The bridal couple left this morning at 4:00 am.  I don’t quite know what to do today.  I’d like to go do something, but we’re horribly tired.  Also, it’s a cold and rainy and disagreeable day.

I need to torture Grant, but I don’t think I’m awake enough to.

Perhaps I’ll go lie down till the interest in moving passes?

We’ve been going going going for 8 days.  Perhaps it’s time for a day of rest.

Sorry we haven’t been on much.  It’s been rather crazy.

As I expected, everything was crazy going up to the wedding, but it barely slowed down after.

Yesterday was mom’s 85th birthday, so, of course, everything came to a standstill while we celebrated that.

Around the edges, we managed to get lovely daughter in law’s family shown around downtown Porto and a castle, which was paltry, but they left today (early Monday.)  We don’t think they’re home yet.

We’re going to put the happy couple on a plane Wednesday.  And then we (Dan and I) stay another six days.

Low points so far: I forgot the tank on my apap.  Yes, even though I lost a ton of weight, I still need an apap, because my mouth conformation is weird.  Anyway, so I hadn’t slept since I left CO, and was falling asleep standing up.  Dan let me use his tank, so he’s sleep deprived today but I’m functional.  We have two more days of this, after which #1 son leaves me his tank (That mouth conformation thing. We have interchangeable ones) and get mine from the bathroom in CO when he gets there.)

Food.  Um… that should be both a high and a low point. The food is wonderful, but I’m so far off the low carb wagon it will take me a month after I get back to lose the poundage and get the inflamation to subside.  I knew how it would be, of course.  But I didn’t expect mom to try to feed us above and round the meals.  And I keep thinking I might never have this again, so…  Yeah. Not good.  I’m going on TWO walks a day when I get back.  And it’s only ten more days or so.

We’re going to need another checked bag and another carry on.  Part of this should be BOTH a high and a low point.  On the one hand, of course, we’re going to shell out for more luggage.  OTOH we’re doing so because we accomplished mission number 1: acquire student cloaks for me (mom gave mine away), my husband and the two boys, with patches for the right degrees.  Lovely DIL wanted one too and got it.  They’re really inexpensive, water resistant, tight-woven wool, and you can sew patches on.  (Hey, Larry, can I get an MHI patch?) With them on — as a friend put it — you look like a Hogwarts student who grew up and became a pirate.  The checked is because in our original booking through Norwegian we were extremely limited on carry on, and I want to take two changes of clothing on carry on.  One, because we have a 12 hour layover OVERNIGHT in Madrid.  We need to find some place to sleep, and if we do, we need clothes to change into.

One because I’m going to get a room to take a shower and change in the 5 hours in JFK, because by then I’ll be gross again. We’ll get to CO in the middle of the day and I want to look and feel like a human being.

Either from the carby carbiness, or because of the high humidity or whatever, the place where I broke my ankle is killing me.  And everything feels icky and achy. (Might be lack of sleep, too.)

The Good: The wedding went wonderfully.  Weird for a bilingual ceremony, but there were no glitches.  The kids were both radiant, and kept getting lost in each other’s eyes to the point that everyone else was deeply moved.

The banquet which my mom considered simple to the point of being unbecoming was quite good and more than sufficient. (Roman banquet like, as Dan saw it.)

The excursions we took DIL’s relatives on were fun, we mesh well and we might manage the thing that I never looked for: we might have discovered new friends in my son’s inlaws. It’s a normal, almost forced thing in Portugal, but I never expected it.  I’m glad of it though, that we can look on them as almost-relatives.

We also had a very good — if expensive, because we bought the things for the kids to take back — day today.

And we have a week or so to recover after they leave.

And best of all, dad and mom are doing better than I could have expected.

I’ll update again when I can.

Too complicated to explain, but I’m the SANE one in this family.

No, seriously.  It’s not weird I read and write science fiction…

The suitcase was found. I now need to decide which of the THREE wedding outfits I wear….

Meh.

Lots and lots of meh-itude. :D

Oh, the things I’ve seen — and done.

Started with “missing” the flight out of Denver. Only not really.  Oh, the things I’ll have to say about Norwegian airlines.

An obscene amount of money and five hours later, circa midnight on Tuesday, we got the flights we could get.  Note I’d never have come via Madrid otherwise, much less with a tight connection.  But I had to.

So we arrived here without luggage.  Because we’d paired our carry on till we had not even a change of clothes, we had to wash our travel clothes overnight.  Our bags remain MIA.  Which is a problem, since it includes not only Dan’s and my clothing to attend the weeding (Thank G-d the Bride and Groom have dress and suit) but also the converter to plug this laptop in, so I’m writing this on the dregs of battery.

We’re about to go out and try to find “clothing that looks like we should be at a wedding.”  Since my size was always outsized here, even when I was a seven, I’m going to end up dressed in the equivalent of “old fat lady” clothes.  For which we have to shop and burn half the day that Robert’s inlaws have free to see something of the country.

Calls to the lost luggage center get them to tell us they’re “endeavoring.”

ARGGGGGH.  There will be more about this when I have more battery.  And there will probably be a private sale (as in I collect them and sell them through here before/instead of putting on Amazon) of a book of essays which I’ll start rounding up as soon as I have a converter (we should try to buy one this morning.)  Because we’re over 10k down for new tickets before we start getting replacements for things, I don’t expect royalties for about a year, and the delivery payment is spoken for for younger kid’s tuition. And PJ is no longer relevant as a source of income.  Once I get indie out, we’ll be fine, but this is the worst possible year for financial hits, and the hits keep coming.

Pray/send good thoughts that the trip got the worst out ahead of time and it’s smooth from now on, because I’ve had just about enough.

It is available for buying now

The explanation from Synova in comments yesterday:

For those who don’t know what an eArc is, it is an unproofed (if that’s the right term) advance reader copy. This means that changes might be made to the final book. It also costs more. If you want the final version as well, that’s a separate purchase.

Admittedly the things I don’t believe are exponentially larger in number than the things I believe.

One of the things that always makes agnostic in me rear up is “the new, new thing for self-promotion.”  There is a herd instinct in my field, and honestly it seems worse in indie since no one knows what works.

Right now the new new hot hot thing is newsletters. I’m agnostic on these.  I know they work for a ton of people, I don’t know if they’ll work for me.  And they don’t seem to work for me as a reader.  I’m subscribed to the newsletters of about a dozen writers, whom I like well enough to wish to hear when they have a new book out.

So, do I?  No.

Why not?  Because the philosophy driving newsletters right now is to treat them as something between this blog (note not necessarily other blogs) and twitter.  You send something out every couple of days, so people feel they know you and want to buy the book when it comes out.

I don’t know. Maybe most readers’ mailboxes aren’t as busy as mine, but any given day, on skimming the emails I divide them into three categories: must answer right now; must answer by end of day, and don’t have to answer.

Honestly, these last few weeks (we fly out of the country tonight, and it will be even messier for two weeks upcoming) my “Must answer by end of day” haven’t been getting answered, for which I beg pardon, and it will get better around May 15th.  The “don’t have to answer” though are pretty much on perma don’t-answer.  At least when I go through one of these phases when life is hitting me with the busy stick.

Which means my email learns. What it learns is that these emails are spam.  Which means I then don’t hear when a book comes out.

IF I can figure out how to do emails (honestly, like putting the donation button on my blog it might be a job for husband) I will probably have two email lists.  One is for updates, snippets, what have you, and the other ONLY releases.  So, if you see it in the email, you know there’s something to buy.  I think that MIGHT work, in the sense that the author tracker in Amazon used to work (Right now my email also puts it in spam, so I can’t tell you.)

Right now the hot hot thing which is confusing a lot of readers and social media  users is to have a nice picture with an embedded quote from your book.  This is an attempt at getting around Facebook’s limiting of links. I’ll be honest, I don’t think that works most of the time.  It MIGHT work marginally, if you can then put a link for purchase in the first comment.  But if the book isn’t out yet?  Again, going on my experience as a reader, I’m going to say nuh-uh.  Why?  Because my memory sucks.  Unless I’m your most fanatic fan ever, why on earth with fishes do I want to look at this, think “Oh, that’s interesting” and not be able to buy right away?  You know as eggs is eggs I’ll have forgotten it when it comes out in a month or so.  With a link in first comment, and if you pick the hottest, bestest of your quotes?  Mayyyyyyyyybe.

And then there’s book trailers.

The Passive Guy is Agnostic on them.

I used to be downright disbelieving on them, and like him I can’t remember when I last saw one.  They were the hot hot thing of the early oughts.

But as I was writing why I didn’t believe in them, I realized things had changed.

You see, I used to say “When you’re in youtube mode, even if the trailer knocks your socks off, what are you going to do? Run out to a bookstore and buy the book?”

But things have changed. If a trailer, or something knocks my socks off, I open an amazon window and buy the book for the kindle.

It also, like the quotes and pic might make a good way fro readers who ADORED your book to share with friends that is stronger than “You must read this.”

Caveats, of course, that it must be good, it must not be crazy expensive, (I used to be able to make them from static pictures, and now that I can render…. um…) AND it must come out after the book, so people can buy right away.  But I think it might have some value.

All the vale it used to have is what I think email lists have now: they tell the publisher you’re invested.  Seriously, you used to write “Has book trailer” and the publishers thought it was teh hottest thing.  Because NY publishing is Hollywood for ugly people.

Now… well, now book trailers might be worth it.

I find the herd instinct weird, because most often what everyone is doing has no more effect than a pardon me in a hurricane.

So periodically I need to reevaluate things and at least become agnostic on some…

It’s long been my belief that sometime the 20th century will be held on a par with the 14th for “centuries you’d prefer not to live in.”

Of course the 20th century saw a lot of advance in technology, life expectancy, cleanliness, the ability to feed the masses of humanity.  On the other hand, just like the 14th century is marked by the black plague, the 20th century was marked by state killing. Masses and masses of humans went to their death at the hands of their own governments.

And because the 20th century was more industrialized and efficient, these killings were done in big batch lots by the numbers, or at least with lots of paper work.  In the past it took sun-worshiping cults and stepped pyramids, and even then they mostly killed prisoners of war, not their citizens.

The thing is that in the twentieth century most citizens became prisoners of dreams.  Both the ideologies responsible for most of the non-war (war too, but) killing of people in the 20th century were “dream ideologies” that inspired, promised and drove people towards an imagined utopia and incidentally promised the birth of a new man.  And yet Aryan Man or Soviet Man were both completely impossible, had no basis in any factual reality or history.

They were pieces of dream, incarnate, striding the land, attracting people with their shining beauty, and hiding the dark carrion evil within.

This last week, under the stress of trying to figure out thing in Portugal (which might or might not happen. Paperwork seems delayed in ways that make no sense, unless of course someone hasn’t liked my articles on the American Council of Bishops and their shilling for illegal immigrants.  In which case that someone should perhaps consider that they really don’t want me upset. Or “never pick a fight with a woman who buys pixels by the bushel.”[UPDATE: Apparently I was maligning the local guys, and it was Portuguese unease with email causing issues.] ) and packing, and a head cold that descended on me out of nowhere, I ended up reading a lot of posts on the supernatural/occult.  I have no idea how I fell into it.  It had something to do with the private detective who goes to hell, and I wanted the name of a minor (and crazy) fortune teller, and next thing you know I’m reading articles from religious people telling everyone how shocked they were that something that looked beautiful and good turned out to be evil/have evil effects.

This practically made me rock back on my feet, because, I’m sorry, what kind of emotional infants is our civilization raising? I thought “a man may smile and smile and be a villain” was well established. And if a man, why not an entity, or for that matter a group of people, an ideology or a dream?

Then I remembered being in a group of female sf/f writers and getting excoriated when I pointed out there’s a long history of male characters who appear horrible, but who do their charity secretly, (as one is supposed to.) And how to me the most powerful character is the one I at first misjudge, and which later shows to be a good person.  This brought a clamor of “No, we have to signal all the right beliefs/politics, etc. upfront, otherwise he’s a villain!”

When I understood they thought “Anyone not politically correct is evil” I shut up. Because these are moral and emotional infants, who have never examined what their own dreams would be like in reality.

Like many mal-adapted teens, I had dreams that would be nightmares for anyone else like “One morning, science stops working, and magic comes into the world.”  The death and destruction that stuff like that would cause did not hit me till I was about 14, but it did hit me by 14 and has, since then, made me the enemy of “if only we shout loud enough, or march shoulder to shoulder, there will be paradise” school of dreamers.

Because you know what? Paradise doesn’t happen when the dreams try to work in the real world and with real humans.  The dreamers always forget the non-glamorous things like sewage, waste removal, or even growing food.

The problem with the twentieth century is that it was saturated in dreams.  Because Marxism infected academia, news reporters and entertainers of all kinds, bits and pieces of it infected everything.  Still does at times.  And the problem is NONE of it works in any way better than the rest.

I woke up to this seemingly innocuous article:  Workers Love AirPods Because Employers Stole Their Walls.

Seemingly innocuous because, even as they base the entire article on the fact that a cherished piece of collectivist dream was dreadfully wrong, they give it an anti-capitalist spin.

The entire idea of wall-less offices (or even cubes, though that, mostly, was an attempt to expand really fast without having to build/spend a lot) was part of the collectivist dream.

It started with wall-less schools, in which the kids were supposed to learn so much better, because in the ur-story of the socialists, humans were created as collective creatures, only happy in the group and it was the invention of private property (the oldest skeletons we find have their own arrows and their own implements that likely they used in life, but never mind. The dreamers want the past to be perfect communism, so they declare it so and shout and stomp their feet) that brought evil and strife into the world.  So they built a lot of elementary schools without walls.

Look, we’d already tried this, and we knew its limits. Most monasteries in the middle ages were supposed to be “everything in common” and they worked, up to a certain number of VOLUNTARIES.  Once the conditions were broken and you got too many people or people who were involuntarily shoved into the monastery, things… went wrong.

But the dream required that children be naturally “communal” so…  So, it was a bloody disaster.  Which is why by the time younger son went into a school originally designed on the open plan, someone had made very sturdy walls cutting willy nilly through the original plant.

Those were popular when? The seventies? But someone failed to learn.  And no, it wasn’t the employers, except to the extent that the employers were brought up in the public school system which extolled that failed dream, and listened to “consultants” that were the product of humanities degrees that were infected with it.

By the early two thousands (Twentieth century- the hangover years.  I think it will take all of the 21st to recover from the 29th) I was reading article after article about how people were so happy and more productive in wall-less offices, and how the younger people — ah, that fabled Homo Sovieticus — was NATURALLY social and communal.

Turns out, no. People do not work better in groups. As all of us who have been forced into group work growing up KNOW.  Turns out, that, as we explained to older son’s second grade teacher “no, the future is not more group work and collaboration, for the simple reason that it doesn’t work very well.  The future, with work from home tech being easier is more likely to be for self-starter and individualists.”

But the dream persists.  And when it blows up, it must be the fault of those evil employers and “greedy” capitalists.

Because at least in the minds of born extroverts — yeah, people like me just wake up screaming — the dream that we’re all really collective creatures who’d love to live in a pod and share all our thoughts and feelings persists. And is too beautiful to give up.  Even when the reality proves to be a crab bucket of petty bickering, mistrust, paranoia, empire building and lack of production.

In fact, there is a non-trivial overlap between those who can’t do and those who dream.

Keep your eyes open.  Reality isn’t always pretty, but dreams are dangerous things.  Beautiful dreams have killed millions of human beings.

And even the pieces of them are harmful.

Book Promo

*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.  One book per author per week. Amazon links only.-SAH*

FROM ALMA T. C. BOYKIN:  Miners and Empire: Merchant and Empire Book Five.

Aedelbert Starken shapes stone, not magic. Or so he thinks.

The town of Garmouth depends on the mines for life. Aedelbert comes to the city with his partner Caedda Quaedel in order to build three new smelters for the ore. Aedelbert and Caedda, master stone-cutters, just want to work, collect their wages, and move to the next job. Nothing more or less.

To their chagrin, building smelters and training an apprentice pose the least of their problems. A noble with a grudge threatens the mines and the city, leading to a race between the men of Garmouth and the mines, the noble, and the forces of ice and water.

Aedelbert wants nothing to do with any of it. The Scavenger, however, has other ideas. And what He gives, He can also reclaim…

C.J. CARELLA: To The Strongest (The Bicentennial War Book 1).

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: hair.

Marx Attacks! (Go for the illu, stay for the article- SAH)

So the left-wing Marxist soldiers are engaged in a systematic and widespread attack on Western Civilization, armed with the weapons of critical theory: radical feminism, social justice, identity politics, the normalization of homosexuality and transgenderism, and the accusations of racism, bigotry, xenophobia, homophobia, sexism, and evangelical religious oppression. The battle is waged against what they view as the establishment of “whiteness.” The equinsu-ocha, the white devil, is the enemy, and has to be destroyed at all costs in order to bring about social justice and cultural transformation.

The strategy? Criticize, demonize, disrupt, divide, and destabilize Western society and its institutions so that they can be dismantled more easily and a new social order can replace them. The criticism and accusations don’t have to be true, and they almost always aren’t. Truth doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is the Marxist narrative, to be accepted as dogma through blind ideological conformity.

Go read the whole thing.

A friend of mine posted this on facebook, and I thought it was too good not to run with/expand/share:

Look, I get that, and we can test this theory with insults:

You Utter Puking Cat!
You Utter Water Bottle!

Likely, of course.
But consider “I was utterly carpeted” might work for drunk. Or “I was utterly scribbled.” but depending on context both could also work for angry or worried or more likely flabbergasted.  Consider:

Those utter bran muffins!  I was so completely lawned that they said that.  I can’t believe anyone could be that completely flowering bush!

What say you.  My husband is of the school of thought that ANYTHING can sound dirty said suggestively and with a wink.

“Hi there. I’d like to help you cook!”  Or “I see you’re moping the floor” can be utterly obscene the way he says it when he’s … well… you know… when he is trying to make it so.

What other completely inappropriate to the task words can you pervert?

Come on, you peeled carrots.  I’m sure you can give it an escaped balloon chance.

(And yes, I’m AWARE that this wasn’t the type of linguistic post you expected.  But it is one of the ways languages change and grow. Eh.)