Author: Sarah A. Hoyt

Kevin J. Anderson uses a popcorn analogy to illustrate two methods that beginning writers can use to break into print.

One of them consists of writing a single novel and polishing it and perfecting it until it is the absolute best it can be. He compares this to putting a single grain in a pot with just the right amount of oil, at the right temperature and waiting till it pops to produce the perfect single kernel of popcorn.

While this can work, if the kernel you put in is a dud, or if the one novel you concentrate all your work on is unpublishable, for reasons having nothing to do with how well crafted it is (theme, market, events in the world that make your premiss untenable) you’re going to fail.

Then there’s the other method that I – and a lot of other people used – you throw some oil in a pot at as close to a perfect temperature as you can make it, and you heat it. A whole bunch of them are going to pop, even if you get a few duds. (This doesn’t mean by the way that we care less about each individual kernel… er… novel. And it doesn’t mean that in the middle of the “okay” kernels there won’t be one or two perfect ones. Possibly not the ones we expect.)

This approach, of course, takes its toll on the writer, but it has the opportunity for bringing the greater rewards.

What Kevin didn’t say is that for at least the last ten years and probably more, publishers have taken this approach to writers themselves. It used to be they carefully selected a writer and often invested considerable time and effort in helping him or her perfect the craft and improve. Perhaps there are still editors out there that do that. One or two of mine have been very good, but often work with limited time, because these days their job is not to help the writer progress, improve or even become more commercial. At best, if they’re interested in you, they give you a call and make suggestions. My friend Rebecca Lickiss, for instance, at one time got asked to write a “bigger” novel. But that was all the guidance she got.

Gone are the days of legendary editors shaping a house to their vision and keeping writers for years as long as they were paying their own way, trying to help that writer develop a following.

These days, and I think since publishers have been able to control every process of distribution and exposure a writer can get/have so that they could “comfortably manufacture bestsellers” at will, they have used the popcorn theory with authors.

Well, not quite, because they do have favorites. In the center of the pot, they would clear a little space and drop one or two little favored kernels they shepherded to the popping into bestsellerdom. The rest of the kernels were thrown in haphazardly, around the edges, where it might be too hot or too cold. And if they didn’t pop they got thrown away and other kernels thrown in.

This total absence of response to market signals – in fact, inability to get market signals – since what the system was rigged for was GIGO, that is to give you back what you put in, didn’t bother anyone, because those perfect kernels that popped meant great profits for the houses. Also, the smart ones were aware that the house giveth and the house taketh away and they would toe the line. The dumb ones… well, there were always replacements for those.

But now in the brave new world of electronic publishing, which will only grow faster as paper books grow more expensive – and for our friends across the pond, this is guaranteed as our price of energy is skyrocketing, thereby skyrocketing manufacturing and transport as well – anyone with a name, no matter how acquired has a great incentive to publish him or herself. As Dave Freer detailed in his Monday post at Mad Genius Club, there is no real reason for bestsellers to go with mainstream publishers anymore, and sooner or later they’ll all realize it.

This means the popcorn theory of publishing is dead. Heaven alone knows how many publishing houses it will take with it.

To me this seems amazingly obvious, as it seems amazingly obvious that the only way for a publishing house to stay afloat and prosper is to establish a brand – a taste if you will. The only way for a publishing house to stay afloat is to return to the days of legendary editors, say a Hugo Gernsback or a John W. Campbell, who take authors in whom they find a glimmer of something that could be great and mold and shape them and help them find their audience.

The big ones will still escape – unless you really make sure your brand is a value added (and you might. I know people who read everything Baen publishes, for instance, just for the brand) – but by the time they escape they’ll have been writing for you for years and getting incrementally better. And those who aren’t total SOBs might even write for you, on the side, for years after they start a solo-publishing career, because they’re grateful for the help you gave them.

Why aren’t any of the businessmen in publishing houses seeing this? Have I made some huge mess in my reasoning? Because this has gone beyond “obvious” to “plain as the nose on your face.” I don’t understand how anyone can miss it, much less people whose livelihood depends on the current, soon to become toxic, model.
*crossposted at Mad Genius Club and Classical Values*

Today I wrote about 11k words, a few to finish a story, the rest in Darkship Renegades. I’m not particularly happy with either set, but I’m sure they’re both editable to brilliant… well, as brilliant as I ever get, at least ;). *The gentleman in the back row CAN stop guffawing. I’m all too aware of my own shortcomings.*

Meanwhile the thought of doing a blog post threw me into a pit of despair. I’ve been thinking about things I’d like to write about, but… not tonight.

Tonight — a snowy night in Colorado — I’m going to go to bed. I don’t even feel like reading, and that’s like … an addiction before going to sleep.

I’m just going to go and sleep. If we’re all very lucky, there will be a coherent post tomorrow.

Meanwhile, if any of my audience — except my beta readers (duh) — has read both my collection “Wings” and my mystery series, Daring Finds, tell me what two characters appear in both. Send me a message, I’ll put you down for a copy of a Fatal Stain, whenever I get one.

When I was a young girl I succumbed to one of the fads of my time. I loved The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. In a way, even if a lot of the story now seems like an extended cliche, I still do.

When I was re-reading Darkship Thieves, before setting about writing the sequel, I was haunted by a quote from Saint-Exupery even though I hadn’t re-read The Little Prince in… thirty years: “What moves me so deeply, about this little prince who is sleeping here, is his loyalty to a flower–the image of a rose that shines through his whole being like the flame of a lamp, even when he is asleep . . .”

I don’t know if this is just me – of course, Darkship Thieves is my book, so I would feel this more, right? – or if it communicated itself to other people, but after not reading the book for two years (and trust me, as much as I’ve written since, it feels longer ago) I suddenly felt as though what made the book powerful were the parts I never went into: the weight of history behind Kit and Thena, the dank, dark, blood soaked history of the mules; the clawing of a space of safety and life for the descendants of the bio-improved people;the repression on Earth.

Perhaps it is because the second book deals with a lot more of that history, and how it comes back to bite you in the behind when you least expect it. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that, as my sons reach an age when their moving out of the house is (hopefully – if their plans go right) within a very short reach of a couple of years or so, and then my life will change completely – and the years of raising them that seemed so long in passing now appear to be no more than a fast blink, in the rearview mirror.

All of a sudden, I find myself thinking in an historical dimension, generations following generations, each no less important, not less individual, no less intense, but made, shaped, confined and somehow changed by all that went before and what they wish to make sure comes after.

It’s a humbling view, like looking at the sea and realizing that before you were born it was beating at this same shore, close to the same spot – that millennia after you’re dust in the dust it will still be doing so. At the same time, it is an exalted view, because while you’re alive – you, ephemeral and passing as you are – can build a cement barrier and change where that wave hits. Or you can walk down to the shore, let the ocean bathe your feet, and leave a little of your warmth and life in it, forever. Who we love and hate, what we believe and fight for, all leave a mark – even if it might seem minute.

It’s exactly the same with characters, at least in my mind. And what makes Thena such a powerful character, for me, is her love for Kit. As interesting a personality as she is, what makes her come alive for me is her love for this deeply flawed man, for whom she would rebuild the universe over, if needed.
It shines in her, even when she’s completely still.

Perhaps this makes me a complete fool, or at least a romantic one, but it is in their feelings for each other, in their intense involvement in their brief moment on the page, in their unspoken love – which perhaps doesn’t fit into words – that I find my characters alive on the page and vibrating with a purpose and mind of their own.

I was reminded of this problem this week, as I have a short story due for an interstellar exploration anthology.

Now, you guys know though I’ve written for Analog, I’m very far from being a scientist. I mean, sure, I took all the fast track science and stuff, until 9th grade when, due a concatenation of personal, political and historical circumstances I landed my rebellious little (back then!) behind in the so called liberal arts.

As we all know, a lack of mathematics atrophies certain areas of the brain, an atrophy possibly encouraged by regular doses of Cliff’s Notes. (Look, I read Shakespeare and Jane Austen and can even take Goethe in small doses, but really, no. That modern Portuguese novel they made us read, where the whole point was nothing happened? Wagner’s librettos? The sheer suckiness of most of what calls itself magic realism? [I said most. Hint, friends of Castro can’t do magic realism for the Marx. Seriously.] All of this was digestible only in Cliff’s notes form. Because otherwise I’d have punched holes in my parents’ walls. And my parents’ walls are made of two-foot-thick stones, so you see the problem. (Though I’ll note the instance of big literature test where I’d happily managed to forget the book even existed and had failed to provide myself with cliff’s notes or the Portuguese equivalent. When I realized the test was happening, and I couldn’t contrive some emergency to post postpone it or close the school for the day [you TRULY don’t want to know] I read the prologue. From the prologue I guessed the rest of the book. My answer – essay – ran to ten pages, focused on the prologue and how it foreshadowed the entire book. I had an A. And that, children, is when I decided to be a fiction writer. Also, when I learned to despise that type of author with the withering disdain of those who do for those who pretend.)

What this comes down to is that when my two, intensely science track sons ask me a question, it only goes to further their opinion I’m mentally retarded. Or weird.

Oh, I read all sorts of popular science books, because I’m INTERESTED. And I can, given time and a pad of paper come up with reasonable extrapolations.

BUT – and this is a big but (yes, the one with two tt too. Office chair sprawl) – it’s been years since I did science fiction SHORT STORIES. Novels, yeah, but not a short story.

Somehow working on this story catapulted me back to my original view of what it took to write science fiction short stories – their being you know, smaller and therefore more concentrated than novels. (SF short stories, now with twice the science!)

And here’s what I believed when I started out:

1- Science fiction short stories have to hinge on a science puzzle or effect.

2- Since all of the easy puzzles or effects have been written, it takes years of research to write one science fiction short story.

3- You must spend at least three afternoons in calculations (which at this point requires me to spend a week learning the math again) to verify your premiss.

Despite the fact that this directly contravened the instructions the two editors gave me, by Friday night and more than halfway through the story, I’d worked myself into a “can’t breathe” panic, convinced what I was writing was wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

Thank heavens one of the editors was more patient than he should be, even if he now probably thinks I’m insane. (I’m not revealing names till I sell the story!)

And now that my head has been reset on science fiction short stories, (again) perhaps I can send a story to Dr. Schmidt and stop hiding from him at conventions. (Besides, I think he’s onto the false nose and the moustache.)

Oh, yeah, and (#4 – You MUST use a slide rule. EVEN if you have three scientific calculators in the house. You MUST check your calculations with a slide rule.) I suppose I should get back to second-son’s room and return to him his “toy” slide rule that I absconded with. Right?

For those of you who read Darkship Thieves, the novel is the sequel to it, and then there’s the sister of the sequel. So, you see, it is a serious threat.

This used to happen all the time. My kids started noticing signs and would say “uh, oh, mom is coming down with a novel.” It was the little things that gave it away – like the fact that mom only rushed out of the office to use the bathroom, then rushed back again, muttering, forgot to eat, sometimes answered them with sentences that made no sense. Or perhaps stumbled around the house with a vacant look, walked into things and said stuff like “but that ending won’t work” in the tone of voice of one in pain. Usually things stopped short of watering the cat and giving cat food to the plants, but there was the time when I went to the store with a frozen chicken under my arm, leaving the purse safely stowed in the freezer.

It’s been a long time since a novel took me this way. Most of the time these days, I can work nine to nine, then read a bit and go to bed, but there’s time for eating and cooking and cleaning. The only thing approaching that white hot rush has been the last two/three chapters, before the book closes.

But now Darkship Renegades and A Few Good Men (don’t yell) have taken me that way. I’m having trouble even reading short stuff – like … offers – which I need to read. I’m spacing out in the middle of conversations with the family. Today, I officially ran out of clean underwear, so I’d better do some before tomorrow.

What is it? Is it that the kids are finally old enough that I can concentrate on work without fearing they’ll burn down the house? Or is it these particular books?

I don’t know. I know posting here will be erratic – oh, every day, but don’t be surprised if it’s sometimes at midnight and sometimes at ten AM – and might sound about as coherent as giving cat food to a plant. But know this – I’m being held hostage by a novel and I’m having a GLORIOUS time. It’s like an altered state of vivid dreaming, but the writing is much easier when I’m like this.

The first one should be done – latest – by end of month. Second, G-d willing, late April. If I’m not out by then, send dogs and perhaps native guides!

It’s funny how many fairytales and myths revolve around skin. Not just selkies, but also swan maidens. If you took their skins, you had them forever.

Recently I’ve been thinking of my writing as a process of removing my skin.

Before you go “ew” and try to claw out your eyes, let me explain.

All of us walk around in hard shells. We have to. Oh, maybe it was different at one time for each of us, I don’t know. When was the time you got stomped on and learned to put up a front, learned to put up a shield? When was the time you walked, puppy like, up to a group of other kids, expecting they would of course like you, and ended up pounded?

I remember the moment for my older son with almost painful clarity. No, he didn’t get pounded. If you knew you, you’d know that’s silly. He’s always been… well… built like the proverbial brick sh*thouse. But he was our first and we thought would be only child, born after six years of infertility. And he was a good baby. Slept through the night at four weeks. We delighted in him, and in his first year of life never even raised our voice to him, much less showed him impatience. He was healthy and we protected him, so he was never hurt.

And then we took him for vaccinations. They asked us to hold him, so he wouldn’t move, and they stabbed him quickly on each thigh with the syringes. The look of sheer betrayal in his face. It wasn’t the pain, I don’t think. It was the betrayal that we’d taken him here, allowed him to do this. And though of course, he doesn’t remember that, I swear he’s been more wary since.

Now, by the time most of us reach adulthood, we’ve had hundreds of such experiences, and we’ve learned to shelter ourselves from the… slings and arrows of capricious fortune. Part of it is the “I didn’t want it, anyway” and part of it is the “I’m too old to expect they’ll love me at first sight.” Etc.

This works okay in life. It would be very weird, frankly, to be an adult sauntering into a party with the eagerness of a two year old. And I think if you went around putting everything in your mouth – yes, yes, you, you know who you are – just to see how it tasted, someone would probably put you away. (Hey, my oldest used to eat dead bugs. From the windowsills. Until I caught him…)

So in life, we need our skin, our tough shell, our protection.

The problem is when you bring that protection into writing. It’s lovely in a way, isn’t it? You can write and keep it at a distance from yourself, from the parts of yourself that count.

This means different things to different people. Many people are afraid to write about sex, for instance, because it’s too close. Others will not write about emotion. Or pain. (You try reading a book that’s all joy joy, happy happy, then tell me it was any good. Even feel good books have dark moments. Some people flinch from the supernatural. Others from murder.

I confess to having had problems with all of those, at different times in my career. But there is more to it than that. Weirdly, I noticed something while listening to books. Listening somehow makes it more personal. I listen to books while walking, too, which I guess makes it more intimate – there’s no distraction of a physical book in front of you.

Anyway, I noticed that all the really good books, the ones that grab, have what can only be called “writer personal hang ups.” For instance, it’s clear that Heinlein liked cats. Or that Terry Pratchett nurtures a taste for the same sort of greasy spoon I love: the acid coffee, the burnt crunchy bits.

For me those are probably the hardest part. It’s the silly stuff you like or don’t like that’s really close to your heart. If you let it out there, people will be worried. Or shocked. Or bored. They won’t understand. They’ll make fun of your toys. You’re that little kid again, walking up to the group of older kids, and you just know they’re going to pound you.

And then there’s letting my characters bleed. I mean, really bleed, really suffer. I don’t want to. It’s not even that I don’t want to hurt them. It’s that I don’t want people to see it. What? People might think I enjoy my characters’ suffering. And besides everyone is entitled to privacy in their distress, right? No, no they’re not. It turns out people who love your characters love them more if they see them bleed. Not cosmetic bleeding, but go for the jugular and follow it down, in detail, while they bleed and twitch.

Lately I’ve been writing with no skin on and it leaves you oddly sensitive, oddly raw to the world afterwards. You have to remember “I must put my skin on again. I must go out in the world and be normal again.”

In that sense, it is the opposite of the swan maidens. When you have your skin on, you’re just someone like everyone else. You have to take the skin off to be the magical being beneath.

And even if it hurts – a keyboard is a blunt implement to remove skin with – you dance so much freer on the page without it.

When I was just a reader – before being also a writer – there were many things I didn’t understand. I think this is fairly normal. For instance I had no idea the publisher could change your title. I had no clue most writers had no say on the cover. (Yes, yes, for those of you out there, I REALLY had no say on the cover of Draw One In The Dark, hard cover. Sorry. It just happens to be true.) I didn’t even understand that most elementary of ideas – that which books get published and which don’t and in what order is not under the control of the writer.

What this means is that, say, in 2012, I could have four books published which all revolve around intelligent cats. (I won’t, I swear. I haven’t written them.) The reader – or worse, the literature professor, which is kind of like a reader with a license to snoop – would then conclude “in this phase of her life, Sarah was preoccupied with intelligent cats. Which would make perfect sense, of course. Except, if you poked into the sales history, you might find out that one was a reprint of something I wrote ten years ago, another was a write-for-hire book because the publisher had the cover and hired me to write the story (this never happened to me, but it happened to someone I know. No, don’t ask), the other was written three years ago, but the publication was delayed and yet the other was something I wrote twenty years ago and was just now accepted/published. Thereby meaning that while I’d written a lot about intelligent cats, none of it was “in this year.”

This is how one of my friends became convinced I had written “legions of gay vampires.” To date I’ve sold exactly two gay vampire stories. This out of a total of five vampire stories ever written by me. However, he happened to come across those two stories in the same year. And, heck, at one time, out of ten stories published, I had four vampire stories. Mind you, I had fifty non-vamp stories Unpublished, but as far as the public was concerned I sat up in my little attic and wrote about undead people with a hemoglobin habit.

So, what’s all this b*tching in the name of? Actually it’s not. It’s just that I just realized what is probably the greatest disconnect between reader and writer. One that is almost impossible to breach from the other side, even when I TRY, even when I know what’s on the other side.

Series.

Series are experienced dramatically differently by writers and readers. As a reader, I’ll find a book I like and run out and buy all in the series. Or if I have to buy them one by one I will often, afterwards, re-experience them all as a unit. Just recently I went through all of the Tiffany Aching series on audio over a month of walks.

But unless you’re dealing with a writer who has only one series – a breed becoming increasingly rare – the writer didn’t experience it or work it that way. I.e. I’m now working on the Darkship series, again, but this was after detours through Sword and Blood and two refinishing mysteries. Getting back to Athena, realizing that FOR HER two years haven’t passed is the work I have to do so that the reader has that sense of continuity.

So, do you ever think about that – that the books you read in a row might have YEARS of life experience between them? Is it ever obvious? (My pet theory is that it’s obvious when the character gets “broken” – i.e. loses consistency.) And how do you read series? (I’m weird because I tend to tire around book ten.) Would it ruin it for you to know that there have been other series, books, between the books you love? Or do you imagine your characters waiting patiently to go on with their lives?

(crossposted at Mad Genius Club)

No. Don’t try to send me a baby gift. Human twins are far less work than this.

Through some process I can’t fully understand, some books refuse to be worked at unless they’re worked at together.

The ones that drive me totally insane are the ones that are in widely different universes/time frames/styles. For instance, I wrote at the same time – had to – Gentleman Takes A Chance and Soul of Fire. And if you’re sitting there going “at least they both got dragons” … yeah, you’re right. It is, however, where the resemblance stops. There have been others, too, though right now I can’t remember the pairings.

At least the current ones are in the same universe – one of them, Darkship Renegade starts the minute that Thena and Kit Sinistra land in Eden and then it doesn’t stop. (No, that’s pretty much it.) The other one begins on Earth a few hours before that with a character coming out of the prison that Thena attacked in order to free Kit. And then it turns Earth inside out and upside down. (No, that’s also pretty much it.)

I’m not sure, yet, whether the two interact at all. (They might not in these books.) But I’m sure I can’t write one without writing the other AT THE SAME TIME. Sometimes I hate the way my mind works.

In the last day, I noticed a lot of postings on Facebook about the shuttle. And this made me realize something about space, and what space means.

I haven’t been exactly paying attention. Whenever a novel is done – let alone a novel that was delayed due to my stupid body, once more, reminding me that these things come without warranty – there’s a lot of things I’ve been putting off that have to be dealt with. Particularly when I’m plunging straight into another couple of books that need to be finished, both of which are ready to enter ‘final phase’ (the phase when things are coming together and I work in a sort of white-hot haze.)

So, in the last couple of days I verified that my kitchen does, indeed, still have a floor by removing all the fur and grime that had accumulated over it; reduced the waiting Everest of laundry to a mere Pikes Peak; did grocery shopping; made sure the kids are still alive (you never know, and zombie children are such pains); cleaned the cats water fountain; removed approximately three Haveys from every surface in the house, including the floor (a Havey is a measurement of fuzziness. It equals about an inch of fuzz on everything.)

As has been obvious from this blog, I’ve logged on to the net maybe twice/three times a day, if that, and I haven’t exactly been thinking about the internet.

Even so, I couldn’t avoid postings on the shuttle.

. Perhaps it is a function of the type of friends I have, but for a day, posts on the shuttle seemed to overshadow even the endless political postings by people who should know better about what they put on their professional Facebook pages (Hint, if you feel free to put it up in a place where your potential bosses will read it, you’re not talking truth to power. You ARE the power.)

It reminded me a lot of the moon landing. For a moment, for a blessed few hours, we looked up from the ball of mud as all eyes turned to space and to what we all knew in our hearts was the next movement for our species. Remember, I wasn’t an American then, but I felt it too. And it wasn’t just me. Within a week our elementary school teacher, in this tiny one-room school house, started talking about how lucky we were to be living in a time when we might grow up and go to space. At various get togethers arranged for kids, the various, insanely-cheerful songs of the row your boat variety suddenly included references to the lunar age, to man of the space age. (Oh, I’m sure some Soviet scientists were furious that day. Bureaucrats even more so. But doubtless even they were in awe.)

The difference of course, is that the moon landing was a first and everyone pays attention to a first. So you might think it means nothing. It doesn’t explain the attention paid to the shuttle, because we’ve been expecting the end there – we know it’s an expensive program and it’s being shuttered.

And yet. And yet there’s something that calls us to space. In Space Engineers, Simak posited that we always longed for the stars, because we’d known we come from there. Of course if I wrote anything suggesting that, it would get buried under screams of outrage – even if I wrote it metaphorically, so I won’t. Beautiful and chest-expanding as that idea is, the explanation is much simpler.

As some of you know when I’m sick I read biology and anthropology manuals and sites. (Unless I’m REALLY sick, in which case I read about dinosaurs. It’s like comfort food.)

Our species – all species – have two modes: expand range or die. As my friend Dave Freer put it, we’re a species of colonists. It’s what we do. Every human race, every human culture longs to expand and most of them have, with varying degrees of success. Expansion is healthy both for the new culture and the one left at home. Innovations are bought back; inventions are sparked; restless young men are given productive outlets.

Are expansions within Earth and into someone else’s territory different? To an extent. It could be argued, though, that from the very long term perspective those expansions have, ultimately, been for the benefit of humanity in general. (Yes, I could expand on this, but not at six in the morning on a day when my to-do writing list is overflowing the page. Also, I suspect to explain it in detail would take a book. However, take the fact that as a whole humanity is now – at the end of expansionary movements and wars of conquest that started in the paleolithic – not only more numerous but more long-lived and healthier than ever. Then connect the dots.)

Whether our expansion is a good thing for anyone else, frankly, is a matter of total lack of concern to me. I know it’s chauvinistic and irredeemable of me, but when it comes to choosing between my own species and hypothetical blue aliens with linked in pony tails, I’m going to choose my own species. And no, I don’t care how ecologically sound these hypothetical aliens are, or how loving-kind or how perfect. Heck, I wouldn’t care even if they stopped being hypothetical.

Yes, I know, you’re looking at me in horror. But there are things that are so basic, so simple, so fundamentally gut-right that it takes years and years of education and an exquisite attention to moral formation to make people ignore them or think otherwise. Arguably our system does just that to people, just now.

And that’s insane, because even herbivores fight for their herd. You never see cornered antelope go “Oh, look, it’s much better for our herd if we let the lions eat the weak and the old. I mean, it’s not like they can live forever. And what right do we antelopes have to take over the area? Everyone knows we overgraze and destroy bio diversity.” The reason antelopes don’t do this is that they haven’t spent twelve plus years listening to how the species they belong to is harmful and useless and should go extinct for the sake of higher values of a nebulous kind. Lucky antelopes.

I did spend sixteen plus years listening to what horrible creatures humans are. I’ve also read countless books to the effect. But, aw, shucks, as my parents found out from the moment I could move around and say “no” I’ve never taken suggestion well. Also, I’m a mother, (no, not in the sense you guys call me that) and I’m selfish. I’d like to see my line of descendence stretch all the way into the future and if possible to the stars.

Those posts yesterday proved that despite schooling, despite instruction, despite the fact that the rest of you aren’t as tri-plated irascible, stubborn b*tches as I am, (which is a good thing. A world full of me would be terrifying, not to mention boring) most people at a gut level feel the same yearning to push our species past the ball of mud and on to new and bright frontiers.

Oh, we know it won’t all be blanket trees and candy fields. If anything we know the dangers far too well. We know in this wave of expansion as in many others, men and women will die, and we’ll lose some of our true best and brightest. Doesn’t matter. In reaching beyond one simple planet, they will bring a better life to the vast majority of us. A life so rich, so free, so full of security and abundance that we can’t imagine it, and our ancestors would have called it heaven.

And that is why I’m talking about it in the future, despite the last decade or so of our being assured this expansion would never happen; despite the last two decades of our being hectored on how this was a pipe dream and we had to learn to be good stewards of this one, tiny corner of the galaxy.

Look my friends, here is wax. Block your ears against the siren song of the nay sayers, the guilt-trippers and the scared sisters who always, always prefer their fireside to the discovery of new lands. Their ilk has always existed and always will. Someday our descendants will come back from their distant space colonies, conquer their descendants and bring them the innovations we discovered meanwhile. And then some of their descendants will join in the expansion to another galaxy and – if it’s possible we’ll find a way – another universe.

Oh, things look nasty right now, but the way we’ve been doing space is expensive and not very efficient. If there’s one thing we’ve learned in recent decades (since we went to the moon) is that not only isn’t big government necessary for big projects, big government is usually an hindrance to big projects, (it tends to be staffed by all those fireside sisters.)

So, government is broke and won’t be doing much for us. That’s fine. Not a problem. Le us do for ourselves. Let us try many ways to get into space. the best will succeed, and after that we’ll continue trying.

Look up into the skies at night see all those stars? Your descendants (direct or collateral) and mine will walk in planets circling them. They’ll be born and die, war and marry in worlds we can only imagine. They’ll change, they’ll grow, they’ll understand more than we can know.

And they’ll dream of bigger things.

*crossposted at Classical Values*

I know you’ll find this riveting, but today it’s all I’m up to post.   Turned out I wasn’t as recovered as I thought.  I found I simply wasn’t up to cleaning the house, so after the book was sent I slept a bit and then we went out to dinner.  Stayed up late talking and for some reason I had a case of middle-of-the-night wide-awakes.

I’m just up now and grabbing coffee, medicating the cats (you don’t want to know!) and then going to lie down and read.  If I feel better later, I’ll vaccum and maybe iron a bit. 

If you’re all very good and eat all your green beans, I might post a blue plate plate special short story later.