A few days ago, in my conference, I asked for topic suggestions and one of the ones I got was to write about writers in the media, as compared to the real thing. (BTW, still open to topic suggestions, if any of you want to ping me with one.)

This is more difficult for me to write about than it sounds, because truly, the only time I watch movies is when I’m sick and/or doing something else so mindlessly boring that I need to distract myself. This including ironing or exercising when it’s too snowy for me to go out. So I watch maybe all of five movies a year, a lot of it re-watching old favorites. Yes, yes, I AM odd. As for TV, I watch it even more rarely. I’m NOW catching up with Stargate which is all new to me.

Most of what I know about TV is filtered to me through my husband who watches tv series while exercising, because it’s timed more perfectly to his schedule than movies.

My impression might or might not therefore be valid. However that has never really stopped me from shooting my mouth about stuff I don’t know anything about (I’m a fiction writer. I make crap up. Live with it.)

To begin with, when I was very young, my impression of a writers’ life came mostly through pulp novels, a lot of them pulp sf novels. In them, agents would send their writers off for weekends at borrowed country estates (I’m trying to remember the title. Simak. Tunnel from the future – mind is blank. I can remember the Portuguese title, but that’s the same as the American title for Clark’s Our Children’s Children, which in Portuguese was called “The Book of the Grand Seigneurs” Yeah, that – translation and titles, is probably another post, if anyone has the slightest interest) told them they were working too hard (or not at all), suggested cures (Martians Go Home, Fred Pohl) or came over to make sure their writer was working. Writers worked a lot, very hard. Publishers were shadowy figures, in the background and mostly published whatever they were given.

Of course, you know this is not PRECISELY true. And wasn’t even when I started out. It might have been true in the forties, for pulp authors. I honestly don’t know. When I came in agents were the first slush readers for houses – effectively, if not in name – so not only were they harder to get than (sometimes) a publisher (if you met one at a con, say) but they were often more impersonal than publishers. Very often during my career I had an easier time hearing from a publisher/editor than from an agent. And yeah, no matter how much your agent approved of what you did, publishers STILL culled further. Which, for once in this process, makes perfect sense. (Of course that’s all upended now with ebooks.)

Then I came to the US and started writing in earnest and had what I think is the normal impression – all writers are well off. Well, at least they make enough to be upper middle class, right? It seems logical, given the amount of work that goes into a book, and how few people can do it competently. The ones who aren’t very good don’t last, the ones who last are raking it in.

I was, of COURSE, going to be very good and therefore I would be supporting my husband by the time we hit thirty, and then he could work on his music. (Splort. Giggle. Yeah, that worked out for us.)

Ironically, if I had made a sale back when I was twenty something (I was saleable, mind, I just had clue zero how to go about SELLING. I wasn’t “good” but that’s something else. Tons of people aren’t, who sell. And tons of people are who don’t sell.) at the levels paid to mid list writers then, two books a year would have doubled our income and given us a significant help at the beginning. But I didn’t know how to even start selling, so… Nothing doing.

Little by little I learned better. Which is why now I roll my eyes when I read books (a lot) about some writer with no contacts and no special attributes who just shoots to the top of the charts because she/he’s so “brilliant.”

I see this in the mass media too – and of course, I wish it were true, even if I myself might not be as brilliant as I’d like to be, because as a reader, I’d get wonderful stuff – that if you’re really good you’ll make it big. Often the plot of books/movies, etc with a writer are that of the writer finally breaking through and writing better and enjoying enormous success. This makes for great plotting. It’s also, alas, not true. For the time I’ve been in the business, at least, the publishers have been under the impression that they were Hollywood and that the important thing was to ‘manufacture celebrity’ as a way of selling books. Many times the books themselves weren’t read (that’s how important the quality was) if the proposal met basic standards and the author was “nothing special” in the way of “something we can promote” and not having a “platform” – this meant the author was not particularly beautiful, cool, didn’t have an interesting personal story or (lately) a well-viewed blog, and didn’t know anyone in the business. These were in general relegated to the mid list no matter how brilliant the book might be. (This was responsible for making Sir Terry Pratchett largely unknown in the US while already a bestseller in the UK. Gave me great comfort to know he was selling about what I sell per book. You see, British guy, not particularly sightly, no “platform” – books were pure gold, but you had to FIND them to read them, and distribution in the US was a laydown of about 5k copies per book. [I got very lucky and found him early on because someone in town bought all the British editions, then sold them to my favorite used bookstore.] Their excuse for why he didn’t sell here was “British humor” – it took changing his agent and editor both for him to break out of that slot. I’m sure the numbers from GB helped with that break out. If he’d been an American and published only here, even the greatest writing genius of our time might still be selling 3 to 5k copies per title. If they hadn’t got rid of him yet.)

But sometimes the movies get it at least sort of right. The title of this post is from Sliding Doors (which you absolutely must see if you haven’t.) It is spoken by the main character’s no-good boyfriend and it captures an attitude I’ve often seen among “wanna bes” They want to be writers in the worst way. And they are. As in, they never finish anything, because it has to be a towering work of genius. Someone in their childhood convinced them they’re brilliant, and… well, poor things. From that movie too comes the splortch worthy line of “I know one day you’ll finish your book and we’ll be rich.” My friend Rebecca Lickiss and I laughed till we cried, because see, it is what every new writer – and their relations – thinks and… well, not true. Notably, the rest of the theater thought we were insane. At least no one else laughed, and some people stared. Which tells you how widespread that myth is.

As for Castle, I haven’t watched it. To some extent, the entire idea of his getting ATTACHED to a police unit is silly. Writers write. Yeah, we might go out on a police ride-along (I haven’t, but I don’t write procedurals) but the chance of being that involved just for research is close to nil. We’re more likely to cultivate a police officer buddy and then call them at the most outrageous hours with questions. Another thing my husband told me that made me grin was the idea of the poker game with all these big names. It’s cute. REALLY cute. And it’s not as if you all don’t know each other – bestsellers usually do. And heck, I know tons of bestsellers. It’s just that the chances of you all being in the same place at the same time, much less doing so weekly are zilch.

All the writers I do work like heck, even the bestsellers. And these days publicity/con, etc commitments are as big as contracts, which means chances of you being in the same town at the same time, even you all live there, are almost none. A bestseller friend of mine tries to get a bunch of us local writers together fairly often, and he succeeds about twice a year, if that. Divergent travel/delivery schedules keep us in conflicting “orbits.” The last get-together was one of the better attended. There were about ten of us, but some people were “missing”. There’s always people missing, because of scheduling conflicts. You know how you guys go to cons to see your favorite authors? You know how periodically all authors disappear from the con for hours? Yeah, that’s because what entices US to the con is the chance to socialize with our friends. Weirdly, I sometimes see my friends from here in town ONLY at worldcon, across the country.

However, one thing my husband told me Castle did is sort of true – at least has been true at times in my life and might be true again – I don’t remember the exact quote, but Castle was trying to spin a bunch of stuff about his process and his police partner snaps “You mean, wait till the last minute, then write the book in three days in a caffeine fueled haze?”

What it didn’t say and it’s sadly true (perhaps because like alcohol and drugs, which I advise against, btw, it’s a way of breaking through the conscious constraints which is good for self-doubting authors, like most of them) is that such work is often the best the author does. If it said that, it wouldn’t be a good story, so it doesn’t. But it is the truth, nonetheless.

*I promised a peek at my husband’s novel.  Okay fine I didn’t promise it but — eh eh eh eh eh — he left his computer unwatched (foolish man) and I — eh eh eh eh eh — took the first five pages or so off his drive.  Mwah ah ah ah ah.  Enjoy, because I’m going to be in SO MUCH trouble.*

Chapter 1

Meet Ninth Euclid

          When I was a skinny boy working on my daddy’s farm, I loved watching the sun rise over the fields.  There was a quiet just before the Oasis dawn that’s simply unparalleled on any other world in the Eternal Empire.  I’d sit in the hayloft in the south barn, whose single window faced the magnificent sunrise, close my eyes, bask in the blissful silence and pretend I was the only child of parents who didn’t talk much.

          It’s the kind of fantasy that could only be created by someone like me, the youngest in a family with ten children.  My surname is Ancel, but nobody remembers to use it, since there’s no other Ninth Euclid in memory. 

          My daddy, displaying a certain lack of imagination and not a little eccentricity, saw fit to name me and each of my eight brothers Euclid.  He said once that he had no idea what the name meant, but that he liked the way it sounded.  The first two boys were twins, and Daddy couldn’t figure which one should be Euclid, so, after two weeks of arguments with my mama, he gave them both the nonsense name.  Everyone called them First Euclid and Second Euclid, so when the next boy came around, he named him Euclid, too. 

          My one sister, Hannah, thought it was funny to call out, “Euclid-one-to-nine,” for family dinners.

          We Euclids all slept in a single room with three large beds, which made for a cacophony of snores keeping me awake most of the night and frequent bruised ribs whenever one of my bedmates decided to turn over.

          So I’d sneak out of bed under the cover of the dark  — easy enough, since with chocolate-colored skin and coal-black eyes and hair, I tended to fade into the background at night.  

          Later, after Lord Oswald hired me away from Daddy’s farm, I found my ability to blend in to be detrimental to dealing with the governors, who tended to assume from my size that I was just some hired muscle, so one day early on in Oswald’s employ, in a fit of utter insanity, I dyed my short, curly black hair bright blue, the predominant color of the skies over my Daddy’s farm.  Coincidentally, as I soon found out, it was also the color the ladies from a particularly discriminating pleasure palace dyed their hair.  After my Lord’s initial shock and a good laugh at my expense when we walked into The Hen’s Coop that very night, I found to my Lord’s delight that it had the unintended benefit of confusing the governors immensely, so I’ve kept my hair blue.

          But, as a child, my hair was still jet black, and I’d stagger unseen, half-asleep, half-awake, the quarter mile or so to the south barn, where I could get some sleep in the pre-dawn silence.  I’d be up with the first rays of ambient sunlight splashing across my eyes, which gave me a few minutes for my only-child fantasy.

          Eventually, one of the roosters — there were two of them sharing a coop, each one somehow believing he was the only rooster around for miles — would stagger out of his coop directly below me and shriek a wakeup alarm.  The other rooster would blurt out a short quip, apparently surprised that there was another rooster around.  He’d crow even louder than the first.  Naturally, the first rooster, amazed that another rooster had encroached on his territory, responded even louder.  Before long, there was a din equaling the crowd’s noise when old Emperor Seraphim VI deigned to visit one of the eighty three planets in his empire.  Well, at least the crowd’s noise when his new Empress, Jewel, stepped out of the space-to-ground transport, in one of her famous shimmering, is-it-transparent-or-isn’t-it gowns and her long, black hair both fluttering about her shapely curves with every step.

          No, on second thought, the roosters were louder.

          Those dueling roosters signaled the start of my day for many years before Lord Oswald happened upon me. 

          Lord Adrian Oswald is actually a prince, one of the many heirs to the emperor — His Grace’s first wife’s sister’s grandson, to be exact — but he prefers to use the title Lord instead.  He says it’s less pretentious.

          A humbler man I’ve never met, perfectly satisfied with his position, with never a thought about advancement beyond the planetary governing of my Oasis.  Although, judging from the way he looks at the Empress Jewel, he’d be more than happy to accept a promotion to emperor if it includes the lovely Jewel as well.

          For nearly a decade now, I’ve been his personal secretary, keeping his appointments, scheduling his entertainments and frequent travels, sometimes even helping with battle strategy when the need arises.  Lord Oswald claims I have a knack for killing people in interesting ways, even if it’s just vicariously through the legion, Prince Oswald’s personally-selected planetary-wide defense troops.

          That’s not to say that I couldn’t kill someone personally.  I stand more than a head taller than most people, almost two heads more than Lord Oswald — even that tall pretty-boy Prince Vere, the emperor’s favorite heir and, not incidentally, grand-nephew, shrinks beside me — and my arms are as big around as a forty-foot elm tree.  Working on a farm for most of my childhood, I developed the muscles to match my size, so killing a man isn’t beyond my abilities.  I’ve just never done it.

          For the last half hour or so, I’d been listening to Lord Oswald’s regional governors bicker among themselves about who was entitled to what taxes and what kind of trade limitations were appropriate and other boring government crap.  I was reminded of the roosters back home on the farm, and I kept drifting away from the arguments, trying to decide if the governors were louder than the roosters or not, even though I was supposed to be taking minutes for the interminable meeting.

          The sound swelled and ebbed cyclically, hypnotically, until at last the spell was broken by the slam of a door.  The echo bounced around the hall in the ensuing silence as every eye in the room instantly found Lady Redwing standing by the only exit.  I glanced at my Lord, who looked ready to admonish the Lady for her interruption before wisely checking his watch.  When he realized what time it was, he merely shut his eyes to the Lady and massaged his temples in a vain attempt to ward off the inevitable headache that accompanied Lady Redwing’s Thursday afternoon visits.

More on the author’s glamorous life…

What? You didn’t know I had one?

Yesterday I engaged in Extreme Ironing and today I need to clean the house before I go away on a professional trip for two weeks. I’m attending Fencon and then staying over to teach a workshop in Bedford, TX. In between I hope – away from kids and cats and assorted other interruptions – to finish several works that are hanging by at thread and perhaps to get some sleep.

I know half of you are going to think it’s weird that I am engaging in housekeeping before leaving and the more daring of you will accuse me of being a downtrodden woman. Very funny. The truth is that our entire family is what can be euphemistically described as “driven.”

My husband, very generously decided to forego the chance to pursue his own artistic ambitions, so I could – sixteen years before I published a novel – which meant if we still wanted to have a comparable lifestyle to our peers, I picked up a lot of the slack. This involved a lot of stuff like ironing and cooking from scratch (yes, I know, but I REALLY cook from scratch) which is considered female-like and exploitative. It also includes furniture refinishing, wall painting and a lot of the other stuff. As for my husband, in addition to his more than 9-5 job he maintains all the computers in this house (I think ten, at last count) and does the taxes which take an unreasonable amount of time because my business is neither easy nor straightforward. Now we’re also trying to phase in some time for his writing, because it’s been years (since the kids became old enough to take considerable time) since he’s been able to do anything with it, and he’s really very good.

As for the kids, they’re teens and prickly, so I won’t go into their lives, but I think Robert is engaged in three or four different “enterprises” as well as keeping a 4.0 in pre-med, and Marsh is doing two or three things in addition to half/college and senior year in highschol, which these days seems to involve a year of sending out applications to colleges, each with the administrative/bureaucratic work load normally associated with filing a brief before the supreme court.

Our lives slot together very precisely to allow us to spend time together and to keep up with our conflicting commitments. That means if one of us is going to be away or incapacitated, it can throw everyone off. Papers don’t get filed with schools, novels get delayed or – and this is usually what happens when I get really sick – the house becomes the sort of screaming mess that takes me months to unravel afterwards.

Since this is not unexpected, I’m leaving some stuff done in advance, and then leaving them with specific charges on what to do. (Because I’m the one at home most of the time, I’m, by default, the manager.) Yes, they can iron (though since I got da machine, they don’t know how to operate that!) and they can clean and they can cook, but not to MY standards without supervision. And I don’t want to come back, after a con, and have to spend a week cleaning. So, today, I set things in order for them.

… which means I really don’t feel like writing a blog post, though it looks like I have…

So, I’ll close off with some stuff about the workshop.

The workshop is to help the Bedford library. (They pay my plane ticket, the rest goes to them.) I’ve done this three times and it’s a lot of fun. I honestly don’t have any idea if it’s full up or not, but if you’re going to be in the area it’s September 30^th to October 1^st. I have no idea how enrollment is this year, but if you’re in the area, look at http://www.bedfordlibrary.org The info should be there somewhere, and if it’s not send them an email.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, I have catboxes to clean.

I know I’ve annoyed people who like it by saying that my first trilogy is really difficult to read. All I can say is that the people who like it have greater linguistic facility than 99.9% of the country and more than I have unless I’ve worked up to it.

I had been reading almost exclusively Elizabethan stuff for six months when I wrote this, and my younger son had memorized half of Shakespeare (at two. Because I played it constantly on TV and audio) so I think I went a little crazy on the style. OTOH it was the style I’d been ASKED to do and also, it has a certain charm of its own, if you are in the mood for that kind of language, or if you’re a die-hard Shakespeare freak.

Now, I know I’ve said at the time I couldn’t plot with two hands and a seeing eye dog, but the truth is that this is not a worry for these novels. I stole the plots fair and square, then changed them to suit me. So, they do have plots. Okay, they’re not connected to the level I can do now, but heck, neither is Darkship Thieves. Nor Darkship Renegades which I turned in a month ago. And probably in ten years, I’ll think me now couldn’t plot AT ALL. The novels are probably more tightly plotted than the average run of the mill fantasy. (Note the two ll. Run of the mil fantasy — hi Larry Correia! — tends to be very well plotted indeed.)

Anyway, all this is in name of Baen brought them out as an e-bundle in their webscriptions. If you click on the covers, it will take you to the place to purchase and you can buy it as a bundle or as individual books.

There’s bonus material with it. One of the extra books is my collection, Wings, which contains short stories published in Asimov’s, Analog, Weird Tales and other venues.

The other is a little harder to explain. You see, when I first finished All Night Awake and sent it to my agent he told me it was horrible, terrible, and I needed to rewrite it according to this… well… formula he had. Anyway — I was young and stupid. With my friend Rebecca Lickiss (I owe you one!) and my husband both screaming “nooooo. Don’t do it” I went ahead and did what he wanted, abandoned my book and wrote the book he wanted me to.

Was the first book better? I don’t know. I know All Night Awake, as published, sold the least of any of my books. I also know that though he gave me a useful pointer “have internal action mirrored by external action” so the first might be way more introspective, the first is also likely to be more in line with Ill Met. So those of you who didn’t like All Night Awake, after liking Ill Met will be glad to know that aggregated with the published All Night Awake, Baen brought out the “forbidden edition” too. It’s completely different except for about thirty pages. Of course, it doesn’t fit in with Any Man So Daring, but it might still be of interest to my die hard fans (Yes, yes, I know who the six of you are [grin].)

So, there it is, it’s now available in ebooks, without DRM and at a reasonable price and those of you who read my sf might get a chuckle at how “literary fantasy” I started out.

The secret, of course, is that I can still do this. It’s actually much easier than doing the action-packed stuff. So, I’ve traded up for a more challenging craft… much to the despair of all my agents and almost all my editors. But I feel less depressed doing it.

And for those who are link impaired as I am, here’s the links, again.

Bundle —     http://www.webscription.net/p-1506-sarah-hoyt-bundle.aspx

Ill Met By Moonlight —

http://www.webscription.net/p-1507-ill-met-by-moonlight.aspx

All Night Awake –

http://www.webscription.net/p-1508-all-night-awake.aspx

Any Man So Daring-

http://www.webscription.net/p-1509-any-man-so-daring.aspx

And Wings:

http://www.webscription.net/p-1510-wings.aspx

My outline said “Lucius wakes up” — that’s all my outline said. Then after that was the rather risky subversive group getting together. So, what came pouring out of my unsuspecting fingers?

I woke up with my curtains being opened, the light coming in to shine against my closed eyelids.

I wanted privacy to take a leak. I wanted a cup of coffee. And I’d be damned if I was going to have four men help me bathe.
Sigh. I need my head examined.

I have some experience with revolutions, partly because Portugal never believes a thing worth doing is worth doing only once. I get PTSD at the sound of Green Acres because Porto had one reel in its local broadcast station. Green Acres. When Lisbon got cut off, they played it back to back. This meant that someone had taken over the main broadcasting station in Lisbon.

(Okay, here I should explain that Portugal had two broadcast stations. Yes, I had a deprived childhood. [Yes. I spelled that right. I’m quite sure it’s an I.] Only one of them broadcast during the day at all, and that limited hours. So usually my experience was come home from school and watch something on lunch break and… ack… Green Acres. I wonder who is in now.)

For those who wonder why I’m “obsessive about my Portuguese background” – I’m not, but this kind of childhood experiences mark a person. I think this is why I’ve always been fascinated by revolutions. The ones that go right. The ones that go wrong. And the ones that go very wrong.

I read obsessively about the French revolution, the American revolution, the Russian revolution, and other, less obvious, revolutions. Like… The industrial revolution, or even the agricultural revolution.

Societies don’t change easily. People don’t change easily. Societies are worse than that. They’re slow to change like dinosaurs whose signal has to travel from head to tail and if it’s in full careen, it’s going to take a while to stop, let alone turn around.

One of the things I’ve noticed, in recent times, is that revolutions have another issue, particularly social revolutions of the non-bloody kind. Knowing you’ve won. Knowing it’s now, not thirty or fifty or seventy years ago.

Often when I’m talking to people, particularly people of an academic bend, I find myself wondering what world they’re talking about. It’s the silly little things, like “Oh, a woman would never dare say/do that,” when I saw women do it just that morning. Or “the neighborhood will get upset if there’s a non married couple” – what, like that one, that one and, oh, yeah, that one?

I will grant you that every once in a while, one comes across a person or persons who seem to be a blast from the stereotypical past, but my kids schools’ have more trouble with unwanted pregnancies than with girls being sent home to put on a longer skirt.

One of these effects of “delayed realization you won” keeps annoying me. Lately there have been any number of women writers complaining that they’re not proportionally represented as science fiction writers. They’re not being taken seriously and this is because they have vaginas. Etc. etc. etc.

Now, I’ve been this field for ten years as a published author. First of all let me get out of the way that there are some prejudices in this field, usually evinced by people you wouldn’t expect. For instance, I was pushed rather strongly fantasyward, in part because I had the v word. (Yes, verve.) And a friend of mine who is a physicist, was told that she should write fantasy, not science fiction, because she was a woman and therefore had the heart of a fantasy writer. (To which Rebecca Lickiss answered that yes, but it was in a locked drawer, and besides the statute of limitations had expired.)

There are other, more subtle prejudices. Some people told me they never read women writers, because they can’t write action. Weirdly, when they read me, they have no problems. I don’t worry about it. I just wait till they come around.

And btw, any male writing in romance or a romance-germane field, like certain forms of urban fantasy gets the opposite pressure, I’m sure. It’s all part of no one having a perfect life, and other people having certain expectations. My husband, for instance, had trouble placing his space opera (still hasn’t) because it’s character development oriented. (Yes, he actually got rejected by someone who told him it read too much like Bujold. No, I’m not joking.)

However, claims that women are discriminated against in fantasy always make me laugh. And claims that women as writers are discriminated against make me laugh even harder. And then there’s the post at MGC two days ago, and the comments – my Lord, the comments. Part of what got to me was seeing my friend Dave Freer getting attacked for making a perfectly reasonable and polite comment. Well, I was brought up to think part of my job was to give voice to those who didn’t have one, whether they be battered women in Portugal or silenced and demonized males in the US.

First let me establish there was a time I called myself a feminist. This is because I believed in the equality of women. I still do.

This doesn’t mean that women should be exactly the same as men. Or that they should behave exactly the same way. In fact, any such notions were pretty much dispelled by the time I came of age in the seventies. The average man and the average woman are very different creatures. And I strenuously object to such things as the fire fighters tests being rewritten so that you don’t need to do a fireman carry to pass. OTOH I heavily endorse any woman who is able to pass non “rewritten” tests being a fire fighter if she so wishes. And that’s because the median of anything is not the only person – there’s also the extremes. For instance, bad as I am at spacial reasoning (sad that) I am miles better than some males (okay, none that I’ve met, but I’m sure there are some. Maybe they were hit really hard on the head.) In fact I pretty much occupy the far outlier extremes of a bunch of categories (and I’m not saying which extreme.) As such, I am sympathetic with outliers. And I think letting people do what best suits them, without judgement, censure or barriers is best for everyone.

I believe in equality before the law not equality of results.

I still believe the same things, but I’m not calling myself a feminist, partly because the word has gotten corrupted. A lot of people seem to think the only way to elevate women is to degrade men. Others seem to be on a permanent hunt for offense, including attacking perfectly innocent words – no, history does NOT mean his-story. Please, study some linguistics.

This is many flavors of wrong, for many reasons, but the main reason is that it leads to a sort of permanent revolution. This reminds me of when the French revolution had got rid of every aristocrat either through beheading or immigration and had started attacking as aristos people who could read. Or people who dressed better than the others. Or people who used the word “roi.”

This is the sign of a revolution that has become its own reason to exist, and which will consume its own partisans, until it all ends in a sea of blood or until it’s stopped at last by a “strong man” of some sort, and suppressed for good. And at that point no one complains, because, frankly, it’s a relief.

Part of what disturbs me about this is that the justification for the “permanent revolution” is that we “could lose all the gains tomorrow.” You know, like if we don’t jump behind the latest harebrained “offense” campaign, next thing you know we’ll end woman suffrage (and good riddance, women have suffered enough! – Yes, yes, it’s a joke. And yes, I’m aware there is no joking in feminism. Another reason I no longer use that word.)

But the advances are fragile in another way. Much as I hate to say this, women’s gains rest on two things – one of them is safe contraceptives. The other is a stable western civilization. (No, I’m not even going to argue that. You want to live anywhere else in the world, be my guest. I wouldn’t, though.) And both of them can be lost more easily than you think.

Western civilization can be demoralized and subverted from within by a contingent of males who feel like women exist to punish them. Males who have been treated as criminals or morons or both from kindergarten on. Males whose education and employment figures, if reversed (i.e. if women had the same stats men have in the US today) would be a real offense and a call for investigations and remedies. Males who, btw, have never discriminated against anyone (most of them, at least) and whose fathers and, for that matter probably grandfathers, never discriminated against anyone.

These males can very easily see how women are treated in the rest of the world and, if pushed enough, form a concerted effort to subvert the current rules of behavior. (And no they haven’t done it yet. They haven’t even THOUGHT of doing it, yet. Again, don’t get me started. I lived in a country that is Western but only just. I know what discrimination is better than most people my age or even slightly older.)

I love the women who say it’s just the way the pendulum is swinging and that it’s right for it to go to far in the direction of privileging women. Let me enlighten you – if this is a pendulum, it’s one that has men as its favorites. Men are physically stronger and more aggressive. Any devolution from civilization to barbarism, or even any prolonged disruption in the economy that, oh, say, interrupts the production of contraceptives, and men will have to be very, very good not to be in charge. And if you’ve been pushing your little pendulum with glee and joy, don’t be surprised if they push it as far as they can the other way, till you’re in a world out of your worst nightmares.

You’ve won the revolution. Do you know what the mark of a GOOD revolutionary is? He knows when to put down his musket and go back to his farm. He knows when to shake hands with his neighbor who was on the other side. He knows when to make his rule so just, so fair that no one would contemplate returning to the former rule.

And he does not look for counter revolutionaries under ever bush and hallucinate that the war is still ongoing. Because then they just lock him up and beg the old regime to take over once more. Or start looking around for a Bonaparte.

Since I and my sons and my potential grandsons and maybe even granddaughters have to live in this world too, I beg you to come to your senses.

*http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdT9oq7VBDA

Years ago, when I was just starting to figure out the writing thing, I attended Kris Rusch’s and Dean Wesley Smith’s Master Class (which they no longer teach, though they teach other classes, useful in the current situation) in Oregon.

One of the things they told me which I didn’t fully believe was “You never outgrow problems, in writing. You just trade in for bigger problems.”

This seemed like duck speak. I mean, at some point you become a professional. That problem you have, on how to start a story? It goes away. And besides, you’re selling practically everything you write. What can you possibly worry about?

Perhaps my biggest fear at the time was that I wasn’t a real writer. No, please, don’t ask me to explain. It doesn’t make sense to me, even now. Perhaps it was that so many people at parties, so many arbiters of other people’s lives informed me “you’re not published, so you’re not a real writer.” Perhaps it was my mom’s more or less constant refrain of “when are you going to quit the writing non sense and concentrate on something real?” Perhaps it was that when I was little writers were some sort of heros. They lived in another country, and you know, everything was easier there.

It never occurred to me, to be honest, that any of the people I admired were once, themselves, unpublished and that some of them – Bradbury – wrote a lot before he could break into publishing. No. In my mind, the “real writers” always knew how good they were. Which left me as a fraud and a put-on. And so no one was ever going to buy me.

Nineteen years ago, when the older boy was little, I used to go for walks with him in his pram, and think about stories, but also day dream about the day that would never come, when I was published, and no longer had to worry about whether I really was a writer. I remember vivid wishing that myself from the future would just come back and tell me I was published. It would make everything so much easier, without the constant doubt.

Shortly after that workshop (actually at the workshop, in the editor-pitch-session) I sold my first book. So, did the heavens open? Did the angels sing?

No. I knew it was a mistake. Not mine. Theirs. They’d made a horrible mistake, I was a fraud, and soon they’d find out.

Weirdly what cured this was my first series collapsing. Here is was. The worst had happened. When, despite that, I kept selling, I coined the term Zombie Career TM and forged on.

But the fear was always – as has been for most midlisters for the last ten years – that I’d never sell again. The only way to keep writing involved not thinking about sales, but thinking instead about the things that mattered: how well written the book was; how much promo I did (I did a LOT for Darkship Thieves, for instance); cherishing the fan letters and the fans in my conference.
The fear of not selling again is gone. Or rather, it’s oddly twisted, sideways and backwards.

I think at this point, ten years in, and with some regular fans, what I should be worrying about is never making it to bestseller. Or perhaps that my particular brand of writing will stop. (Okay, guys, yeah, that’s silly for me, since I write so many different genres, but it is vital for many people. When Horror collapsed it left a lot of stranded writers.)

But instead, here are my fears right now and what I’m doing to counter them. (Is it enough? Who knows. I’ll do more as it occurs to me.)

1 – That I’ll never be a bestseller because there won’t be such a thing as a bestseller list.

Answer: Who cares? Some bestseller lists, done a certain way, are real measures of success. However a lot of bestseller lists are cooked and reflect either laydown or customer confidence. So, who needs them? The only real bestseller list is reflected in bank accounts. Which brings us to:

2- What if my name recognition/fan base/publicity efforts aren’t enough, and I end up not being able to make even the little living I’ve made at this for the last few years?

Answer: Other people are making a living, so there’s a way to. Promote more. Research the market more. Write more. Establish different sources of income. Subscriptions. Donation buttons. Non fiction. Anything else I can think of. Meanwhile cherish the publishers I mean to keep working with, and keep my fingers crossed behind my back. Finding a way not to sleep or to write while asleep would help, too.

3 – What if my favorite publisher goes under? What if my favorite novel-under-contract gets trapped in publishing h*ll due to bankruptcy or lawsuits? What if something horrible happens and I can’t possibly self-publish or go small press? What if traditional publishers somehow pull a double-reverse and they’re the only ones that survive, and we’re back to the state before all this, and I’ve blown it by firing my agent and going indie?

Answer – The unknowable is the unknowable. And right now no one KNOWS everything for sure. Yeah, we could all die tomorrow, buried in ash. Or publishing in all its forms could stop existing, which means I can default to cleaning houses for a living or something. Meanwhile, I do the best I can. I keep up with changes and try to second guess the best I can. And if it all goes wrong? Well, I’ve been at the bottom before. I’ll come around again.

And what would I tell my younger self, if I could go back? Would I tell her that I’m published, I’m a real writer? Would I tell her not to be afraid?

No. Who knows? Perhaps my/her fear was necessary to keep writing.

Would I give her specific advice that worked then? Like, “do more cons.” Or “participate in Genii boards online”? I don’t know. If I’d gone that route, I could have ended up in a different place career wise. Yes, yes, I could have been amazingly wealthy and successful. Or I could have been unpublishable and blacklisted years ago.

So, what would I tell my younger self? If I could, I would send back in time the print outs that I have pinned to the corkboard to the left of my desk. One of them says “If you must walk on thin ice, you might as well learn to dance.” The other has a General George s. Patton quote: “Success is how high you bounce when you hit the bottom.”

Keeping the pace up in fiction is not as easy as it sounds. I know I’m not always wonderful at it, though I (hopefully) am getting better at it. If you read my Shakespeare trilogy (soon to be available from Baen books webscriptions) this was perhaps my greatest failing. (Well, it’s either that or the fact that I went after near-authentic Shakespearean language. No, don’t ask. It seemed like a good idea at the time. It was fun.)

In fact, before the Shakespeare trilogy, the last unpublished big book I wrote got rejected by an agent saying that my issue was timing (aka pacing) and that this simply can’t be taught. He was right, my issue was timing. This came from the fact that I couldn’t find a plot with two hands, a cane and a seeing eye dog, not even if said plot were, at the time, biting me on the posterior. (What, your plots don’t bite? Lucky you.)

He was wrong that it couldn’t be learned. Almost everything in writing can be learned. The idea of genius – the myth of someone who is born with all the abilities he or she will need to make it in this field, is wrong. (In fact, the older I get and the more I write, the less I’m sure there is any native component to writing, save the compulsion to tell stories.)

Start as you would with anything else. Read books that have great pacing. Laurell Hamilton’s first three books are three of those. But if you wish for something more sedate, but which still keeps the pages turning, read mysteries. At least, read highly structured, traditional mysteries. I recommend, of all things, the ones in which I stumbled onto one of the essential mechanisms: Elis Peter’s Brother Cadfael.

Of course, to begin with you need a coherent plot that’s long enough for the book. What do I mean by that? Well… that’s a subject for another post, but let’s just say you need to make sure there is enough to the plot that we won’t get to the middle of the book and wonder why we’re still reading. Okay, let’s put this way: theft of diamonds – probably enough for a novel. Theft of lollipops – probably enough for a short story. (Unless the lollipops are laced with arsenic and people start dropping like flies, one a day, and you’re trying to trace it before the next person dies.) Colonizing a planet – novel. Colonizing a bedroom – unless you’re a microbial life form, probably enough for a short story.

Second, make sure your character’s actions are LOGICAL. If your character takes a break, while trying to find the bomb, to go window shopping, I just lost my interest in your character.

The first, most important “sense of timing” mechanism is the obvious:

Have a ticking clock.

Sometimes these are real clocks. “There is a bomb somewhere in the city. You must find it before the clock reaches midnight.” This is often a timing device of thrillers.

However, there are other timing devices that don’t tick – though they can tick, if you really want to – the most important of which is: We have to do X before something terrible happens. This too is often the timing device of thrillers. “We have to find the lollipop before my child eats it.” And of romances, “I have to interrupt the ceremony before she marries that jerk.”

There is also the timing device who is literally a person: “We have to solve the murder, before John turns himself in.” Or “we have to figure out this designer plague before Bob becomes a werewolf.”

Now, with timing devices, you have to show them. You can’t just set up the clock at the beginning, then let it run in the background and never remind the reader. You have to show it, intermittently throughout the novel. The child inches closer to the poisoned lollipop; the bomb ticks; the woman gets into her wedding gown.

“But I don’t want to have an obvious timing device” you say. “My plot is loser than that. I don’t want a definite timing device. I want something more unstructured.”

Well… you can always have – the great chase. Someone wants to kill your character. They’ve started adding these to romances, I think to keep them more interesting. It’s also a great way to add spice to cozies, though the person might only be THREATENING the character – but the character doesn’t know that.

In plots structured this way, I ALWAYS try to have two people chasing/attacking the character. That way, when things get slow in one plot, I throw in a guy with a machine gun. (Well, not literally, but you know what I mean.)

Three caveats for that type of plot:
1- Have it make sense, when you turn it around to the villain’s pov. Even if the villain is mistaken or silly, the actions must make sense for the villain. You can’t have the man with the machine gun come LITERALLY out of nowhere. The villain has to have sent him over for a reason. Something provoked it right at that moment.

2- It has to escalate. The violence, chase, whatever has to get more severe each time. You can’t just keep repeating the same action, every time. Also be very, very, very careful of repetitive scenes.

3 – It has to matter. Unless the threatened character is likeable and you’ve done enough to make us like him, it will not fly.

Another way to hide tension and therefore make the pacing faster is to make us care desperately about the character and want the character want something he/she just can’t get easily. That’s what I used with Darkship Thieves, interspersed with “chase scenes.”

The Don’ts are as Important as the Dos, so try to remember – Don’t have your character stop to do her nails. Don’t let her sit around thinking about that beautiful summer day when she was a kid. (Unless you keep it short, and it ends with an explosion she almost fails to duck from because she’s reminiscing.) A down-time is fine – think three guys in the car in Draw one In the Dark, or the time they have while “hiding” in the hotel room – but don’t have them forget they’re running. Give them bad dreams, or something. They can get comfortable at the end of the novel. Until then, keep the pointy boot at their behind.

In which the gentle reader gets to watch the writer in a fight with her unruly subconscious. Or How the Devil Is In The Beginnings
Of all the mistakes a writer can make, the one I find most annoying and recursive – for me, at least – is figuring out how to start a story. No, seriously. Yes, sometimes the voice comes, like trumpets from heaven. I wake up with the character in my head and the opening lines.

Other times… other times, it’s like pulling teeth. I have everything about the story in mind, but I don’t have an “in.”

Lately I’ve found myself making a truly beginner mistake, one that I thought I was exempt from because I never went through it as a beginner: starting the story well before the story starts.

One of my fledgelings is prone to this. And that’s fine. As long as he knows that he’ll have to discard two to three pages off the beginning of his story that works. Because, you know, there could be worse curses, like never beginning at all.

But I used to have this down to an art. I knew, if not the voice, at least the moment when the story started. Now… now, I find myself floundering around in molasses for pages and pages and pages, until finally something kicks up and I go “Oh. So, that’s how it finally starts.” This is particularly annoying since I SHOULD know better. I’ve done better in the past.

Unfortunately writing is only partly conscious for me. Most of it comes from somewhere at the back of the Jurassic brain, where dinosaurs fear to tread. And for some reason the beginning has turned into the La Brea tar pits.

So, as much to help myself as to, hopefully, help the rest of you, because I CONSCIOUSLY know the rules of how to start a story, I’m going to list a series of questions that should give my back brain a hint of how to find the beginning of a story. It goes something like this.

1 – Identify the main problem of your story, then

a) start with a problem that leads directly to the heart of it.
b) start with something that mirrors the problem in the story, or foreshadows it

2 – Identify the characters main strength
a) start with a scene that demonstrates it in such a way that it makes us immediately determined to follow that character through hell and high water.
b) start with a scene that shows his strength failing, in a way that we know this is a surpirse.

3 – Start with a scene that doesn’t contain your main character but which
a) sets up the world and the world’s problem
b) sets up the main villain
c) sets up the limits of the danger your character will face (the answer is “very high” and this is usually done for thrillers.)

4- For extra points combine all three of the above in some form

5- follow the rule of the tangled skein of string, if you can’t find the beginning, cut through and start somewhere.
a) deal with the past via short flashbacks.
b) remember to keep it moving
c) make sure your entry point sounds startling and interesting.

Okay, so now you – and I! – should have some idea where to start. HOW do you start? This sounds obvious, but it’s not.

Look, nine times out of ten, when I read entries for contests or slush for publishers, the main reason I stop reading without finishing the story is that I’ve gone some distance – a page or two, usually – and I still have no clue whose head I’m in; where they are; what the goal is.

So, here goes: You’re there at the beginning, and your character is something and doing something. Try not to make that beginning sound like the sentence above.

Right up front, try to remember to tell us:

1 – Who your character is. Not just the name. Many times the name won’t even tell us the gender of the character, but in whatever order: name, gender, occupation, main characteristic as pertains to story.
Compare these two openings:

Edgar was there. He was doing what he’d come there to do. He’d tried so long to get there and now he was there. And he was going to do it.

Edgar was back in the sacred groove, and he was going to kill the high priestess, if it was the last thing he did. He’d had to fight dragons and mow down entire groves of sacred forests. Now he was going to kill her.

Which story gives you a clearer idea of what’s happening? Which one would you read further on? And no, I’m not even exaggerating with the first example. I wish I were.

2- Your character has a body. Nothing gives more “solidity” to a character than a touch of humanity. His underwear chafes. She has a blister on her thumb. She’s sneezing because she’s allergic to polen. He’s wearing a new shirt that feels uncomfortable.

Make it work in the service of your story, or at least sink it in unobtrusively, and if possible make it work to define the character and/or the time period. However, giving the character something to wear, or something to do with his hands is always good. And it can do double duty. If your main characters is wearing a kirtle or carrying a banjo, you’ve at least given us some hint of a clue of a vague direction to where and when we are. Ditto if he’s wearing jeans and turns on the tv.

Imagine you are in your character’s head. Now look down. What is the character wearing? What gender is he/she? And where is he/she?

Don’t write it in that form, but try to include it soonish, so the reader is grounded.

3- Use props to avoid infodumps. If your character is holding either a violin or a teddy bear, it tells us something about him/her and might postpone informing the reader that this thirty year old has anxiety issues and sleeps with his teddy bear… Who plays the violin.

And hopefully this will help you, out there, and also stop my subconscious from spinning in circles around itself. Honestly – its’ like all of a sudden I grow six extra legs, and I can’t remember how to walk.

So… here we go. Move one leg forward, then the other… one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight…

I usually do a nine eleven post. It has now become fashionable to apologize at the beginning of these. I have no intention of doing so. No, I have not gotten over it. No, I don’t think I ever will.

Nine eleven was not a sudden, cataclysmic devastation of the sort that comes out of nowhere, tears your life apart and leaves you to rebuilt and get over it. Nine eleven was a sudden cataclysmic devastation that came out of somewhere and left us to deal with rebuilding and with questions, moral and emotional on how to prevent its like again within the limits of the future.

The difference between the two should be obvious but it doesn’t appear to be. Take Hurricane Hugo for instance. It marched from the coast, up the beach roads to Charlotte NC where I lived at the time. It changed our landscape within a night. We were fortunate in that our little cul-de-sac neighborhood lost power only for the 11 hours. But people lost houses, people lost lives, and people lost livelihoods. One of our favorite antique markets was made into kindling, destroying the livelihood of the family who owned it. It was, at the time, a sudden, devastating tragedy. Afterwards, we got T-shirts that said “I survived Hurricane Hugo.” I don’t know what eventually happened to those, because, you see, we got over it within a year or so. What else was there to do? It was the weather. You can’t say “this will never happen again.” Or rather, you can, but who will listen? The weather will do what the weather will do.

Nine eleven is a different kind of tragedy. It was brought about by men – by the will of men, the brain of men, the malice of men. Nine eleven was preventable – if we’d known it was probable (our security can’t prevent “possible” – we’d have to have the whole country in uniform for that.) More importantly, further nine elevens should be preventable by men and women of good will and with a bright enough brain.

Have they been prevented? Oh, please. Of course, yes, we’ve prevented a few of them mostly through intelligence work, and a few more by our determination to be a mob, not a flock. This is good. But mostly, mostly, we’ve hamstrung ourselves with stupid kabuki travel theater, have turned on each other over what brought nine eleven on and have accused each other of unspeakable (and unimaginable) nonsense.

The one thing that Hugo and 9/11 had in common, the one thing that made me fall in love with America and continue to be madly in love with it (I wasn’t born here, but I got here as fast as I could) was the… empowerment of the individual. Barely had the wind stopped blowing, after Hugo, and our neighbors were gathering, helping each other cut down trees that threatened to fall, helping each other patch roofs and, later on, when our electricity came back and other people’s hadn’t and didn’t for days, my husband and I spent the next several days making ice and taking it in coolers to our friends, and cooking massive hot dinners, where friends could come and have a meal. Our showers too were used around the clock. Everyone else had similar experiences. If you’re shrugging and going “of course” pat yourself on the back. You’re an American. In most countries, you’d stand around waiting for the “qualified aid personnel” and then complain if the aid was late, instead of taking your hand to what was there and doing what you could.

Nine eleven – well, I know people who crossed the country to help search the ruins, and I think ALL of us wanted to. Instead, we did what we could, even if it was just becoming a check in point for friends in NYC or donating blood.

But the different nature of the disasters revealed itself almost immediately. No one in Charlotte stood around scratching their heads and saying “Why did Hugo attack us?” But almost immediately there were people beating their chests over 9/11 and going “it’s our fault. It’s all our fault.”

Again, this is a very American thing to think – almost endearing in its Americanism. It is the other side of “what can I do” it’s “what can I stop doing so it won’t happen again.” Americans – and I’m talking here of you who grew up here – also tend to overestimate how much influence their actions had in the world and what they could do or not do about it. In American Culture, in Portugal, I was required to read a book, written by an American, about how everything that went wrong with modernity was America’s fault. This book, also used in our universities in the US, is hilarious in its naivite and inverse-hubris. Children, until 1913 or so, the US was a rural backwater, of little importance to the fulcrum of the world, which at the time was located, firmly in the middle of Europe.

It’s just that we’ve grown so powerful and so rich, and those around us have failed to catch up, and we feel – like Hollywood starlets elevated to riches we’re not sure we deserve – that we’re both the center of the universe and that we must have done something wrong. Relax. We haven’t. Not any more than any other country (more on this later) and in fact, considerably less than most countries of any importance. And stop flapping lips in an idiotic manner. The rest of the world would like nothing better than believing we’re to blame for everything, and thereby exonerating themselves. This, you see, makes it easier for them to do nothing about their problems. It makes it easier for them to take our subsidies and not feel an ounce of gratitude. And it makes it easier to hate us.

And that’s the one thing you’re going to have to face. Yes, they hate us. Yes, they will always hate us, until they bring us down. Should they manage that, they’ll spend the next two thousand years trying to deify us, portray themselves as coming from us, trying to imitate portions of our culture, and claiming no part in our downfall.

We are, in fact, in a very similar position to that of Rome in the ancient world.

Why do they hate us:

1 – Envy. Our own theology identifies this as the first sin leading to the first murder. Yes, yes, I know, half of America is afflicted with the heartbreak of psoriasis, (in my case eczema, but never mind. Our heartbreak is often overlooked,) the other half is broke and unemployed. Our children aren’t learning and our dogs scratch themselves too much. Forget it, okay? Our lifestyle is not only far and above more… comfortable than that of your average European (and we EXPECT that) but even our homeless live better than the poor in other countries. When is the last time you’ve worried about your next meal. Really worried? Worry about losing the house, sure. The job, even more sure. Not being able to buy cat food, of course. Problems sending the kids to college, of course. But worry about not eating for days? Please. Even our poorest of the poor have soup kitchens.

In a dark time in my life, in what is considered a first world country – even if the poor relative of the family – I went for three years without new clothes, because we simply couldn’t afford them. Since this was between the ages of 11 and 14 and I grew about a foot, even given my mom’s abilities with remaking clothes, I’ll leave you to imagine what I looked like. Here, even while very broke, we never let our kids go without suitable and appropriately sized clothes. And it wasn’t that hard. The thrift store near us often holds dollar-days where each piece of clothing is a dollar. And though it meant pancakes for a week, at times, we were NEVER so poor we couldn’t spend ten dollars and get the kid sweaters and a coat.

We’re better off than 95% of humanity. They envy us madly. Why shouldn’t they?

2 – Fear. No, not of us. (One of the things Pratchett is wrong about is the whole “if you want war, prepare for war.” It’s not true, it’s never been. Not blaming him too hard, though, I learned this in school, too, and it’s part of what Europeans believe. They fasten onto the mad militarism gripping Prussia on the run up to World War I and the answering militarist thinking in the other countries, and think that’s what CAUSED World War I. Was it? No. Go back and read about the geopolitics and the pressures of growing civilizations. But this is the explanation you’ll find in most books. Because it’s facile. And because it’s easy to avoid. “I just won’t think of war–” Europe should do itself a favor and start really looking at itself and its fracticidal tendencies, and stop trying to diagnose a country they know as little about as we – often – know of them.) Yes, they project it onto us, but what they truly fear is modernity. And, for those who’ve never lived abroad, everyone knows modernity comes from America.

In the summer of 2000 I found myself in a panel at a conference, where they were talking about how wonderful the future would be. How the whole world was now connected. How everyone lived in one big village. And how wonderful this was. And I suddenly felt disconnected and lost, because I could see the other side. Look, I’m not going to claim Portugal is particularly backward, or particularly hateful. It’s not. As countries go, Portugal is the nice guy in your office who keeps his head down and does what he thinks he’s supposed to. The idea of a Portuguese terrorist (or assassin!) could only take root in the mind of a novelist who disdains research. But Portugal is, by culture, a lot more traditional than the US – everywhere is, pretty much. Yes, there are reasons for that, but no room to discuss them – and it clings to “how things are done” a lot more. At that, it’s not the worst such country.
However, I recall people who reacted with irrational gibbering fear turned anger to each wave of technological innovation no matter how small, from new ways of lighting, to piped water. Reactions to behavorial changes are even worse. When I say I grew up between Elizabethan and Victorian England, I mean I was taught not to do things such as stand at the window, because that was shameless and looked like I was trying to attract boys. Yeah. Try to figure out how old that rule is.

So I thought of people more attached to their ways than Portugal, perhaps with the same view of their own supremacy, meeting the wave of the future. Of course they would turn to sabotage and terrorism. The result, Traveling, Traveling, was published in Analog in 2002 and is the free story (free story tab on my blog) for this week. It was the only time I was semi-prophetic, and I promise not to do it again.

Like it or not, the US is modernity for most people. When they want to stop the future, they’ll hate us and attack us.

3 – We’re safe to hate. We don’t defend ourselves. Not in words, not in movies, not in our fiction. Partly because we never cured ourselves of that colonial affectation of our upper classes aping Europe. And partly because we feel vaguely guilty about being better off than other people and a newer nation too. We revere age and tradition. And so, we ape their hatred of us, too. Or at least our artists do. So what they get from Hollywood and even from our literary lions, makes them go “See, it’s their fault. Even they say so.” (The fact this soothes their pride, helps too.)

I remember being in a car with a rabid anti-american when I was about 12. He was going on about how the only reason Portugal wasn’t the leading computer manufacturer was that the US wouldn’t let them. Even at 12, I thought “Oh, so, the long vacations, the lack of capital and, yeah, the fact that our tech education prepares people for the early twenty first century has NOTHING to do with it” and also “HOW does America stop us? And why would they care?” But the rest of the world believes this stuff.

It also, for the record, and because of our movies in part, believes a lot of other crazy stuff: like, that our barely competent secret services are some kind of supermen. That they have operatives everywhere, know everything and secretly control everything. It even seems plausible, from over there, given America’s wealth and the movies we see, in which of course the CIA is often the culprit and often superhuman. For Europeans there is a CIA agent behind every door and under every bed.

And yet, no one ever gets killed for spewing anti-American bilge. We’re the world’s most pussy-cat “empire.” In fact, we’re not an empire at all. All our soldiers want to do is go home. Do we punish people when they attack us? Well… sometimes. Late and usually reluctantly. Yes, 9/11 sent us to war. And then we stayed to rebuild the countries. Let me tell you, children, no other country does that. No. Truly. No other country does that.

In the seventies, I sat with friends around a café table in Porto and tried to scheme how to get the US to invade us. Because Portugal could use the rebuilding.

We’re safe to hate.

Given these three factors and the preponderance of traditionalist, triumphalist countries in the world, the amazing thing is not that 9/11 happened. What’s amazing is that it doesn’t happen once a year.

So, what do we do about it, you say? Let’s take it in order:

1 – You can’t get rid of everything you have. No, you wouldn’t be able to. Despite the beliefs of most college professors, world wealth is not finite, and it’s not a matter of a country playing rob-the-ball from the other. (In fact, at the root of all this, is also the fact that the very, very, very erroneous theories of Marxism have taken over both here and the rest of world, possibly because they’re facile and they make college professors feel virtuous.) Wealth is produced. Wealth grows. And the US, given who we are, and our tendency to roll up our sleeves and get to work, can’t help becoming wealthier. In fact, al the hardships our politicians put us through, which might or might not, be designed to make us look more humble to the world, only make us discover new ways to create wealth. Mind me, we’ll emerge from the great recession a completely different country, but yet wealthier, by an order of magnitude than the rest of the world. I’ll take bets on that.

2 – You can’t make people stop fearing. There is no way, there is no possible way to do that. Even here, right now, as change accelerates, a lot of us are afraid of what’s coming. We have perhaps a little more reason, because we don’t know what the future will look like. They should have an easier time. Except they don’t. A modernity of few children and shattered families is scary to a great deal of the world, but so are things that no one should find scary: mobility, representative government, women who don’t cover their ankles, equality of sexes. It goes on.

The second one alone, though paid lip service in Portugal excites much fear and does not prevail in most homes. And again, Portugal is a modern first world nation. Technically. Imagine the other countries.

This doesn’t mean we should cover our women, stone our gays (sorry, guys, you’ll have to buy your own pot) or make women stay in the home against their will.

Unfortunately, what we do do after we conquer countries – the forcible dragging into the twentieth if not the twenty first century is going to make it harder. Much, much harder. It’s akin to invading a wild species habitat. They’re not ready for it, they don’t know what to do, they just want you to stop.

3 – We can stop looking like the patsies of the world. We can stop being so easy to hate. That starts one on one, and person on person. You do not let foreign friends, in fact or online, talk about the US as being responsible for their plight. You just don’t. You man up; you woman up; you adult-it up. You educate yourself and you come back with facts. You tell them the truth and shame the devil.

First, for those of you who have only read histories of the sort that beats their chests and blames everything on America – find some of the popular but deeper histories on, say, Rome. Or Greece. Or before that. Find out how nations operate. Nations that aren’t the US (the vast majority of nations aren’t, you know?)

Read about other nations that existed in a unipolar world. Rome, for instance. Yes, Romans were Hell’s Own Bastards, the most evil civilization at their time and place – snort! – oh, you swallowed Spartacus whole? Children, children, children, the rest of Europe at the time were as much gentle pastoralists as the tribes of South America when the conquistadors arrived were noble savages, talking to the birds.

Yes, the Romans were scary-mean and addicted to violence and… Yeah. So were the other tribes. War was the normal state of humanity. Despicable practices, both civil and religious were the norm.

Rome distinguished itself only by being, for a brief time, capable of generating more wealth, more innovation and a better life for its citizens than the rest of the world at the time. And it was hated for it. The methods it used to stay on top were horrible and crude. And they worked. Because what came after Rome was 2000 years of darkness that made its earstwhile enemies claim to be its friends.

But after Rome read about the age of empires. Do try to use a book not infused with Marx. Those are always at best unrealiable and at worst laughable.

Read about how nations act. You need to know this, because Americans don’t act that way. And they tend to think other nations are like America. So we let them hang our few “sins” around our necks: the supporting of dictators to stop our enemies; the disproportionate force attacks on those who attack us and the – snort – despoiling of the “native” tribes. Read the age of Empires. I don’t have time to teach you history here. America is a babe unborn compared to ALL European countries, event he most backwards.

And then sit back and wonder, given you can’t do anything about the top two, what can you do about the last factor. Well, you can’t gag Hollywood, either, not without violating who we are. And I doubt you can make most of them study history. And they’ve rather proven they can’t be shamed.

So what can you do? You can be feared.

I say this with much, much trepidation. In 2004 I had an argument with Jerry Pournelle in which he took this position and I told him no, we had to be loved.

It’s been six years. I’ve grown up. He was right. IF another attack happens, we should make sure the response is of the sort that makes children cry in their beds in future centuries, for fear the Americans are going to come get them. We can bind their wounds afterwards, if we so wish, but first we have to respond harshly enough that they are afraid to fight back as we drag them to modernity.

Yes, I’m recoiling, even as I type that. I don’t want to see innocents suffer, and war, even a “small, surgical” war is suffering. Yes, even if we do the type of high level attack that really upsets their leaders (government centers, religious centers, monuments) we’re going to kill some innocents.

But look at it this way, our proctracted “drag them to the future and force them to love us” strategy is causing them to suffer too. And we didn’t go out there and hit them. They hit us, again, and again, and again, until one hit was large enough to make us attack back.

It’s time we make it known it’s not SAFE to attack us. We’re the crazy bastards who would as soon nuke you as look at you. We don’t want war, but we must prepare for it.

And then, after one or two of these, they’ll realize that they can throw fits over their own version of modernity; they can sit back and design it; but they can’t stop us by attacking us. That only makes them hurt more. And then they’ll stop attacking us, and forcing us to hurt them. They’ll stop hurting our women and children. We’ll stop hurting theirs. The future can be peaceful. We WILL help them rebuild.

So, if there is a next time – and yes, I pray to G-d there isn’t, but pardon me, I read history – hit back twice as hard.

Do it for the children.