Author: Sarah A. Hoyt

Yesterday in comments, John brought up the fact I’ve got some very bad comments on Amazon, on the Magical British Empire Trilogy, from people who think I used every possible (and some impossible) politically correct stereotype.

I know about the comments, though the last time I even heard of them was more than a year ago, and I haven’t looked at the comments since. Part of this is because there is very little point in doing so – it only upsets me, which is what the commenters intend.

More interesting is whether there truly is a point to their comments – did I set out to write a politically correct work and kow tow to all the sacred cows?

Come on guys, you know me. Even if I agree with a stereotype, I feel vaguely uncomfortable using it in writing. In fact, even when I meet a stereotype in real life, it annoys me because come on… art should be deeper than that. It’s only afterwards that I think “Oh, wait.”  Like, the dry cleaners I take my clothes to: Asian, works insane hours, does alterations quickly and cheaply, exchanges ls and rs.  I love his work, but I feel so guilty that he’s actually like that: as though I made him up. I’d never write him like that!

So, why do these people think I use every possible stereotype? And that the only villains are white people? Well, the reason is threefold – one, I was then absolutely restricted to the traditional book market (one of the reasons I’m looking forward to maybe an upending, is the end of that gridlock, which in turn will open up greater creative license.  See 18th century French painting and their “one correct way to produce art” and the period after) which means that anything that blatantly went against the grain would simply not sell.

Does that mean I sold out? Uh… guys, if I ever sell out, it will be for a lot more than 12k a book. And I COULD sell out if I wanted to. I understand the mind set of publishers – we had largely the same education.  I simply can’t do it — though I berate myself — and look at myself in the mirror.

This brings us to reasons two and three – they think I use every possible stereotype because they’ve read SO MANY books that do, that they’re oversensitive. (Like, if the roulette keeps landing on red squares, you come to expect it, even when there’s no reason to.) From the moment they expect it, they then interpret everything as a stereotype.

As for the villains, no. I can honestly say all the books have bad people of all races. (And good people of all races.)

It will probably be easier to understand this if I explain how the (first) book came about.

I spent a lot of time in my childhood reading “explorer’s diaries” true and false both. For a while when I was six, I thought “native” meant “savage” which tells you the tenor of my reading.  For the longest time my family called me “the native” because of explaining at the table that I was feeling very native.  Meaning savage.

Then I discovered science fiction. And then…  Oh, twenty years later – I don’t remember what sparked it, but I think it’s the book about the sepoy rebellion called Our Bones Are Scattered – I started reading books about Africa and India and China during the Victorian age. (BTW The Washing Of The Spears is an excellent book.)

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, but the beginning of ideating a story is often a craving to read “more of this.”  So I read  lot of these books.  All I could buy and all our library carried.

After a time I started realizing something. Here I must break off and point out that I never believed Europeans have some sort of genetic predisposition to colonialism. This is something that other peoples tell themselves and as a lullaby to put themselves to sleep or as a just-so story to feel virtuous. The problem is we’re not that genetically different. Humans are humans are humans. (Yes, I read the 10000 year explosion, or whatever it’s called, but I remain unconvinced.) All humans and humanoids for that matter (all other higher mammals too) are “colonizers.” As Heinlein – and Dave Freer – have pointed out, the rule of life is expand your territory or die out.

So, how come Europeans colonized the rest of the world and not the other way around? In reading The Washing Of The Spears I realized I was seeing a pattern, the same pattern I’d read in the colonization of the Americas or any other non-European land.

It wasn’t Europeans’ “superior civilization” or even their superior weapons. What gave them the edge and allowed them to colonize, rather than be colonized, was their overcoming tribalism.

When I posted about this at Classical Values, a year or more ago, M. Simon pointed out that started with the Egyptians. Perhaps it did. I’m not versed enough in Egypt to know that. I know Greece was still to a large extent tribal. But Rome wasn’t, which is what allowed the formation of the empire. And the Roman non-tribalism extended to Western Nations and became part of their DNA, encouraged by the Jewish-Christian idea of the brotherhood of all humans.

Why would this give Europeans an edge? Well, because it allowed ALL of Europe to react to a slight to ONE European group. And Europe had another innovation – fast communications: newspapers, telegraphs, etc.

This came up against one of the techniques of tribal warfare as has been practiced forever, or at least since we can discover/interpret records. When a part of another tribe moves to your territory and tries to colonize, you kill them all, preferably in a horrifying way. Best case scenario, when the rest of the tribe finds out, they look at how gruesome the killings were and decide you’re not to be trifled with. Worst case scenario, you get a tribal war, which you might win.

Over and over again, this worked. Until the Europeans.

Descend on some small European settlement and kill everyone in horrifying ways, and the Europeans decide you’re evil. And with their communications and their large nation states, they annihilate you, or come close to, and then rule you, because you’re too savage to live on your own. (If you read the colonization stories, this was usually how it went. Greed was there, of course, but didn’t play as much of a part as certain Disney movies make it sound.)

So… I set about to illustrate this, and also our… complex relationship with the colonized lands. (“Our” being western culture, though Portugal is… er… a little different. But it WAS a colonizing power. The first, in fact.) I set it in a parallel world, and I made the magic of Europe be unified (yes, I made Charlemagne and Queen Victoria the villains. Has it occurred to anyone I don’t much like hereditary rulers?) And the magic of the rest of the world fragmented and therefore unable to oppose European magic. Much of the story is attempts to unify the rest of the magic, or to unify the world under one ruler.

Did I set about to use a character from every race? Uh… no. I wanted to use characters from three tribes, in Africa, because I wanted to illustrate how different tribal culture can be. I made reference more than once to tribal warfare (the Zulus arrived in South Africa just ahead of the Caucasians. And, oh, yeah, their wars of expansion were horribly bloody.) Yes, I also made reference to the atrocities of the Congo – because they happened, and did you think Europeans were wonderful by virtue of their blood?

Yes, the first book has an Anglo-Indian main character. I needed her to have a chip on her shoulder and also a magic that had been incomprehensible to other Europeans. Since Magic in that world is inherited/genetic, I gave her a double heritage.

Yes, the main villain in the first book – not the others – is European. That was a story-necessity. He needed to mean SOMETHING to the main male character. Also, to be honest, how many times in the twentieth century have Europeans (Eastern, mostly) gone to Africa, promising freedom and national unity and wanting only power, under the cover of their “ideology.” Look up the history of the Russians (and Cubans) in the old Portuguese colonies, sometime. What seemed like a native uprising was really just the old USSR expansionist tactics. So I used a similar device in Heart of Light…

Things I’m upset that all the detractors missed:

Emily feels discriminated against for her dark skin. Do you EVER see any of the characters think she’s less than beautiful? Yeah, I’m sure her step mother and maybe some girls at her school made her feel isolated and like an outsider. So?  There’s a reason for hte stories about stepmothers and anyone who read “boarding school stories” knows conformity was the order there.

Peter says a lot of politically correct nonsense. Peter is a member of a (left-wing) anarchist group that would have destroyed the world if it got its way.  Does it sound like I’m putting myself in him and speaking through his mouth?  Well, gee, thank you so much.

Nigel is perfectly willing to fall in love with Nassira, despite her skin color – Nassira, OTOH, has issues considering people of OTHER TRIBES as full equals, much less a white man.  Does this make her a bad person?  No, she’s from a very insular culture.  They all are.

In the second book – mostly because I was tired of reading a lot of nonsense while researching it – Sofie brings up the problem of what she is: part European, part Indian, belonging to India for generations. When they achieve liberty, is it right to kick her out? Why?

In the third book, at the very end, Nigel’s very proper parents are EFFECTIVELY color-blind. (Did it happen in Victorian England? A few times, recorded in history and biography.)

Yes, there is a gay couple in the second book. It’s necessary for plot reasons. I actually had that character as a “villain” but that made him too cartoonish. Having him act and decide things on the basis of impulses he’s denying made the book far more interesting. (Read got him and everyone else in trouble and peril.)  Note BOTH members of the gay couple have to leave their cultures at the end, though the cause of their being despised by each culture is different.

Should I go on? The books are as close to unbiased as I could make them. Yes, the story says some hard truths about what happened in Congo and some awful stuff about the arrow war and terrible stuff about the native cultures, too. Yeah, it points out humans are humans and all fallible.

Pardon me, but it is a hobby horse of mine that there is no such thing as a noble savage and no such thing as hereditary guilt. If you want to be mad at me for that, be my guest.

But don’t be my guest because you take things I put in the mouth of characters as my opinion. Look at the character first.

Yes, I know you’re flinching from the expected slap, but it does not excuse you not engaging your brain.

If readers are that offense-prone, maybe they should read only things certified to agree with them?

And now, ladies and gentlemen, I’m late to look at an office to rent. I’ll be back.

*Have some compassion for the writer working with two teen males — #2 son and best friend — in the house, engaged in a gaming session to last 48h and forgive me for giving you a snippet I’ve given before.  This is from the beginning of Darkship Renegade, the sequel to Darkship Thieves aka, the work in progress (again, at last.).*

Out Of The Frying Pan

I was a princess from Earth and he was a rogue spaceman from a mythical world. He saved my life three times. I rescued him from a fate worse than death.

We married and lived happily ever after.

Ever after comes with an expiration date these days. We’d been married less than year when Kit got shot in the head.

I knew we were in trouble as soon as I got my answer from Eden. It’s entirely possible that Kit knew it before. Eden is his native world. He knows its quirks, its traditions and its habits in a way I couldn’t after living there close to a year. In a way I probably wouldn’t if I lived there fifty years.

We’d called out as soon as we came within link distance. It had to be done. Eden is a hollowed out asteroid. Humans live on the inside. More, it is an asteroid colonized by a persecuted people who wanted to make their existence this close to Earth as inconspicuous as possible.

Kit has said you could land on the surface of the asteroid that contained Eden and not know that there was a thriving civilization inside. I don’t know if it’s true. Never tried it and I learned long ago not to take anyone’s word for anything. Even a trustworthy person can be mistaken. But I was fairly sure that unless the people inside extended a landing tube to us, we would never be able to get in. Whatever sealed the entrances to the landing areas didn’t even show to visual or radar scanning, so I doubted we could hop around in our space suits and pry the tunnels open. Whoever said knock and it shall be opened hadn’t tried to enter Eden.

Which was good. It made Eden very safe. And bad. Because in the circumstances we’d brought on ourselves, it meant we had to convince Eden to let us in, or we’d be left on the outside with only the resources of the Cathouse at our disposal. And though the Cathouse was a great ship, or at least a great ship for its age and mechanical condition, we didn’t have enough food to see us back to Earth or to the water-mining colonies of Proxima and Ultima Thule. We certainly didn’t have enough to live on indefinitely. So, no matter how much trouble we were in, and even though Eden might shoot us out of the sky, we had to tell them we were here. And we had to ask permission to land.

My heart was beating somewhere between my esophagus and my mouth as we did the final approach to Eden. And don’t tell me that’s a physiological impossibility. I know what I felt. Given just a little more nervousness, my heart would jump out of my mouth and flop around the instrument panel like a fish.

But I looked composed and calm because there was no point disquieting Kit, whose fingers danced on the keyboard with the practice of the many years he’d been trained to and flown in and out of Eden.

I took a deep breath and told myself that these were not the last moments of my life, and Kit reached for my hand and squeezed it, hard, while his other hand pressed the com link start. “Cat Christopher Bartolomeu Sinistra and Nav Athena Hera Sinistra, piloting the Cathouse on behalf of the energy board. I request permission to land.”

There was a silence from the other side, long enough for my heart to almost stop. Eden didn’t have to let us in. As a world Eden was so paranoid that if it had been a single person it would have been living in a compound with secure entrances, keeping multiple weapons trained on each entrance, and have an option all arranged so that if all else failed and his enemies got in, he could blow himself and them to kingdom come. Only, Eden was not pathological. Paranoia is a perfectly well adapted reaction to everyone being out to get you.

I swallowed hard and told myself that if Eden didn’t want us, we’d find our way elsewhere. Even then I knew I was bluffing. And all that kept me from shaking was the impression of Kit’s mind, warm and amused.

Not words. We could mind-talk, an ability bio engineered into pilot and navigator couples in his world and engineered into me for a completely different purpose. But when there were no words, there was occasionally a feeling, and sometimes a feeling was all you needed. Whether the feeling was real or projected, I didn’t know. There was a deeper level of mind-touch at which it was impossible to lie, but we didn’t engage in it normally. It’s not good for sanity to be unable to remember which body goes with which mind.

I managed a half smile in Kit’s general direction, as the voice of Eden’s Dock Control crackled over the link: “The Cathouse is more than six weeks late. It has been entered in the roll of losses. Cat Christopher Sinistra and Nav Athena Sinistra are dead.”

“Not really,” I told him, while my heart hammered wildly and I felt almost boneless with relief. I hate bureaucracy as much as anyone else, but not nearly as much as I hate exploding. That they were talking instead of burning us was a very good sign. “Only late.”

“You cannot be late. You only had fuel for a four month trip. Three weeks later you’d be out of reserves and dead. You–”

“We were down on Earth,” I said and grinned, a grin he couldn’t see but might just sense from the tone of my voice.

For three centuries, before my arrival here, Eden had managed to hide its existence from Earth so well that, despite a few hundred trips each month to steal powerpods from the biological solar energy collectors orbiting the Earth, they had become mythical down there: the Darkship Thieves, like fairies and elves and gnomes were talked about but never glimpsed. For all those centuries, the instructions had been for any ship captured by Earth to destroy itself. We’d not only not destroyed ourselves but Kit had surrendered to Earth in order to save my life. I understood, since I’d been in his mind at the time, that it was the only thing he could do. I also understood how Eden would view it.

“What?” the Controller asked.

Kit cleared his throat. I could see him reflected in the almost completely dark screens in front of him: his eyes bioengineered for piloting in total darkness looked like cat eyes, glimmering green and very wide open, in worry. His calico-colored hair, a mutation caused by the same virus that had given him the eyes, super-human coordination and speed of movement, contrasted with his normally pale skin, which had gone yet paler. Without his modifications Kit would have been a redhead, so his skin was normally that shade of pale that can turn unhealthy-looking at the slightest disturbance. Now he looked white and grey, like spoiled milk. It was the only sign of fear, or even worry, he gave. His voice sounded firm and clear, “Nav Sinistra had radiation poisoning and we stopped on Earth for regen treatment.”

“You stopped on Earth for treatment?”

I swallowed hard, to prevent having to grope from my heart somewhere on the control board. “Well, it wasn’t that simple, but yes,” Kit said. “I’ll be glad to tell you the whole story after we land.”

“You’d better, Cat.” He pronounced Kit’s rank as an insult. The term “pilot” had long since become “cat” in Eden, due to the modifications of pilots of darkships making them look feline. ” And you’d better make it convincing. This is most irregular.”

“Controller,” I said. “We must land. Kit’s family is expecting us.” Kit’s birth family, the DeNovos were socially influential and powerful in the very limited community of Eden. And his sister Kath would probably have been a force to be reckoned with in any size society. It was a good thing she’d been born in Eden, because if it had been on Earth, she’d probably now be sole supreme ruler of the whole world. This was slightly more difficult to achieve on Eden which had no rulers of any sort, much less supreme ones.

Another silence and the Dock Controller’s voice sounded dour as it came back, “Navigator Sinistra, if you delayed your collection run for personal reasons, you have to know that the Energy board will fine you for the delay in supply, and all the boards will want to interview you for potential breaches of security. Also–”

“I know, Controller. Now, could you give us a dock number, please? Before I go crazy and just give my Cat instructions to dash at Eden in the area of the landing control station. We earthworms tend to be so temperamental”

Kit chuckled aloud, then stopped with an intake of breath. The impression from him was amused, but also scared, the amused trying to cover and hide the scared and not quite managing it.

“Dock fifty five, but I want you to know that I shall have armed hushers ready and that you will be examined for any evidence of undue influence and that–”

I flicked the comlink off. A sleeve-like structure extruded from Eden and Kit piloted us into it, then leaned back as dock controls took over the navigation. His foot skimmed along the floor next to him, flicking up the lever that turned off our artificial gravity now that we were covered by Eden’s. Not that keeping it on would give us double the gs, but I understood one could interfere with the other and cause some really interesting effects.

It wasn’t until our ship was settling into one of the landing bays, that he released the seatbelt that crisscrossed his chest, and, without letting go of my hand, got up and said, “You know, you really shouldn’t have taunted the controller.”

I knew. I knew lots of things. It seemed like from the first moment of my existence, my life had been hemmed with rules.

I was born the daughter – the only daughter – of Good Man Sinistra, one of fifty men who controlled the near-endless land and resources of Earth. As such I’d been told not to taunt and not to hit as long as I could remember. My parents, my nannies, the heads of various boarding schools, the commanders of various military academies, and the psychological medtechs that ran several rest homes, sanatoriums and mental institutions, had all told me I had an aggression problem and must control my impulses.

Perhaps I should, but I had a strong feeling that if I had then I wouldn’t be alive. Nor would Kit.

And I suspected Kit knew it too. Hence his very mild reproach and the warm squeeze on my hand as we walked down the spiraling corridor that led to the airlocks of our ship, then waited for each of them to cycle in turn, before the very last door contracted open.

We were in one of the cavernous, circular bays that admitted ships to Eden. It must be an out of the way bay, not normally used, because there was none of the cargo evaluating and price-calculating machinery you saw in the newer bays, like the one in which we’d landed in when returning from our last trip.

What there was, instead, was a large group of young men, all armed, all aiming directly at us.

To the other side and a little behind the young men stood two older men, a dark haired one and a blond one.

The dark haired one was the dock controller. At least, he wore the grey uniform of the position, and he had that harassed, frustrated look of someone who was sure he’d been born to better things, but who found himself confined to an inglorious desk job day after day, month after month with nothing more interesting to do than give coordinates to landing ships.

The blond was something else altogether different. To begin with he didn’t wear any uniform, but a well cut black suit consisting of something much like an Elizabethan doublet and leg-outlining pants, all of it either covering a lean and muscular body or tailored to give that impression. The fabric shimmered with the dull shine of real silk and conveyed an unavoidable sense of wealth and sensuousness. The face, above the suit, was sharp and vaguely threatening. He looked like a young Julius Caesar or at least a Julius Caesar from a world where people didn’t lose their hair unless they chose to.

It was the blond man who spoke, and so his words had far more force than if they’d been spoken by a mere bureaucrat. “Cat Christopher Bartolomeu Sinistra,” he said, each syllable dropped in place like an essential part of exacting machinery. “You are under arrest for treason against Eden.”

Recently I’ve been reading a series of romances by Lisa Kleypas. It is hard to overstate how BADLY I disagree with her every opinion. This woman goes out of her way to include at least one favored minority in every book; she’s convinced that if every civilized person refused to fight there would be peace and one of her characters actually said that “violence never solved anything.” Okay, her character was in the Regency, so I couldn’t say “Ja, Ja whol, wunderbar” but even so I wanted to introduce him to a Heinlein character who would answer with “Go tell it to the city fathers of Carthage.”

So why in heavens name have I been reading her?

Because the preaching is discrete, subtle, and ignore-able. She doesn’t stop in the middle of the book to preach ad nauseum. And her wrongheadedness seems to be limited to macro issues. Her portrayal of eccentric and loveable characters and of the way these characters react to each other and the world reacts to them is spot on and therefore engaging. And she knows how to plot which is not always a given in romance. (Or anything else.)

Reading her characters is like talking to your old aunt whom you adore, but who is sure that the world would be a better place if we all wore tinfoil hats, and is sure we were colonized by aliens from alpha centauri. Even though you think she’s nuts, her beliefs are by and large harmless and you still enjoy her company the rest of the time. She’s not going to convince you, but you’ll have tea together and have fun and as long as her tinfoil hat is set at a rakish angle, all will be well with the world.

I can tolerate dissent of a more serious kind, in authors I love. Which is a good thing, because if I couldn’t I might have to part with some of my favorites in science fiction.

I started reading science fiction with either Clifford Simak or Heinlein.

No, I don’t remember which. I have a vague memory that I read Have Space Suit, Will Travel at eight or so. But if I did, I didn’t identify it as Science Fiction. That first, conscious science fiction book was Out Of Their Minds by Clifford Simak. (Have Space Suit would not have struck me as SF because the family was a lot like mine. You probably don’t want to ask. My son told me the other day that Athena is like a grown up Peewee. I told him no, it was a grown up me. He asked what the difference was.) I don’t remember my second SF book, but it was one of those turgid the US is a backwater compared to the USSR near-futures not uncommon (or sensible) in the seventies. The third was A Canticle For Leibowitz, still one of my favorite re-reads.

After that I was off. And because I was at the mercy of my brother, who was borrowing from a friend, I read practically anything with SF on the spine. Later on, on my own, I bought everything that said “SF” which accounts for my having read a lot of VERY BAD French romantic space opera, Pierre Barbet, and a French magazine called Panspermia. (I bought it because I thought it was devoted to the theories of Fred Hoyle. Let’s say it… er… er… er… um… wasn’t. There were illustrations. I wrapped it [plain brown wrapper] and gave it to my nine-years-older brother. He was grateful. Er. I think.)

But the two writers I kept coming to, again and again, were Heinlein and Clifford Simak. Both of them offend/ed in different ways.

I was never – I think – conventionally Portuguese (for one I found the iron clad ‘how to behave rules’ stifling.) But I was in many ways conventionally educated European (I can still pretend to be. Most of the time I don’t bother, though. Life is WAY too short.)

Some things Heinlein said offended me and scared me at first encounter, and I don’t remember when I came around to believe in them: the advantages of an armed society, for instance, or that taxation is not inherently right and proper. But I kept reading his stories because I loved them.

Most of what Simak said seemed right to me at the time, from his idyllic depiction of a world with falling population (yes, there is a post called Malthus Is Dead coming soon <G> Heinlein was wrong on THAT too) to his belief that the USSR and the US were basically covalent, to his belief that the future would be imposed top-down in a command economy. Oh, also the idea that only humans understood war or waged it.

All of these were conventional ideas that I thought were fine. Now most of them offend me. Some because they are ultimately evil – like the idea that a falling population is GOOD. That comes from the idea that resources are finite and that humans exist only to have resources divided among them – drains, not producers and not creators. However, at the end of that chain of thought lies eugenics, a decision of who deserves to live and a campaign against “useless eaters.” If you don’t think that’s evil, you’re not in my head. (For which you should possibly be grateful.) And now we know that primates and a lot of other mammals wage war. As for the equivalence between the US and the USSR – no. Just no. There are books you can read on what went on there. Oh, we’re not perfect. What nation is? But there is no comparison.

However, I can still read Simak, in the same way that I continued reading Heinlein even when he offended me.

Why?

Because despite the flaws I saw, or thought I saw in their scaffolding, their macro world building, their close-in world building was fine. Who could not identify with the man who for the first time can talk with his dog, mind to mind? Who could not feel an all-too-human tenderness for the robot pope? And who would not like Kip and Peewee? Or the cat named Petronius?

On the micro level, the characters acted like people you could know and love, even if they didn’t think as you do. How many of us have friends who are a chorus of “yes people”?

Except perhaps editors. I’ve railed about this before. I don’t know when I realized I was reading the same story – or at least the same assumptions – in science fiction, over and over again. All of a sudden our field, the most oddball field of all, was bowing not only to “established science” (gone were all the thrilling stories about humans really coming from the stars or weirder places) but also to political correctness (no? Try selling a genuinely evil female pagan, in a Christian society. TRY it. To a non-Christian house. No, I’ve never written that, but my recent book with very Catholic mythus had issues selling at all. Even though Pagans had equal status.)

My brother told me that he recently asked about Portuguese translations of new science fiction and was told that “young people don’t read SF, they watch movies/series.” He and the publisher (in Portugal) were baffled by this, but I can tell you why. It’s because series like Stargate still can be completely irreverent with “established science”… and less politically correct. And the fact that movies/tv are less politically correct should give you pause.

This ties in with Dave’s post because for the longest time there have been things you can’t do or say in science fiction. And by and large they’re not the ones that the people in power in NYC think are “countercultural” or “daring” or “Speaking truth to power.” You see, the poor dears don’t realize that in this microcosmos they ARE the power.

They do realize that their tastes aren’t universal – perhaps not even majority – because Baen, the smallest of the main houses, with the smallest budget and discriminated against by bookstores for their content, has made a living of their TRULY countercultural (for SF culture) publishing for decades and created as many if not more bestsellers than the other guys. For that, NYC hates them and reviles them and distributors and bookstore managers discriminate against them.

I don’t know what they think they’re doing.

Editor after editor has told me his/her job is to educate public taste – but they’re missing something. Well, two somethings. First, no, their job is to sell books. (The fact they don’t get this explains a lot of the issues in the book business.) Second, you can’t educate people who won’t read you. And you can’t control, btw, who will read you but roll their eyes at your beliefs or read you and eventually come to agree with you. My relationship with Heinlein and Simak proves that. (And BTW, I still like Simak enough I wanted to call my second son Clifford. My husband said over his dead body, so that’s that.) Heck, I still like Left Hand Of Darkness, though I can honestly say that Ursula Le Guin and I have never agreed on a single thing (okay, maybe she also likes chocolate. I’ve never asked.)

But your – and the editor’s if you have one – main job is to get the books in the public’s hands, and to provide entertainment which will keep the public coming back for entertainment. The message is secondary and will never be delivered if you’re not read. Also, you can say “I won’t let people write/read this” (like clinging, spineless women) but you can’t make them stop existing. And you can’t make people stop wanting to read about them. The most you can do is cut yourself off from readers by boring them with the same fundamental assumptions over and over again, and no dissenting voices.

And look, bub, if your cause is THAT important, surely you can donate the filthy lucre you’ll make from people who don’t agree with you buying your books. SURELY that counts for something?

So… I am looking in some wonder and hope towards the self-publishing that might allow the public to finally find the SF they want to read, sf that’s evaluated for its ability to entertain, not its ability to preach. Perhaps there’s a great revival of sf ahead?

What I would like? I’d like to read about how humans really came from the stars (Oh, come on, any SF writer worth his salt can get around what is known with enough handwavium to make that happen.) I’d like to read about humans colonizing alien species and this being good for them. I’d like to read about truly evil aliens and GOOD humans. I’d like to read about disciplined, strong men who don’t need women to save them.

What would you like to read that’s not being provided by the current publishing establishment? What are the chances of its being written? What do you read that offends you but is still a good story?

*crossposted at Mad Genius Club*

You suddenly find yourself needing to research something that has nothing to do with your current work – the exact time it would take to go between London and Paris on foot, if one could walk on water, say, or perhaps the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow.

Things no one could have paid you to read or watch, are suddenly fascinating and you say something like “Wow, Oxford dictionary, what plot, what verve. I wonder why I never read it cover to cover before.” Or perhaps “Paint drying. Incredible!”

Your house needs to be clean. I mean, really clean. Why did you never think to wax the floor of the front porch before?

If you actually make it to your desk, you realize your keyboard is filthy and must be unplugged and cleaned, with qtips and paint brushes.

What the block means, at least in me – I am almost exclusively an intuitive writer. This doesn’t mean it’s unplotted. I plot and pay a lot of attention to structure. It’s more that I don’t know what I’m trying to say with the work till I read it. Meaning leaks in.

Usually what brings me to a complete stop is knowing that meaning went awry in the plot, sometimes. But it can also be sheer lack of self-confidence. With Darkship Thieves, I moaned and b*tched for MONTHS because the plot felt too fractured to me. With Darkship Renegade? Honestly? I think it’s because I WANT it to be SO good that I’m blocking myself.

The funny and sad thing is that without these fits, I could easily write a book a month. (With necessary revisions.)

The good news is that I think I’m almost done with this block thing this time. Now, if real life doesn’t interfere, I should be able to finish. (Yes, I thought that before, but real life intervened. So, keep fingers crossed.)

Sorry to be so late posting and not to have posted at all yesterday.  I’m not feeling really well, and I’m not sure what the problem is.  However, writing ANY nonfiction seemed entirely beyond my power.  Still does. 

You know I hate to flog my own stuff, so don’t think of it that way, but here to amuse you (I guess) is the opening of the short story Blood Ransom which has lent its title to the little anthology of short stories just brought out by Naked Reader (link on side bar, if you really must.)

This is one of those characters who’s been clammoring, and there’s an entire series with her, sort of hard edged procedurals in a world divided evenly between vampires and humans.

Blood Ransom

Sarah A. Hoyt

They stood at my door, in the last light of the dying day, side by side, looking like they would like to be invited in, but I wasn’t that stupid. One of them was taller than the other by a good two inches, but other than that, they might have been twins: identical dark hair, cut very short, identical broad shoulders and a suggestion of muscles beneath the identical black suits, identical mirrored sun glasses.

They also both smelled like Immortals: the suggestion of corruption beneath a floral scent and what – even if one knew they’d never been near a funeral parlor – one couldn’t help thinking of as embalmer’s fluid.

I saw myself in their sunglasses: a faded middle-aged woman with indifferently brown hair, indifferently brown eyes and a multitude of freckles, wearing my gardening jeans and t-shirt. I wiped dirt from my hands to the legs of the jeans and said, “How may I help you, gentlemen?”

It took them a moment to respond. Perhaps they’d gotten used to deference in that new world I’d left behind as surely as if I’d been a nun.

“Ms. Bretenes?” the tall one asked.

“Yes.” Surely it couldn’t be that hard to find me. There wasn’t a farm or even another house for two miles around. And suddenly that thought turned around on me. There were two immortals at my door, and there wasn’t a farm or a house for miles around. No human who would come to my aid.

My hands felt clammy with sweat and the pulse on the side of my neck beat frantically. All of which was stupid of me. After all, the immortals were now civilized, part of the established order. They would no more want more humans turned than any rational being wants his food supply diminished or turned into competitors. It hadn’t been just political correctness renaming them from vampires to immortals. They had become citizens and been, in a way, defanged.

“We…” The short one said and hesitated. “That is, may we come in?”

“No.”

They inclined their heads in unison. When the tall one looked up, he said, “We have come to ask your help.”

“My help?” I echoed, sounding half witted, which was a compromise. I held back the words Do you know who I am and how many of you I killed?

By my husband Dan Hoyt

Lately, I’ve been reading Regency romances.  Why?  Well, as a writer, it’s always a good thing to keep up with what’s selling to readers.  Not that I’m targeting my audience, mind you, but I’d like to thing that someone out there might be interested in reading my work, and it helps to know what readers find interesting.  That way, I can better set the tone of my story, and I can still write whatever I find interesting.  Duh, winning!

 Why romance?  Why not science fiction and fantasy, which is the genre I tend to write.  Romance is the biggest chunk of genre readership, hands down – by an order of magnitude (that’s a factor of 10 for you non-scientific types).  Heck, judging by recent phenomena like Amanda Hocking, it might be the biggest chunk of readership, period.  And I wanted to know why.

 Why Regency, then?  Why not paranormal, which seems to be the hot sub-genre these days?  Simply put, staying power.  Arguably, Regencies are the one sub-genre of romance you can depend on still being read decades later.  I’m not going to drag Jane Austen into this discussion, since she was writing them during the time period in question, but there are a ton (okay, I’m not below a sly Regency reference!) of writers who credit early 20th-centry Georgette Heyer, who spearheaded the modern Regency sub-genre, as a major influence.  (Not unlike musicians today crediting Leonard Cohen, even if they were born decades after his heyday.)  Look in any used bookstore, and you’ll find a boatload of Regencies cycling in and out.  Clearly, they still enjoy a great deal of popularity.

 So, to the point.  I wasn’t trying to find out what makes women tick.  I wasn’t even trying to find out what kind of men women like.  I am happily married after all (26 years!), so I’m not trolling “the Marriage Mart.”  But if these Regencies can be believed, I found out a few surprising things about women, nonetheless.  By way of disclosure, this is based on a half dozen novels, and is purely intended for entertainment, based on those novels, nothing more, and should not be construed (I hope!) as an accurate depiction of modern women.

 5. The most attractive thing about a man are his eyes.  Forget being a gym rat, if you’re simply self-confident, women will overlook a lot of defects in your physique and see you for the buff, attractive gentleman you strive to be by working out every day. To be fair, this wasn’t as surprising as it should have been. Unlike  Regency heroes, who always seem to have green or blue eyes, I have brown eyes, but I always thought they were one of my better assets.  Over the years, many girls and women commented on my “piercing gaze that seems to look right through you into your soul.”  When I was courting my wife, I sent her a picture with my patented piercing gaze looking over my sunglasses, and she showed it to her girlfriends; the general reaction (according to her) was akin to: “Hey, I have an idea!  I’ll come over to America with you and steal your boyfriend!”  So I had an idea women looked at men’s eyes.  Some advice for you guys looking to impress a woman:  pay attention to her when you’re with her!  What she says, what she does, where she looks – you know, at least act like you’re enjoying her company. Nothing puts off a woman more than a disinterested guy.  Which brings me to…

 4. Women fall in love “at first sight” with a man who’s honorable, and they’re looking for the man who falls for them instantly, too.  First impressions are key, even if they’re bad, so long as time proves their intentions were honorable.  Remember Pride and Prejudice?  He can be as unlikeable as sin, but as long he’s honorable, he’ll win the fair maiden’s heart. Oh, it helps if her knees turn to jelly and he sets her loins on fire, too.  That seems to be a big thing.  Women – and men – who are in love can’t bear to stand, and eventually fall down – usually into a bed – with the sheer exhaustion of being in love.  Of course, Regency men  – at least the titled Lords – don’t actually seem to do anything at all, short of managing their inheritance and spending money.  Which shouldn’t be all that surprising, since…

 3. Anything a woman does, she’ll do better without trying than any man, no matter how much he practices.  This includes managing an estate, playing the violin, shooting a bullseye with target pistols, fending off an armed attacker, etc.  I don’t know about you, but I can play the piano and sing, but after several years of doing them only sporadically, I don’t think I could make it on  American Idol, America’s Got Talent or The Voice.  A woman with my musical background would be the next YouTube sensation, if she just put up a camera-phone video of her singing Happy Birthday to her one-year-old child. Simply put, women are awesome-sauce!  I’m beginning to understand why the Kama Sutra’s list of what a woman needs to be competent doing includes both painting teeth and planning and executing a war campaign.  Which made it all the more surprising to me that…

 2. In the end, women want to have a LOT of babies.   They’ll give up everything for the right man, and then their lives will be perfectly fulfilled by producing children.  And I’m not talking just one or two here, but a dozen seems to be the preferred number.  Mind you, this is only possible with the right man.  And apparently, the right kiss, because…

 1. Any woman, no matter how inexperienced with men, will give it up for a really good French kiss.  And I’m not talking about just third base, here; I mean a solid home run, with an extra couple of base runs for the fans. If only I’d known this when I was a teenager, I might have dated before the second semester of my senior year in high school!  Ah, c’est la vie.  Still, I landed – and kept – the hot foreign exchange student from exotic Portugal, so I guess I did something right!

First of all, you should read Kris’ post today, which does tie in with my post on ebooks.  My only disagreement with her is how fast midlisters with less name will sell in ebook.  Neither of us has an answer, of course, we’re both writing, and we’ll both do our best to survive this.  In fact, if I had to bet on a survivor, Kris would top the list.

    http://kriswrites.com/2011/06/15/the-business-rusch-bookstore-observations/

Now, various random facts:

– Yesterday my attic window showed up open behind the cat boxes.  No idea how or why.  The roof is not accessible from anywhere outside and it takes more than cat strength to open that window.  Oh, also at that time, none of my family had gone near it.  Vampires, I’d guess.

– As I lose weight my feet size are shrinking.  I’m down two whole sizes.  Fat Feet is a GREAT name for a rock band.

-How is it possible to have TWO whole novels in your head, all ready to come out, and not be able to make your fingers type?  Head>desk.  If I’m absent for a couple of days, I’m putting all my energy into getting my fingers to obey me.

-One of my cats thinks he’s a teapot.  Guess which.

This post will seem to be about translation. It’s not. This is a metaphor. The post is a continuation of yesterday’s on writing minority view points: who should do it, how it should be done, and why the establishment gets it wrong, of course. (Also on whether there is some special virtue in doing it. And on who wants to read this.)

The discussion here and at Mad Genius Club yesterday reminded me of when I was sixteen and embarked on a class called “Techniques of Translation.”

Although I had studied French and English and German, the translations I’d done so far were of the “I took the pen of my neighbor” variety. I thought the class would teach me to smooth out the sentence to “I took my neighbor’s pen” and that would be that.

I was wrong. Oh, it taught that also, but that was a minor portion of it. The class mostly hinged on the moral, ethical and – most of all – professional dilemmas of being a translator. I know any number of you are translators, formal or informal, but any number of you are also not. So, for the ones who are not, let me break the news with my usual gentleness:

There is no such thing as translation.

The French have a proverb “to translate is to betray a little” – or at least that’s the closest meaning in English. It’s fairly close to the true meaning, but slightly askew, of course. Every language is slightly askew to other languages.

The idea that there exists in every language a word that is exactly the equivalent of other languages is sort of like assuming that aliens will – of course – live in houses, go to school, ride buses, understand Rebecca Black’s “Friday”.

Language is how we organize our thoughts, and each word, no matter how simple, carries with it the cultural freight and experience of the specific language. Oh, “mother” will generally mean “the one who gave birth to” – except for some tribal, insular cultures where it might mean “the one who calls me by her name” or “my father’s principal wife” – but the “feel” behind it will be different, depending on the images associated with “mother” in the culture.

So, when you translate, you’re actually performing a function as a bridge. Translation is not the straightforward affair it seems to be but a dialogue between the original language and the language you translate into. If you’re lucky, you meet halfway. Sometimes that’s not possible, and you feel really guilty about “lying” to the people receiving the translation. When on top of language you need to integrate different cultures and living systems (which you do when translating anything even an ad) you feel even more guilty, because you’re going to betray, no matter how much you try. At one point, a while back, I had my dad on one phone, my husband on the other, and I was doing rapid-fire translation about a relatively straight forward matter. And even that caused me pangs in conscience, because my dad simply doesn’t understand how things are done here. I had to approach his experience and explain our experience in a way he wouldn’t think I was insane or explaining badly. That meant a thousand minor lies.

Okay – now, what does that have to do with yesterday’s topic?

I am, as I tried to point out, a woman who grew up in a different culture. I am American – please don’t dispute it – because one of the wonders about America is that it doesn’t matter where you came from, you can be one of us. However, my past is Portuguese.

Portugal is one of those odd countries, about which most people know nothing while thinking they know a lot. Nine out of ten people think it’s in South America. Heck, a Yale liberal arts graduate once ARGUED with me about this. An international operator once informed me that it was a city in Spain.

People tell me we have ancient wisdom; that we’re standard white westerners; that we’re Hispanic (closer, at least when it comes to our experience in America because most of us ON SIGHT look Hispanic); that we’re passionate and hot blooded; that we’re (at least women) repressed and obedient, and a lot of other things I DON’T KNOW. I don’t know because it’s impossible for me to know, because a) everyone seems to have a different stereotype of what “Portuguese” means and b) because people assume I am this, without telling me.

Portugal is, in fact, obscure enough to be used for “hot strange minority” in comedies or “exotic place” in TV dramas. The way it’s used (a “swinger” couple in Friends, really?) usually makes me laugh my head off.

So right now, those of you who think that literature needs more minority view points or whatever are going “but, that’s exactly what we mean. Why don’t you write your amazingly different culture and enlighten us?” Oh, you’re so lucky you’re faraway enough I can’t hit you with a dictionary.

I’ve been taken to task on this blog before for not writing “about Portugal’s 900 years of history” instead of stuff set in Tudor England. (Portugal is very proud of 900 years of history, which reminds me of Heinlein’s dictum on people who are proud of their ancestry. Never mind.)

So, Chilluns, gather around and let me tell you a story. Imagine a Sarah newly deplaned from Portugal. I knew next to nothing about the US. I’d come here to do my 12^th grade, so I sort of kind of knew what it was like to be a senior in high school. Sort of and kind of, because of course exchange students are a species apart. Even that was four years in the past, as I left after my exchange student year, went back, finished my degree, then married the nice boy who’d lived down the road from me in Ohio, thereby managing the feat of marrying the boy next door across the ocean, which is par for the course for my weirdness.

I wanted to write, of course. I particularly wanted to write because for the first time in my life I was living with someone – my husband – who not only didn’t disapprove of it, but encouraged it. On novelty alone, I wanted to write.

The problem is you can’t always write aliens. You can’t always write fairies. And I didn’t feel qualified to write Americans. And there’s only so many people without a past you can write. (I was hit over the head, I swear. I remember nothing but two minutes in the past.)

I decided to do the sensible thing and write stories set in Portugal and/or with Portuguese characters. It did not go WELL.

The BEST response I got (it was personal!) was a rejection informing me I was a narrowminded pain, who clearly had never been outside the US (this, btw, for a story I didn’t think was in ANY WAY critical of Portugal. Yeah, there are things that drive me nuts about the place, but I also love many of those things. Kind of like you’ll love the way your kid always looks scruffy. I thought that was clear in the story. The thing this person objected to? The fact that no one refrigerated anything and the fact that TO THEM the place sounded icky.)

It was that rejection that opened my eyes. I realized I was up against the “betraying a little” dilemma again. It wasn’t going to be as easy as writing WELL about Portugal. If I wanted to write about Portugal, I had to choose my lies carefully, but I was going to HAVE to lie. Or write non-fiction, dry as dust and twice as boring.

That is, to write about Portugal, I had to know enough about the US to know at least what was LIKELY to be in the editor’s head when the word Portugal was said. I had to know what they expected. This wasn’t as easy as say your picture of Australia (Crocks and big knives) because Portugal is not that well (mis)known. More importantly, I needed to know what people wanted to get out of reading about Portugal. Did they want to experience the exotic, in which case I should emphasize that? Did they want a sense of history, in which case I should push that? Or did they want the feeling that they were enlightened and kind for reading about this small, barely second world country, in which case I should emphasize the victimhood and struggle? What did they want?

It was a hopeless case. I realized I couldn’t cram the whole organic culture as I’d known it in there. I couldn’t even put in the warts (because Portugal is a small country, even if I come from there, if I put in the warts, publishers will perceive it as bullying and myself as a “narrow minded pain.”) Worse, I didn’t know what they thought were warts (what? Really? Lack of refrigeration? Mankind lived for millennia without it, you know?)

Worse, at best anything I wrote about Portugal to be halfway accurate would need to be between whatever Americans could accept (exotic, Latin, etc.) and the truth and I didn’t know America enough to get there. It was like trying to translate when all you know is classroom language on one side. You can’t do it.

So I gave up on that and wrote historical (mostly Rome and England because there the stereotypes I had weren’t that far off) and eventually became comfortable enough to write American characters.

I think at this point I could write Portuguese set/Portuguese characters. I’m accultured enough to reach Americans I THINK.

The problem is, I don’t really want to. We come up against those moral and ethical dilemmas again and it makes writing SUCH a pain.

First, we come up on the reason I moved here at all: I always felt like a stranger in a strange land. Part of this was me. Part of it, though, is that my family – I’m reminded of this every time I go back – is odd. Oh, not in any bad way, but I continuously meet other Portuguese who assume they know how… my family interacts; what I was taught at home; what we ate; what we believed. They’re wrong on almost every count. And the weird thing is they’d be right for ALMOST every Portuguese of my class, age, and upbringing at least as far as I can tell. I’ve come to the conclusion my family (and to an extent the village I grew up in) is just a bunch of outliers. Which explains why going to friends’ houses for vacation was like being an exchange student. No, I don’t know why or how this happened, but I know if I portray “real Portuguese” it will feel profoundly weird to me.

Second: Most Portuguese in the US – for the few people who actually KNOW Portuguese people – come from the Islands (Azores and Madeira) which makes them about as much like me (from the North of the continent) as a native of NYC is like a native of the deep south. No. Less so. In the states, you’re more likely to have had schooling rituals (prom/homecoming, etc) and chain stores in common.

Third: I have been away from Portugal for twenty five years, save for brief visits. In that time everything has changed, perhaps more so than in most places, due to integration into EEC, huge immigration from Eastern Europe, etc. I SIMPLY don’t know how things work now. Even the schooling system seems to have been reinvented from the ground up. There are a LOT of private universities, for instance, while in my day there were two and they weren’t taken seriously. There are also more grades and arranged differently. People’s shopping has rearranged with the introduction of supermarkets and not always in ways I understand. And NONE of it makes sense to me. For instance, my parents’ house was near a train stop. Not a station. Usually not listed in anything, just a place on the line where the train stopped. You could get in and get your ticket onboard from the conductor. Over the last twenty five years, the “stop” has acquired shelters, clocks and announcements. Also graffiti and loiterers. Okay fine. But this time, when I went back, I found out you now have automated machines where… you get a ticket to get a ticket on the train. Yes, that’s right. You buy a ticket from the machine, which allows you to buy a ticket on the train. Why? I don’t know. My mother couldn’t explain it, and the stuff on the machine made no sense. Even HOW to do it made no sense. My parents have started using the bus, which is more uncomfortable and takes longer, simply because they don’t get HOW to do it. I’m sure there’s a reason for this double-blind ticket purchase other than the Portuguese love for bureaucracy. Or maybe there isn’t. BUT I don’t know. And that’s a minor example.

I realized I knew nothing of Portugal when my husband, my kids and I found ourselves in a sizeable village at lunch time, starving, and I couldn’t figure out WHERE to buy food. (In villages it’s not necessarily marked, and besides you can buy food at any of the following: grocery stores; restaurants; taverns; coffee shops; improvised for-the-season cafes. Or all of those might NOT serve food. The ones I found I couldn’t determine if they did, and had no idea how to ask.)

I know you don’t believe that last, and that’s an example of why it’s hard for me to write about Portugal – because I don’t know what’s in your head and now half the time I don’t know what’s in Portugal, either.

So, to pull it all back – insistence that minorities only must be allowed to write minorities MIGHT seem like it makes sense. Kind of like translating “I got my son’s pen” makes sense. They know how their culture/lifestyle works, so of course they’d write it better.

But it’s NOT like writing it. It’s not an account. Because novels are – at least supposed to be – entertaining, it’s more like translating. What you write must not only be accurate. It must sound accurate to the reader. The two are antithetical. So at best it’s a compromise and a small betrayal.

Are minorities/foreigners/etc. capable of doing this? Of course. As I said, I think at this point I am at least for short stories (not sure about trying a novel.) But can they do it better than a non-native/non minority who studies it really well and writes about it?

Well… yes. No. Maybe. It depends on the individual writing and how willing they are to take out their own experiences, unpack them, and then betray them a little to match what’s in the reader’s head, so they can make sense of it all.

Portugal is hellishly difficult to research from the US – great regional variation, for instance (coming from the fact that it’s only in the last twenty years that they’ve started defeating tribalism, and that not well. Not real tribes, but the different regions ARE different ethnicities.) Also no one has written a “Daily Life In Portugal” – though there is a “Daily Life in Medieval Portugal” which I haven’t read, though I’ve bought it. Portugal is hellishly difficult to research from Portugal, too. I had trouble finding a good, comprehensive history when I visited. And because their distribution of books is insane (the concept of back list was alien when I was growing up at least) and there’s no amazon.pt, it’s very difficult to get history (or other) books on specific narrow topics. You might go to the story looking for an history of Roman Portugal, but what’s on the shelves right then is an history of Port Wine; an history of Celtic Portugal; and an history of shoe laces.

However, I think I’d at least consider reading the book if someone were dedicated enough to wade in and read all the books (many of them in Portuguese) you can read to get the complete-enough picture to write about Portugal and did it without either condescension or too much clean up (Portugal… well, dears, let’s just say when I was growing up there we considered Italians and Greeks organized. And Ireland has almost Germanic precision as far as we were concerned. And we were PROUD of this. We should be. Looking from the outside it’s a minor miracle anything works enough to keep up a technological society to the extent it exists. BUT I understand this – it must be genetic because not only do I fight it every day, but so do my kids. HOWEVER most people would, I think, clean most of it away) and without implying Portuguese are victims because they live in less materially comfortable circumstances (and have a guaranteed month of vacation in Summer, a week at Easter and Christmas, plus the most holidays of any country in Europe.)

Do I hunger for such a book? To be blunt, no. I worry that the betrayals made would spin the book even further away from my admittedly odd experience. I worry I would for the rest of my life be meeting people who go “Oh, you’re Portuguese, so you’re exactly like…” (I wonder if Greeks feel that way about “My Big Fat Greek Wedding.”)

I prefer to read about interesting people, no matter where they come from. Oh, I’ll give a try to the exotic, if simply because it’s a change of pace. Stuff set in rural South Africa for instance. And I absolutely ADORED Paul Mann’s Indian mysteries, one of those series I don’t think lasted long enough.

HOWEVER if I start a book set somewhere and it’s all about “victimhood” it goes against the wall so hard it leaves marks. Oh, sure, some people have it really tough (Paul Mann’s description of the underclass in India was responsible for my donating more than I should to various charities) but for books to be entertaining they can’t just be about oppression and misery and taking it. Good authors get over plotting by dropping walls on character. And most readers don’t view fiction reading as an exercise in self flagellation where you must suffer to understand how bad other people’s circumstances are.

And when I say I’d read about exotic locales, those can be in Europe, too. Small town England in the present day would be fascinating. (The latest I’ve read set there was Agatha Christie.) It has nothing to do with stealing victimhood, only with me being an SF geek, forever looking for the alien – even when I’m aware it’s “translated” and “betrayed.”

So, that is the ultimate conclusion: I’d be willing to read anything, written by anyone, as long as it’s interesting. I don’t want to read about people “like me” and I’m not angry there aren’t more of us as characters. (One of my characters has a series about a woman with my background. I don’t want to know. No, seriously. I’d have to kill him in a horrible way. And don’t say “what do you mean one of your characters has…” Any explanation would land one of us in the loony bin.) I don’t object to reading about people like me, though, if done in a way I find entertaining. And I don’t care about the background of the author, provided he/she can write the story convincingly.

Exciting, uh? Aren’t you amazed? I know I am. That this is shocking to the establishment explains why they’re in trouble.

A couple of years ago, a male friend who wrote from a female POV got back a letter telling him this was unethical. Not just bad writing, mind – which knowing my friend it wouldn’t be – but wrong on a moral level. He couldn’t write women, because he wasn’t one.

This worried me because I’m one of those writers who writes preferentially as the opposite gender. There have always been half a dozen of them (Heinlein was about even) and in my case, when I started writing, I just didn’t feel comfortable writing as a woman. Part of this was that I was raised to be a tomboy and, having attended an all girls’ school for five years, know that I’m not only NOT a typical female, I have no clue how typical females work. But on top of that, I didn’t know how AMERICAN females worked. (Yes, they’re more different than males. Partly, I think because women are more “creatures of the group” by evolutionary design.)

However, when I looked further into this, I found out that the problem was not writing something you’re not – phew! Those of us who have written aliens ARE grateful – but this thing called “stealing victimhood.” You’re not supposed to write anyone who can be considered down the totem pole from you and “victims of society.” Yes, yes, for this they use the whole Marxist thought thing which, as you know, makes my teeth hurt (as the fangs come out.)

But let’s forget that for a moment, because if I start beating up on Marx I’ll be here all day and I have a book to finish.

Let’s just assume that they are right and that there is inherent “victimhood” in being female, “of color” (as opposed to those translucent people you see all around. Total yucko, them. Also, they get run over all the time because people can’t see them), gay or handicapped.

Okay, so there’s “victimhood”. And? What do they mean “stealing victimhood?” Is it points in a game that you collect and can convert into cash?

My dears, I know that it doesn’t make sense, but yes, in their minds – which means the minds of many recent college graduates, editors included – YES. Yes, there’s inherent value in being a victim. Yes, this will convert into mountains of cash.

Take a deep breath. What this means is that … Yes, yes, indeed… These people BUY BOOKS because of that. And I don’t mean just for their private consumption, but for selling to other people.

Now think about it, boys, girls and dragons, when IS the last time you picked up a book in the store or downloaded a sample from Amazon, for that matter and went “This book is about a deaf pacific islander lesbian! It’s a total buy!” Right. Unless for some reason I’m interested about the life of deaf pacific islander lesbians at THAT moment, then the book better have a lot more to recommend it. I suspect most people are the same.

Except possibly editors and glitterati. The books my kids are forced to read for school, which are a fair sample of what the “intellectuals” consider good are often exactly like that “oppressed minority gets oppress” IS the book.

And the fact they think that “victimhood” is something to steal just about tells you why the publishing houses are almost all scrambling on the verge of bankruptcy.

Look, kiddies, if I want to experience someone who gets victimized I can look at being a writer struggling to survive while everyone has their hand in your pocket. Only that’s not likely to be bought and would probably confuse the readers who know we’re all rich.

I write characters of all colors, including some that don’t exist in reality. I write characters of all sexual orientations, including some that don’t exist in reality (dragons turn them on. No, really. Um… I should release that story for kindle), I write characters from every possible origin and of some impossible genders (shape changing/gender changing elf.)

What I DO NOT write are victims. Oh, some of my characters are up against huge obstacles and some of them get crushed in the end, but they go down swinging. (Not usually that type of swinging, no. I get bored writing it, guys. Sorry.) If they lose, they lose with fists balled and yelling defiance to the world.

Why? Because I have no time for victims. And I PARTICULARLY, STRONGLY despise people who think being born something like woman or melanin enhanced or gay makes you a victim. It’s funny, but none of my friends in that situation feel that way. Oh, they’re sometimes annoyed at the way people behave to them – like, who isn’t? – but that’s part of being human. None of them lies down groaning and muttering “oh, the injustice.”

So, I’ll continue writing whatever and whomever I d*mn well please. If I do it badly, you can stomp me. But you CANNOT accuse me of “stealing victimhood.”

I didn’t do it, guv. Ain’t taken no victimhood. You won’t find it anywhere on me.

*Crossposted at Mad Genius Club*

Some days it’s hardly worth getting out of bed. I woke up feeling icky and sluggish. Yes, I realize this is probably part of the adjustment to altitude and time change. But then it’s been one long morning of being nibbled by ducks. Admnistrivia is the curse of the writer without a full time assistant.

I swear I had some interesting – I think? – thoughts around here somewhere. If only I can find them. They might very well have slipped through the cracks on the floor.

I want to write but right now all my body feels like doing is curling up and vegetating. I’m going to go for a walk, and hopefully it will reset my body so I can work.

Sorry. Hopefully I’ll be “on” tomorrow. Meanwhile there’s a new shape shifter/vampire collection of mine out from Naked Reader. The title story, Blood Ransom is the most recent one, and is in the worldbuilding for the “present day” vampire world – the continuum of the Musketeers vampire stories. I’m calling that world Blood Worlds mostly because it’s obvious.  http://nakedreader.com/

Oh, yeah, and my son has more Ninja Nun out.

And now I’m goign to walk.  If you find my mind in your desk drawers or something, send it back.  I’ll pay postage.