Or maybe not so quick. . . so, the Dragon Awards are open for nominations. And it would be kind of cool, don’t y’all think, for Sarah to be nominated? No Man’s Land for science fiction.
But also, there are lots of other deserving creators this year, a number of them from the weekly and special promo posts. Some of our number don’t even stick to books: you may or may not be aware, MCA Hogarth wrote a game!
The best part about this, from my “creators get paid” perspective, is that Finalists get publicity. Winners get publicity. Publicity gets sales. Sales pay creators. Everyone wins!
So please, no fuss or drama, click over and nominate.
I’ve been traveling a fair bit to conventions the last couple years with my elderly mother, and have gotten to see a fair bit of our great country from the non-local perspective. By and large, hotels have someone of Indian subcontinent ethnicity or some African ethnicity at the desk, and the rest of the staff is in the American Indian-to-Hispanic range, and very much NOT English speaking. Whether we’re in the Big Midwestern City, the Small Midwestern Town, the Western Resort Town . . . but last week we ended up in a Small Western University Town, and staffing was very different.
This particular university town is one I’m pretty familiar with. It runs about 20,000 people when school is in session, and half that when school is not. The university also hosts a very large and famous festival during the school year, now honoring one of the major contributors to the school, but during his life, he attended right up until the last year (and I got to meet him). For two weeks in the winter, the entire world shows up. The local hotels are definitely not resort quality, but they don’t belong in such a small town, either. Other than that event and graduation, they look to fill their rooms by hosting whatever conventions they can attract, and they’re pretty good at doing that.
The worker population at those hotels reflects exactly the local demographics. European ancestry, that American Indian-to-Hispanic–but these are all native English speakers level fluency–and a small smattering of other. Front Desk/Housekeeping the day we checked in said she was in the Large Animal Veterinary program.
Americans will take these jobs, if they are allowed to. American university students will take these jobs. Americans who have every expectation of rising far, both in social standing and in income bracket, beyond this work, will take these jobs. They won’t stay there for thirty years: the young lady I talked to would much rather treat sick calves, but they’ll take them and work at them. Hard. That hotel was as clean or cleaner than any of the others, the breakfast prep area was clean (and they had the door open so we could see them breaking the eggs to scramble, unlike the other hotels), their computer system at the front desk was no worse, and they were pleasant and hospitable.
Meanwhile, my own young adult children have been working, not in hotels, but in similar types of low paying low prestige jobs, while working on their own plans for life improvement. Food, mostly. They don’t intend to stay there for a career, but it gets their bills paid (because they know how to be frugal) and builds their savings for the next step.
But I’m noticing that a lot of American parents are trying to protect their kids from those low-paid and unpleasant jobs. Not so much in my region, where half the population farms or ranches, and young adults work on a family corporation owned farm or ranch, or if old enough legally for the neighbor’s ranch. But folks in other regions. And more here every year. “Well, Matt can’t get a job because he has travel soccer.” Don’t do that to your kids, please. My oldest had ballet (which was more hours than his travel sports friends per week) and got a grocery clerk job at sixteen. They worked with him on scheduling. Mostly. And when they didn’t, he learned how to leave a job and find another.
You learn something from those low level jobs that you can’t learn from sports, arts, and other paid-for activities, that you can’t learn from school. Some of the most wildly successful adults I know came from families so poor their parents took their income for the family when they worked as teens, decades ago. The scramble, the hustle, the knowledge that if one job fails another can be found, showing up on time, when they have to pay you and for what, you can’t learn that from an activity your parents pay for you to be part of, or that the government mandates you participate in.
American teens and early twenties are willing to do those jobs, if they’re allowed to. Don’t say “We need immigrants because Americans won’t work.” That’s blatantly untrue. When they’re allowed to, Americans will work. (Americans will insist on being paid fairly according to law, and on safety, and on breaks, and you can’t keep their passport so they can’t leave, but we DO have laws about those things.) If you want young adults to not get into illegal activities to make money, give them legal jobs. Let the high schoolers have jobs even when they’re failing class: not working won’t make them care more about school, working will. Let them work on non-family-owned farms, which is currently illegal in much if not all of the country. Let the junior high and middle schoolers work. Sure, limit their hours, but let them have actual show up to and get paid jobs after school a couple days a week and on weekends. There is not one thing about running a cash register that the average twelve year old cannot do successfully and safely.
Get the government out of the way of Americans working. Get social class out of the way of young Americans working.
We’ll all be better off for it in the long run, and the kids these days will be better off for it in the very short run.
About noon yesterday I got the first note from a college student of my acquaintance, followed very shortly by confirmation from a different student at a different school: Canvas got hacked by a ransom group.
Canvas, for all five of you that have not had to deal with it for a public school, a public charter school, a private school, a college, a university, or any other group that uses it, is a really pretty terrible software platform that lets you read textbooks, download assignments, upload assignments, take exams, check grades, submit grades, etc. It works mostly, depending on the users. Mostly.
Which makes it slightly better than the competition, so many educational entities have signed up. Internationally many.
Almost all the eggs are in one basket, and as those of us who remember the nineties recollect, the tech troublemakers target the biggest basket as much as they can: the payout is better, whether money or chaos.
One friend asked “But what do they think they’ll gain? Who would pay the ransom?”
My answer was “Not everyone is as tech savvy as you are. Think of our local school district, which had to close a school due to declining enrollment, and whose position is ‘we didn’t do anything wrong, it’s home schoolers’. Faced with the ransom message, with a debit card to a slush fund meant to cover paper and toner, and two weeks from final exams, are you absolutely sure that some administrator isn’t going to pay up to avoid more people pulling their kids out angrily and more school closures resulting?”
The policy at the colleges and universities appears to be landing solidly on “We’ll just cancel finals in the affected classes.” So no finals for the kids who waited to the last minute to take the online finals, and the pre-final grade is the grade for the class. Or that’s how it’s playing out for my friends. Colleges I don’t have sources at, or where my sources are busy taking in-person finals right this minute, may be doing other things.
There’s no great answer in the short term.
In the long term, maybe more pen and paper in person exams. I’m old enough to remember blue book exams, and I heard those are coming back in some classes because of AI usage by students, which is a whole other thing, because apparently it’s been found that a number of the students enrolled in online classes and turning in AI essays are not actual people but extraction of loans and grant money fictions who vanish when the funds are gone with no recourse for the government . . . but that’s a different story.
I certainly don’t fondly remember standing in line with the course registration paper in hand, waiting at the registrars’ office to sign up for classes. It worked, but it was obnoxious and a pain. Online WAS quick and easy, comparatively . . . but right now it’s down, so you cannot register.
If you and your children are affected, time for The Old Freeze Your Credit Song and Dance. Except if you did that two months ago for the Blue Cross Blue Shield hack, you’re probably still frozen. Or one of the many, many other hacks, that have become part of our daily lives.
At the same time, our oh-so-safe-by-obscurity Linux distros have had a couple nasty exploits discovered in the last week. Maybe not-so-safe-by-obscurity anymore.
P.S. Those are not MY eggs pictured: mine are considerably dirtier because my hens are messy creatures. I do believe that eggs are probably safe from computer hackers, but the local magpies are hopeful of successful thievery. The roosters think that magpies look like they might be tasty . . . in any event, there are no computers involved in the production of eggs here, and the highest tech is the whiteboard that holds the daily records.
Sarah says to post something fun, while she’s off doing necessary and unfun appointments. I’m not sure about fun, but shocking?
This is the most recent four-footed addition to the family, Hyrokken. She’s an in-family rescue who joined us the end of January, my uncle’s dog (his health is declining), a five-year-old ninety-five pound red and white Malamute, who is exactly as shocking as she looks when she hops up to look in the window in the dusk.
She was raised by cats, and is bullyable by cats. Watching her cringe away from five pounds of hissing black Gertrude will always be funny.
So chaos increases here, as do dog food bills. How are your fuzzy four-footed family members this fine spring day?
(Sarah is working on comments from the editor for Witch’s Daughter today, and also letting the antibiotic kick in.)
I have very little to say today, I’m afraid: the sun is shining between much needed rainstorms, my rain gauge blew away, the weeds are growing faster than the gardens . . . and the dogs relocated the front yard to the sidewalk, a joint project achieved separately in between spates of trying to murder each other. (No, the photo is not one of them. They’re in time out.)
I do finally have the new computer up and running. The old one failed in an entirely improbable and perplexing way, with first Firefox, then Discord, then finally the OS refusing to recognize keyboard input, over a week’s time. Pale Moon, which is my secondary browser, and LibreOffice still both talk to both keyboards. When you can type text in some programs but not in the OS search function box . . . well, it’s probably MY computer.
Spring is as busy as fall around here, with the trees currently enthusiastically enlisting everyone in their reproduction projects whether or not we’re willing participants. And of course the grass is growing, the wildfires are burning, and we’re side-eyeing the large puffy clouds overhead for their intentions regarding rain, hail, and lightening.
The oldest cat is on my lap discouraging gardening work by emitting sleepions, the younger two are probably opening cupboards somewhere, or maybe rewiring something (they are Indy and company’s full siblings). What’s up at your place?
Does anyone want to help remodel with the cats? The Wolf just said something about paint . . .
(Sarah’s taking a day off-maybe-for the sort of chores and appointments that must be done on a weekday between 8 and 5. Yesterday, she said “Post on anything for me” and you were going to get kind of a summery of the absolutely insane and flabbergasting level of local government -ish that is the Water District. Today a Hun sent me a DataRepublican “Hello”, and I figured you’d much more enjoy seeing the probable end of the Senate Majority Leader’s political career as it unfolds. Hopefully I get all the links correct: https://cleanr.aho.st/ is a treasure but one I’m not very good at as an X user. You still might get the Water District some other day: it was wild.)
I think the end of Senator Thune’s career starts here, maybe:
Turns out that @LeaderJohnThune was totally projecting when he said the SAVE Act was an influencer campaign.
Senator John Thune is compromised by a company that literally exists to sell access to himself.
Google/Alphabet, $75,000 to Thune: Among the largest H-1B sponsors in the United States annually. Lobbied against mandatory E-Verify. Employees donated heavily to FWD . us (the Zuckerberg-founded pro-immigration lobbying coalition). Google supported DACA protections.
— DataRepublican (small r) (@DataRepublican) March 10, 2026
I'd been looking at PAC contributions when I should have been looking at the people who actually have daily access to the Capitol – the media. The true lobbyists.
If y’all X users see more to this today, please feel free to add the xcancel links in the comments for our non X user Huns, and many, many, thanks to the Hun who made xcancel and the Hun who sent me the DataRepublican said Hello to Sen. Thune message.
Sarah is at a family reunion of sorts, and expects the regular weekend posts to happen when she needs a break. Please possess your souls in patience if they are late.
Interestingly, eagles sitting on posts, and hawks sitting on posts, and smaller hunter-scavenger birds sitting on posts, are a common feature in my life. They show up to eat what is there in the field that is eating the crop, or what was there eating the crop before the heavy machines rolled through. Trying to find a photo of this, however, on the internet . . . well, I guess eagle on fence post is just not a showy enough eagle for the internet.
Have a lovely Friday. The sun is shining, Gertrude get off the table (cats!), and the weather is suspiciously April-ish for February, as it has been suspiciously April-ish since November, and we have no snow when we should have a couple feet. I expect a very bad fire season in the Western USA, so if you need to make sure you have a rescue inhaler or in house air filters for wildfire smoke, given how the winds blow east, please so do. And the rest of us should get ourselves outside and start clearing hazards.
See you in the comments! Or with the chainsaw . . .
A friend of mine, and one of the regulars here, is responsible for triggering this post by sharing an advertising clip. The person in question can admit to it or not, but credit-or blame-where it’s due and all that. Here is the ad clip:
Before we go any further, I should probably point out that I am, in fact, in my day to day life, a professional musician. Not full-time, which is why I have other gigs (like annoying Sarah, er, reminding her of deadlines and appointments), but I do in fact get paid to play, file taxes on said pay, collect a nice pile of receipts for tax deductions, and all that jazz. I have opinions. And my friend got a nice little rant, then I cleaned it up and fleshed it out for public consumption.
AI is destroying human creativity?
Aurochs coprolites. This comes up over and over, and it’s as foolish and ignorant of why humans create as anything ever was. In fact, if it’s not an AI writing it, it is written either by liars or the most uncreative humans who ever existed. The people who can only color a color by numbers picture, because they lack the creativity to decide what color the shapes should be.
First of all, let’s take the Arts and split them up. Not according to various schemes of utility, but according to whether or not they make original creations. When I sit down at my desk and write music, I am creating. When I sit down with my cello and play J.S. Bach Suite No. 1, I am NOT creating. When I sit down with my cello and improvise? Creating. Playwrights? Create. Actors? Interpret another’s creation so it may be observed by others. Actors? Also improvise, which is creation. Embroider by pattern? Not creating. Create your own pattern? Creating. Change the pattern slightly? Creating, just as arranging music is.
Got that? OK.
Now, when you go listen to me play J.S. Bach Suite No. 1, you are listening to me turning written on a page notes to music. You do not experience the creation, the music, directly, but you experience it through the intermediary of my performance. (Can anyone experience it directly? Yes, sort of: some of us can read music ‘out loud in our heads’. It’s a less common skill than reading words ‘out loud in your head’.)
When you go to the gallery, you experience the sculpture, the paintings, etc., directly. No one stands between you and the art.
When you listen to a recording of music, you are listening to the performance as it was recorded. Got that? You are not experiencing it as J.S. Bach writes it down, hundreds of years ago, you’re listening to someone’s interpretation of symbols on a page. (And we have very strong opinions on what exactly those symbols properly are, and if they’re recorded correctly in the urtext, and who actually wrote down the urtext, and . . . anyway, best discussed at a music school after a concert with adult libations and lots of pencils.)
When you listen to an AI generation of sounds, you are doing the same thing as listening to the recording of a performance. There is no performer present. Physically, it is you and the machine. The machine can create the same pattern of sounds over and over, or you can have it generate a new pattern of sounds, no different than listening to the same recording over and over or putting on a new recording.
Why do musicians play? Because we get something from the playing. Not pay–we often don’t make much if any money. A few do, many don’t break minimum wage. I tell my students to calculate their hours of preparation per performance, then divide the pay by the hours to get their hourly earnings. It’s enlightening: one doesn’t play a wedding for the money, working at McD’s usually pays better. But we’d play anyway, we’d put the practice in anyway, paid or unpaid, it’s what we do, not for a job, but because we are the sort of people who find pleasure in making music.
Why do composers write music? Because we can’t not write music. Why do writers write? Because they can’t not write. Why do painters paint? Because they can’t not paint.
If there were no money, we would still be creating. Humans create. We created stories and songs when we were crouched shivering around our first campfires. We created paintings of ocher on cave walls. We would be creating if we were crouching shivering around campfires in the burned out husks of our cities.
Humans create.
AI may affect how much and when humans get paid for creating, though I doubt it will be any more disruptive than recording and printing were. More people will create not for sale. But most people never created for sale, throughout human history. People create for comfort, for distraction, for education, for a variety of reasons. No one created all the great political commentary tunes of Europe for money (Sur le pont, Pop goes the weasel). No one even claimed credit for those–which would probably have been fatal. They, and their equivalents, will turn up over and over again.
For performing artists, we will continue to get paid by people who need to show social status by live performances, or who simply prefer live performances. (Recorded music has a flat affect to my perception. Not flat in pitch, but lacking depth and resonance.) For creating artists, they’ll find the same kinds of niches for pay.
The rest of humanity will grab some crayons or a guitar or an AI and create what we need when we need it. For creating humans, AI is just a tool. Fancier than some, too complicated for most to understand, and able to achieve close enough to the human’s vision to go on with, as long as it’s not overly restricted.
What makes us create? Well, for the non-religious, I couldn’t say. For the Christians and Jews, and other groups that consider Genesis holy writing, “In the image of God created He them.” We are created in the image of the Creator of all, so of course we create. Creation is an inherent part of what we are.
Now go tell your child a bedtime story, you creator, you.
(Note from Holly: Sarah is well, for a value of still getting over the never ending crud that’s going around. Alive, has eaten breakfast, has taken the editing pencil back from Indy cat who has decided to become an artist, we think . . . but it’s a bit of a time crunch on fiction and . . . dang it, Indy! Give that pencil back! Would y’all buy his artwork if we gave him colored pens and let him draw? Or books if he’s actually trying to write? I wouldn’t put writing past that cat.)
One of my grandmother’s favorite sayings, usually while excusing someone for something stupid or mean they’d done, or even more for continuous counter-productive behavior, was “we don’t make ourselves.”
True as far as that goes, and in the deep intersection between nature and nurture, it’s often very hard to tell who did what.
One of my kids tests off the scale for verbal reasoning/competency. One of my kids tests off the scale for math. Hint, they’re not the kid you’d expect, either for their professions/interests, or from interaction with them.
Partly, I think, because would-be verbal son is so introverted he’s not been around people enough to polish his verbal fluency.
Thing is, he could have, if it were a high value for him and he wanted to do it, get over his introversion and learn social graces and sociability. I know. I acculturated pretty completely, (I’ll never acculturate as completely as if I’d grown up here, because a lot of the learning we do is before we can speak, but I’m say… 95% of the way there, and no worse than an American who spent his first year or two away from the US with foreign relatives, which you know very well happens) and culture is laid so deeply in that it’s not, but it acts like inborn characteristics.
Now breaking your habits of mind and behavior is hard. It feels like going insane. Our minds have all sorts of safeguards in place to prevent that happening, from distrust of what is strange, to the deep, abiding comfort of habit, which pulls you towards routine, which forms a great part of what you are.
You can’t do it without sufficient wish, sufficient will, sufficient motivation.
But it can be done.
We don’t make ourselves, but we sort of do. Take the innate differences between male and female. I realized how massive they were when younger son turned 14. I’ve always been an unusual strong female (perhaps not now. Years of illness have taken their toll.) I don’t remember, anymore, how much I could lift at 30, but I remember the trainer telling me that it was more than the average male. And I had greater endurance. Which I already knew because through the many, many house moves of our thirties, Dan and I would consistently do most of the work, long outlasting any male friends who came to help (and in one notable occasion doing as much as an 8 person team of professionals, because yeah, we were paying but it had to be done sooner than they’d manage.)
HOWEVER that was in a time when I was in exceptionally good shape, and it’s not normal. When younger son — who is a bit more inactive than the rest of this family and at the time had flab instead of muscles — turned out to be able to dead lift a 100 lb. cement sack when I couldn’t. And I was in actual decent shape. And he’d just started getting the call from Mr. Hormone, betrayed by a fall in voice register and a sudden and — to his mother startling — hairiness.
I.e. I know that males, including very young males get an advantage from testosterone that I simply don’t have.
If I wanted hard enough however, I probably could have maintained the strength of my younger years and be “stronger than the average male” (probably just stronger, not you know, overwhelmingy stronger.) which would still cause me to fold like wet kleenex when faced with a male with a modicum of training or in good shape (which I’m going to guess doesn’t describe the “average” male.)
I wasn’t willing to do that. On this side of recovering from serious and prolongued illness, I’m doing my best to actually exercise. I don’t however have any interest in becoming exceptional at strength (if it’s possible, still, at my age, which I doubt.) I just want to be in reasonable good shape, because I have better things to do with my time.
So, what is this in name of?
Oh. We don’t make ourselves.
There will be some time in your life when you’ll either come up against something you really, really want and aren’t good/strong/smart enough to get. Or the thing you always wanted and were smart enough to get will disappoint you so greatly, break you so badly, that you won’t be sure you still want it, much less keep chasing it. What was once interest and desire and the ability to work insanely will turn into “anything but that.”
I don’t know anyone my age who hasn’t experienced times like this at least once: either in career or in work, or with their children.
Sooner or later we all hit the wall and become profoundly broken and find it hard to take one more step, make one more attempt, reach for the brass ring once more. My friend Dave Freer blogged about this.
You will experience this, even if you’re not a writer. You will hit this wall. You will find yourself lost, with the beloved thing now an object of aversion, something you will give anything not to do/be/be around.
What then?
Obviously in the case of some marriages, some professions, even perhaps some living situations, for your sanity, for your peace of mind, for your survival you have to walk away.
But what if you don’t have anything to walk away to? What if you molded yourself into this thing you wanted to be for a lifetime, and you have no other goal, no other dream?
Well, then, again to quote grandma, you must forge your gut into a new heart. And you must march on.
Because you have nothing if you give it up. And you die. You either die physically or you kill a part of yourself. And you can’t go on.
No marriage, no career, no child rearing will be as it was in your dreams. When you embarked on this, with flags flying and trumpets blowing, be fair, you had no clue what it was like. You didn’t even know what it was truly like.
Just like no plan survives engagement with the enemy, no dream of “I want to be/do/create” ever lives up to the image in your mind. And every career field, filled — alas — with humans is filled with suckitude and failure. If you run from this, you’ll meet it again, sometimes over and over again. And you’ll die lost and embittered.
Forge your gut into a new heart and go on. Older, wiser, experienced, prepared. And make the thing you love into as close as possible as what you imagined. Ransom yourself from the depths of bitterness and horror and tiredness.
A couple days ago, Sarah had the bright idea of listing off a bunch of authors on X, and asking her followers who else writes and Xeets. So we have a list, of Indy, Trad, and whatever other flavors of writers are around. This also prompted me informing a whole lot of folks that if you get paid for it you are a professional, and yesterday’s repost at MGC of the Real Writer Certificate. (You can get yours here: https://madgeniusclub.com/2026/01/21/the-velveteen-author/)
Here is the list of Xeeting authors. They may or may not post politics, writing, or anything else: the single requirement was that someone who follows Sarah put the handle on the list. (FTR IndyAntifa is MadMike. Because trollolol.)
With that out of the way, you may notice that some of your favorite authors are pointing you to places other than Amazon a lot more than they have previously. This is likely mostly for the very practical reason that Amazon has been having some code issues lately. They appear to be fixing it as fast as they reasonably can, but it is, I am told by those who have reason to know, a large and kludgy amount of total code. They have informed authors of the problems, but the problems are on going, and if you encounter one on the buyer end, go ahead and report it to them.
For instance, I went hunting for a brand new book by a friend that I knew Sarah wanted a link for. Brand new, as in it had only dropped that moment, the friend had posted it on Facebook and as is the nature of Facebook, it put a bunch of tracking crud in the link. I had the author name and title in hand. And Amazon’s website refused to turn off the 4 stars plus filter for me. Which, being a brand new book, I could not find, because no one had yet finished reading it and starred it. I griped to friends: Nathan didn’t have the broken filter issue and was able to get the actual clean link for me.
That sort of silly code problem. If we can’t find books, we can’t buy books, and authors really like us to buy books.
And if no one told you, the new Dresden Files dropped yesterday. Early reports from friends include “Didn’t sleep” and “Work’s going to suck today but worth it”. So see you on the other side!
AND I got to see another chapter of the sequel to No Man’s Land. I adore the first voice character. She’s the kind of woman I aspire to be. Though maybe leaving fewer dead bodies behind . . . but they all deserve it, so . . . yeah. When I grow up, I want to be Vic.
According To Hoyt 