*Note these are books sent to us by readers/frequenters of this blog. Our bringing them to your attention does not imply that we’ve read them and/or endorse them, unless we specifically say so. As with all such purchases, we recommend you download a sample and make sure it’s to your taste. 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. That helps defray my time cost of about 2 hours a day on the blog, time probably better spent on fiction. ;)*
When the kingdom of Altria falls before an expansionist lord, the champion Korr is tasked with spiriting off the next in line to the throne as well as a princess who could be used to legitimize the duke’s claim to the throne. Joined by his childhood friend, one of the legendary Rangers of Altria, Korr seeks shelter with the man who trained him to fight many long years ago.
The Grandfather tells Kiralee stories. He talks in riddles about bondage and freedom. He whispers to her that her whole world is a lie. Should Kiralee trust him, or does he have an agenda of his own?
Eleven-year-old Branna fell asleep on a hill in the foggy Irish countryside and woke up in a land that was supposed to be a myth. Fairyland is a beautiful place of green oaks and golden light, but it is also a dangerous land, and Branna must use all of her cleverness if she is to escape the clutches of the fey creatures who rule over it.
Like all Private Detectives, Seamus Lebanon [Leb] Magis has often been told to go to Hell. He just never thought he’d actually have to go.
But when an old client asks him to investigate why Death Metal bands are dressing in pink – with butterfly mustache clips – and singing about puppies and kittens in a bad imitation of K-pop bands, Leb knows there’s something foul in the realm of music.
When the something grows to include the woman he fell in love with in kindergarten and a missing six-year-old girl, Leb climbs into his battered Suburban and like a knight of old goes forth to do battles with the legions of Hell.
This is when things become insane…. Or perhaps in the interest of truth we should say more insane.
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.
*This is beyond horribly late, partly because I spaced my morning ADD meds which happened because Havey cat had intestinal issues all over the bed spread. When you wake with the bed covered in poo, it turns your day into a mad race to get the bed de-pooified, followed by a mad race to get the cat who is still spreading…. er… stuff around with what got attached to his fur. So, if you want to blame the following post on someone, blame it on the cat. Also, the lateness of it. Let’s put it this way, I’ve JUST showered and had breakfast, because the little so and so hid, and spread the joy in the process….*
So, you want to join a conspiracy! I get it. It’s the done thing. Anyone who has been part of blog life since the early 2000s knows that sooner or later you get accused of being a shill for some vast conspiracy that secretly runs the world.
Since my favorite scene of Grosse Pointe Blank is when the character confesses his avocation and the old friend asks him if the job comes with a dental plan, I decided the benefits and pay are the crucial thing of every conspiracy. So, I’ll go with it. Feel free to add any I miss, as this is typed in haste:
Vast Right Wing Conspiracy – Guys, I don’t think this one is real. Sorry. But the individualists failed to organize. There is probably a plan for paying people, but the two founding members never agreed on what to pay them, what to pay them for, or in fact where the money is coming from.
International Zionist Conspiracy – I’ve gotten accused of working for them so often, that I think I have some insight: they pay by check (I’ve never gotten one, alas) and if you manage to reach them they tell you the check is in the mail.
I understand if you level up, you get to become a banker? the owner of most of the world’s resources???? Not sure. As I said, I’ve never actually got the check.
Illuminati – Judging from their spam, they make you very very rich, but weirdly their email and phone is based in Nigeria. No word on health care. I’m going to assume it’s some guy named Ngumbumbu and the mummified head of his grandfather. (Bonus for identifying that last reference.)
Opus Dei – pays in Spanish gold doubloons from the Vatican basement. (You usually get a premium on them at your old coin store.) At first, you’ll think you just joined a sort of lay order, with strict regulations on your behavior and commands for mutual aid. BUT after you level up, you get the command of albino assassins and also the opportunity to avail yourself of medical and surgical care. Don’t do the later. It’s administered by a guy named Guido, and your only chance of survival is fervent prayer.
The Knights Templar – We understand they pay in ancient artifacts from the city of Jerusalem. They have an exercise program that consists of riding horses while in armor and hefting very heavy swords. We’re not precisely sure what they do, because when asked they answer “everything.”
Communism international – only considered a conspiracy because people refuse to see it happening right under their noses, even when told it’s happening right under their noses.
Pay – very good. Initially it will get you advancement out of proportion to ability in all established left-leaning fields. For about a century it has been a ticket to riches in literature, the arts, music, teaching, and more recently it’s reaching into politics and science.
Advice is to get while the getting is good. Because come the revolution, most of the initial agents are first against the wall (see Trotsky) and after that only the very few get paid. For the majority, it’s a conspiracy to die for.
The Deep State – the schrodinger conspiracy, at once denied and thanked by the left (see above.) Pay – other people’s taxes. Health care plan – very good.
Downside – you’d best learn to swim or you’ll sink like a stone, for the times, they are achanging.
The Clinton conspiracy – I know nothing that will lead to the arrest and conviction of Hillary Clinton or anyone associated with her. And I can’t even reach the back of my head, much less shoot myself there three times.
The lizard being conspiracy – See entry immediately above.
Trump ordered a strike back against terrorists responsible for the death of Americans and others. The left lost its mind. Film at eleven.
I had a spectacularly bad night (there’s a uri working itself through the family. Yes, I HAVE had the flu vaccine and I actually urge you to. It’s a poor match to this year’s strain, but it offers SOME protection, and this year’s strain is deadly.) and woke up at four AM and couldn’t go back to sleep, so even the ADD meds are ineffective for getting me to keep my concentration for any length of time.
Which means I sat down to write this post, I — instead — ended up reading news sites, and checking on friends on facebook, because my own thoughts were interrupting me.
Which is how I came across this:
And she went on:
Okay, the most common answer to my friend who shared this (making fun of it, mind you) was “WHO is she?” Perhaps because, being people of words, we’re not the most plugged in to well…. media. I actually have a dysfunction of actor-knowledge. Except for very few, rare actors and actresses (come on, in a physical medium it is rock bottom stupid not to make a difference between the sexes. Men and women have different ways of interacting with the world and therefore should have different acting techniques) I have no clue who these people are. I just assume they came into being for the role, and vanish into some nebulous never-never once the movie or play is over. It works for me, particularly because the strange things that come out of their mouths when they mistake themselves for deep thinkers disturb me less.
So why am I giving this chick any importance? Several reasons actually:
1- because this won’t end her career (any more than it is already,) and she KNOWS it. In fact, it might help her. While someone on twitter admitting she voted for Trump brought out the cancel mobs.
2- because it’s not just brainless actresses. I heard similar sentiments all the time from editors of major publishing houses who thought they were amid liberals and therefore safe. (And how one kept one’s meals down in such situation was by itself amazing.)
3- While this simply doesn’t raise to the level of treason or sedition — not because it isn’t, but — because we’ve been ignoring its like for so long (like Nancy Prancy going to Syria (?) to show she liked them, unlike that meany-evil Booosh) and you can’t enforce a law you haven’t enforced for fifty years, it is giving aid and comfort to the enemy. In fact, across cultures, it is convincing countries that tightly control their “face” to the world the impression that the American people really don’t want to defend themselves and are ripe for plucking.
4- It shows that what I have been saying for decades — based on hearing people say this stuff in private ALL THE TIME when they thought they were safe (they were still keeping the mask on) — that Americans who paint themselves as understanding foreigners so well and being “peaceful” are only doing this stuff because they’re craven cowards who hope the crocodile will eat them last.
5- It shows how much people use leftist dogma as a positional good, (ie to make themselves appear big, or good, or more moral, or smart or whatever) without thinking, (I have yet to see any evidence Rose McGowan, or her ilk (yes, up to and including many editors in traditional presses) CAN think. No, I’m not saying they’re stupid. I’m saying their circles reward unthinking strict adherence to the dogma promulgated by the left. In fact, thinking is dangerous, because you can accidentally step out of the choreographed circle dance and find yourself the target of group aggression. An environment in which conformity is rewarded is one that trains people not to think. (And if you have kids in college, consider, please, that this is what you’re actually paying for.)
This, guys, is the strength of the left and cancel culture. Even people who aren’t CONSCIOUSLY aware of it, know that they will be DESTROYED if they say something that betrays they’re not dancing in the perfect circle, and that they dissent with any point of the left’s program.
So people stay quiet, and the idiot left — which is probably at MOST 20% of the population — gets to terrorize everyone, from big corporations to every field where they’re the majority, up to and including traditional publishing, art, journalism, etc. etc. Thereby they amplify the sense that they’re the majority and gain some number of adherents. At least double their number, I’d guess, because HUMANS ARE SOCIAL APES who want to be in with the group. Which BTW accounts for the socialist clown show that are the dem candidates this year, all of which would objectively destroy the economy and with it plunge the world into a depression that would make Obama’s great recession seem like a… well, summer of recovery.
Oh, I get staying quiet. UNDERSTAND please that I get staying quiet. I did, for decades, because I wanted to keep being published, and baby needed shoes. And, as most of you know, I paid the price, career and money, for speaking out. There are people who will never pick up one of my books, because they heard, and therefore “know” I am racist, sexist, homophobic and don’t want to read that. (The fact I’m none of those makes absolutely no difference. You can find anything in any work of more than 20 words, if you want to. Witness how people devoid of genetic knowledge decided that an off beat color in a half-Asian woman’s eyes meant you were racist. I haven’t checked lately, but violet eyes on elves are probably specieist, instead of merely goofy.)
So, I understand. But we were perpetuating the left’s slide into madness and amplifying the most bizarre elements on that side every time we stay quiet. We are empowering the fifth column.
Now, keep in mind, I don’t think they win. For one, most of these people are too crazy to fight their way out of a wet paper bag, with someone pushing from behind. Their decision not to think might help them stay cozy within the group, but it doesn’t make them very competent.
Also, the fact they silence us means they don’t know the sheer amount of rage under the surface of every day life. The rage will out. At them. Eventually. The longer it takes, the more explosive it will be. And frankly any of amount of suppressed rage involving a vast majority of the population isn’t a good thing. It is what pushed what would otherwise have been a middle-class revolution in France into the insatiable hunger of madame guillotine, it fed the “sudden and unexpected” downfall of the Ceaușescus. And if this goes all the way to “rage burst” I expect it will be like a mix of both. And what came after, in both cases was not exactly the platonic ideal of a constitutional republic (or really any form of it.) Which is not what I want for our country.
But Sarah, you’ll say, besides speaking out having a horrible price, they won’t listen. I can’t argue with these people!
Sure, but even arguing does show they don’t have it all their own way. Most people aren’t going to analyze things like the fact that the wokest always go brokest. And corporations are even less likely to do that.
HOWEVER the most important thing isn’t even to rationally discuss this. Sure, once you get someone — a spectator — who genuinely wants to discuss points, then you engage your logic. BUT UNTIL THEN and more important than it, it behooves you to realize who you’re dealing with.
These people are signaling they’re smart (a characteristic that in the left has long come to mean “has the correct beliefs”) and educated, and totally worthy of being upper class.
They’re not thinking, or reasoning, or in any way being …. rational.
So what is the best way to stop that cr*p? Short of cancel culture, which requires us to act like the left, and try to shut down opposing voices (and why would we do that, when the more they talk the more they reveal themselves as the despicable creatures they are?) something that is not precisely in the right’s playbook because the individualists have trouble organizing?
Well, stuff like this is a good beginning,
But more importantly, her original tweet is full of comedy gold. For instance, she thinks the US is misogynist…. compared to a nation in which women can go to jail, get raped and executed (they have to get raped first, because Islamic law has problems with killing virgins. Chew on that) for going out of the house with their hair uncovered!
She opposes nationalism…. compared to what? Are other countries not nations? Note that you can’t criticize Mexican DRUG CARTELS without the Mexican president being offended.
Racism? WHAT COLOR DOES SHE THINK IRANIANS ARE?
But more importantly, her assumption that if you cower before someone attacking you, they’ll stop attacking you. She’s not only not too bright, but why is she denying “little tan people” agency? Does she think they can’t decide to attack even if we don’t? (I guess the crowds of people shouting death to America while Carter — and Obama — were appeasing Iran would blow her mind.)
More importantly, if she is so mad at the “terrorist regime” we should tweet back at her (and I would if I were on twitter) instructions on how to buy a ticket out of the country, followed by instructions on how to renounce citizenship. And make fun of the fact she doesn’t seem to know how to do that.
As hard as it is to mock her basically pledging allegiance to Iran and its flag, because she tweeted it out with the Shah’s flag (LOL) because what she wrote already sounds like a Babylon Bee article, it must be mocked. One should perhaps — very seriously — endorse her perspective that no flags should be disrespected, which is why we expect she’ll join us in outrage at the kneeling during the anthem and the flying of the American flag.
Mock them. Ridicule them. They’re a target rich environment.
More importantly, necklace the democratic party with those of them who drop the mask. No, seriously. They are, as they are right now, a profoundly anti-American party.
They hide it behind a bunch of things, from concern for the “environment” to “looking after the little people” but all their policies would cripple and destroy the US. Being the rump end of the Soviet agit prop policies of infiltration, they have convinced themselves that America is the enemy, and that ending it will make the world a better place.
Only it won’t. It is America standing tall and opposing the tyrants that makes the world better. And while we are tired of foreign wars, and sending our young to die on foreign shores, and I completely approve of the president’s policy of limited engagements, we ALSO can’t allow our enemies to hit us impunely. That is to invite more attacks, and ultimately a war of a magnitude that none of us wants to see. Aggression against us MUST be responded to with maximum force, so that the bullies of the world know we’re not a safe target. And contrary to what Ms. McGowan’s stupidity conjures up for a world picture, the bullies shall always be with us. Be we ever so kind and pure, we’ll be hated by individuals, religions and nations whose drive for total (and totalitarian) power our mere existence challenges.
More importantly, resisting and defeating attacks against us sometimes has the side effect of freeing other people.
I understand there were Iraqi demonstrations celebrating the death of Al Soleimani.
Will there be repercussions to the death? Undoubtedly. But the question we must ask the fifth column is: WHAT are they going to do to us, beyond killing Americans and encouraging terrorism against us, something they’ve been doing for decades?
And by the way, no, dear lefties, this doesn’t mean they will eat you last. The enemies we face are variously very nationalistic, deeply racist and extremely misogynist. If you’re a white woman (or an American of any description) who is showing disloyalty to your own people, they’ll eat you FIRST.
And rest assured when that time comes, we’ll show you the deep felt compassion and empathy that Hilary Clinton showed the Benghazi dead.
Because at that time, really, what difference will it make?
Don’t tell us you never saw it coming. You’ve been warned. Leftism is no longer a positional good. And we’ll make sure no one mistakes it for such.
You’re wearing last century’s intellectual fashions, covered in the corpses of the 100 million people massacred in their name, and the millions more who gave blood and life to fight their way out of it.
*Sorry, I was going to put this up much earlier and it was to be an original post. BUT I woke up too late. I’m going to blame Greebo. Since he came back from treatment, he’s been very clingy (And yes, he’s gaining weight back, let’s hope this is permanent) and last night he put himself in a ball up against my waist. Since I sleep on my side, we were curled one around the other. This is kind of important, because it was very comfortable, which sleeping with cats normally isn’t. He also purred all night, which is very soothing. So I slept till almost ten. Unfortunately Havelock cat chose to have intestinal disturbances… everywhere. We know it was him, because it included his spot at the foot of our bed, where no other cat dares sit. Yes, I know. Ew.
Well, I’m trying to finish Other Rhodes to go to betas (due the 31st. Yeah. well.) So normally I’d ask Dan to deal with it, do a blog post, then write. BUT we have house guests coming this afternoon, which include practice grandchildren, so the floor and anything they might touch MUST be cleaned. Meanwhile I found this post. I think it’s old enough most of you never read it/don’t remember it. Enjoy.*
Rats in their Heads – a blast from the past from April 2013
There is a meme going around facebook, an innocuous little question of “What was the last female writer you read, and the book?”
It’s very popular and being echoed all over. It’s also a good example of how people think when they get rats in their head.
“But, Sarah,” you say, “why would you object to being introduced to authors you might not have heard of?”
Brother! This is not how book recommendations and word of mouth happen. First, with few exceptions, no one in mixed company is going to admit to having spent the entire night awake reading something called “The Sinner” (a romance) or “Three For the Chair” (a mystery) or even “Martians Go Home.” (Satyric science fiction and very funny.) Instead they will mention the sort of book people buy and leave sitting around on their coffee table to look smart or caring or whatever it is society values this week.
Word of mouth book recommendations are far more targeted. They’re done by people who know you or at least know what you like to read. Even I, who read almost anything, have stuff I will not read. One of them is insufferably stuffy books my kids were forced to read in school. I couldn’t read them even to give them help with studying them. In fact, I’d rather have a root canal than read most of those. The other one is zombie fiction. [I read Ringo’s zombies, but they’re not the rotting falling apart kind of zombie. They are scary, but not that way- SAH-2020] I truly don’t care if your zombie book is a masterpiece. I don’t read zombies because yuck. (Actually I don’t read most horror. Not because I’m squeamish: I can write blood, guts and wading-through-both-of-those scenes. I just don’t enjoy being either grossed out or scared. So reading horror would be fatuous.) You can recommend me those till you’re blue in the face. I still ain’t gonna read them.
However, if it were “What was the last writer” or even new writer “you read and the book?” the meme would be merely stupid and vacuous.
It is far worse than that . “The last FEMALE writer” you read. This is because female writers are supposed to be discriminated against. Statistically (if you look at it sideways and squint) females get reviewed less than males, and this leads to their selling less than males and this leads– Excuse me. I’ll dissect this nauseating fallacy later. First tell me the last book you read where you gave a good goddamn about the author’s sex.
Unless you are reading true accounts of childbirth or of surviving testicular cancer, if you were specifically looking at the gender of the name on the cover, you’ve got rats in your head.
The first rat is a cute and fluffy baby rat that leads you to believe that the name on the cover has anything to do with the gender of the author – but we’ll let that go by.
We’ll let it go by because the big rat is stinky and dropping pellets all over the culture, and will destroy us if we don’t trap him and kill him. It’s stained with the blood of millions and it’s called Marxism.
One of the things Marxism does is treat people as widgets. Take me. Female, Portuguese origin, married, mother of two, liberal arts post-graduate degree. I’m supposed to be exactly the same as anyone else with those characteristics. You should be able to pop me out of this blog and pop someone with those same exact characteristics in my place, and the results are supposed to be indistinguishable. (Stop laughing. It’s impolite to laugh at the mentally afflicted.)
No? How no? What is the purpose then of all these comparisons “more men get reviews,” and “More men are bestsellers” and—
Even if those are true (some of them are for certain fields) what makes you think they’re fixable? Or that they should be fixed? Or that there is anything to fix?
Look up there to where, no, you can’t pop me out of this blog and pop someone else in its place and have it be the same. So, let’s suppose – don’t I wish – my blog became one of the most popular on the internet. Does this mean that Females of Portuguese Origin, married, with two children and a liberal arts ABTD are being discriminated FOR in blogging. No? Why not?
The second rat is “diverse thinking.” First of all there is the un-examined, cute, fluffy rat that says “diversity is strength.” This is a shibboleth that’s never been proven, anywhere at all. In fact, I can give you plenty of examples where diversity was the downfall or at least a serious handicap to a society. But it is an almost adorable rat compared to the true repulsive idea that you can get more diversity of ideas by getting more PHYSICAL diversity. This idea is something Hitler would have loved. No, I’m not breaking Godwin. I’m simply being factual. The whole idea behind the eugenics movement that was all the rage when Hitler came to power (and not just the rage in Germany, btw. If you think that, you have more than rats in your head) was that culture was inherited and inhered to your racial ancestry. The white race was this and this and this, and the Black race was this and this and this. And the pink race with polka dots was this and this and this.
THAT was the brilliant idea that filled the ovens with human beings. The Marxists were so scared people would be repulsed by the results that for a while, they hid their “scientific governance, by the numbers” under The Worker Class and the Capitalist Class and the Intellectual Class – instead of calling them by race names (Both are constructs, in case you wonder. Particularly in a blended society like the US.)
But it is impossible to run a society by the numbers without always coming back to the same primal sin of treating people as things. Because if Bob over there is an exemplary person and Joe is a terrible person, there’s no way the government can equalize that. But if Bob is rich and Joe is poor, the government can take money from Bob to give to Joe. And if Bob is white and Joe is black, you just won the support of all the black people who aren’t doing very well monetarily (most white people aren’t either. It is a characteristic of doing exceptionally well that few people do that. By definition. That’s what “exceptionally” means.) Not just because you might also give them money like you gave Joe, but because – by claiming that the reason Joe didn’t succeed was a social injustice and invisible racism – you gave them an excuse for failing (and most people, anywhere, under any regime, fail.)
It is perhaps no wonder, then, that this big stinky rat of an idea has got fixated on women, the minority that isn’t. I mean, how much more virtuous can you get than by supporting the majority of people, while claiming you’re fighting discrimination?
So people take to the statistics and examine how many women are mega bestsellers, and how many women get reviews and how many women…
This shows that women are discriminated against and then the drumbeat starts for “how many female writers have you read today?”
Rats. Or perhaps hamsters. I think if you lean close to those brains, you can hear the hamster wheel squeaking.
First, where are those statistics coming from, and exactly what is taken in account? The last three major popular successes, pushed under everyone’s noses and talked about on every blog, magazine and show that cares about culture and books are… Harry Potter, Twilight and Fifty Shades, all of them in fact written by women.
Almost every romance published is written by women. So is most of the fantasy. Quite a few of the historicals, unless they’re military history, are written by women. A good number of the Christian books (a huge part of the market) are written by women.
Now, almost every thriller, almost every hard sf, almost every adventure story and police procedure seems to be written by men.
So – how come most bestsellers/most reviewed, etc. are men? Isn’t that unfair?
Lies, damn lies and statistics. Writing (except for Romance) used to be a mostly male profession. You could tell there was actual prejudice against women writing, in say SF, because women wrote under male pen names. (In romance there is prejudice against males and most people still write under a female pen name.) [Turns out I was wrong about SF. Most women wrote under male pen names because writing it wasn’t quite respectable. It was their acquaintances in real life they were hiding from, not the fans. SAH-2020]
Writing was a male profession when you could make a living from it and back when women were not expected to make a living. [Note this only applies to the US/other wealthy countries and mostly in the 20th century for the middle class. Before that everyone was expected to contribute to the household’s survival- SAH- 2020] By the time I came into the field, unless you were willing to do what I did and engage in EXTREME writing, you made ON AVERAGE five thousand a year. And the funny thing about social expectations is that they cut both ways. Given that writing doesn’t make a living wage, most men could not engage in it. They couldn’t engage in it long enough to even break in, let alone try to get big. A woman can stay home with the kids (or even just stay home) and though in our crazy society that incurs some societal censure it is nothing like the censure incurred by a man who stays home and is supported by his wife. (Yes, I know some brave souls do it, but they’re rare.)
When I came into the field 90% of the new authors making it in fell in one of three categories: women, gay men, academics – i.e. people who could have other means of support while they pursued their art. Of this, by and far the largest contingent was women. (Who often overlapped with academics.)
This has been a fact of life for the last fifteen years. However, there are still some remnants from the ancient regime back when it was mostly a male profession. They’re old and having stayed in the field long, revered. They’re mostly best sellers and widely reviewed.
There is another effect. Think back on the first women that broke the gender barrier in science fiction. They were almost instantly notable. Why? Because they had to make an extraordinary effort to break in. This is going to select for driven individuals, who immediately will do better than the run of the mill “followed the usual path, had an easy time getting in.”
The males in my generation – particularly those supporting a family at the time, like Dave Freer – who broke in, were strong enough and driven enough to come home and work at their dream after pursuing a full time career elsewhere. Do you wonder that they have more staying power than someone who was told “Just pursue your dream, dear, someone else will pay?”
Then add another layer. New York Publishing by definition has got the rat of Marxism in their heads. They always treated writers as widgets anyway. Round the mid seventies, early eighties they realized that they had more widgets with outies than innies, and they decided to correct it the usual way. “Buy more women” the cry went out. And in came not only a barrage of women who had an easier time breaking in than men, but of women who were told what kept them out had been discrimination. And who, therefore, hated the field they were getting into, because those meanies had kept them out. Out came an outpouring of “poor me female” writing. Which in the early nineties caused me to snarl at a Barnes & Noble, “I wish someone would pass a law forbidding women from writing.” After I’d walked up and down a fantasy shelf and found NOT ONE novel that wasn’t about some abused high-magic chick whose father was a monster.
Here we digress from writing in general to genre writing. It will shock you to realize that different genres appeal to different people, right? In general romance – by and far the blockbuster of genres – appeals to women. I know this shocks you, since women are not at all by evolution designed for being fascinated with relationships. This doesn’t mean men don’t read it. I know several men who read Romance (and no, it has nothing to do with their orientation) but the proportions are so grossly skewed that if you see someone in public with a romance novel and can’t see what gender they are, you can take a safe bet it’s a woman. At the other end of this, military fiction is read mostly by men.
I can tell you as a female reader and writer that from my teens I was upset by the assumption that whatever I was reading was OF COURSE a romance. Ditto for what I was writing. To this day total strangers assume I write romances or (I DO have an accent) children’s picture books.
The ridiculous equalizers of author genders ALWAYS concentrate on those that appeal least to women. Say, thrillers, or science fiction. (Why don’t they try to get more men in romance? Why do they devalue a female way of seeing the world, which always centers on relationships? Are they anti-woman?)
The problem with trying to equalize the innies and outies is that you get people who aren’t going to appeal to the genre’s majority readers. For instance the attempt to bring in more “sf” writers of the right physical configuration gave us science fiction that rotates around someone’s belly button. (There is a difference between novels about colonizing a world, even with strong character development, and novels about someone angsting over colonizing a world, so that the book could take place entirely in my laundry room and there would be no difference.) This meant readers – male and female – who liked SF as it was left in droves. The same for those who liked adventure fantasy but were tired of the female-revenge-fantasy woven in.
Of course these things shake out, they always do. By the time I came in, NY publishing had got the idea that somehow their experiment had been less than successful. Of course, since the rat was still spinning in their head, the only thing they could think – and which was told to me over and over – was “Women can’t write science fiction.” Which is why Darkship Thieves was unpublished for thirteen years, while they pushed me to write fantasy. Other gems I was told were that “you don’t write like a woman” – this was said derogatorily by the way – to which I probably shouldn’t have responded that no, that part of my anatomy was grossly unsuited for typing. That my women were insufficiently “strong” (by which they meant that they fell in love with men.) That I couldn’t write gay males because that was stealing victimhood and because gay men weren’t transparent to people who didn’t share the experience (to which one of my gay friends said he was glad he wasn’t transparent, he’d hate for me to be seeing what he ate for lunch.)
That is, the people who treat people like widgets, all in the name of equality, were telling me what I could or could not write, because my thought wasn’t conforming to their ideas. I.e. it was too “diverse.” That is, all of the above was “bad widget, bad. Fall into your category.”
Again, the primary sin behind this entire meme is treating people as things. The secondary sin is expecting physical characteristics to dictate the way I think.
Do my experiences have a lot to do with who I am as a writer (and a person)? Sure they do. How many of those are experiences only a woman can have? I can think only of being pregnant and giving birth. (And a man who is sufficiently connected to his wife, or who has asked a lot of friends could write those as convincingly as most women. I mean a lot of them are physiological.)
But doesn’t my experience of going through life as a woman, of relating to men as a woman, etc. color how I write? Sure they do. But I have enough male friends and enough imagination to write men convincingly too.
So should you read my books because they give you an experience of what it’s like to be female?
Rat droppings!
I write science fiction, fantasy, mystery and historical. You should read those for the joy of reading those. And my books should be enough to hold you and get you to buy the next one whether the name on the cover is Sarah Hoyt or Joe Smith. (How DO you know I don’t write as Joe Smith? I could if I wanted to.)
If you’re picking my books because they have a female name on the cover, forcing yourself to read them to prove you’re not sexist, and hating every minute, that makes you LESS likely to pick up the next female author.
Writers are not their books. There are men who write women better than women do. And there are women who write men better than men do.
And the books should stand on their own.
Everything else is rat droppings. Big stinky rats with blood on their teeth.
*This morning I’m taking the very unusual step of doing identical blogging here and at Mad Genius Club. Mostly because I think what I woke up thinking is important in different ways for the different audiences. Just be aware the posts are identical, but the discussion will probably be different, so you might consider peeping over at MGC sometimes. Oh, and yeah, I wasn’t going to blog, but I woke up going “Oh, duh!” and I had to share. And, oh, yeah, happy New Year.*
This is where I confess I’m a wussy. I’ve spent most of the last year (not all of it because there were significant medical issues, including a near-fatal drug side effect to deal with) hesitating on the edge of the sea of indie publishing, unable to motivate myself to write.
Given that traditional is done with me, this was the equivalent of considering giving up on my career of twenty years, and the only skill I’ve worked on seriously in my adult life.
There were reasons. The reasons just might have been completely wrong. And one of those reasons is important for the rest of you to know.
Some of the reasons are intensely personal. The aforementioned drug side effect, for instance. People with my odd form of auto-immune are often helped by singulair. I was too. Until I fell into a depressive spiral from which I could not pull up. Turns out I’m one of the 0.1% people who have a bad reaction to singulair.
Once that was fixed, there were other personal hurdles, including family matters — by and large good, but time consuming — which ate the first half of the year.
Once that was done–
The problem is that all through this, and in fact till this morning, I was struggling with some facts I couldn’t understand. It goes something like this:
Traditional and Indie careers seem to have no point of contact. What I mean is, traditional mid list (or even high mid list, or even some bestsellers — though not all — ) authors who go indie seem to do dismally. At the same time, indie authors are bringing down serious cash and even getting serious name recognition.
Most traditional authors who are dumped or leave the field seem to make a significant amount of their living from teaching. While I like teaching, I got into this to tell stories, and honestly it’s all I want to do.
Except for Witchfinder, and that was 8 years ago and it’s a strange book, my indie publications the last two years have been oh, hum. In trad, I can count on selling 3 to 4k in the first month, usually, in indie, I was seeing first-month sales of 500 copies, with some additional KUL reading. Now sure, the things I have published, recently were mostly collections and recently a short novel, Deep Pink,which is also profoundly weird. And I get those aren’t things that sell normally. Still watching the counter go up to 500 had me scratching my head and going “I thought I had at least 1k hardcore fans.” Again there’s a long tail, and my publications have been one-off, and I won’t know what splash a full length space opera novel makes till I release it (end of January), or the next Dyce novel (end of February) but all the same, you know, it’s disquieting.
If it weren’t for the fact that I know several other traditional authors experiencing the same thing — leftists, centrists, and people who think politics is a strange dish we eat with onions — I’d think my problem is that I am profoundly politically tainted. I mean, if someone admitting they voted for Trump is enough for a twitter mob to try to drive them out of romance publishing, what does being an avowed anti-Marxist do to one’s numbers. (And yeah, sure, I could keep my mouth shut. Except I can’t. I have kids and will have grandkids (and have “adopted”, practice grandkids now) I’ve seen this movie before, and therefore I can’t allow it to continue playing and for the consequences to fall on those I love after I’m gone. My voice might do very little but it’s a voice, opposing the madness. At any rate, I was never very good at pretending or fitting in, and mean girls think they’re psychic and can “find” whatever they want in your books, as we’ve had proof lately.)
But what else could it mean?
It is at this point most traditional writers I know, particularly if they were always mid list (Represent!) sigh and say something like “I guess I never really had that much of an audience. There’s something in my writing that just doesn’t sell. Well, I’ll know the craft and people will pay for lessons/coaching. I guess I’ll do that.” Or you know, decided to start sewing stuffed dragons or stuffed Mr. Trashbags for a living. (Shhhh. It’s a hobby.)
Which, okay, fine, maybe it’s a thing.
Except that I’m sorry, I’ve met young, (thirty something) indie authors making a living after 1 year. I’ve looked at and read their (usually fairly short) books, and there is no magic sauce. They read like very young-in-writing authors, who will get better in time. Some of them are eminently readable but I have to turn off the part of my back brain that groans and goes “oh, hey, I used to do that.”
…. So, what gives?
Well, this morning I woke up with the solution. No, I don’t know HOW. My brain doesn’t work like a normal human being’s brain, which turns over things rationally and comes up with a solution. No. I think most of my IQ is in either my subconscious or my toenails or perhaps, given my peculiar form of getting drunk (I become annoying and exhaustively rational. Think Mr. Spock.) my waking mind got tired of blurting out truths others find unpalatable and therefore shuts itself down hard.
Which means my most productive insights come about something like this: worry at a problem for days, weeks or months or even years, (depending), and get nothing. Then suddenly while I’m doing something completely unrelated, or just woke up (or on the case of plot problems, often in my dreams) get the solution with startling clarity.
This morning I realized why your traditional career might give you a little boost (or a significant boost) in indie, but it won’t be at the same level starting out. And why even those who have dual careers need to start out again in indie, even while they’re still doing fine (and are sometimes megasellers) in traditional. And also why traditional publishers think the indie market doesn’t really matter and fail to understand the significance of ebooks.
Are you ready for this? Once you see it, you can’t unsee it: it is because traditional and indie play to fundamentally different sets of readers.
What? Do I mean paper and ebook? Do I mean non-KULL and KULL?
Yes, but no.
One of the things that has always frustrated hell out of midlisters caught in the funny house of traditional publishing is that traditional publishing ignores a VAST number of readers, and they’re the readers midlisters are most equipped to do well with.
They’ll tell you it’s not a vast number. It’s something like 5% of the reading public. And they’re right. Except that it’s 5% of the reading public that accounts for 80% of sales.
This is a known demographic. They go by many names from super readers to compulsive readers. To call us — yes, I’m confessing — by our real name, we’re story addicts. The threshold to be one is RIDICULOUSLY low: 3 books a month. I have no clue what they call people who in slow times average three books a week, and when on vacation or otherwise not busy can do that a day, but I know we exist, and I know I’m not alone. (Right, I’m not alone? Right?) We’re the people who sneak a book into the pocket of our formal clothes and panic because you can’t figure out how to sneak a book into your wedding dress. We exist, and we won’t live in the shadows anymore. I mean… ahem… whatever.
The point is that traditional publishing always ignore these people. There are reasons for it, having to do with production times and laydown. Traditional books follow a weird and convoluted trail to publication, a trail that takes scheduling with many people, and independent entities like stores. This makes doing even four books a year very difficult. Which means that most authors, be they big names or midlisters are locked into a book a year.
Then there’s the produce model of publishing: your book supposedly spoils or ages after being on the shelves for 1 week and gets returned after that. And then there is ordering to the net and a bunch of other things that seem completely insane to the rest of us, and which have essentially killed midlist but which cater to ONE audience: the people who read one or two books a year.
These are fundamentally and intrinsically different groups of readers: they read mostly on paper, for one. They usually buy their book in a bookstore (though with the scarcity of those, a lot have moved online). They often — though not necessarily — read as a positional good. I.e. they read because they think of themselves as smart people, and smart people read. I suspect as a whole they trend left-ier (because left politics are also a positional good in our society,) more display oriented, and tend to think of themselves more as “intellectuals” than your average book addict. They overlap with people who read less than us story addicts because they’re busy, have kids, are in a phase of their life when they simply don’t have much time to devote to reading, or reading is not their primary form of entertainment. These people don’t trend leftier, snobbier, etc, but they tend to only be aware of books when they’re pushed, or only pay attention when they have a marketing campaign telling them “read this”. For the very busy (I went through phases when I was rebuilding houses, and the kids were tiny. Keep in mind I’m an addict though, so to go without a fix I need to be insanely busy. But yeah, it happens.) this makes sense, as you want to be assured that book you just started is no going to come apart in the middle. A lot of us midlisters tap into that fandom as do odd-ball authors, mostly in the Baen stable, (for sf/f) or cozy authors for mystery who get enough push to hit that audience. (Or in midlister’s case, who are lucky enough to be found sometimes.)
It wasn’t always like that. In the pulp days, authors were known to put five, six, seven books a year, and have fans fall on them like starving puppies.
In fact, the pulp model is much like the indie model.
Those careers died/were killed slowly, and there’s a number of factors, but what put the final nail in that coffin (in my awareness-time as a writer who wasn’t published yet, but who was analyzing what she saw happening) were two governmental interventions (and no, I’m NOT just being a crazy libertarian, this was obvious and clear.) One of them was Bill Clinton’s (executive order? signing a directive? I don’t remember the specific model yet, and I want to register that a representative republic shouldn’t give anyone wholly ignorant of an industry the ability to interfere with it by such injurious means, period, and that we the people SHOULD have means of actual redress to stop these ridiculous regulations, beyond voting the bastards out) dictating that there should be some percentage of recycled paper in every book.
This completely silly — since trees grown for paper are trees grown for paper. No one is cutting down virgin forests to print books. (So this is the equivalent of “save the brussel sprouts.”) — but it has been proven extensively and conclusively that paper recycling and re-processing is more injurious to the environment than MAKING paper.
Also, since recycling paper is more expensive, within a month it took the cost of printing your common, run of the mill mass market paperback from $5 to $8. I was a new-mother at the time, and those $3 put most newly-printed mmpbs out of my reach. I went from buying a couple a month to buying maybe one very three months, and I had to have heard of the author before. The distortions caused by this killed the careers of a lot of mostly mmpb writers — those who write for the story addicts — and also caused distortions that included the rise of the goat gagger (books of more than 250k words) and making hard cover the most profitable format for the houses. Which in turn caused a whole lot of other distortions. I won’t go into those, which at any rate were amplified by Borders clever stupidity of ordering to the net, which all the idiots then copied. I’m not going into these because, a) I’m over 2k words and most of you are hungover and b) I start shooting green light from my eyes and foaming at the mouth.
Anyway, suffice to say as I said above it makes sense for the trad pub market as currently constituted to cater to the one or two books a year market. Which explains a lot of their choices, from the books they choose to promote, to their covers, to the fact that they tend to shed any writer to the right of Lenin, and shed us faster and harder if we’re minorities or women, or both (represent!) because as pointed out that market trends left-ier than the general population.
Which brings us to the story addicts. These poor souls can’t GO without books. I know. I am one. So, how did we survive?
Barely.
The dark years of the late nineties and the oughts tried our hearts full sore. There were actually groups of us online, in email lists and some sharing the same “I’m being driven from pillar to post” sad tales. We started buying used A LOT. Which involved reading books by authors who had since been shut down from no initial sales. Which meant that we would read two three books and break our hearts because there were no more. Or read books printed before we were born. And we expanded our genres because everyone outside a massive city eventually runs out of used books in their favored genre. (We almost all started reading romance, for instance, at that time, which given my groups is not a normal read for us. And some of us “ate” history books like m & ms, because they tended to be LONG, which meant more reading for the money. Also they’re usually priced cheap as used books.) And read marginal books to the end (and sometimes three or four times) because well, it was a book.
Which is why, not just as a writer, but as a reader, I say Thank G-d for indie.
You see, Indie by its nature, the fact that books are cheap (and a lot of us lunatics are subscribed to Kindle lending library, too) and that they are varied, but mostly THAT THEY’RE IN SERIES and series that are published two to three months apart for new installments, caters to the 5% who buy 80% of the books.
COMPLETELY different market from traditional. And one about which I can speak authoritatively because, again, I AM THAT market, or a typical member of it.
If you write anything remotely readable and non offensive in one of our genres or subgenres, (we can now be picky) we will find you and we will read you.
EXCEPT that it comes with a caveat: indie has a high cost in finding an author initially. Oh, not as high as trad is getting, by publishing a lot of utter crap, but still high. You will find that about 50% (and for some genres higher) of books you sample make you scramble backwards away from them going “dear Lord, no.” In science fiction I’ve found this often includes people who think they’re inventing the genre from scratch, or are adamant they’re not science fiction, while writing all the tropes… as if they were brand new and earth shattering (but enough about traditional publishing!), in romance and mystery they often include recent college graduates (I was one once) who think serious must equal “there are no good guys” or “no one is clean.”
Anyway, covers often warn you away from those, by being of startling inappropriate horribleness. BUT not always.
What this means is that you WANT series. Judging by ancient mythologies’ tendency to become convoluted soap operas, I suspect humans crave series, period, but indie reinforces that. I’ve been known to fall into a series and read it to the end even when it’s just “so so.”
If a series is actually good, and it has a lot of books? BLISS. I know what I’m reading that week.
This explains why a lot of the high-money makers in indie are releasing books every other or every month, in a series. (Though that might drive me insane, and I have a starting public, and I’m willing to give it a little extra time, too, so I’m going to run a few series to start with.)
So:
Trad pub and indie are marketing to fundamentally different people. Trad pub is not utterly blind, it just doesn’t cater to us, and never has.
In indie, you benefit from long series (even if sometimes what you put out any given month is a short story) and from publishing frequently.
And while some of your readers from trad pub will find you right away, it might take time for them to figure out you’re publishing in the new model, particularly if you’re still publishing traditional or if you’ve been silent for some years (as I sort of have, due to illness.)
So, your initial sales for your first indie books will be disappointing. This is almost inevitable.
But you still have the skills and the know how. If you’re writing for your fans and not the editors (and sometimes this takes a bit of mental adjustment, but you can do it. If you’re a long time writer, you’ve survived about a million changing trends, anyway.) you can be successful at this game. (Yes there are other things you can/should learn to ease your journey, like keywords. I SUCK at keywords. I suck like a hoover. But I know people who also suck and are making REAL money. By which I mean more money than most trad pub midlisters ever saw.)
You just need a serious publishing schedule (and to take it seriously) beta readers and editors you can count on and a decentish cover designer (I’m one of those. I’m getting better. I aspire to good, as I do in everything I do, but that takes time and practice, and it’s a career I never wanted, but which makes my life easier than dealing with finding artists.)
THIS IS POSSIBLE. You can do it. I can do it.
Or at least I’m going to try really, really hard, which is why I sat down with my husband and wrote a schedule for 2020 which would probably give most people nightmares, and which involves my learning to keep regular hours, not get distracted by things like house cleaning and learning (again) to produce reliably.
But you know, if my insight is correct (and I made the schedule before I had that insight, just based on what I see working) it should work.
Which makes 2020 the year of go big or go home.
Wish me luck. Or join me in the insanity. Whichever your inclination!
Let’s go!
*Yes, yes, I had a typo in the title. Note not in the title at MGC. But instead of copying i wrote out the title again, and this happened while my entire family was moving and talking around me, and before I went away from the computer for a while. Typos happen.*
So it’s the end of 2019. Not the end of the world. The rest promises to go pretty much as always, ticky boo. Even if ticky boo for some people includes getting crazier. Honestly it doesn’t bode well that 2020 is the year of the rat.
I told my husband I remember being very excited at the end of the 70s. Now part of this is that I got to write a retrospective of the decade for the newspaper, (which no longer exists) because I was interning in the morgue. (Newspaper morgue, where the old issues are kept. It was in the basement, cold, dark, and surrounded by dead news.)
Now we tick over a new decade and I yawn and go “D*mn it, I’ll have to remember to change that 1 to the 2.”
He said it’s because the eighties were the first time we remembered changing decades. And also I had the promise of an exchange student year in America come June, and also, honestly, who didn’t want to get way from the seventies?
He has a point of course. And yes, a lot of it is that I know how this game works. And also that time is going faster every year. (Actually though there’s an argument for it being an effect of the aging brain, there are physicists who think time is in fact accelerating. This theory makes me feel better when I realize next year I’m going to be the age at which Shakespeare died and yet my accomplishments don’t come close. You see, he had the advantage of slower years in which to learn and think. Temporal privilege!)
A lot of it, on the other hand is that the world is not full of possibilities. I’ve chosen my track, and while that has a lot remaining to be explored (next year, indie with both feet!) it’s not like — absent rejuv — I can suddenly take another track and become an aerospace engineer, or a doctor. I hope some day to get a doctorate in classics, but since that’s mostly a “I want to have it, and teaching classics in community college beats being a greeter at Walmart in my seventies.” it might very well never happen.
And I’m okay with that. Sometimes the roads not taken were not worth the toll. Almost any other degree I could take would be as useless in the states as Languages was. And Languages, to be fair was only useless because I don’t ENJOY translating and ran away with the writing circus as soon as I could. It pays less, and was way more stress because of traditional publishing, but I did enjoy the work, until the stress shut me down. (Yes, it’s coming back. It doesn’t look like it from the outside, but it took me almost two years to enjoy writing again. Putting Deep Pink out was a major victory, but now the way looks easier. Hopefully Winter Prince and the first Rhodes mystery out in January. In reverse order, since Rhodes will take less time to finish. And then we’ll see. I warn you I’ll be doing closed pen names. Nothing shameful, I just want to run an experiment to see if rumors of my politics hurt my sales (not the real politics, mind you. The bullshit in wikipedia about SP, for one.))
But you know, the US takes MDs from Syria but not from Portugal, even though Portuguese training is identical with England. Whoever decides that stuff is insane. Or perhaps has an agenda of importing people from certain countries. (Who, they? Biased? Nevah.)
Anyway, this new decade thing: I hope to write a lot. I hope to start teaching, once I’ve established my writing routine, so one doesn’t eat the other. Mostly, I suspect, weekend workshops on specific topics, done via Skype. (We still have a hole in our finances from the flight debacle — yes, I still need to write about it — and the house needs repairs urgently before things get worse.)
I will also — at last, yes — assemble a collection of essays from this blog. First volume to be called Joining The Freedom Gang. It will be released under S. A. Hoyt mostly so it doesn’t go to my author page or show up when you search for fiction.
I was going to have a private sale of those, but tax laws for online sales (I’d have to collect taxes from each of you and KNOW your state’s tax laws) make that impossible. It’s almost like our laws and regulations are designed to hurt the little guy and protect large tech monopolies.
So, anyway, that’s what’s ahead. Also, everything working out both boys will be moving on to fully independent lives next year, which is a major change for us. Not so much to empty nesters, as we’ve been largely alone for a year or so, but to just us, not responsible for others, even if we help them.
It will be interesting.
And who knows, maybe someone will invent rejuv and I’ll get to be a spaceship captain in the next millennium. I don’t want to live forever, but for now the adventure is fun.
If I don’t post tomorrow (we’re going out to dinner with the family and probably staying downtown to watch fireworks) have a happy new year, and may your adventures continue being interesting.
We have a problem of reproducibility in studies. And by that, I mean in the HARD sciences. If you need background, look here,here, here,here and here.
Why this should matter: most of us, including people who are responsible for doing things like creating weapon systems, making regulations on what medications are safe/how you should cook your food/what age you can drink/smoke/fight/boogie (really any regulations at all that interfere with your daily life)/treat you when you get sick have neither the time nor the inclination to look into the entrails of “studies” that “prove” this or that or the other.
Medicine, particularly under Obama care went into “evidence based” mode, for instance. What this means is that what they’re going to use on your problem is not in any way based on the doctor’s experience, or his experience with YOU particularly, but on “studies.” This makes perfect sense, of course, to treat people with normal bodies at least (I recently found that for a significant number of my friends, a supplement does the opposite of what it’s supposed to. I have the same issue, and it was good to know I wasn’t alone.) Unless, of course, the “studies” the doctors are relying on have flaws that render them irreproducible.
Needless to say, the crisis is much bigger in the social sciences. In fact, there is significant push back in Psychology to assure us, now they’re getting it right, and we’re totes supposed to trust them now. This after they lied to us about things like the rodent overpopulation studies and Zimbardo’s prison experiments, and led to the creation of severely flawed, if not outright drawers on head legislation based on those things. Yeah, now we’ll trust them, because they’ve COMPLETELY eliminated the problem. And if you believe that, I can find you a nice plot of land in Florida which I guarantee won’t be under water or anything…
The problem is that the reproducibility crisis is baked in.
I’m not even going to protest against government funding of science. I would, except that the regulatory burdens we’ve put on research, particularly research involving people make it almost impossible for individuals or companies to fund most of the research that we need or would like.
What I’m going to protest is the drive for “results”, particularly the results that the governmental entity funding the studies wants/wishes for.
Yes, honest researchers resist that push. But if they’re fairly sure of the results, the temptation to “fudge” can be … irresistible. Because, you know, getting the “desired” results means more money.
So, while there is still excellent research being done, a lot of it is corrupted.
That goes double and with little bells for ANY social research. Why? Because all social research involves people. And that calls forth more “bias of the researcher” and “desire to make it fit the expectations” and…. And subjects can pick up on all that, even with the researcher thinking he/she is being strictly dispassionate and objective. Which means…. We’ll never have absolutely infallible social and psychological studies. (Not to mention that both society and psychology change over time, and therefore change how people react. What is “over time”? I don’t know. Could range from decades to centuries, depending on what the research is.)
Now, sure, we can get some insights into humans on things like “how long will children weight for a reward” but you can’t really extricate all the factors going into it, from disparate brain development, to family environment going into that study. At best you can say “on average, a child will–”
However the results are weak at best, and therefore ABSOLUTELY should not be used to base social “push” or much less regulation on.
Distantly the Margaret Mead debacle is responsible for everything from pushing girls into promiscuity (and the great idiocy of the 70s in which very educated people believed it was for CHILDREN to have sex) to the current globalization crisis, because it assumed cultures were just put on or dropped like garments. (Something, btw, that any immigrant who has acculturated and knows how hard it is could tell them is not just insane, it’s lala land crazy. I’ve found myself on occasion talking to groups of people from various backgrounds who came here and acculturated to the measure of the possible, and all of us agree it’s very difficult and requires extraordinary motivation. So importing masses of people and expecting the culture to remain the same is idiocy. But Mead thought humans were infinitely plastic, and it was all a matter of culture, and of course, cultures could be tinkered with, duh.)
The Zimbardo prison experiments convinced a vast number of liberals and particularly liberals designated “victim” classes that everyone would be out to get them/exterminate them WITHOUT the benevolent government standing between. (Please, please, please, someone hammer into their heads that government, like soylent green, is people. And therefore would/will be out to get people if it can. Though honestly, because that experiment was actively faked, most of what government does is “get” people through good intentions, bone-headed implementation, sheer stupidity and ignoring the laws of unintended consequences.)
As for the overpopulation studies with rats (first hint, humans are not rats) they convinced more people than should be possible that there was an overpopulation crisis and led to the depopulating of the west, which in turn, in slow unfolding crisis, led to the importation of unassimilated third worlders, which in turn is killing the one culture that lifted more people out of poverty and need than any other in the world. And it might lead to the extinction of civilization itself.
Now the left is striking (while the iron is fevered, like their minds) with the idea that studies prove the need to stop micro aggressions, and “hate” speech and all sorts of other things because these “harm” people.
And these studies are, if possible, even more flawed and tenuous than the ones that led us down the merry path of 20th century hell.
Which is why it’s vital to understand these social “studies” aren’t science in any recognizable way. Most of them are irreproducible. They are also often done with tiny samples, and bizarrely biased.
And even if they were attempting to be completely scrupulous, there would be other issues. For instance, people raised on the idea that everyone is out to get them, will react differently from people who have been told they’re as good and capable as anyone else and can weather other people’s displeasure with no harm.
And people who EXPECT women (say) to succeed with no effort (which was kind of the premise of feminism: “if we could move in on equal terms, we’d outdo all men, because we’re better.” (This was based on early pioneers who had to fight to even get into male fields, and therefore tended to be extraordinarily well prepared and motivated. Same thing with conservatives in any artistic/entertainment field today. It was almost reasonable to think so, except the opening of the field brought in the unmotivated and ill prepared, and women, like men, are mostly mediocre.)) are likely to see any set back as someone else’s fault and the result of “discrimination.” (Which is the reason that American women — American women, who live in as close to a matriarchy as humanity has ever created — think that they live in a patriarchy. And minorities, who are practically pushed and prodded (often in directions they don’t want to go. Ask me how I know) to succeed are convinced their every failure is the result of a non-existent (still, by and large, except when you count foreign trolls. As the Jussie Smollet and other cases show, there is way more demand for racism than there is supply. ) white supremacy.)
Working with such a population doesn’t in fact give us any realistic idea of whether “hate speech” is harmful or in fact has any effect at all. And as for micro aggressions? Pfui. If you’re human and don’t get micro-aggressed (and often macro) in rubbing shoulders with other humans, you’re probably not paying attention.
And doing away with the amendments and values that have — again — lifted more people out of poverty in the history of humanity as well as created the most genuine progress (in ease of feeding, cleaning, transporting, clothing and entertaining people) in history in the name of appeasing the conclusions of some nebulous and irreproducible study is cheer idiocy.
Besides, we have some very large sample studies on the results of their favorite policies: the USSR, the Eastern block countries (note they managed to make GERMANS poor and lazy, despite their culture being by nature antithetical to that.), China, Venezuela, etc etc etc. These vast and by nature unbiased studies tell us the regulators, who “believe in science” are in fact standard issue would-be oppressors who are, fortunately, not a majority of the human race, because if they were Zimbardo would be right. (And I hate Zimbardo for several reasons, among which is being a mud shark of science.)
Also, note that every dictatorship ever was really good at creating “studies” to show what they wanted.
Yeah, real science doesn’t lie. But there are areas of human endeavor that are curiously resistant to testing hypothesis. Unless of course you take the large-scale studies inadvertently done by history itself.
When someone flings a “study” in your face, fling both middle fingers, upright, in uncompromising salute (might as well give them something to feel it’s a micro-aggression.
*Note these are books sent to us by readers/frequenters of this blog. Our bringing them to your attention does not imply that we’ve read them and/or endorse them, unless we specifically say so. As with all such purchases, we recommend you download a sample and make sure it’s to your taste. 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. That helps defray my time cost of about 2 hours a day on the blog, time probably better spent on fiction. ;)*
Kidnapped by orcs as a child Elara, heir to the elven house of Greenwood, was raised as one of them. So long did she live among the orcs that she scarce remembered her childhood in the Greenwood. She grew to think of herself as orc, even marrying one of them. She earned high honor among them as a worker of steel, and one who could hear its voice.
When elf warriors out of Greenwood killed her orc family, slaughtered their clan, and brought her back to Greenwood, she learned that she was the last survivor of the royal house of Greenwood and, thus, their queen by right.
While the elves saw her as their queen, Elara saw them only as enemies, as the ones responsible for slaughtering the family she loved. And so, she bides her time, awaiting an opportunity to bring destruction to the elves who had ripped her from a happy home.
After centuries of warfare, the Fae were banished from the human world, taking most of the magic with them.
Not all of them made it through the gates to the fairy lands. And not all of the magic is gone. A group of warriors vowed to protect humanity from the remaining fae and so they have over the centuries.
Christopher Chevalier, a descendent of one of those warriors, has spent his life studying combat and magic to fight the fae. When he comes across humans acting like fae, using magic he’s never heard about, he has to swallow his pride and ask for help from Listrial, the Fairy Queen and one of the fae who got trapped in the human world.
Dan Ben-David just wants his refrigerator to work consistently. When it reveals another world, one he forgot he’d lived in, he finds more questions than answers about his past.
Winifred Andersdotter wanted nothing more than a nice evening out with her boyfriend. When they’re set upon by thugs who’d taken exception to her boyfriends red cap, they fight back and everything begins to change.
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.
Today is my 34th (religious ceremony) anniversary, i.e. the “real anniversary” though we often celebrate the civil wedding in the summer, because you know… well, because for instance today we’d planned to go out to dinner, and the weather is bitterly cold with blowing snow, so we’re not. I’ll make dinner and we’ll eat at home.
Which honestly is fine.
I’m doing a quick cleaning as per usual on Friday, only quicker since it’s only been US in the house most of the time (it’s amazing how much more mess even ONE extra person adds) and then try to get some writing done.
You know, some of our time together has been neither easy nor pleasant: illnesses, being broke, worrying about the kids. But I wouldn’t trade it away for anything else. All in all, these have been 34 very happy years, and I’d be very happy with another 34.
That’s about it, since I don’t exactly have the brain for a real post.
Only two things: I gave my friends at MGC the option of deleting this comment but they inexplicably chose not to:
Sorry this is so horribly late. I’ve been trying to finish a few commissioned covers so I can close that to do list before the end of the year.
I actually meant to write this yesterday, but was fairly useless by the end of the evening and knew I wouldn’t find the right words.
I’ve got bad news and good news.
The bad news is that having figured out two more or less permanent burrs and occasional (very occasional) posters on this blog are actually trolls and probably paid, one of them for sure Turkish (and probably not the one I said so) the other one just a Johnny-one-note who has been calling for blood and guts and inciting physical revolution everywhere he posts and frankly apropos nothing much, I realized it’s going to get much much worse. Which means things are going to get very confused. And it’s all going to ramp up to 11 in the lead up to the election. Which means there’s a few things we must establish up front, if this blog is going to be any use.
Softheads – When I talk about softheads, it’s not necessarily an insult. Some people are more prone to emotional manipulation than others, particularly emotional manipulation in one direction.
This has nothing to do with intellectual capacity. In fact, some of the most susceptible to emotional manipulation are really brilliant people. I’m one of those people, give or take the brilliance (meh) because I tend to try to be rational, which means emotion gets in under my guard. For instance, until Trump won in 2016 I didn’t realize how depressed — despairing, in fact — I’d been.
Yeah, if you go back and read my posts, it doesn’t come across that way, but trust me, it was as though a weight lifted off my mind, such a weight that I hadn’t been able to think straight around it.
But I’m a depressive. As a depressive, I have to be aware of the “burn it all down” and “let’s light the funeral pyre” impulses. I have to, because I had to learn to compensate for those, or I’d never have lived past my teenage years. (And the explosion would have been EPIC.)
Can I be a softhead though? Oh, sure. Until two friends, one a Libertarian icon and one a Conservative icon, (in amazing agreement) sat me down separately and made the case for Trump, I was ready to get locked into never-Trump land. It was only after they talked to me that I took a look at who my companions were on that side, and recoiled. Though even now I’m saddened and mildly angry at how many people I used to trust are all ready to vote for a commie instead of for a president who has turned out much better than even his supporters could have anticipated (except Scott Adams, of course.)
And how many of them are actual embedded leftist agents, and how many are softheads? I doubt they themselves know. When you are subjected to a lot of push from everyone around you, and people you are used to trust and think reasonable, you tend to go along and have trouble breaking out of it.
Humans are social creatures. None of us is immune.
Trolls – I always knew we had a few trolls here. Some of them are just people who hate me, personally (bats eyelashes. One only knows why! Me, who am all sweetness and light) and some are people with a deep agenda. Some are even very subtle. Normally I only block people when they really get on my nerves. RES (it’s all the wallaby’s fault) and I had a discussion about blocking, must be six? years ago now. He gave me the key to blocking, which is “block people who act like the drunk uncle at a wedding” and therefore diminish everyone’s ability to communicate.
But I might have to do more work, in the future, like search those people who seem to have a specific agenda (which is how I found belisarios whatever has a Turkish last name, and the twitter under his email is in Turkish (and also sells dubious copies of CDs and DVDs.) So it seems to be obvious that we are dealing with paid (a friend who works in the field of well… fraud, tells me Turkish trolls are cheap) elements, spreading a specific message.
And the message, honestly is “All is lost, let you and him fight.”
Anyway, I’ll have to get more proactive on that.
Disinformation campaigns – it has become obvious that there are several disinformation campaigns going on. The Steele Dossier might be the most innocent of those because it was aimed at the press and high level political stuff. But look, in a global world, where trolls can be had for very cheap abroad, and where the opinion making is moving off the main stream media and onto blogs and websites, the enemies of the US both internal and external (FYI most of them are a continuum, honestly) WILL use cheap trolls for disinformation but more importantly to shape mood and influence reactions (Facebook ran studies on this since 2015. WHAT do you think it’s being used for?)
We’re no longer in the land of the copy-pasta trolls we’ve all known since 9/11. These are highly sophisticated and can make softheads of some fairly smart and influential people.
You can tell it’s a campaign though through several signals:
The first and most important is that it comes LITERALLY out of nowhere. I.e. it might be a perennial issue, and one the right roughly agrees on, but suddenly it’s EVERYWHERE at once.
The recent “ahhhhhh porn!” campaign is typical of this. Suddenly, it was everywhere. Friends (okay, okay, acquaintances. Those people are nuts) who are on the chans tell me these are tested there first, and from there appear in fringe blogs that are … uh…. not necessarily what they seem to be. Or at least some of them aren’t.
And then with amazing suddenness it’s everywhere, including the most respectable sites on the right/libertarian spectrum.
That one, shocked the heck out of me, with how rapidly it propagated and has me questioning the softhead/infiltrator continuum. (though honestly it could be just susceptibility.)
It was a campaign designed to divide the right, specifically; one that’s hard to answer, because honestly who is PRO porn; and one that was designed to weaken the first amendment, which is congruent with the left’s aims. (Give government a chance to regulate porn, and everything from “gun porn” to “religious porn” can be forbidden. In fact, China bans “unrealistic” stories under that heading. Think about it.)
Also, note, when most of the right from libertarians to conservatives went “wait, what” the entire topic went away, very rapidly.
But mostly, mostly, the main thing to look at is “What in heck brought this obsession about?” “What brought this up, all of a sudden?”
In the same way, before the election in 16 there was something like it with “burn it all down” without waiting for the election. It wasn’t as blatant, and it didn’t get to the best sites overnight. But it was … curiously out of tune with the times. Even those like me who were sure it was all lost (but was trying not to betray it) thought it was a little weird that it was coming out of nowhere and insisting we burn it all down before the election.
The definite bad news is that it’s gotten much worse and the trolls/agents have gotten much better at their job.
The good news is that the reason this is happening is that Trump has turned out much much better than expected, and that his policies are good for America which means they’re making rivals and enemies of America deeply uncomfortable and scared.
Take fracking, which has made us net energy exporters. This is going to hurt a broad range of countries from the Middle East to Russia. And some of them have no way to save themselves if the price of oil won’t come back up.
The idea of Trump being re-elected is an existential threat to them. And most of them can’t face the American armed forces, but they can get Americans at each other’s throats.
They are probably doing this to the left as well, which explains the utterly crazy-cakes shampeachment, not to mention the insane candidates the left is fielding.
Both of which also fall under evil will oft evil mar. I.e. if the left weren’t fielding such insane candidates, there wouldn’t be the need for a campaign to start the boogaloo NOW before Trump gets reelected. But then, these people don’t understand Americans very well.
The more it looks like Trump will be re-elected, the worse the disinformation via trolls and agents will get, and the louder the calls to start the boogaloo now, as well as branding anyone who says “the heck” as a coward or an enemy agent.
But I want you to pause and think about it: all of us who AREN’T Never-Trumpers agree that Trump fights. And that he’s not a coward. And yet, has he fielded armies? No? Then maybe it’s not a time for a physical fight.
Yes, the situation in Virginia is worrisome. Yes, the possibility of massive fraud come November has me using up a lot of hair dye. BUT neither of of those has come to a point yet where the calls to boogaloo make any sense. Virginia might. They’re tap-dancing on a powder barrel. But it hasn’t YET. And as for election fraud a) the president and various groups have been doing a lot of work behind the scenes. b) does anyone think Trump will take fraud lying down. c) the left has no clue how to act by stealth anymore. They counted on a complicit press. They’re sure to botch it. They’re sure to be obvious.
The shampeachment? It’s bizarre and indicates a level of disconnect from reality that has most of us going “Wait, what?” but I think in the end it’s a leftist own-goal.
So, as I said before, there might be a time for this word. The time is not now. And anyone screaming for it now is either being paid to (I find it interesting two of the almost-for-sure paid people were screaming for just that) or are people whose (usually depressive) tone of mind predisposes them to buy what the left is selling (just like the very moral fell for the “urgency of hampering the first amendment to stop porn.”)
If you’re a regular here, and I’ve known you for years, much less if you’re someone I’ve considered a friend, if I smack your nose when you start repeating whatever the campaign of the day is, it’s not personal. Unless someone has stolen your account (it happens, we’ve had two cases here of someone impersonating a regular, some years ago) I know you’re not a troll. If someone makes you think I’m attacking you (and hey, it could be word press. Some threads are hard to track) that person probably doesn’t have your best interests at heart. That said, I might smack noses. The person who smacks your nose to keep you running off the ledge is not an enemy. (I got my nose smacked hard, granted in private, in the run up to 2016. In private, in one case, in public but in person in another.) If you think I smacked your nose unduly hard, you probably have my email. You wouldn’t be the first one to email me and go “I really am not a troll and I don’t know why my IP shows THAT.”
BUT more importantly, I’d appreciate it if you discuss the subjects rationally and allow yourself not just to reconsider your positions, but to consider what I’m saying, and also where you might have got the ideas/influence pushing you the other way.
Because the campaigns are going to get worse, and the trolls more subtle leading up to November. As I said, Trump’s reelection is an existential threat to foreign and domestic enemies, who might not be able to hold on another 4 years.
And that later is the very good news.
They’re fighting very hard to divide and us and get us to destroy ourselves because they’re losing power. And they’re afraid of losing permanently.
According To Hoyt 