Category: Uncategorized

*It’s interesting. I’ve gone on becoming more and more myself, to the point the person who wrote this post feels like a stranger. I guess this makes a good “How it Begun.” – SAH*

Whole a blast from the past from November 2013

So I thought I’d give a report, only it’s not a report on the current state of my writing so much as on the current state of my psyche – and no, it’s not whining.  In fact, it’s surprisingly not whining.

It’s almost exactly a year since I decided to throw caution and social manner to the winds and be myself as hard as I could on this blog, as well as everywhere else.

I’m not even absolutely sure how to characterize this “coming out” since I find being called “conservative” almost puzzling when my ideal state is almost a complete overturn of the current crony capitalism and also has bloody nothing to do with “conservative” in Europe which implies a belief in classes, etc.  But I knew that when I decided to start talking about what I believe the “establishment” would characterize me as “conservative” and also, therefore, as “a bad person.”

Look, first, I’m going to point out that having to hide your opinions, political or otherwise, is likely the normal state of the human race.  I’m not whining (or not much) except in comparison perhaps with an ideal state, where every man shall sit beneath his vine and his olive tree and no man shall make him afraid – something that has yet to happen in human life.

One of the unspoken conditions of getting a job is to pretend to be the sort of person that your employer would like to employ.  This can mean something innocuous, like you’re the sort of person who is clean and polite and show up on time, but because humans are humans you pick people like you (or like what you want to be like) to associate with, so you’re likely to pick people on less tangible characteristics.  It is not a slander to say that religious people might prefer someone of their religion.  Throughout history, immigrant communities have preferred to hire someone of their own ethnicity.  And people who’ve gone to the “correct” colleges and hold the “correct” opinions are likely to hire the same.  Which is what we’re faced with in the writing community.

It only seems strange because it’s so uniform, and there used to be almost no refuge.  That is a side effect of both the concentration of publishing into a very few houses and of the “long march” that the extreme left has engaged in in this country.  (Very long – if we’re to believe Heinlein, and I do, then they were in a fair way to taking over one of the major parties in the thirties.)

To me, too, hiding my opinions was perfectly normal.  Look, guys, if I hadn’t learned the fine art of double think, there’s a good chance I wouldn’t have survived my high school years, let alone emerged from college with a degree in the liberal arts.  I just pretended, when answering the questions that they were set in a separate universe, where Marxism works.

So when I started trying to break into writing, I didn’t consciously think of hiding my opinions, but I also didn’t go out of my way to rub anyone’s nose in them.  And then, after I’d broken in and talked to some editors – including the surreal conversation with the one who thought libertarians wanted to ban the internal combustion engine (and also were close kin to Satan) – I started not only purposely hiding my politics but laying in a trail of confusion and razzle dazzle both in my works and out of it.

Mind you, my opinions are “diverse” enough.  As most of you know I have no issues with gay marriage, but I do have an issue with forcing churches to perform it.  I can see euthanasia being legalized as a personal decision (none of my business, even if I’d try to talk a friend out of it) but hate the idea of the creep (people who are allowed to euthanize while depressed/mentally ill) and also of the state (or even the establishment) convincing people to do this “for the good of others.”  I won’t say I don’t have an issue with abortion – in terms of “war on women” the health issues that attend it, the SOCIETAL issues that attend it, and the almost universal pressure to sanctify it are pretty icky.  I’ve talked about it on this blog, and I don’t intend to go there again.  I think the whole “you’re a human if mommy says so” corrodes our civil liberties.  I also think it’s almost impossible to stop before ten weeks, and the whole idea of a regulatory apparatus to stop it completely makes me queasy. In my more annoyed moments I wonder if the regulatory apparatus to stop the murder of ADULTS is worth is.

Beyond that, it’s a gut thing.  I was raised “pro choice” – no other option since I grew up in Europe and all the bien pensant were “pro choice” – but I haven’t called myself that since the first time I got pregnant.  Personal. Internal.  Intense.  Let it go.

However, the way the establishment works, it doesn’t matter how many things you agree with them on, if you don’t agree with them on something, then you are Satan.  It is, I think, the result of being a small, insular society, no different from a tiny village in an isolated region.  They are afraid of the stranger and those who are different.

So I learned to play on the opinions I shared with them and not mention the ones I didn’t.  The fact that they tend to assume “all smart people agree with me” helped me greatly.  As did the fact they believe “conservatives” froze sometime between the nineteenth century and the fifties.  The fact I think women have minds, the fact I believe melanin has nothing to do with capacity to perform intellectual tasks.  If I touted those, I was immediately assumed to be “one of the good people.”

Not enough, mind.  I was never willing to parrot the whole party line enough to become one of the precious darlings.  That’s fine.  But it was enough to keep publishing in a broad spectrum of houses.  And I didn’t go so far, I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror.

I thought…

I confess I didn’t realize how much pressure I’d been under.  I used a nom de blog to comment on political blogs (and cause mischief.)  I was in the background of several discussions as the Dan Rather thing unraveled for instance.  But in the daylight world, I pretended never to read anything outside Main Stream media.

Then Toni Weisskopf, who had been talking to me ABOUT Puppet Masters asked if I wanted to write the afterword to the re-edition of the book.

There’s no way I could pass that up, even if it meant outing myself.  In fact, at the time I remember thinking “Should I?”  then I thought “Come on, how many of them will read Heinlein?”

As it turns out surprisingly few.  In fact, each step in this “coming out” was attended with a few more whispers, but nothing overt, until a year ago when I finally started seeing doors overtly shut in my face. Which is fine.  I knew what I was doing.

It still comes as a LONG journey.  Four years ago, I practically spit coffee on my monitor when I saw my name mentioned on Instapundit (turned out to be about one of my books.)  The last year I’ve now and then helped out when Glenn is on vacation…  And yet it was only when I decided not to stay away from politics on this blog that people got upset.  And frankly the posts they get REALLY upset about are the anti-Marxist ones.  (All the while assuring me they are NOT Marxist and that Marxism is dead.  Guys, historians are going to have a field day with our time.  If enough civilization survives that there are historians.)

Have doors shut off?  Well, yes.  Though nothing overtly enough that I could tell you “this is because I came out.”  — I think in the modern day, discrimination, whether from the left or right, is more subtle than that, which is why people feel the need to fake overt discriminatory episodes.  They know it’s there, and they can’t prove it, and they go unhinged – and frankly, with the advent of indie at the same time, the couple of doors that shut off were a blessing in disguise – it meant I had SOME time to go indie in, in addition to my work for Baen.

So – a year in, what has my final throwing open of the ideological closet doors meant?

Externally, not much.  Indie gave me the ability to do what a friend had advised and I couldn’t do YEARS ago: a) never work for people I don’t respect.  B) don’t write something just because you can sell it and you need the money.

Even if I hadn’t come out politically, my external demeanor would be the same, because… indie.

Internally…

Internally… it’s a whole other matter.  I didn’t realize, honestly, I didn’t, how much effort it took just to hold up the false front.  Imagine that you have to go through an entire day holding up one of those Greek theater masks in front of your face with your right hand.  Everything you do is with your left, and you can’t shift your arm, you don’t have flexibility to rest that hand, you don’t—

Like that.  But over years and years.  The brain space devoted to playing chess with potential would-be guessers of my real opinion, and more importantly, the brain space required to not say something I couldn’t live with while not openly dissenting, were driving me batty, and I didn’t even know it.

Mind you, I wasn’t even any good at dissembling. I’ve since found that everything I think shows on my face (which explains so much.)

BUT just keeping this side of open opposition was taking so much nervous energy that it’s a miracle I could write at all.

A year later?  A year after being able to admit to my own thoughts in public?  How does it feel?

Well, it feels very strange – you have to remember I grew up in an environment where most of my beliefs are beyond heretical.  It’s the habit of a life time. – Sometimes I put up posts, and this will be one of them (note I’m putting it up the day before Thanksgiving with blog traffic in the tank.  I’m brave, but not crazy.) – and wait for the blow to fall and cringe at the screaming that will surely start.

But it also feels… well… the way to describe it is that I have more room to be myself in.  It’s like I grew up in a little box and now for the first time I can stretch out.

I feel – whole.  That would be the best way to describe it.  Just whole.

So – is that worth it?  I mean, I don’t go out of my way to yell my politics at the hairdressers, in the grocery store, on the street (okay, I do shout at certain bumper stickers, but I always did!  And it’s in the privacy of my own car) or in social occasions.  BUT when I’m having a discussion with someone, I can let my reason go where it will and not be afraid it will endanger my livelihood.

And when I’m writing, I don’t have to think “How does this belief sound if I were a NYC liberal?”  I can let the writing flow, and be what it needs to be.

That alone – that alone is worth it. A thousand times yes.  It’s not a luxury most human beings have been able to have throughout history.

The great artists of the past, and the great writers too, were all hemmed in on politics and had to step carefully.

But we’ve come to a point I couldn’t keep quiet any longer.  We might be playing for all the civilizational chips.  And it feels very good not to be on the sidelines.  And mostly – from a personal point of view – it feels good to be whole and to be myself as hard as I can.

Wrecking what’s there is not necessarily bad. It just depends on what you’re wrecking or how.

I remember when I was fifteen or so, going by a house that was being demolished and being a bit sad, because the room exposed was a nursery, with a beautiful forest scene painted on it, with all sorts of cute animals. It was something that was sad to destroy, but I realized that the structure of the house was probably no longer really habitable. I mean, Portugal is littered with these: beautiful little urban palaces, which CAN work, if you have an army of servants but really don’t anymore. And which don’t have a bathroom, or what we’d consider a kitchen.

I still want to take them all, and fix them all.

This morning, in the Huns group, we got in a discussion that made me a wee bit uncomfortable, because it was “this has to go.” And “this has to be destroyed.”

It made me think of the left who thinks if they wrecking ball everything, then paradise happens. And that’s not the way it is. That’s not the way any of that works.

However…. However… part of what we were talking about were the deeply dysfunctional beliefs that have crept in over the last 100 years. Like “Smart women don’t raise their own kids” and “smart women don’t have kids” and…..

How do you wrecking ball assumptions?

Well, not by destroying the people or the institutions (though a lot of institutions need to be changed, yes.)

We destroy these assumptions and the institutions they are built on, by creating new and functional ones.

Leave the indiscriminate wrecking ball to them. Go and live our contrary assumptions.

Go and build.

Let them be the destroyers. Destroying never wins, particularly when it’s based on fantasy, not reality.

Go and build.

In the end we win, they lose.

You’re not going to ask why, are you?

I’ve been waking in the night not with the horrors, but with a dull, tired resignation, half wanting the worst to happen, so that we can move on… which will only matter if I survive.

This has been going on for two weeks, after a dream so bad, so dreary that I will not describe it for fear that will seal it into truth. I’ve told it to three of you. But I don’t know if I conveyed the sheer sense of resigned dread in it. The sense of something horrible after which life will never be the same.

This winter approaches rapidly and with a clarifying sense. I pray it will be just tight enough to wake people up, but not so tight we become…. something else. And I pray for my family in Europe. I think things will be harder there. Not as bad as in poorer countries, though. And I’m forever grateful that Portugal — though not warm in the North — is a Mediterranean climate, and not as cold as say Germany.

And I wait. And I feel dread, as though something dark and cold is moving in the world, something that doesn’t like humans or — truth be told — life at all. It has invaded people’s minds, the minds of a self proclaimed elite who’d rather destroy all of humanity than allow us to be free of their plans.

Northern Europeans are in the face of a cold winter and possible hunger trying to turn off their remaining sources of energy and stop farmers producing.

Our idiotic governing Junta is studying plans to dim the sun’s light. Because computer models show them the Earth has a fever. This despite the fact that warmth has never hurt humans, and cold always does. Despite the fact that their computer models haven’t proven right, ever, and are in fact as reliable as those that showed the Wu-flu decimating humanity. (I speak advisedly.)

And our idiotic titular “president”, the FICUS (Fraud In Chief of the US) has tried to bait four nations now into nuking us. He’s now reduced to baiting 2nd line nuclear powers, to wit Pakistan. Bets are open on who will be next. Israel I suspect, knowing the minds of these idiots, but India is a contender, and hey, England has a chance.

Why?

I don’t know. Because ruling over a decimated land appeals more than having his carefully constructed public image destroyed in public? Because what they’ve done is so heinous that humanity will rightly recoil from them, if they find out? Because enough consciousness of their sins and failings remains that they’d rather kill everyone than admit it?

Or of course because they hate us. They hate us for being us, for being individuals, for refusing to be manipulated like widgets.

It is a bright and clear day where I live. But it might well be one of those spectacular Colorado sunsets I miss just a little, where it looked like the world had been dipped in blood, and you heard thunder rumble just over the horizon.

The waiting is unnerving. And I don’t know if anything I do, if anything any of us does has any lasting meaning.

But I believe it does. I believe it will find echoes if not now, not far off.

I also don’t believe we will be nuked. Or if we are, it won’t be where the idiots think. I saw them bandy a map from the eighties, showing all the now closed/vacated silos in the heartland, as though trying to bait the enemy into nuking flyover. But I know how foreign minds work, and even they know we’ve decommissioned most silos. They also know — from knowing their own countries — the way to utterly cripple us: Hit the five or six biggest cities. Our centers of government.

It would lead very neatly to that dream I had. That vivid, grey, evil nightmare.

… it is not what I want. But it might not be mine to prevent. Just as the slow grinding of scarcity and anger and some precipitating incident that would lead to the same moment is not mine to prevent.

So… So I’ll do what I can do. And I’ll enjoin you to do the same.

Go forth, and seed doubt and discord. Oh, no. Not among our own, not doubt in America, and who we are.

Look, we live surrounded by people who not only believe things that aren’t so, but believe impossible things that lead them to commit horrible acts.

No, I’m not saying to confront them. I’m saying to be smart. Assume the superior sneer, the sarcasm. Strike when safe, and do it with a light hand.

That’s how they’ve been taking apart Western civilization. With stupid, but assured, and superior-sounding sarcasm. “Oh, Washington and the cherry tree? Don’t tell me you believe that.” Sarcastic voice “I cannot tell a lie” Snort.

Would it surprise you to know the only thing they have against that story is that it cannot be proven? No? Well, it did me, but it shouldn’t have.

So you know, when they say that the Earth will boil in twenty years… assume the superior smile, roll eyes. “That late? I thought it was supposed to be like 20 years ago. And we weren’t supposed to have any snow by now.” Shrug of shoulder, grin. “And wouldn’t that make my life easier in Winter.”

“Inequality of income is bad? Only if the poor can’t eat. Other than that, honestly why would you care?” Giggle. “Envy, right? Yeah. I wish I had my own jetplane too. But what the heck.”

“Overpopulation? Yeah. You’re right. We’re totally running out of space in the land. Quick, go tell all the small cities offering people money for someone to move there.” (No, really, look it up.)

And go forth and teach too.

We live in a time of profound ignorance. In some ways times are always of profound ignorance, but now the apparatus that should be devoted to education teaches only lies and made up nonsense, while resolutely keeping people from learning anything that might help.

Teach. Teach in small ways if you can.

One of you got nicknamed Anime at Fencon because she couldn’t convey her name’s spelling at registration. I now want her to do the eyes. (Grin.)

This reminded me that years ago in a Media… d*mn it, can’t remember the name of the store. It has closed now… the cashier wore a name tag saying Genesis.

Being a geek, I enthused, “Oooh, what a lovely and unusual name. Like the book in the Bible.”

“It’s a book in the Bible? I thought it was a band.”

So I explained. That the band was named for the book of beginnings. Quickly, and with a smile.

Do that. Don’t act horrified, don’t browbeat.

Slavery? Well, it is horrible we had it, given our creed, but the whole world had it, till the industrial revolution. We weren’t the last to abolish it in the west. It persists in Africa and the middle East. (Don’t argue, just inform. Shrug if they argue and say “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion. Not his own facts.”)

Colonization? Every species colonizes. Otherwise our ancestors would still be fish.

Indigenous people were noble savages? There are no noble savages. All humans are imperfect.

Say it. When it’s safe, when you’ll not be physically attacked or fired or– Just say it. Interject some truth in the fog of lies.

Truth and reality are coming back to the world.

I pray it not be in fire and blood. But I wake up with the dull certainty I don’t get what I want.

And what I — and you — can do might not be much. But we’d better do what we can to minimize the hurt and the loss.

Be not afraid. Fear solves nothing and makes everything worse.

This too shall pass. And the light at the end of the tunnel is not a train. Don’t be ridiculous. Where would we get fuel for a train.

If we’re lucky, it won’t be all consuming fire either.

Go work towards a better outcome. Maybe it counts for nothing. Or maybe we get lucky. In either case nothing is lost and something might be helped.

Go.

Book promo

If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months (unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, by clicking through and buying (anything, actually) through one of the links below, you will at no cost to you be giving a portion of your purchase to support ATH through our associates number. A COMMISSION IS EARNED FROM EACH PURCHASE.
*Note that I haven’t read most of these books (my reading is eclectic and “craving led”,) and apply the usual cautions to buying. – SAH*

FROM ROBERT A. HOYT: Almost Curable

Almost Curable’s fourteen short stories take you on a journey to equal few others. There are fantasies, like a long-dormant guardian waking to save a lost boy; or a luckless medieval princess finding her destiny; or even an angel helping a tech nerd fight off the devil, and then there are nightmares, from a steampunk adventure in which the characters have to face a literal dragon, and where dark elf ancestry can brand you for life. Or a land of living sugar slowly losing its fight with evil.
There are cautionary tales, like the one of the fully automated bio grocery store, or the one about AI watching your children.
And then then there are stories we don’t know what to do with — and doubt you will either — such as the one about the zombie dinosaur who is too cute to put down.
Enjoy a journey of adventure and wonder through these amazing stories.

FROM FIONA GREY: Glitter: A Professor Porter Short Story (Professor Porter Paranormals)

Professor June Porter is worried. Her daughter Medina has shown no signs of magic, leaving her defenseless and isolated among magicians. Unless, of course, everyone’s about to discover just how special Medina is.

FROM RICHARD F. WEYAND: Hecate (Pantheon Book 1)

Recently widowed engineer Timothy Conner would always remember it as the day his life changed forever. The day he went to the estate sale.

Timothy Conner bought an ancient book and got a cat into the bargain. But the cat and the book concealed a centuries-old secret. Conner probes that secret and releases an ancient being of unimaginable power.

Life for Timothy Conner would never be the same. The world would never be the same.

Because the world had never been what he had always thought it was.

FROM J. M. NEY GRIMM: Eurydice Otherwise (The Hades Cycle Book 1

She’s not Eurydice, but she’s caught the eye of hell’s king…

Phoebe, a nature spirit of ancient Greece, loves her mountain birthplace and intends never to leave it. But the Olympian Artemis’ dazzling glamor lures her away to join the goddess’ retinue of handmaidens.

Initially the handmaidens welcome Phoebe warmly, but their friendship turns to bullying once Artemis turns her back. Phoebe’s inexperience makes her no match for the mean girls, who win every verbal battle.

And when Phoebe chooses a protector other than the often-absent Artemis, she courts a danger far worse than cruel taunts or stinging slaps. Unless she learns to value herself for herself—rather than depending on the regard of others—she will perish in Hades’ depths.

Eurydice Otherwise is the intense first tale in The Hades Cycle. If you enjoy ancient mythology brought to vivid life, you’ll love the entrancing characters, inventive world building, and startling twists in J.M. Ney-Grimm’s gripping short story of the old gods.

FROM C. V. WALTER: Healed by His Alien Nurse (Alien Brides Book 7)

Coming soon…..

FROM LAURA MONTGOMERY: Fractional Ownership

When his company demands either a move to Mars or the loss of his job,perpetual plaintiff Lewis Ostrow finds he can’t even get a ticket to the world without lawyers.A short story.

FROM ALMA T. C. BOYKIN: Noble, Priest, and Empire: Merchant and Empire Book Seven

Valdher of the Wilds, Lady of the Forest

Unwanted survivor, failure, Halwende cost his father money and should never have become heir. When Valdher chooses him as priest, no one is prepared for what follows, least of all Halwende.

Sneelah of the Snows, Lady of the Ice

Young in his power, Aglak Rothbard settles long-simmering disputes. With force. Icy-cold force, just like the goddess he serves.

One man seeks to open the raw, new lands in the north for settlement, as his Lady commands. The other seeks to balance rapid change and the desires of a deity reluctant to release her hold on the north. When long-forbidden magic is brought back to light and used for ill purposes, both men and their deities must work together for the good of the Northern Empire. Two men and their patrons, strong in power and stronger in will. Who will be master of the northern lands?

FROM SARAH A. HOYT: Darkship Thieves

Athena Hera Sinistra never wanted to go to space. Never wanted see the eerie glow of the Powerpods. Never wanted to visit Circum Terra. She never had any interest in finding out the truth about the Darkships.
You always get what you don’t ask for. Which must have been why she woke up in the dark of shipnight, within the greater night of space in her father’s space cruiser, knowing that there was a stranger in her room. In a short time, after taking out the stranger—who turned out to be one of her father’s bodyguards up to no good, she was hurtling away from the ship in a lifeboat to get help.
But what she got instead would be the adventure of a lifetime and perhaps a whole new world—if she managed to survive….
A Prometheus Award Winning Novel, written by a USA Today Bestseller.

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.

So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.

We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: WILD

*Sorry. It’s the sleep thing. I’d almost not slept the night before, so I slept like 11 hours before I could get moving this morning. So, I got up very late, and I NEED to clean the house, because husband has the day off and plans for late afternoon. I know I’ve been playing hooky a lot this week. Bear with me. I’ll try to make it better. – SAH*

The Masks Are Coming Off- A Blast From the Past From August 2018

For years, being a conservative or — in my case — a libertarian (no step on snek) in the arts, in writing, in publishing, in any cultural enterprise was an exercise in going insane.

You knew what was going on in private, you knew how hard they could hit on what absolutely minor and ridiculous points, but the public in general was not aware of any bias, and if you complained, they thought you were paranoid.

This was particularly the case when you were small potatoes, or  when what they were doing was rejecting short stories or asking you to change your books.

Sure, I could sense the principles behind it, and how changing my books would make them say something I didn’t want to, but at the same time there was the weird feeling “um… is this true?  Or am I imagining it?  I’m a small-time writer, writing in a tiny-small-time field.  How could they possibly micromanage it to this extent?”

It was particularly hard for me because I grew up under socialist (national then international) regimes, with occasional outbreaks of outright Ocasio-Cortez er… I mean Communism.  This both allowed me to see the holes in it (no, truly, even at 13 or so, studying Marxism in five high school courses will cause you to see the holes) and, once I’d decided I was against it (I was actually fairly left, in the US meaning until my mid-twenties.  Couldn’t help being.  Young, stupid, and raised in a soup of leftists “facts”) I started seeing all the little ways the establishment — educational, cultural, arts — pushed people towards the idea of for lack of a better term “the inevitable certainty of Marxist victory.” The inevitability and echo chamber are essential, because Marxism is not particularly convincing if you look at it.  If you’re sure it will triumph, though you’ll pick up a vast majority of “the scared” (which are way more than the “convinced”)who want to be eaten last or not at all by adopting the philosophy now and being strident.

So, coming from that background, my “feelers” detected all sorts of things.

In my entire — 34? well, if you count hidden pen names and work for hire more like 40 novels, but never mind — I had very few edits.  Mostly the books get copy edited, not edited.

About 3 books were “edited” which amounted to “remove this scene, move that one” “I don’t think this sentence says what you think it does” and “this will heighten tension.”  Those were as far as I could tell very innocuous.

Only two books had rewrite requests, and both of those, had I followed through on the rewrite would have changed the books completely, in one case yeah, to fit with feminist and “race” narrative (they wanted the Masai woman from the first book to accompany the two white guys to India on the adventure because “she’s as good as they are” — which no one was disputing, though perhaps less equipped for yet another culture change — and when I objected that if we took her to India we would get into issues of Indian racism, I was told that only whites were racist), and in another case to have my character LEAD rather than oppose the future analog of the French revolution.  My refusal to do those re-writes, because then the books would say what I didn’t want them to say severely damaged, if not broke, my relationship with the respective publishing houses. (Yes, and I know some of you will recognize the book and go, “but that was… it can’t be.”  What you don’t get is that I don’t have that big a name, and that the house isn’t MAJORITY libertarian/conservative.  It just allows it and it depends on who you’re actually dealing with.)

But this was all done covertly, behind the scenes, and of course none of us could talk.  First because we’d seem like paranoid loons.  I mean, we’re complaining about things no one saw.

Second, because we would never work in that town again.

As this started to change, so did the pressure on writers become more open and more obvious.

This case is… well, let’s say I’ve known more like this than not.  Houses are actually willing to lose money as long as they can micro-manage the message.

And boy, do they micro manage.  Yep, at that level.  None of their “intended” bright future can be questioned, not even the incidental bits, like “a female president wold be the best thing ever.” or “Leftists are always wonderful.”

And no, of course they’re not doing it on purpose, in the sense that they’re not trying to consciously push every little detail of the message.  That would be exhausting, and also require them to be super-geniuses (they aren’t.) I’ve known and been friends with a lot of lefties before the current frothing times.  Haven’t dropped them, though some of them have dropped me.  It’s not that they consciously police every detail.  It’s that they are immersed in this “vision” that includes every little detail of the socialist paradise and its coming, and they absorb the latest directive from the echo chamber. So when they see something against that, they flinch and want the painful part removed.  Like, in the French Revolution book, I suspect someone looked at how I was denying that equality of outcomes was a good thing, and got very upset “no, no, she’s supposed to be supporting these.” probably even considering what I had done an error, not an intended thing.

But that’s traditional, and look, guys, I have friends in journalism and in education, and I know they get the same exact pressures.  “No, no no.  You can’t teach that.  You must teach this.”  “No, you don’t want to report that.  Or at least remove this word.  Otherwise it gives people the wrong idea.”

Heck, sometimes headlines get changed and strange assemblies to discuss some current events get caught (so much of these when kids were in school.)

So here’s the bad news: our culture has been immersed for almost a 100 years in a cohesive, monolithic narrative.  A narrative that moved steadily left, with no relenting.  This is why those of us who are older than about 35 grew up in a world where voicing a dissenting — conservative or libertarian — opinion got you labeled “crazy”and “uneducated”.  If you were denying what everyone knew, confirmed multiply from unrelated fields like news, research (oh, so easily manipulated, particularly in the soft sciences) and entertainment, then obviously you were either crazy or uneducated or, yah, stupid.  This is how leftism became a positional good.

The good news?  The barriers are coming down, the doors are blowing open, and now we know we’re not alone, we know we’ve been lied to and manipulated.  Sometimes we don’t realize the magnitude of the manipulation which, yeah, can be staggering.

And yeah, I know, some people on the right are convinced indie channels like Amazon are out to get them.  We know facebook and twitter and yeah Google are.

I contend Amazon isn’t — yet.  None of the cases I’ve seen are convincing.  Also, when it comes to indie publishing, they can hit a few, mostly on covers and titles, but they can’t do this kind of micromanagement that trad pub does.  Why?  Because they can’t.  Because they’re not dealing with 10 or even twenty books a quarter.  To police every indie novel, every story that goes up?  I would take a massive work force, and not the third-world-country-uncertain-in-English one that Amazon hires.

Won’t happen.  Not saying that we don’t need alternatives, and yeah, we’re working on that.

But that’s exactly the thing.  PRECISELY.  In exact detail.  There are alternatives. Or there will be, once things become untenable.  And as the masks come off, as each corrupt medium and source goes full turnip, people shy away from it.  Not just us, mind you, but the Muddled Middle.  How many people think CNN is reliable anymore?  The crazier they go, the more they make their agenda obvious, the shakier they get.

And when they reach a certain point, alternatives become viable.  Even when we think they can’t.  Look at journalism, which we thought was immovable.  But it’s not.

The USSR had to regulate typewriters, because they were dangerous to its stability of uniform message.  So were copiers and mimeographs.  Mimeographs, which in the west caused only a ripple of really bad fanfic could bring the ability to control information down.  Then fax machines came in and it was goodbye.

The current technology has issues, but one thing it’s doing is making it difficult for the left to maintain the unified narrative and view of the world without which it CANNOT survive.

Sure, I won’t guarantee they won’t win some elections.  Given their amazing fraud machine, they might even win most of them.  And yes, I know how dangerous that is, because it can take us into actual blood on the streets and much much worse, a reaction-regime which is not America in any recognizable way.

But in the end, regardless of how rocky it gets, we win, they lose.  Because they can only survive where every voice repeats the same and logic never intrudes.  And that’s not the world our technology is shaping.

Be not afraid!

Yes, I’ve still been having nightmares. And I’m obviously low on coffee. Which is why it’s so good I got a shipment of king Harv, to wit Hurricane blend.

Yes, they’re funny.

And because I’m fighting the urge to crawl back into bed, and I have a Barbarella script to finish, I’m going to link their funny page/homage to the late King Harv, himself.

King Harv, a man for all coffees seasons

You are not your brain. Or perhaps I should say “you’re not your intellect.” Your body is not just a meat suit. And your brain is not just a wet lump in your skull.

If you internalize this, really internalize it, it will solve a lot of the problems moderns (Post-moderns?_ have interfacing with life. It might even allow you to forgive yourself for what seem like unforgivable slips from what you believe and want to be.

First, I’ll confess I suffer from a serious case of forgetting I have a body. Not wishing my body were different. Not thinking of it as a conveyance, but purely forgetting I am a physical being.

The apex of this was a panel at which I was the moderator, and the rest of the panelists were women and I said they were all women but me. (Perhaps that’s why idiots got the idea I was “really” a white Mormon male?) Understand I wasn’t thinking of myself as male. I’d just forgotten I had a body and therefore a sex. And if my husband — who knows me better than should be legal and knew exactly what had happened — hadn’t shouted with laughter from the first row, I’d never have realized I’d said anything wrong. Even while the other panelists blinked at me in horror.

This is caused, of course, by the fact that I live too much in my own head. Look, there are entire worlds in there, and more fascinating toys than I can explain, and I don’t mean just the fictional stuff. I like exploring ideas or lines of scientific inquiry and running them to ground.

When the kids were little and I could afford very few books, I got the fiction from the library and used what little money I had to build my biology, paleontology, history library.

But — I want to make this clear — I’m not just a mind. The mind is housed in a brain, which in turn is subjected to whatever is going on with the body — turning into a gnome at a speed that dismays me. Or perhaps a dwarf, given the hair on chin — that houses it, be it chronic pain or hormone imbalances, lack of sleep or improper nutrition, or the fact that I was kept locked in the house for two fricking years, with few ways out.

This was brought home to me starkly when editing Darkship Renegades. Semi-spoiler — is it possible to have spoilers for a book that’s been out for almost ten years? — one of the central subplots of the book is a horror one, though it’s achieved by theoretically (my research person tells me now validated with some research from Scotland; curiously while I was finishing editing the book for re-issue) scientific means: one of my characters has his brain damaged and taken over by another personality, one which is also brain damaged.

My first contact with this book when I started re-editing was to be annoyed at myself back then, because structurally it’s not really a novel. It’s two novels intertwined and enmeshed. If I were writing it today it would be two completely separate books. But then the book within the book, the possession plot would have come across as complete horror.

Would it surprise you to know that this subplot was not there at all in the outline? Or that as I read it again, to do a re-edit, I got the horrible feeling I was reading an SOS?

You see, when I wrote the novel, I felt as if my brain were… well, being taken by someone else was a description, though what I actually felt like was that it was dissolving.

That I managed to keep the blog going and write novels in that state was the astonishing thing. I now know that Alzheimers probably won’t stop me writing novels. It will just make it harder.

Oh, before you flood me with diagnosis: I know exactly what caused it — I was suffering from untreated (and fairly weird) hypothyroidism. The fairly weird part meant that every doctor who looked at me went “Oh, you’re hypothyroidal” (the mask is fairly obvious to anyone who’s seen it) and then testing and going “No. It’s normal.” and stopping there. Until one didn’t… three years after that novel. (It got worse before it got better.)

The damage was extensive enough, I’ve been recovering ever since.

What it felt like, inside, was like driving a car on an icy road. If you’ve found yourself ever doing that, you know exactly what I mean. You find yourself sliding, you correct, you slide in the other direction. Only the car was a thought, and the icy road was a mind that JUST didn’t work and had patches of “white matter abnormalities.” Which amounts to holes in the brain network, basically.

What it involved in practical fact, while writing, was keeping a notebook beside me, in which I had names and descriptions of characters and the place I’d left them (and doing that) the last time they were seen. Because five pages later, I’d have forgotten.

Yes, I’m all better now. Not well, as recovery is loooong. I only recently stopped having to keep a pad with the names and descriptions of secondary characters, because otherwise in chapter eighteen John would be very surprised because the last time we saw him, in chapter 13, his name was Jim. But now that’s not a problem either, so that’s good.

But it is amazing how many of my novels back then involved a character’s brain being taken over by something else or being unable to coordinate thoughts. Which was a feat in mystery, where I had a character get serious concussion for that effect.

Now re-reading, it’s obvious that my body was desperately trying to communicate “not well. Please, do something about it.”

Kind of like when I was sinking into the pneumonia that almost killed me at 33 I kept having dreams of being buried alive. But I had no clue that meant “I’m suffocating out here, please help.” So it was another week before I collapsed in the hallway and we got help.

Of course, with hypothyroidism, I was trying to get help, and being told I needed an anti-depressant, or it was all in my head, even though the florid symptoms were written on my face.

Took me a while, while re-editing to accept that Darkship Renegades isn’t flawed, per-se. It is not the book I meant to write. And it has the imprint of when things were very wrong with my brain. But it is not a bad book.

There are other books from writers suffering from brain issues, where I can see the marks of the issues, but I still love the books completely. And wouldn’t mind another six of each.

So, what is the point of all this?

The point of all this is that I’ve known for however long — 11? I don’t remember the year I wrote it — that at the time I was very ill, and things weren’t working right to an almost terminal degree.

But I’ve always felt guilty that book deviated in…. tone from what I intended. I wanted it simpler and more cheerful. And I keep telling myself it would have sold better if it had been so, and why didn’t I do it that way?

Well…. I didn’t do it that way because my brain was trying to signal how ill it was. And because I’m not a creature of pure spirit. And heck, the book — and the series — might be better for it, even if it deviated from what I intended.

In the same way, I’ve always blamed myself because around that time my other duties went by the way side. (Okay, that was also, I think, the year I wrote 6 books, but still.)

My son was explaining to his wife how he grew up was not how she met us and he said “until I was like 16 mom cooked every night, and she was a great housekeeper.” And I realized the wheels came off that when I was having issues keeping thoughts on track. Makes sense. Hard to plan the day so you can write AND keep house, and then it became impossible.

But the thing is, knowing that, I’ve blamed myself for being unable to finish long works for a while, or for having trouble “closing” novels, or for making absurd errors of fact in novels, or … for becoming a terrible housekeeper and costing us money going out to eat, because the evening came as a total surprise.

Because I keep forgetting the physical brain influences how I function. I’m not a detached spirit.

I don’t think I’m alone in this, particularly among people who work with their minds.

So, this morning, the dime finally dropped and I’m trying not only to forgive myself for being who I am, but to admit that the books influenced by the body not being quite right are probably better than if they were books of “pure spirit.”

Dave Freer at some point had an off comment about how science fiction declined when it stopped being written by engineers.

I think his larger point was “people who do things.”

Our books are not creations of the thinking mind. Oh, they are that. I’m not advocating they be thoughtless or that we write them after taking leave of our senses (though that happens accidentally, now and then.)

What I’m saying is our books are the sum of us. Body and brain and (hopefully rational) thought. And your body and brain bear the mark of what you’ve lived to.

It occurred to me recently all the deep study I’ve done on culture is really affecting the current book. As has the two years of house arrest affected the conception of the series. The sheer sense of helplessness while confronting mass insanity has left a mark.

So… when I look in the mirror at my increasingly gnome-like self, I don’t need to love who I am, but to accept that’s me, and this body is what I’ve made of it, plus whatever inscrutable genetic legacy my ancestors left me. (Couldn’t it be a tendency to excessive thinness, oh, nameless ancestors? (shakes fist)). I am in fact starting to look much like my paternal grandmother, and she was beautiful to my childish eyes.

And when I look at how things weren’t quite “me” in some novels, well, that’s where I was, and what my brain was doing. And I should just accept that. Because it’s part of the author, and therefore part of the book. And readers who don’t know what was going on will take other things out of it, as I did out of Diana Wynne Jones’ books when she had a brain tumor and wrote some of my favorite books of hers.

Your books, your art is not, nor should it, a detached, bloodless story. We have plenty of those from people who go to school to learn to be writers, and then regurgitate their professors’ “Wisdom” all over the pages of cardboardish novels.

For years now I’ve told all beginners to for the love of heaven not take a degree in writing. Take a degree in anything else. Even basket weaving will give you experience of something outside your head, and not “teach” you a lot of idiocy you then have to unlearn. (Trust me. Literary analysis has nothing to do with how people read actual books.)

I’m also telling you not to wait till you have perfect experience, or perfect knowledge, or perfect craft.

Write now. Your work will be flawed because you’re flawed.

But if you wrote a piece of work that wasn’t flawed, it also wouldn’t be human.

And stop holding yourself to blame for not reading to the kids EVERY NIGHT, for not keeping a spotless house, for not adhering to your diet perfectly, for not climbing the corporate ladder ahead of people you know are dumber than you, for not sewing your own clothes, for whatever it is you hold against yourself–

Stop. Whatever your flaws, it doesn’t mean you willfully failed to perform. Most of the time you know when you’re being willful, and honestly I know very few people who sabotage themselves without other causes. Usually organic causes.

And if you think about it, you usually know what they are.

I don’t want to hear “Yeah, I was very ill, but I should have baked a birthday cake.”

No, you shouldn’t. You should have gone to bed and taken medicine and forgiven yourself.

And understand this is not St. Sarah preaching to the fish. This is a fish saying to other fish “Hey, guys, really, this water stuff all around us does shape our lives. Stop blaming yourselves for not being able to live on dry land.”

In retrospect, that I managed to write at all, and to keep this blog going, and to function only slightly hampered is a minor miracle. (On admission to hospital after weird almost-death in shower in late 16, about 3 years into treatment, they told me my brain looked like the brain of an 85 year old. Yes, that is better. Last follow up in 2020 just before lockdowns, the “white matter abnormalities” had disappeared or been so reduced it didn’t matter. The brain recovers. It’s just slow.)

We’re heading into very hard times for a little while. I feel/hope/sense no more than two to five years, though if we’re very unlucky and the rest of the world more messed up than I expect, it might be ten. (Which might, perhaps, be the rest of my life.)

Don’t make it hard on yourself by holding yourself to blame for being human and imperfect. Don’t blame yourself if your preparation isn’t perfect. Yes, most of what’s coming we can see coming. But that doesn’t mean we can anticipate every possible circumstance.

Be kind to yourself, as you’d be kind to someone else you love who falls short of perfect. Trust me, it doesn’t increase the risk you’ll be too soft.

Be human, with all that entails. In the end it works better than if you could be that flawless machine of spirit you sometimes envy.

And forgive your own faults, even as you work to remedy them.

Yes, things will go very badly at times. But it’s not your responsibility nor your ability to avoid all harm to you or those you love.

Now go prepare, and do the best you can.

Years ago I wrote a post, I think at PJM — or at least I can’t find it here — about the process of “roll left and die” that magazines and book companies went through before utter collapse.

Over the years this became synonymous with Get Woke, Go Broke, but it was not actually in any way the same thing. Though sometimes, one might look like the other in end stages, which is the intention.

Confused? Don’t be. Let me describe the process of roll over and die, first in metaphor, then in a magazine.

Imagine that you have a fatal disease. It’s not a question of whether you’ll die, it’s when. And it’s not a matter of months or years, but days and weeks. Your affairs are kind of a mess. But if in your dying days, you convert, or make a profession of faith, or talk about how you’ve seen the light, or whatever your particular community values, your widow and orphans will fall in the soft and be taken care of in the best style. What do you do? Well, obviously you do the thing that will see your people to a good place when you’re gone.

Magazines — and other companies — aren’t people. Which means that they are both more and less subjected to this rule. The magazine, of itself, has no feelings of course. But the people running it are the windows and orphans, and they surely want to be taken care of.

So, a magazine that’s about to fail, no way to save itself, will often go extreme, hard all zonker left. And when it dies, the industry, which is generally left but usually more reserved (used to be more or less under cover) will go “Well, they failed, because they went left too hard too far, but what heroes of socialism” and the editor/publisher/etc. will find positions almost immediately.

This used to so reliable that from 1990 to 2010 I watched some people kill magazine after magazine, and be handed a new one (financing for a new one) to kill.

Of course the reason the magazine had died wasn’t that final spasm of socialism. It was that more enjoyment could be derived by reading mattress tags than by reading the magazine. But that last final spasm made it look to people who believed in the same fallen godling that the reason the magazine had failed was because the public wasn’t ready to accept their superior socialist wisdom. They made it look like go woke go broke, in order to cover the fact they sucked as editors and possibly money managers. And so, the survivors fell in the soft.

The strategy started failing in the nineties, because all of them were doing the roll left to die, then floating belly up waiting for rescue, but there weren’t enough people to rescue them. A lot of editors with a long kill list retired early 2ks to spend more time with the family they don’t have.

But they still try it. I still see it. I suspect half of the trad publishers are doing it now.

Because it’s an ingrained instinct by now, and because their creed doesn’t allow them to realize they’re all failing.

I never thought I would see this with “real companies” meaning not publishing or entertainment.

But I’ve started seeing it too. Companies’ stock gets wobbly and suddenly they’re doing ads with pregnant men or something. Because then when they die, they die as heroes of the revolution. (Insert disgusting commie fist.)

I’m 90% percent sure that’s what paypal has done. There were… danger signs before and there are some weird indications in their records, though it would take an expert to analyze them and I’m not that.

But the only “isn’t eating meth with a candy scoop” explanation I have for them initiating a bank run on themselves, and making themselves thoroughly untrustworthy forever is that they knew something was very wrong and likely to take them down, and did what they did to go out as heroes of the socialist revolution, or pure innocent victims of “right wing fanatics.”

Perhaps they’re afraid a changing of the guard will lead to people investigating how money was transferred for pallets of bricks in the middle of targeted streets, or paying for antifa street theater, or worse, for “vote aggregators” in 2020. If that’s what triggered it, we’re going to see a lot of crazy barreling towards us in the next month, and more if the guard does change and fraud doesn’t win.

Alternately, of course, they’re doing meth by the bucket load. Which is possible.

But since I suspect there’s at least some people there who aren’t as stoned as Jack Dorsey looks, I expect it’s Roll Left And Die.

And like the publishers in the nineties and oughts they haven’t realized that no matter how they signal, the rest of their community is also in deep trouble, and there will be no one standing by with blankets and hot chocolate, to comfort them after their fall “for the revolution.”

So, that’s going to be interesting. Even more interesting, if a bunch of the other “internet” companies follow suit. And by interesting, I mean in the sense of a Chinese curse.

It’s jut the hammer we need smashing into the economy at this time, innit?

Which…. now I think about it. Oh, h*ll. Is the Junta doing the “roll left and die” as well? Are a bunch of the western governments?

…. That’s it. I’m not going to sleep for the next year or so.

At least I’ll write a lot of books in all that time.

… They might be hallucinatory.

Being a time traveler — by virtue of having been born and raised in a culture that’s the equivalent of an old lady leaving in a house stuffed with the nicknacks last six generations and unwilling to even dust much less throw anything away — I remember bells as a method of communication.

Mind you I never learned what the bells meant, partly because I assumed if it was vital, the radio would tell me, partly because I was a kid, which emans the things that the adults knew were a mystery reserved for adults.

So when the bell rang, mom and grandma would pause in their work and say “poor so and so, he finally passed.” (Usually just ahead of us hearing the widow keening, which usually could be heard across the village, yes.) Or “A girl child? What happened? I wonder who?”

Because the bell rang so many times for male, so many for female, and then for age of death. It also had peculiar rings for fire, and flood, and invasion. (Not that we were ever invaded. Though in the late sixties, we went with my aunt by marriage who was from Brazil to trace the little Northern villages her family came from. This was before Portugal had even a vestige of a highway. The “National Roads” were the ones large enough to accommodate a carriage and iffy for a car. They were cobblestoned and the maximum speed was around 30 miles per hour. We left even those behind, most of the time driving on goat paths and beaten-dirt maybe-paths. We visited villages that probably never had more than ten families in them, at the height of their booms, and were now down to often only 10 people. And when they saw a car headed for them, the bell would ring, and they’d declare a holiday, with people running in from the fields to meet the “foreigners” from around 50 miles away. It amuses me greatly that the “strangers coming” might last have been rung for Napoleonic invaders, or their English foes.)

Last night I woke up with the horrors. Two things contributed to this. This post is mostly about one of them, but the other is a sign of the “temperature.”

I will remind you first that while I said, about two (?) years ago that we’d already won, I also told you that it was going to get very, very bad for anywhere from 2 to 10 years. This was before the lockdowns.

I will tell you right now I misunderestimated them. Not the winning thing: they can’t win. They’re trying to do so by tactics that won’t work here because we’re armed and because we’re dispersed. They have no understanding of the actual country, versus the country in their heads (and that, by itself could be an entire series of posts) and they have even less understanding of us, those who oppose them. And even the early stages of their “victory conditions” will destroy our economy to a level not just us, but the entire world starves. (We’re not the USSR or China, and vampirizing the world to feed us won’t even keep us in poverty.)

Note I’m saying they can’t win, not that they can starve the entire world. I think we’ll find this winter that they’ve already gone a massive way towards that. I think America doesn’t starve, but we’re going to be tight and Christmas will be lean. Perhaps more lean than I imagined, by one of the signs yesterday.

That is already baked in due to the lockdowns even if they hadn’t been hitting the economy with a hammer these last two years. I underestimated by about a million how crazy they would get. Locking the entire world, because it had to be plausible, of course, down and then frauding in plain sight, then trying to persecute anyone who ways they frauded is … a level of crazy I didn’t think EVEN THEY could reach. And yet, here we are. In clown-world timeline.

Anyway, I woke up with the horrors, dreaming of a highway in grey light, with rows and rows of gibbets and tired men in coveralls going down the long row and methodically hanging men, mile after mile. Army? Police? stood in a solid line behind the gibbets. I had no clue who was winning. I very much doubt that there had been due process for that many people. The executed that I saw were all men, though.

Is it a true seeing? I doubt it. More likely my brain expressing “Bad things coming.”

The two things that happened yesterday, one was alarming as heck because I never saw that, not even in Portugal.

So, for reasons OBVIOUS to almost everyone, this last weekend we ate out a lot, in three distinct places. One was a formal dinner, (not with CB) in a fairly upscale (but not prohibitive) restaurant. That was the only one that wasn’t completely weird.

The others were…. odd.

First I need to explain that Dan and I get AMAZING service where we are regulars, and before this last weekend, pretty darn decent service at places no one ever saw us before. We look late middle age, we dress “clean and good quality” if not designer. We are pleasant and talk to servers and smile a lot. We also tip well as a matter of course (because I experienced “service” when tipping was legally forbidden in Portugal.) Which explains the amazing service where we’re known.

We try not to go out a bunch. Probably our highest “eating out” time was when the kids were little and I was writing three to six books a year. We ate out two to three times a week, usually at the “cheap diner” level. We knew every single place in town where kids ate free, and what day. It ate our budget, but particularly when my auto-immune was crazy, it was the only way to feed the kids.

Other than that, we go through times we eat out every night — when we’re moving or when the entire family (now just two of us) is sick or slammed down — but mostly we go out MAYBE once a week, after church, and not every week.

So, it had been… a while. I think the last time had been a month ago, when a friend visited town. Being an online friend whom we didn’t know in person, we met him at a local deli type place for lunch.

And this weekend struck us as odd. Look, it was really really really bad service, on the level we’d only had twice before in almost 35 years, for no reason we could figure out.

To begin with all the restaurants but one were half empty, and the one wasn’t overfull for a Saturday night. And the service was of the “we know you’re there, but we don’t feel like giving you menus, let alone anything else” order. Except in most upscale of the restaurants, where the service was actually good, but it was also half empty, in a way I didn’t expect for where it was, and at the time it was, and with all the “get a reservation or you won’t get in.”

Yesterday, in a casual conversation, a friend who is doing temp table service job said people had stopped tipping. I thought this was just her/just her area. So I asked around. Nope. Seems to be universal and more or less everywhere, from low to mid-price restaurants: ie the places people go, because they’re slammed/they don’t feel well/they never learned how to cook. I’m hearing the same from doordash people.

Now this could be because since restaurants are having to pay — in our area — around $15 an hour for table service, people think that servers are getting paid enough. MAYBE. but in my experience people don’t do that kind of calculus before tipping, not when it’s been a custom for so long.

I mean, in Portugal it took a law to make people stop tipping. (Portuguese tips are and were always different. Mostly “what you have leftover, whatever is in your pocket in change. Though when I did food service, I got a lot of unexpected, the equivalent of $100. Since I was doing it at a church-affiliated restaurant and to fundraise, this was weird. Particularly when elderly men and women slipped me the bill and said, “This one is for you. Don’t give it to the church.” (Which of course I did.) Oh, also, I’d get tipped by the women for smiling and engaging their men in conversation and letting them tell me stories. “You made him so happy honey.” At the time I thought this was weird. Now I understand.)

I think it’s that yes, things are getting that tight. Again, the places we go through when traveling, are no longer utter dives (We’re old. Gristle fried in lard, or highly spiced carberific food is not something we can deal with anymore.) But they are … “safe and okay.” I mean, our go-to while getting the house ready to sell wasn’t McDonald’s but it was Red Robin. So, the type of place people in the low middle class go out for “we have to go out.” And people in the low-low class (income only) go out for “good.” (We’ve been there. all through 2015, we used Red Robin or its equivalent for birthdays, anniversaries, etc.) And that level and below are the ones getting stiffed on tips. Higher than that, and people are just not going, or at least not in the numbers they used to. I suspect at the highest level (I don’t know, okay. We were looking at places on line and one said to count on $100 per person total. I can’t say I’ve ever gone somewhere like that. But if this is true and these places exist, I suspect they’re doing just fine, because the topmost aren’t feeling the pinch at all.)

Anyway, that scared me. It joined in with entire strip malls getting boarded a store at a time over the last few months. With people who go to cons/make a living of selling in our world — geekish, fannish, etc — reporting precipitously falling sales.

I haven’t seen this in books, or at least not yet. Perhaps Jerry Pournelle was right and writing as entertainment (not as literary art) is a counter-recession/depression industry, and pays best when everything is in the crapper. I certainly seem to be reading more. It’s still — if you don’t buy from the majors — cheap entertainment.

And that gets us to the other discussions I was in before bed.

It will surprise no one that I’m a member of about five groups of various creatives, including for crafts, though honestly I haven’t done crafts in years. Not regularly. (I’m ALMOST at the point I CAN but it will take finishing unpacking the craft room and getting the sewing table out of the garage, and it’s low priority, since I’m trying to get the new novel out. And write more. And fulfill the pledge rewards (No, I haven’t forgotten. Yes, I’m aware I’m a month and change late. Getting on it.)

Anyway, yesterday everyone to the right of Lenin was freaking out over Paypal. And so am I, honestly, because it is a great part of my income. For one, a ton of small presses pay me that way, probably amounting to 3k or so a year. For another, weirdly the fundraiser RAISED subscription numbers for the blog. People saying “I can’t donate, but I can.”

The left, in the meantime, is out there being clueless and vaguely offensive: “Why is the right so freaked out over Paypal saying they’ll fine for “disinformation” or “inciting violence”, do they admit they’re doing those things?”

Dear leftist corkheads, no. We have, however, been on line as non-woke, non-commies for the last 10 years. Each of us has been banned by Facebook at least once for saying something that we were told was “misinformation” only to be, months later — oops — admitted to be true: Hunter’s laptop from hell. Or that the wuflu vaccines might not be precisely safe and effective. Or that masks don’t do anything to prevent getting sick. Whichever. All of these were the unutterable “disinformation” until later revealed to be true. And we knew they were true, because we’d looked at the evidence, but official channels of the left declared them wrong.

And all of us have been banned due to absolutely stupid things, that make us stare at it and go “What actually.” Like I had a friend who got facebook jail for pornography for showing a woman’s face and neck at an odd, artsy-photo angle. Yeah, okay, if I squinted and forgot everything I know about human anatomy and/or were a bot, I might think it was something else. Only it clearly WASN’T. And all of us have got banned for putting up an absolutely truthful anti-regime meme. Or in my case, I got banned two times, for a large run of bans (three the first time, two the second.) First time because one of my fans was descending into Alzheimers. He’d always been leftist, and a few years before, he’d have argued with me about it, but when I started pointing out the “Whistleblower” on “Trump made a congratulatory call to the president of Ukraine” was no such thing and none of it made sense, it interacted with his mental illness, and he started denouncing me for “breaking federal law” for revealing the guy’s name (which hadn’t been redacted in documents, and everyone knew.) Even though as a non-government organization (or individual) I was perfectly free to shout it from the roof tops. Facebook of course, banned, because it’s impossible to conduct their little police action by hiring American citizens (even with the help of robots) so they hire the cheapest possible workforce overseas. And for all someone in Southern Elbonia’s swamps knew it was indeed illegal to say that name. And their appeals process is non-existent, really. So I blocked the poor sod, and he then (and maybe now, if still alive) went around telling people I’d been kicked out of Facebook and maybe arrested for violating federal law.) The other one was a guy who lost an argument with me, and started going back and randomly denouncing me for whatever. Again solved by blocking him.

But note both times I was denounced for things that had no basis in anything but the accuser’s head.

Now the left might think they’re smart, tolerant and not false accusers, but after being told to die because I said that it was cruel, unusual (and useless) to make asthmatics wear masks for healthcare, which is absolutely true, after being called a Russian Robot for mentioning that the Hugo voting was borked to allow interference, after being allowed of using “racial slurs” after using a STATE DEPARTMENT DESIGNATION FOR CHINESE COMMUNISTS, I’m less than convinced that that halo is true and not hiding horns.

Honestly, if the left had half a brain and looked at former darlings now declared the debil because they deviated from The Word From On High on one minor point, they’d realize that they too could get caught for “disinformation” and “hate mongering” that amounts to saying the right thing at the wrong time, or even being misunderstood.

Which is why what Paypal did was the equivalent of pulling down its shorts and shooting themselves where it hurts.

They thought of themselves as a hip electronic company, not what they are: financial services. For financial services to say “we will take your money at random, with no appeal” is like a restaurant saying “We will randomly poison you because we feel like it.” There is no coming back from that. They’re doomed.

And it’s a bad sign, like “Why did they come up with that?” AND “why did they think that made sense?”

Because they’re desperate and vaguely insane. What they always did to keep control of the culture and the narrative just isn’t working. Things keep happening they don’t expect.

They’re scared. They’re beyond snake bit. They’re utterly and completely and utterly panicked.

Panicked people do stupid sh*t. And they’re still in control of the culture and a lot of the institutions.

This is your bell tolling alarm. It’s time to armor up.

For me this is an immediate thing. I not only make the money for donations — which will shrink because a lot of you are doing the grand jete from Paypal. Salutes. No blame — but also can’t actually leave, because a lot of small press companies pay me there.

So, we will need to separate the blog and publishing accounts… And keep it a while longer.

I know they will eventually be replaced by one of the other services. And IF I didn’t have to get a substitute NOW, I’d sit around waiting to see which of the other services makes it to “default.” But….

I’ll be doing investigation, and hope to give you alternatives for donation soon.

I will survive this. I will be fine. But I won’t say it’s not an extremely annoying disruption I didn’t want to deal with. And I won’t say I don’t resent it like fire, because I do.

And I’m trying to figure out ahead of time what to do if Amazon goes similarly nuts. Which it might not, but it might, all of a sudden, overnight.

Again, replacements will come up, but it might take time.

Now, if banks go insane… Well, make sure you have a “trusted person” and make sure they’re REALLY trusted, so you can deposit with them, and get money.

Stuff like that. Make plans now.

It’s unlikely they’ll round up most of us, even vocal people like me. We are too many and too dispersed. Maybe they’ll get to people like Tucker Carlson. Maybe.

BUT they will try to silence us by financial and other means. Which is what Paypal is all about. They’re panicked over losing twitter, and trying to silence us by making it impossible to get money.

Okay then. The thing you have to remember is that while they’re hurting and inconveniencing us, they’re committing MESSY SUICIDE to do it. They can’t survive doing what they’re doing to us and continue functioning.

So, be not afraid.

Now I go off to finish work due today and research financial alternatives to paypal. This will ALMOST for sure include putting up a permanent givesendgo, where people can donate when and if they feel like it. I don’t like to do it, because it’s supposed to be emergency, but they’re trustworthy, so I’ll do that. I’m also looking into Ko-fi and a half dozen of other things.

PARTLY because I’m going to be serializing a couple of novels at a time, and would like to put up a tip jar. (Sigh.) Okay, so I’m mostly goint to do it to amuse CACS while she’s going through a difficult time, but no reason not to tip jar.

And then I’m going to sit down with my husband at dinner and make a list of plan A through F should various of our mainstays and necessary services decide to take the poison pill of wokeness.

Because forewarned is forearmed.

We are almost certainly going to get one or two gut punches, and it will be bad. Very bad. But there are ways around almost everything. It’s just a matter of figuring it out and having plans.

As for that horrible nightmare? Let’s hope it was just an expression of anxiety.

But in either case, be not afraid. Fear helps nothing, and might hurt. And keep your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark

This is the ringing bell. Listen to it.