as tired as we are.  We’ll need some hours of sleep at least.  And you know time in fairyland doesn’t run at the same rate, so your brother’s fate is not as urgent or it’s perhaps more urgent than–”

“Who is your father?” Gabriel asked.  It had to be someone despicable, if he’d taken advantage of a female elf bound in a working, yet it had to be someone important enough to be enmeshed in this working – whether important in the human or the magical world.

“My dear Gabriel!  What does it signify?  We must rest and then we’ll do our working.  You are very odd asking me where I met Aiden, and then asking who my father is.  It makes me feel like you’re some girl in her first season, or else the girl’s mama checking on my antecedents.  I assure you when I said we should sleep I meant just that.  There is strenuous magic to be done and I–”

“And you speak a great deal of nonsense, Marlon.  Who is your father?  If he’s involved in this working, we must understand how and why before we start.”

“The fact he’s involved has nothing to do with being my father.  Far more to do with his being an ambitious man.”  Marlon tried to smile, but it didn’t quite work and he sighed.  “Has anyone ever told you, my dear Gabriel, that you have the most unpleasant habit of fastening on to irrelevant details and holding onto them buckle and tongue?  First there was your calling the authorities merely because I lacked the cour– Because I kept Aiden about.  And now this obsession with my father.  And you’re not going to let me go up to bed until I tell you, will you?”  He looked up into Gabriel’s eyes, and whatever he read there made him sigh again.  “Very well, Prince.  If you must know, my father is Lord Sydell, his majesty’s spy master.”  And then, with a near sneer, “There, are you happy?”

Waking And Dreaming

“Don’t worry about it,” Arden was saying, his voice very steady.  “Don’t worry about it, Barbara.  The girl will be fine.  She’s full of determination, that one.  The strongest of our children, and she had to be the girl.  What a boy she’d have made.”  And then, with a smile.  “Or perhaps not,” he said. “Imagine all the duels he’d fought and how many liaisons he’d have embroiled himself in.”

Barbara, the dowager duchess looked at her husband, walking by her side, in this path in fairyland, and wondered what to make of his presence at all.  He was dead.  She knew he was dead.  She remembered the study, and his corpse, and blood everywhere.  It had taken them weeks to remove the blood stain from the floorboards, using all magical means available.  She remembered the shock, and the pain at knowing she’d never see him again, in the flesh, no matter how much grief he’d brought into her life.  He’d brought joy too.

The joy was now obvious in those green eyes, squinting at her with something like deep and secret amusement.  It was the amusement that made her snap back an answer, as she’d so often done when he’d been alive, “Mind you,” she said.  “Your boys are not much better.  Michael is, I suppose.  He wouldn’t get embroiled with anything unless it came with magical gears and perhaps a steam engine.  But Seraphim!”

“I don’t think it is what you think, with Seraphim,” Arden said.  “At least, I think he and Gabriel found my papers.  I’m sorry, Barbara.”

“Your papers…  Yes, I’ve for some time now been worried that you were involved in something … something worse.”

“Oh, I was, which is why I’m here,” Arden said.

“You mean dead?” She asked, and her heart beat very fast, afraid he’d tell her, yes, he was dead and that she had now joined him.

But he frowned at her.  “You know, I don’t believe I am.  No, no, it’s true, this is not my body beside you.  I’m not absolutely sure where my body is just now.  It doesn’t seem to matter much in fairyland and after a while…”

“But I saw you dead.  I saw your body, I–”

“Surely, you of all people know about changellings.”

“Oh,” Barbara said. And then, “I am dreaming.  I was just walking with your daughter, and we didn’t turn, we didn’t veer.  Only we heard someone crying and…”  She frowned unable to remember when Caroline had disappeared or when Arden had appeared beside her.

“Yes.  That’s her path.  Not yours.”

“But we didn’t part.”

“In fairyland, all paths are alone, Barbara, for those who don’t belong.”

Okay, I’ve spent weeks now telling you all what you CAN do.  Yes, you can write that story.  Yes, you can finish it.  Yes, you can proof it.  Yes, you can even convert it to ebook.  You can do covers.  You can do indie.  You can work for traditional at the same time.

Now, are you all pepped up and squeeing with glee?  Good, good.

Let me tell you what you CAN’T do.  No, seriously.

You CAN’T evaluate your own writing.  (And for a certain period of time, at least, you should be leery about evaluating other people’s writing too.  We’ll talk about in a moment.)

No, don’t talk.  Listen to me.  You can’t evaluate your own writing.  You just can’t.  I know what I speak of.  I’ve spent the last twenty years dealing with beginning writers and for at least five of those years I was a beginner writer myself.  (We’ll CALL it five years.  Hey, I’m a slow learner.)

What I’ve found for all writers – and no, not just beginners – is that when it comes to evaluating our own writing, our switch is stuck in one of two positions.  One of them is “Everything I write is gold and I’m so good I make the angels weep.”  The other is “I really should stop dirtying paper on one side or sacrificing innocent pixels when I can’t write anything worth reading.”

Both sides need to learn to temper this instinctive reaction if they EVER are to get anywhere.

Being solidly in the second camp, I wish to say that I think we make better writers in the end.  I doubt it, though.  I think it’s just that I’m wildly jealous of people with a shred of self-confidence and wish to hit them hard half the time.  It doesn’t matter in either case, because my side of the evaluation matter is woefully under represented.  Why?  Because most of us – those of us who are compulsive enough to actually power through the doubt and finish novels – just fling them under the bed or into the closet.  Because, well, we wouldn’t want to inflict our stuff on anyone else.

Frankly the only reason I ever sent things out is that I felt guilty.  If I was going to live from my husband’s money and spend most of my day writing (instead of saying, cleaning or taking the kids for walks or whatever it is “just housewives” do) then I needed to at least give it a chance to make me money.  So I sent stuff out out of a sense of obligation and in the serene certainty no one would ever buy it.  Also, I seized on any excuse (oh, we don’t have five dollars for stamps.  I’ll buy a paperback book instead) not to send stuff out, which means my marketing was sporadic.

You can usually tell people on my side of the equation because we have a hell of a time dealing with editorial letters.  We come across as bipolar divas.  That’s because we sort of are.  Whenever someone tells me that I need to change ANYTHING in my book, my immediate reaction is to agree.  Even if the person telling me this last read a book during the Eisenhower administration and has never in his/her life read a book in the genre I’m writing in.  Also, no matter how absurd the suggestion is.  However, I’ve learned – through, trust me, bitter experience – to doubt these suggestions and to try to look dispassionately at the person giving it.  “Okay, so he’s a beginner writer and this is what he’s struggling with and he’s projecting.”  (More on that later, too.)

This then makes you feel like you’re being defensive and makes you MORE insecure about rejecting the changes.  All of which is sheer hell when it comes from an editorial house.  They’re only used to – or always believe – they’re dealing with the OTHER type of writer, so they tend to think ANY resistence means you’re being a prima dona and think all your stuff is perfect.  So, they also tend to give the suggestions in the form of snark or over-powered suggestion.  You know, stuff like “This part really stinks” – when it turns out they want you to change a line.  This type of thing makes people like me go in and scrape that entire part and write it anew, possibly in German (which we learn for the purpose) and leaves the editor in a screaming rage of “why did you change that?  I loved the part with the girl.  It was just that line.”

(If you’re ever in that position, do what I do.  Send the letter unread to a friend who then distills the requests to what they’re really asking for, stripped of color commentary.)

Of course, if this is not a professional editor giving you that kind of commentary STOP USING THAT PERSON TO BETA YOU.  (We’ll go into this later.)  Pick your betas carefully.

So, do people whose self-evaluation is stuck on “sucks” have any advantage over the other type that causes me to think they’d be better writers in the end?

Only one.  These people – we’ll call them the nail biters, okay? – tend to work really hard on their own stuff BEFORE they ever show it to a single living soul.  In fact, they’ll study other authors to know what they’re doing.  They’re always trying to improve what they think is dreadful dreck.

This is the greatest weakness of the self-satisfied set – we’ll call them the Jack Horners, shall we (“What a good boy am I!”) – they are perfectly happy with the stuff they write from the very first line they put on paper.  There are degrees of course, but from my vantage point (here, under the bed, braiding my hair) they are varying ranges of smug.  They go from the person who comes across as perfectly normal but thinks his breaking in is assured if he just learns to work the system because, duh, his stuff might not be the best thing in the world but “is best than all of that” to the ones who think Shakespeare should bow down and kiss their muddy boots.

I can’t tell you how these people get good enough to break in.  Maybe there is a way critics can get to them.  As a mentor, I have yet to find it.  You can stand in front of them and shout what they’re doing wrong and the reaction will be one of three things: a) you don’t understand my style/substyle/subgenre.  I write what I’d like to read.  I bet there are more people like me than people like you.  b) You’re just jealous of my talent.  c) You’re talking about OTHER people, not me, right?  Because I don’t make any of those mistakes.

I know, because I’ve met these people as published – as bestselling – authors, that they CAN break in.  They can get at least good enough to sell.  Some of them are even quite decent.  So there must be a process by which they see their flaws.  Perhaps it just takes a meaner, nastier critique than I’m ever willing to give.  Or perhaps it takes a truckload of sugar per spoon of medicine.  Or perhaps they ARE better at the beginning.  Perhaps they never evolve.  Perhaps one in a hundred really are as good as they need to be to break in, right the first time.  (I’d rather not think that, though, because it makes me think lovingly of cyanide and I’m not sure if it’s for them or me.)

I’ve met incredibly talented Jack Horners, but I’ve never succeeded in mentoring one.  So we’ll just assume “something happens here” and they learn to improve.

Once they’re in, though, they have a huge advantage over us nail biters.  PARTICULARLY in the old system.  I hate to say it, but most publishers took you at your word.  (Why?  I don’t know.  I suspect because there’s no objective evaluation standard for writers.)  If you come in, all big, telling them how great you are you stand a much better chance of being believed than if you timidly slide up and reluctantly admit you wrote a book.  It also helps, still, in the new world of publishing, because the Jack Horners are out there, pushing their book at unsuspecting strangers, while we, the nail biters, hide in a corner and hope someone will discover us.  (Or in the beginning, when we’re afraid of being read, hope NO ONE will discover us.)

You can always tell one from the other in public situations.  Say, at panels, at a con.  ALL the Jack Horner talks about is his books.  The Nail Biter will mention them at the beginning, then talk about OTHER PEOPLE’S books.

Okay, it’s important for you to know which you are.  Either style can be compensated for IF you know that you are one or the other.

If you’re a Jack Horner, you need to remember that art requires practice.  Yeah, you might be all that and a million dollars, BUT even if you are Shakespeare, Austen and Walter Scott rolled into one with a dash of Dumas peppered in, at the beginning there are things you won’t know how to do.  They might be LITTLE things like “how much description is appropriate.”  BUT in certain places they are enough to stop you from being accepted/bought.

You know better than I what it takes to make you accept critique.  Choose your betas carefully for being able to give it, and choose people you HAVE to trust.

Also, on behalf of the Nail Biters of the world, stop telling us you’re the best thing since sliced bread.  It will stop us glaring at you.  It helps if you realize it’s not your talent we envy (necessarily)  – it’s your self confidence.  Go ahead and do your spiel for the public and the editors (A lot of us learn to fake it to a degree, anyway) but don’t do it among us, in private.  And don’t ASSUME you’re better than us because we’re mousy about our stuff.

If you’re a Nail Biter, be aware that you’re judging yourself more harshly than anyone else would.  In addition to betas, pick a couple of support people.  These are not bullshitters.  They can’t be, because you have to trust them.  They’re just people who like your writing most of the time, even if they’re willing to tell you when you’re going severely wrong (which all of us do at times.)  Then rely on them when you scare yourself and can’t go on because you think you suck like a Dyson.  Make sure they’re patient.  There will be times they’ll want to brain you for your bottomless pit of lack of self confidence.  (Mine are all long distance because ah ah, it’s too far away for them to throw rocks at my head.)  THEN TRUST THESE PEOPLE.  When they tell you it’s good stop oscillating.  TRUST them.  That’s why you have them.

Second, make sure you pick your betas carefully.  If you’re like me, a bad or wrongly worded comment about the last book can stop you working on the current book.  And if you are like me, you have stuff out at betas while you start the next book.  So, for instance, a beta who sends you comments piecemeal whenever he/she hits something he/she doesn’t like can be truly destructive, because it stops you in the middle of writing something else, and can cost you a day per comment.

Okay, I’m not being clear, let me explain.  I usually ask my betas to send me a report at the end.  What I do is collect ALL of those and then, when I have the first draft on current book done, or I come to a logical stopping point or what we call around here “the weekend” I take two days, read all the reports one after the other.  I’ve trained myself not to obsess on anything that two or more of you don’t hit on.  Unless it’s an obvious one, like when the reader reminded me suits of clothes don’t last fifteen years.  (DUH.) The rest, things that confused Jane but not John or vice versa (and I have twelve of you, at a minimum, at all times, and I have a minimum trigger of three echoing each other for “take seriously.”  Correction – three I KNOW don’t talk to each other.) I just go “okay, whatever” particularly if they’re minor nitts.

Now, let’s suppose Jane, instead of sending me a report which I can then just go “I’ll open next weekend” thinks her stuff is SO VITAL, so IMPORTANT that I must hear about it RIGHT NOW when she’s having a problem with it, and keeps sending me one-line emails, of the sort I can’t even delete without reading.  (Or worse, and yes, people have done this, calling me to tell me this.  One at a time like Juan Valdez.)  Even if – and usually that’s what happens – her “insights” are such earthshaking stuff as “you use the word good too much.”  Or “you changed the character’s hair color in chapter three.” it’s going to cause damage.  First because it gets to the point I see the phone number or the email address and I flinch.  Second, because even if it’s all a misunderstanding on Jane’s part, I’m a nail biter.  I’ll wonder what I did to bring it about.  Best case scenario, I waste three hours hunting typos on the old manuscript.  WORST case scenario I become hyper conscious of, say, the word “Good” and become unable to write for a month.  Yes, I know that’s ridiculous.  But I yam what I yam and I work with what I yam.

So, if you’re a nail biter use betas who will work with you and who will work in circumstances you can manage so that you can continue to be productive.  And if you are a beta for a writer and you don’t know which kind they are – well… do what they ask you for.  And unless they specifically ask you to be “brutal” or other code word for “I need to be hit over the head with a safe before I’ll listen” present your critique as dispassionately as possible.  Avoid stuff like “this part sucked.”  Or “I hated how you dropped that plot on the floor” or even (if you’re that kind) “this didn’t work for me.”  (Because some people use that with the ‘for me’ as an afterthought and the clear implication it wouldn’t work for anyone.)  Instead say “this confused me” or “I didn’t understand why you did that.”  Or… (grin) “wouldn’t his suit fall apart in fifteen years?”

Then pay attention to what comes back from the writer.  And if the writer gets defensive, don’t argue.  Look, if the writer is a nail biter, they’re really arguing with themselves, not you.  And if your criticism is warranted they will accept it, it just takes a while and you’re really not part of that process.  The more you argue, the more defensive they’ll get.  OTOH if the writer is a Jack Horner, there’s a chance you CAN’T get through.  So why argue?  And as a beta, note when you get proprietary over something you “spotted” too.  (This is only a problem if you’re Jane and keep asking the writer if they’re going to change what you said – usually.  Normally my betas just tell me stuff and don’t ask if I’m going to change it or not.  Those who do usually don’t beta more than once for me.)  If the writer says “It wasn’t a problem for anyone else” let it go, unless it’s your area of expertise.  (Like, you’re a gun expert, and there’s a chance none of her other betas is.)  (Hell, sometimes even if it IS your area of expertise.  I’m beta for a dozen people and sometimes I correct them, say, on foreign languages.  Most of the time the reply is “Oh, thanks.”  But if they say “That wasn’t a problem for anyone else” I SHUT UP.  Why?  Because those people are likely to be closer to the audience they’re aiming for.  If, say, they have a pun in Portuguese (don’t ask.  Culturally it doesn’t REALLY happen.  Okay, in rare circumstances, but not nearly as much as in English) and I tell them “that wouldn’t be considered a pun” but none of their other betas did… well, how many native Portuguese people will read their book?  See what I mean?)  It’s not about your being RIGHT, it’s about helping the writer.  No matter how right you are, if you find yourself browbeating the writer over a point that does NOT affect how the book will sell, stop.  If you’re dealing with a nail biter, at BEST you’ll be cut off.  At worst, you’ll cost the writer months of block.  If you like the writer’s writing, that’s plain stupid. (And if you don’t, why are you betaing?)

On this, and to save both innocent writers and innocent betas I HAVE to urge caution.  If you’re a would-be writer, or even a pro, and you’re betaing… be careful.  You tend to see the same problems you have issues with or had issues with at that point, whether they’re there or not.  If you still think they’re a problem for the writer you’re betaying, put in a “save”.  I always say something like “I might just be seeing this, because I’m struggling with it myself, but I think–”  AND make sure you KNOW that might be all.  For instance, right now I’m struggling with stage business, which means even in published books, I notice clumsy stage business, and I have to remind myself it’s just because I’m sensitized to it.  Be particularly careful if you’re betaing upwards (someone more published.)  The bane of contests are judges who are beginner writers and who assume any submission must be from someone junior to them.  A couple of years ago, I entered a romance contest under a pen name.  I was judged by someone who is a “veteran judge” but unpublished as an author.  I got back a note telling me I was trying too ambitious a theme for my poor vocabulary (!) and grammar skills.  This idiot had gone around changing words like stolid to words like solid and then complaining the sentences didn’t make sense.  She was seeing the speck in my eye because she had a mote in hers…  Beware of that.  (And I’ll say RIGHT NOW I’ve only had that issue with contests, and never with one of my betas, but other people might.)

Okay, that’s out of the way and sorry for the ramble.  I really am not awake enough to be brief.

Whether you’re a Nail Biter or a Jack Horner, there is one circumstance that will throw you for a loop in your own way…  When you’re evolving.  I call this being “in the air.”

You can NEVER judge your own writing (unless it was done anywhere from a one to ten years ago, when you MIGHT have an inkling) but when you’re changing then you REALLY can’t judge your writing.

All writing “growth” is saltational.  I don’t know why.  I bet some of the people on my blog do, though.  What I mean is that you go along a long time, get comfortable with your style of writing.  But all the time, something is happening.  It might be a series of small accretions that suddenly change it completely, I suppose – though that never happens to me or my mentees – or it can be that SUDDENLY your writing becomes completely different.

Maybe the Jack Horners think they’re especially good then.  I don’t know.  I KNOW the Nail Biters immediately get the feeling they aren’t doing it “right”.  They’ve managed to negotiate a truce with the inner critic long enough to write stories or books, but now the inner critic is going “this isn’t even as good as you usual cr*p.  It’s really, really bad.”

Over the last week I’ve been dealing with two of my mentees telling me how AWFUL their current piece is and how they don’t know how to write anymore.  I had a feeling they’d both taken a jump, but being mid rewrite in response to editorial letter (which to me is in itself a delicate psychological act) I couldn’t read them.  I’ve now read one of them.  Let’s say she’s taken the leap I’ve been praying she’d take for the last three years.  It’s not a leap I could take for her, or even explain how to take it.  But she’s taken it, and, of course, she’s terrified and wants to shove the story under the bed.

Fortunately she has me to tell her that her writing isn’t sh*t, but her judgement is.

If you’re a Nail Biter and you’re in the air, take a deep breath.  If you’ve been writing what other people judge is competent prose for years, it’s unlikely the current effort is THAT bad.  (It’s possible, but it usually correlates to illness, injury, extreme old age or extreme tiredness.  If you eliminate those, you’re just probably “in the air.”) If it feels that bad, chances are you’ve taken a leap in style and proficiency.  Take a deep breath and keep writing until your support system can reassure you.

Yes, I know how scary it is.  I’ve been there and have bitten my nails.  My last two books were huge leaps for me, and I cried moaned and (metaphorically) crawled under the bed biting my nails.  But betas and editor agree that at least the last one is a huge leap.

Be of good cheer and force yourself to forge ahead.  Stop biting your nails.  You’re just getting good.

Kris Rusch says writers are dumb.  She’s right.  And wrong.

She’s right that writers can do the most absurdly stupid things when it comes to trusting total strangers to steer their careers.  She’s wrong in thinking that we as a group are dumber than other people, or that other people in our circumstances wouldn’t act exactly like us.

Let’s begin with the type of person fiction writers are.
As a rule, we’re odd ducks.

There are, of course, exceptions.  Don’t come and tell me about your gregarious, perfectly adjusted, quite average authors.   Or at least authors who present as such. There are fewer of those in science fiction than in other fields, but yes I’m aware they exist.

In fact, I can easily pass for one of them.  I did, through most of my college career, pretend to be a perfectly normal student, with aspirations of becoming a teacher or professor or translator or interpreter or something else that my degree could qualify me for.  But inside, it always felt like the degree was a pro-forma, something I was taking because my parents didn’t think school ended till graduate school, not because I wanted it or had any need of it for my life.  It didn’t much signify what I studied, I just took the path of least resistence, because whatever career I had as a “grown up” wasn’t going to be the career I wanted.

I wanted to be a writer.  And I want to say here, that though I had a completely different idea of a writers’ lifestyle – all those stupid movies – as being a lot more glamorous, that wasn’t what I craved.  I craved sitting down and making up stories and writing them and sharing them.

And I knew I couldn’t do that.  Not in Portugal, when books were all physical and international commerce slower.  In Portugal at the time, even if every single person who read for pleasure – let alone who read science fiction and fantasy or even mystery for pleasure – read my books, I’d never be able to make a living from it.  So I needed to do something with my days, it didn’t much signify what.  I’d write, of course, but I was resigned to the stuff never seeing the light of day, because the publishing establishment managed to be smaller and stuffier than ours and, to be blunt, you had to know someone.

But even while acting perfectly normal, even while keeping my aspirations to myself – and a few moans and b*tching to my best friend since first grade – inside I knew I was different.  Hearing people actually get ENTHUSIASTIC at the idea of a translation job gave me a funny turn of the stomach.  Oh, sure, I could do it.  No problem there.  When I finished highschool I was the fourth best German student in town (Sic Transit Est Gloria Mundis and all that) and German was my weak language.  But getting excited about it?  It seemed rather like getting excited at the prospect of learning the multiplication tables.  I could fake it, but I couldn’t feel it, and inside I always WAS aware of being a round peg pretending to have edges.

So it started that way.  And then when I got married and my husband discovered my awful secret, and encouraged me to write.  And I felt weird.  Because our writing lifestyle IS weird.  It’s not just the “you stay home all day and waggle fingers on the keyboard.”  THAT is bad enough.  It’s more the long walks that absolutely count as part of writing, because you’re thinking story the whole time.  It’s the walking around in a dazed state and doing the most absurd stuff because your mind is in another world.

Your nearest and dearest don’t get it – my nearest and dearest don’t get it.  My husband, for instance, refuses to admit that the meaning of vacation is “writing in another place where I don’t need to do any of the housekeeping” AND he’s a writer, himself – so why should anyone else?

And then – at least in the olden days (let me tell you sonny, I’ve seen empires rise and fall) – a few years ago, when you sold, you were faced with a business that worked like no other business (no, not even show business) mostly because it was busy disemboweling itself dishonorably by severing the connection between demand and supply.  I have writing friends who say “No one understands writers, but other writers.”  And it’s not because we’re that weird.  Okay, it is that we’re that weird.  But the business outweirded us and kept on going off weird bridge with a rocket pack strapped to its back.  And you couldn’t explain that to ANYONE who wasn’t in it.  (“Wait, so your book didn’t sell?  And this is your fault?  But your book was never on the shelves!  Wait a minute.  WHY do they publish books they don’t even TRY to put on shelves?”  Ladder, rinse, repeat.  My standard answer was “I think they’re a cover for money laundering operations by Columbian drug lords.”  Did I believe it?  No.  But it shut people up.  And didn’t make them call the men in white coats as did “They’re run by space aliens, here to destroy our fiction.”)

So, we writers tend to feel like misfits, the degree of misfitness depending on how much we can surround ourselves with like minds and how well we can pretend to be normal.  Alas, unfortunately, we writers also tend to be humans.  (You’re excused if you have multiple tentacles and more than one antenna.  This post is not for you.)  And humans are social animals.  We want to fit in, we want to pretend we’re normal.  We want to be part of a group.

Up till now, publishing by its very weirdness, gave us a sense of being in a club.  No one understood writers but other writers because you couldn’t bitch about your editor dropping your book on the floor because you didn’t agree on changing a particular line to any sane human being.  They’d think you’d made it up.  But to a fellow writer?  Likely to have similar horror stories.

So, the publishing industry was horrible, but it also gave us a sense of normalcy.  We too had employers (and this is why we treated publishers and – some people – even agents as “boss” even though they were at best buyers for our product.)  We too had jobs.  There was a career path, a logic progression.  There was a way to get to the top even if not everyone did.  There was a “ladder” just as for all our friends in normal jobs.   We could say “I’m a beginning novelist” or “I’m a midlister, but…”  OR “I’m a bestseller.”  And bestseller got VERY fine-grained indeed, going down to “locus bestseller” and up to “New York Times bestseller.”

And if you think all that is silly… well, of course it is.  But again, repeat, humans are social animals.  When caught at a party in the middle of otherwise normal people, and they ask what you do for a living, if you say “I’m a writer” they ask “Who do you write for?” and if you don’t have an answer, people think you just stay home and write poems on purple paper, decorated with dried pansies.  Few are rude enough to say, as a guy told me (and this, yes, after I was published) “So, you’re a housewife but you don’t like to say it.” but most people will think just that.  And – is it still true in these days of mommy pride? – in the early nineties that was the same as saying you were a highschool dropout with a sixty IQ.  People tended to wander away from conversations with you at that point.  (There was also of course, the company my husband worked for where my writing sf/f made me the red woman of Babylon.  I’m still wondering if they thought it was a DIFFERENT kind of “fantasy.”)

So, in social occasions we learned to say “I am a novelist with three books out with a New York publisher.”  Or “I have published several short stories in science fiction magazines.”  Or… whatever.

The problem is – again that being human stuff – that all this became a security blanket.  We internalized it.  We believed it.  We read books on how to break through to the next level, and we believed that too.  We learned to sneer at each other’s work in the terms laid out from above, “Well, he’s pretty good but he’ll always be a midlister.  His books just aren’t BIG enough.”

And like all downtrodden social groups (Someone in another thread was talking about how fine the social distinctions can get in a ghetto) we self-divided very finely indeed.  You might be dust under your publisher’s chariot wheels, but by gum you were better than people who’d never sold professionally.

The system provided plenty of rules to judge those other people, too.  Some of them were okay – I mean, you do have to reach at least the level where people can follow what you’re saying, to sell to a press.  Unless, of course, what you’re doing is high literature, in which case you can write whichever words your weasel steps on while running across the daily newspaper – a lot of them were arbitrary and most of them were faddish.  Take how we decided that minimalistic style was the way to go.  No other words than “said.” [Yeah, okay fine, I’m all for not having characters ejaculate words (which would be some sort of circus trick, anyway, and make you famous in the more risque sort of reality show.)  BUT let me point out Heyer did it, and no one cares, least of all me.] That was a rule.  And it was a silly rule.  Perfect if applied with half a brain, insane if applied like the guy who judged one of my contest entries way back did: “you can’t use shouted or whispered either.  The reader should be able to tell that from the context.”  (I don’t know about you, gentle reader, but I’ve both shouted and whispered “such bullsh*t.”)] Or, no more than two adjectives per chapter, or whatever.  Some of them were started because they seemed like a good idea at the time and were a reaction to criticism of the genre.  I’m sure that’s how the “Science fiction has to conform to current science” and “Mysteries are NEVER solved by amateurs” rules started.  The fact that they ruined the fun of the readers and shrank the fields didn’t matter.  It was the hoops you had to run through to get to the “published” (or “bestseller” status) and you did it.  Of course, once you got in you were proud of it.

You know why hazing occurred before political correctness stopped it?  Or why many colleges put artificial barriers to entrance?  Or why human mothers feel pain when giving birth for that matter?

Because the more difficult something was to obtain, the more you’re attached to it.  Becoming a professional writer was difficult, it was often irrational, but once you were in you were proud of that status and you’d defend the rules against all comers.

And this brings us to writers’ perfectly normal human stupidity.

A lot of writers – and the funny thing is that they’re not ALWAYS the darlings of the establishment as you’d expect – are JUST ticked that their chains have dissolved and that they’re set free overnight, and can write whatever they want in whatever way they want, and probably make more money doing it.  (I won’t go into that.  Dave Freer did in Monday’s post at MGC.  Go read.)  They sneer at indie published authors.  They pile on in making fun of copyediting standards of self-published people (which is funny because the traditionally published standards have gone STRAIGHT down.)  They will do anything and everything to hold on to the frayed blue ribbon that says “professionally published.”  And yes, the stupid things DO include, as Kris says, signing idiotic agency clauses, accepting ever-smaller advances and generally acting like chickens with their heads cut off, running in circles.  It also includes sneering and attacks on anyone – ANYONE – who reminds them the cage door is open and they can JUST walk out.

I’m not surprised.  Why should anyone be?  If you read Exodus, and whether you believe it’s true or just a story it has elements of truth in it, you’ll find that the Israelites, in the desert, longed for the fleshpots of Egypt – despite the fact that Egyptians had taken to killing their male children.  (And let me tell you, the Israelites had nothing on writers.  Many of us, the publishers killed ALL our “children” regardless of their classification.  I started referring to delivering books as “I’ve thrown the baby into the volcano, at last.)

As in Exodus, this generation might need to pass away before we can experience true freedom… Or not.  I for one don’t have forty years to wander in the desert.  You?

Sometimes, in my more cynical moments, I think that these people running around trying to prop up the system will – when this fails – manage to form just as dysfunctional a system of irrational hoops one has to jump through to be “a real writer.”

Wouldn’t put it past them.  My people are not only human and odd, they’re also – most of us – at best walking wounded.

But that’s my cynical moments.  I think so long as we keep stuff like SOPA at bay, technology has not just opened the cage door but blown it wide.  I think they can’t put humpty dumpty back together again.

Oh, sure, they can still create their own hierarchy.  They can form clubs and associations that judge of each other’s excellence and award each other prizes.  And a lot of people will take them seriously.

Don’t care.  All I ever aspired to is write stories and make a reasonable living.  Don’t care if I’ll always be called a “hack.”

They’re perfectly welcome to forge manacles and put them on their own wrists (I hear the velvet padded ones are the thing in certain scenes.)  They’re welcome to look down their noses at me.

As long as they leave me out of it, I don’t care.  School is out forever.  I don’t have to write like teach thinks I should.  I understand the people who feel bad about this, but no law on Earth or heaven can make me want to be one of them.

Y’all go back to them fleshpots, darlings.  See that up ahead?  I hear there’s rivers of milk and honey.  And even if it turns out to be just water and fertile soil, that’s okay, so long as no one can kill half of my “children.”  I’m okay with that.  The promised land is where you find it.