Category: Uncategorized

There are things that turn your life upside down without being really major.  In the last two weeks it’s been an upper respiratory infection my husband and I keep sharing, and lately the fact that Greebo, editor-at-tuna at Baen has been under the weather with the same.  Now, it’s unlikely it’s the same virus (though it does happen viruses cross the species barrier, it’s very rare) but still.

The “we have a cold” is just annoying, honestly.  Both of us know we’re probably not going to die from this, though I need to keep up with the asthma meds, as already being clogged up make it harder to get through asthma attacks.

OTOH when Greebo stops eating and starts hiding in that pose cats do when when they think they’re very, very ill and possibly going to die (scrunched against the wall in a small space) I panic.

We were about ready to take him to the vet for hydration when last night he started acting more like himself (we did take him to vet for antibiotics on the off chance it was bacterial.)  He came up on the bed for about an hour of pets, and ended up falling asleep in the crook of my elbow.  (Very flattering and at 16.5 lbs of cat incredibly uncomfortable.)

But he’s still not fully himself, because he waited till nine thirty to herd me into the office.  For which I’m grateful because my upper respiratory issue, which was almost gone, came back with a vengeance, possibly due to stress/worry.

When I was a little girl and I asked grandma what she wanted for Christmas, she would answer something like “All I want is a year of good health.”

At some point, mom started giving the same answer combined with pious statements like “You don’t know what a value your health is till it’s gone.”

Now, my health sucks, as it’s always sucked.  I have spent most of my life “down with something.”

My older son says that and the depressive tendencies are how Himself keeps me from taking over the world.  I think he grossly overestimates me.

But here’s the thing: since turning fifty the health is markedly worse.  Not in the “main” part of when I’m ill, but the times between.  I.e. when I’m “okay” I’m not as okay.

I’m half convinced people who stop walking/stop going upstairs, etc just have low tolerance for pain.  Because at some point, after fifty, something is going to hurt all the time.  At some point, you just make a decision to carry on, forge on, live on, and not let it limit you (which is not the same as not taking care of yourself, though I do have some attacks of that too, when I get impatient.)

After fifty if you baby yourself too much, you’re going to end up cutting off capacities.

It’s sort of the same thing with my writing.  I don’t know when it was I realized I’d never make it “big” for a given definition of “big.”  And no, I don’t know if it’s the writing, the political opinions, or the fact that I simply am very odd.  It’s probably “yes” or “all three” so that even if I fix the other two, the politics will keep me out of the big time.

Also there’s the fact that the writing success “ladder” is melting away under me as I climb.  (I swear I didn’t break it.)  Mostly traditional publishing is dying from an inability to face reality.  Senescence, you could say, just like your body when it stops healing as well, as you get older.

Now, I can’t save the writing field (not my circus, not my monkeys) or even mainstream publishers (other than Baen, who sort of isn’t, they wouldn’t touch me with a tent foot pole anyway) but I can not give up.

It’s not easy.  Knowing that there’s a limit to what you can achieve, no matter how hard you try, is like those constant pains in my knees from the auto-immune arthritis.  It holds you back.  As my friend Dave Freer says so often “you get battle fatigue.  You lose the “get up and go””

But I figure it’s like the pains in the body as it ages.  If I give in to despondency and despair, all it means is that I’ll be limiting myself, making myself small and incapable.  Sure, there are things I probably can never do.  But you know, I do believe there’s something else hereafter, and if I get there I want to be able to say “Well, it didn’t work the way You wanted it, and yeah, it’s likely my fault for being mouthy and not having a good poker face, but damn it, I tried.  I gave it my best shot.”  I don’t want to say “I knew it wouldn’t get anywhere, so I gave up.”

Because I don’t know where the writing comes from, or why I’m compelled to do it, I’ll continue doing as much as I can, through turmoil, illness and various disappointments.  Because the thing isn’t entirely under my control, and maybe there’s a reason for that.

The world, on the other hand, is safe from my taking over it.  At least while I’m completely congested.  Afterwards, we’ll see.

Sunday Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike – This Time It’s Warped

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: bent

So this week I actually got exercised enough at some guy pontificating on what writers need and how we’re essential to the republic (rolls eyes) not to mention the “censorship of the market” (that’s people not buying books they don’t like, yo.  In case you don’t understand fancy prog-speech) that I wrote the world’s longest fisk.

For those interested, it’s here.

This led to a bunch of arguments all over the net, including on Brad Torgersen’s page, where a junior asshat came and lectured me about how if I’m not writing JUST for the lurv, I shouldn’t be writing.  And when I pushed back on his nonsense, he started telling me to go copulate with myself.

Among his many insane statements was that most great writers never made a living from their work, and that’s why writers should write only for the lurv.  The only great writers who didn’t make a living from their work were those who suffered from personality defects (or bad luck) that precluded marketing.  The only ones of those we consider great were lucky enough to have their work fall into good marketeer’s hands when they died, because, think about it, if their work never got disseminated widely, we wouldn’t consider it great.

The myth of the great artist writing things “ahead of his time” is a pernicious one, and might very well (I haven’t researched) be part of the Marxist take over of art.  If they can convince people the art they hate is just because the artist is “ahead of his time” they garner critical praise that would otherwise be lacking, and push incredibly bad world-built books (New England a theocratic state in modern times.  SNORT. GIGGLE) into the reading lists in every school which then make the book a commercial success, of course.

Most great writers were admired not to say loved in their own time.  Yes, some like Dumas ended up dead-ass broke, but that’s where the personality defects come in.  It’s possible to make a ton of money and end up broke. To be fair, Dumas was probably the most stable of his quirky, insane family.

Note that when I say this I’m arguing against myself, since my work has failed to be astoundingly successful.  Is it lack of push, wrong political color, or am I simply not both accessible enough and different enough to leave a footprint?  Don’t know.  Could, for all I know, be luck and also personality defect.  Yesterday, watching a much more junior writer sell himself, I realized I couldn’t praise myself half so much without vomiting, because I AM aware in the long distance I am but an egg.  Yet other people assure me that level of self-selling is what it takes.  Fine. Personality defects.  Unfortunately my work will after my death fall into the hands of two boys who frankly couldn’t give away gold nuggets at a cent a piece, so I am one of those who will be forgotten.

But after said asshat erased the thread (probably because I pointed out to him he wasn’t using logic in any way, shape or form) I was thinking about that.  Is your best work done because you have to, or because you need a paycheck?  I’ve had friends who are far more successful than I say “you should write only what you love.”  Which is… interesting, even if that particular friend was under the impression I was writing tie-ins.  (I never have because I don’t even GET media.  I read for fun.)

It’s interesting because it’s not been my experience.

Look, in the course of a long career, under traditional publishing (and maybe indie, because you owe it to fans to finish series they love) all of us write things that are the last thing we want to write at that moment.

Take the Magical British Empire.  When I sketched it out and started sending the proposal out it was 98, and I was an Internationalist Libertarian and also trying to write “literary fantasy.”  I really, really, really wanted to write it.  When this series was accepted in 2010 (?) I think, I was a chastised, far more realistic libertarian, who had realized through the Shakespeare series that while I can write lit fan, it’s not my thing.  But they were paying me, and I needed the money.  Two boys in middle and high school and…. I wrote it.  It was hard as hell though, and a slog.

Now, it didn’t do markedly well, granted.  But it did about as well as things I absolutely loved when I wrote them, like Draw One In The Dark, which also didn’t do markedly well.

Or take the shifters’s series.  I still love it, and I’m aware I need to do a fourth book, but other stuff that must be written NOW because it’s under contract gets ahead of it.

Take the furniture refinishing mysteries.  They were pushed at me because the musketeers were “failing” and so the last in the contract was turned to a furniture refinishing mystery.  I wrote that thing in two weeks, and while I enjoyed it, it was almost devised as a way to make my then editor run screaming.  To be honest she hated it, but the fans LOVED it.  It still sells amazingly well.

Or take Plain Jane.  I was invited to work on this series on the queens of Henry VIII.  I wanted Kathryn Howard.  I got Jane Seymour.  I had not a clue what to write about her (most boring life till she died giving birth) so I put it off until I was literally getting daily phone calls, because the book needed to go to press.

Then I wrote 80k words in three days.  As seems to be a theme of my life, no one had given me the guidelines, so I didn’t even know the concept was “life of a queen told by her best friend.”  So no one even read it, because what I wrote was Jane Seymour, herself.

That d*mn thing still sells.  It’s more than a decade old, and I still get royalties every quarter.

Now, was it written with love and interest?  Are you kidding me?  It was written with “I must deliver, it’s under a house name, just do something.”  In this case I cast it in the mold of a Cinderella story and fit in the historical things we know.  And it sells.  Good Lord it sells.

Is there some intrinsic quality to the books I was compelled to write?  Say A Few Good Men?  A feel, a glow lacking in Plain Jane?

If there is the public doesn’t see it, and the humbling thought is that I might one day be remembered only for that paint-by-numbers work.

So, should you write for the love or for money?

Again, in the course of a long writing career, you’ll do both, at different times.  I’d have quit the business in 2003 if we hadn’t been so stupid as to buy a house before selling the other, and weren’t therefore in the position of paying double mortgages.  But even though my heart was broken at how they’d treated the Shakespeare trilogy, I couldn’t quit.  We had to pay or lose the house.  And so I wrote on, and somewhere along the line found my heart again.

But does it matter for “quality”?  Define quality.  If it’s for “critical acclaim” I’m not looking for it, and frankly nowadays books are mostly subjected to Marxist critique, (Whether it’s called that or not) so mine need not apply.  If by quality you mean “more people will like it” all indications are my great work was written in three days, while concussed and strictly for the cash.

Yeah, but do writers have to write, whether they’re paid or not?  I don’t know.  I’ve met both varieties.  I’ve met people who love writing (to an extent and most of time me) and people who write to have written/get paid.  The success is uniform among both groups.  I.e. same percentage make money from writing/are acclaimed.

Me?  I’m broken. I have to write, and I have to write fiction.  Failing everything else, I write endless Jane Austen Fanfic.  (I’ve never fallen so low as to write Disney Ducks fanfic, but don’t quote me, that might be a project for my 90s.)  In fact over the last decade I’ve come to realize if I don’t write fiction for a long period of time, it’s because I’m ill, and probably deathly ill.

What I write is often informed by what’s under contract/people love though.  Except when something highjacks me and rides my brain without my permission.

So, it’s human, but is it art?  I don’t know.

I’m grateful I can write.  It gives me great pleasure.  I’m gratified when it ALSO brings in money.  The rest?  Not mine to decide.

The thing isn’t exactly under the my control.  Sometimes I think I am but the imperfect instrument of that which writes through me.

And the best I can hope for is that at the end, the Author will deem me worthy of having been written.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

FOR PAST CHAPTERS, LOOK HERE:  https://accordingtohoyt.com/dark-fate-an-mhi-fanfic/

 

*FIRST AND VERY IMPORTANTLY, THIS IS NOT CANON.  THIS IS COMPLETELY UNSANCTIONED (okay, not completely.  Larry said I could do this for you guys without his ripping my head off) MHI FANFIC.
Good, now that we got that out of the way, why am I doing this?  Both Grant and Fado Negro (Portuguese Monster Hunters) have minuscule parts in Guardian, the MHI book I’m collaborating with Larry Correia on.  However, obviously the Portugal of Monster Hunter is not the real Portugal (Really, no arcane creatures come stumbling out of the undergrowth there.  If there were arcane creatures, the country would be chock-a-block with them, when you take in account the continuous human occupation since… well, forever.)  And this story gives me more of an opportunity to firm the worldbuilding.  (Yes, it would be MUCH easier to do this with a notebook and noting things down, but that’s not how my mind works, d*mn it.)
Okay, that’s the rational excuse.  The real reason is that d*mn Grant Jefferson won’t leave me alone.  (Always had a thing for men from Patrician New England families.  Ask my husband.)  So I’m torturing him in order to redeem him.
Will this ever be a book?  Don’t know.  First Guardian will get delivered.  Then, this being finished, I throw it at Larry.  And then it’s his SOLE DECISION. (Which means, don’t you monkeys hassle him.)  It’s his world and his character.  I’m just grateful he lets me play in it in Guardian and here for your amusement.*

The twenty foot goddess brought me up within reach of her face and looked at me with an eye the color of a stormy sea and the size of a Volkswagen beetle.

“If you’re going to climb the empire state building carrying me, you’ll have a long walk first,” I said, and was shocked at saying it.  My voice sounded teeny and weird, but more than that, you see, I was born — I think — kind of a wise ass, but my dad had made me stop blurting out this stuff by the time I was ten.  I guess the concussion had brought it back.  That and perhaps the fact I was being held by a twenty some foot woman.

It occurred to me she might be about to geek me, and I squirmed.  She transferred me to her other hand, where I ended up lying down on her palm.  She smelled like the sea, too, but this was the clean, salty smell of a summer morning.

I stood up, and glared at her.  Well, at her nostrils, which were the only thing I could compass in my field of vision.  “Listen up missy,” I said.  “Don’t you go thinking you can do whatever you want just because I’m bigger–  No, you’re bigger than me.” My head hurt.

She laughed.  The gales of her laughter almost pushed me off her palm.  “I like you,” she said.  “You’re not afraid of me.  I like that.  And I’d never have expected it of your history.”

I refused to take the bait.  I didn’t know what about my history made me likely to be afraid of twenty foot women: I mean, wasn’t it normal to be afraid of 20 feet tall women?  Wasn’t it called sanity?  And wasn’t there a horror movie about attack of the twenty foot woman?

I had no clue what to do, so I crossed my arms and tapped my foot.  She laughed again, which might have been an atttempt to blow me off her hand.

“I like your courage, little one,” she said.  “And you’re going to need it to face what’s ahead.”

I hated cryptically talking supernatural creatures as much in concussed dreams as I did in real life.  “And what’s ahead?” I asked.

She shook her head.  “I can’t tell you, except much fighting, much struggling.  In the end, maybe, possibly you win.  They wouldn’t have won without you.  Today they would have lost the city.”

“Yeah, they all need me.  I’m superman, I am–”

“You are the one we need,” she said.

“And who are you?” I asked, testily.

“Call me Persophane.  It will do as well as any other name.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be confined to Hades for having eaten pomegranate?” I asked.

She opened her mouth to answer, and then the entire world fell apart and I fell down, down, down an impossible height.

Everything hurt.  I was squished against something hard and cold, there was the sound of waves in my ears, and some woman who sounded much like the goddess in my dream was screaming, “Wake up, please Jefferson Grant.”

I managed to speak through lips that felt as though they were made of wood “Grant Jefferson.”

“The waves are coming,” someone screamed.

“We can’t move him,” the woman said.  He’s injured in the head.”

“It’s that or let him drown,” a male voice said.

I was grabbed roughly, and hoisted up.  It felt like they were lugging me up stairs.  Then they dumped me on what felt like sand, which doesn’t feel even remotely soft when they drop you on it from three or so feet up.

I growned, and tried to open my eyes.  It took forever.  It was as if I had great weights on top of them, and I couldn’t move my eyelids.  When I finally managed, I saw… nothing much.

For a moment I thought I had gone blind, then I realized it was night time, and there were no lights, except the distant glow of burning bits on the beach.  I was above the beach, probably on the road.  Down there, the waves roared and crashed and spots went out.

“What in hell?” I managed.

“It’s the live tide,” the woman said.  I thought it was Silvia, but her voice was having doppler effects in my head, which shouldn’t be possible but was.

Suddenly the contents of my stomach decided we had irreconciliable differences and rushed up to leave my mouth in a hurry.  I barely turned to the side before I vomited.  When I was done, one of the guys handed me a bottle of water.  I rinsed my mouth, then took a swig, and looked over at the guy.  He looked villainous like all other Portuguese males, but when he glared back, he said, “You saved the city and us, today.”

“Persophane said that,” I said.

“Who?” the guy said.

Silvia said, “Wen?”

“Just now.  She was twenty feet tall and she…. I guess it was concussion.”

“Probably, but we can’t discount it being more,” she said.  “We value our seers, Grant Jefferson.”

“I’m not a seer.”  At least she’d got my name right.  “In fact I’m as far from a seer as I can possibly be.”

She pursed her lips.  She had really cute lips.  I stopped that thought.  This was the last thing I needed.  Anywhere and anytime, but particularly here and now.

She said, “Um….  I think you’re wrong.”

I’d have answered, but then my phone rang.  On the screen there was “Grrrrrr?”

I wasn’t about to get in a war of growls with Franks.  Instead, I typed, “Not now” and lay back down.

Te Portuguese kids were arguing enthusiastically.

“Concussion,” someone said.

“Yeah, we should stay and watch him, or someone should take him and put him with the wounded at headquarters.”

“If he’s a seer or a sensitive, that could become dangerous,” someone else said.  “What if he wakes up and becomes violent.  We don’t have enough sentinels there to stop him.”

“It’s no problem,” Silvia said.  “I thought I’d take him home with me.  He can have dinner with the family, and we have a guest room.”

There was a long silence, which I understood, since at the back of my head I was thinking “What, what?”

But then a guy whistled low and said, “I bet your grandma will just loooooove him.”

“And vice versa,” someone else said and snickered.

And I wondered if I’d been safer with the twenty foot woman.

HRC: Turning Mourning into a Movement – by Amanda S. Green

Or how many sides of her mouth can she talk out of at the same time?

I knew when I saw the title of the next chapter in Hillary Clinton’s book, What Happened,  that I’d be chewing nails, real nails made of metal, before I finished. “Turning Mourning into a Movement” could mean only one thing. This was going to be Clinton’s attack on several things I hold dear — our first responders and the Second Amendment. Boy, was I right. Unfortunately, I hadn’t anticipated just how hard she’d try to cast herself into the role of the only person in the country — and possibly the world — who could end gun violence in the USA.

For four pages, Clinton describes meeting with different mothers who lost their sons or daughters to police shootings. The bravery of these women in not only surviving but persevering in the face of such loss is touted as if no other mother had ever lost a child. For four pages, we are left with stories that basically let us know just how Clinton feels about police officers and other first responders and it isn’t good.

Finally, on the fourth page of the chapter, Clinton writes,”Treating everyone with care and respect is especially important for the men and women charged with keeping us all safe.” Especially important for the men and women charged with keeping us all safe. Think about that for a moment and then think about how she doesn’t say anything about how those they serve and protect should treat them with respect and care. Yes, there are bad cops but the good ones far outnumber the bad ones. But that doesn’t figure into Clinton’s narrative.

Just as I was about to launch the book against the wall — yes, yes, I know. I’ve had plenty of opportunities before this but this chapter was really getting on my nerves and I was only five pages in now — I came across this:

One hard truth we all have to face is that we all have implicit biases. I have them, you have them, and police officers have them: deeply ingrained thoughts that can lead us to think “Gun!” [w]hen a black man reaches for his wallet. (Pg. 177)

On the surface, one could almost feel a touch of hope for Clinton actually having a clue. Not only does she admit everyone has implicit biases, but she admits SHE has them. Wow, could it be that she is finally admitting she isn’t perfect?

But wait, what if it’s a trap? What if she’s just trying to lull us into a sense of brotherhood — oops, sorry. I used the wrong word. I should have said “sisterhood” — before she drops the other shoe and tries to bury us?

So I looked at the quote more closely than I had on first reading. Yep, that niggling in the back of my mind was right. Clinton, or a very clever editor, set those clauses up in such a way it becomes an indictment of cops. Cops, all cops because of the way she phrased the first sentence, have that implicit bias. It doesn’t matter who the cop is, what his or her racial background might be or their training or the circumstances in which they find themselves. It all comes down to that bias. Riiiight. Pull the other one, Hillary. And congratulations, you almost got me to fall for your line of crap. But I’m on to you now. Let’s see what else you have to say.

Acknowledging this during the campaign may have cost me the support of some police officers and organizations who seemed to think my concern for dead children and other victims showed a presumption of wrong doing by police. (Pg 177)

Now why would any officer ever think that, Hill? I can call you that, can’t I? We’re “sisters” after all. Surely, they couldn’t have taken your words at face value and come to the reasonable conclusion that you would happily sacrifice them upon the altar of political correctness and social justice cause du jour? I’ll note here as well that she does not answer this so-called misconception by officers that she might have held a “presumption of wrong doing by police.” Instead, she continues on and it finally becomes clear what the purpose of this chapter is: She is positioning herself for holding office again — or going to work for a PAC of some sort, be it the Clinton Foundation or more of her high priced public speaking engagements. This chapter is her setting herself up as a champion of those done wrong by the police and, I know this will shock you, the leading advocate for gun control.

She is subtle, unless you really take time to consider her words, in this chapter. That means police officers and all of us doing everything we can to understand the effects of systemic racism that young black and Latino men and women face every day, and how they are made to feel like their lives are disposable. It also means imagining what it’s like to be a police officer, kissing his or her kids and spouse good-bye, every day and heading off to do a dangerous but necessary job. (Pg 177)

Hmm, cops and their families and those who support them have to “understand” this “systemic racism”. Implied in that is that we have to give them breaks others won’t get in the same situation. Funny how Clinton only mentions blacks and Latinos. What about Native Americans? What about others who have come to this country looking for a better life? I guess they don’t count because they aren’t of the right skin tone or country of origin. That sounds pretty racist to me. How about you?

Anyway. . .  Cops are to “understand” and yet all she wants the other side to do is “imagine” what it is like to leave for work at a dangerous job. Hell, the way she described the job, she could be talking about a coal miner, a fire fighter, a pilot or construction worker or many other professions that have nothing to do with law enforcement. It is another subtle way of showing how little respect and concern she has for the cops who put on the uniform each day and risk their lives to protect us.

As I flip through the pages of this particular chapter, I come across a note I made in preparation of writing this post. Simply put, I quit counting the number of times she wrote about meeting with the mother/daughter/sister/wife of someone killed by a cop. The way she frames it in this chapter, it’s amazing she ever had time to meet with anyone else on the campaign trail. Of course, it was all a lead up to her real point — gun control and her positioning herself as the only politician to ever stand against the NRA and al those against gun control even though she knew it might not be a wise political move.

After these searing political experiences, (the NRA funding of campaigns to oust a number of Democrats in the late 1990s and then Al Gore’s defeat in 2000) it became conventional wisdom that it was safer for Democrats to say nothing at all about guns and hope the NRA stayed away. (Pg 180) What? Does she remember the same Democratic Party that I do? When did they ever stay silent on their pet project of gun control?

Here’s where her disconnect with reality once again rears it head. She takes time to explain how she understands gun ownership is important to many in this country. For some, it is ingrained in their culture. For others, it reminds them of the pioneering spirit of the Old West. Others look at it as a right (Duh. Second Amendment, anyone?) Yet, later in the chapter, she gleefully recounts how she pounded on Bernie Sanders because he voted against a certain gun control bills because he knew it was how his constituency wanted him to vote. I never thought I’d be one to step up and defend Sanders but I have to here. He, at least, remembered that he represented the people of his state in the Senate. That means he has to take into account what is important to them. That’s something I’m not sure Clinton has ever taken seriously. She has an agenda and she’s going to follow it and damn anyone who gets in her way.

On page 184 of the book, Clinton did what I feared she’d do. After spending page after page describing all these cases where cops killed civilians, usually young black men, she decided to find an instance where a cop was killed to help sell her point that we need stronger gun control laws. What incident did she choose? The ambush in downtown Dallas in the summer of 2016. Five officers from DPD and Dallas Transit Authority were killed. Nine more were wounded, as were two civilians. Not once in the single paragraph she mentions the ambush in does she say anything more than they were killed by a sniper. She conveniently left out the fact that sniper was an African-American male who set out to kill not just cops but as many white cops as he could. That didn’t fit her narrative. All she cared about was using the deaths of these officers, and the three killed two weeks later in Baton Rouge to make her very limited political point.

Bitch.

I could go on, but you get the gist. No matter how much she protests in the chapter that the voters misunderstood her message about gun control, that the NRA took what amounted to a political hit out on her to keep her from office and that Trump is evil because guns or something, her message was all too clear. She wanted to do away with what she called a “loophole” in the law that allowed sellers to release guns to purchasers if, after the three day waiting period, their background checks had not been returned. In other words, she wanted to give the government the option of simply sitting on background checks indefinitely, effectively preventing people who could legally own guns from purchasing them.

If that’s not enough, she wanted legislation that would allow victims of gun violence and their relatives to be able to sue not just the shooter but the seller of the gun AND the manufacturer. Now, I can see being able to sue the seller if you can show negligence in how they conducted the sale or if they had reason to believe the gun might be used for illegal purposes. But the manufacturer? Think about the chilling effect on the making and distribution of firearms in this country if that became law. How long before liberal judges started handing down monetary judgments so high the manufacturers could not afford to remain in business.

Or look at it this way: Joe Blow walks into the local Cabelas and legally purchases a semi-automatic weapon. It doesn’t matter what make or caliber. It’s a gun and goes bang. He passes the background check. He buys his ammo and takes it and his gun home. A year or more down the road, something happens and Joe decides he’s had enough of his neighbor getting up at 0630 every Saturday and mowing his yard. So Joe loads his gun and walks outside. Five minutes later, the neighbor is down, shot by Joe. The cops are called and Joe is arrested. He stands trial — or pleads out.

Now, that neighbor or his survivors file suit against Joe for shooting him. That’s their right under the civil statutes of the state. But they know Joe doesn’t have any real money. So they file suit against Cabelas for selling him the gun. Oooh, then they realize someone has even deep pockets than the store and that’s the manufacturer. Neither Cabelas nor the manufacturer had any reason to suspect Joe would do something illegal with the gun but, under Clinton’s gun control legislation, they are liable.

So, when are we going to start arguing for the same standards to be applied to knife makers and car makers, etc? We aren’t. Why? Because Clinton and those like her aren’t interested in making sure the victims and their families are financially recompensed. No, they are interested in doing all they can to not only limit our right to bear arms but to drive firearm manufacturers out of business.

But we misunderstood. After all, she kept telling us, “I’m not here to repeal the Second Amendment. I’m not here to take away your guns. I just don’t want you to be shot by someone who shouldn’t have a gun in the first place.”

Riiight, like criminals are going to worry about getting a fun legally. All her proposed laws would do would be limit the availability of guns to those who will jump through the legal hoops to buy them.

With each day that passes, with each page of her book I read, I am more and more grateful she was not elected President. This time, the American electorate got it right.

(You can find the other installments in this series at the following links: What Happened or How I Suffered for this Blog and had to Share, Grit and Gratitude, HRC Gets Caught Trying, A New Deal, A Square Deal or How She Wanted to be the Next Roosevelt, and It’s All His Fault.)

[I know this is hard to watch, imagine what it must be like to read the book.  If you want to help finance Amanda’s liquor bill and at this rate eventual liver transplant, use this address  Send the woman a drink-SAH]

I think most of us were raised with a saying that goes “if ifs and ans were pots and pans, we’d all be fed.”  Or “If wishes were horses all the beggars would ride.”

This is very important to remember.  Particularly when our wishes seem to be “real.”  Particularly when forming our vision of the past and the future.

Look, we can’t trust any of our institutions of learning.  We can’t trust most of the research institutes, particularly in the softer sciences.  The price we pay for allowing the left to take over the respected institutions, flay them, kill them, then wear their skins demanding respect, is that these institutions are not the ones you respected, and everything they say must be examined.

The downside of the death of prestige is that you can’t assume that anyone who has a college degree is literate; you can’t assume a “scientist” understands the basics of the scientific method (as proven by all those who think science is made via “consensus”); you can’t assume any statistics bandied about were collected in any rational way; you can’t afford to believe that even if the underlying statistics are right, the reporting of them is (take that thing about women losing ground, or whatever that went around; most of what it seemed to show is that when women can afford to they stay home with the children.  I don’t think this is a problem, and neither should you.  And if you do, you should ask yourself who died and made you the arbiter of strangers’ lives.); the census has been corrupted by counting “invisible” populations, mostly to hide the decline of big cities, and well… we know we can’t rely on economic numbers.  All of this without going into the whole “hide the decline” boondoggle.

Part of the problem is that the left has “conquered” all the think tanks (well, the overwhelming majority) and all the educational facilities.

Someone here once accused me of everything I said (for a while) was “They taught you this and it was a lie.”  BUT we’ve all been taught an awful lot of lies.  And when the lies aren’t outright lies, they are framed in a narrative that is.  And some of these narratives are seductive even to libertarians.

If you’re attuned to the psychological state of the left, which is more or less that of a collective organism (not because they’re not individuals, but because their narrative at the moment is proclaimed by myriad institutions all speaking in unison, because their opinion is “what the good people believe” and because it fits in the overall just-so story of Marxism, so that Marxist narratives are the path of least resistance) you can kind of trace what is likely to be a lie.  For instance, when something calls for more government oversight/control it’s likely to be a lie.  (Not always, but likely.)  When something is in detriment of the economy/the US/humanity/civilization in that order, it’s likely to be a lie, and a favored lie of the left at the moment.

Since ninety one they’ve been experiencing a state of disconfirmation of their cherished beliefs and between denial and resentment, they’ve come to hate more than the US and wealth, which they already hated, humanity as a whole.

So we had the person here yesterday defending the POLITICAL SCIENCE professor who claimed civilization was a mistake because becoming non-nomad agriculturalists “exposed us to illness” and “crop failure.”

Sure, it did that.  To an extent.  More people together exposes you to illness, but at the same time it gives you resistance to illness.  You have only to look at the meeting of Europeans and Amerindians and see who weathered it better.  It wasn’t the hunter gatherers.  By the sole yard stick of “who survives” the agriculturalists (for a definition of agriculturalism) did better.

As for crop failures, they happened when we were gatherers.  As did sudden game death.  At least as agriculturalists, we had some control and EVENTUALLY surplus which is what buys us freedom.

Yet there are many libertarians who also think pre-history was some mythical land of freedom.  It’s easy to put the paradises of communists and libertarians in pre-history, due to the simple fact there are no written documents and though anthropologists tell us potsherds aren’t culture, people forget that.  You can project all sorts of things to grave goods, forgetting we find a tiny minority of graves and often don’t know what those MEAN.

One thing we do know, though: Pre-historical people WERE PEOPLE.  And before they were people, they were great apes.  Creatures of the band.  AND every band has a big man, eve when the man is an ape.  Sure they range from monarchies to outright tyrannies, depending on the big man, but none of them is big on freedom.  A lot of people — mostly men — don’t recognize familial tyranny, particularly when the big man is a woman, and leading from behind the scenes, but it can often be the worst kind of oppression.  (One of the reasons I love Patricia Wentworth is that she GOT that.  Which says nothing good about her upbringing, but there it is.)

It’s tempting to imagine this mythical individual freedom existed somewhen and that when we’re fighting for it, we’re not building something new with inadequate materials.  But it goes against the (admittedly few) facts we have.  And it dovetails neatly into the left’s “We’ll destroy civilization because it won’t let us have paradise.”

Reason and more than enough reason to be suspicious. And when you get suspicious, dig.  Most of the narrative cannot survive a good probing.  It’s built on air and bullshit.  Dig.  Find the facts.  Do not tolerate contradictions.

IF a narrative is too seductive, it’s reason enough to probe it.

If our neolithic ancestors were so well off, why did they change?  If Amerindians lived in harmony with nature, why were ecological systems way out of balance in the US?  If only the US is evil, are other people not human?

Look behind the lie.  The truth is usually not even that well hidden.  And even if all around you believe a lie it doesn’t make it true.

Surviving the mess ahead REQUIRES telling falsehood from fact.  And some of the mechanisms to reinforce the lie were planted in our head by our education.  Some we’re not even aware of.

But humanity will not survive, certainly not with technology, by going with pretty lies.  We need the truth to steer by.

But this morning has medical stuff on the slate, so…. there might or might not be a post.

It’s a Schrodinger post.

And if I’ve never said that before, why did Schrodinger pick on cats? Even dogs would be better, but why not pick on opossums or raccoons or something?
Stupid ailurophobes. Somewhere, in the after life, Heinlein is putting Schrodinger in boxes over and over again.  And Heinlein’s cats are helping.

No, that’s not my life.  Why would you ask, other than the fact that I woke up with a non-functional computer and then got sidetracked into a million other things?  And this is really late.

Okay, fine, massed confusion IS my life, but it is not the kind of confusion I wanted to talk about.

Richard Fernandez was talking about the death of prestige on PJMedia.  He viewed it as a side effect of the recent sex scandals, but I think the sex scandals and the disintegration of our “respect” for people and institutions are more the result of two twin things: first the fact that the left has been undermining established society for a long time, initially because once “capitalist” (which is to say normal) society vanished, paradise would magically appear, and since 91 in a sort of mad fury that they can’t have their little red wagon*; second the same left was, at the same time taking over all the institutions.

Their lack of respect for the institutions they took over, their complete inability to see what’s in front of their eyes, and the fact that their entire philosophy is based on resentment and envy — which means they’re convinced everyone else, everywhere else is getting away with stuff, and so they might as well — results in the “take over a respected institution; kill it; flay it; wear its skin and dance in front of the horrified people involved in that institution, demanding respect.

By institution in this case, you’re to understand “industry” as well.

So when they took over say publishing, or movie making, they didn’t take over with the intention of making movies like the ones they loved (well, the younger ones might, but that’s another and more complex matter**) but in order to “reform” and make things “good” (where good is  value of “effects social change in the way Marx and his successor determined it should happen.”  So, tons of social critique and angst and our good friends resentment and envy of everyone and everything else.)  This means that just about everything they get control of turns to sh–  I mean, becomes less popular.  Because most of these critters are ind–  educated in the best*** universities, they view their failing efforts and are sure — SURE — it is just because the masses aren’t ready for them.  The masses are too stupid.  They are the special snowflakes they’ve been waiting for.

On top of that they also believe wholeheartedly that everyone is dirty, and everyone is taking advantage of the system/institution/industry.  This is part of their twin obsessions with “getting away with something” (from Clinton’s fantastical corruption, to the grab-ass of Hollywood moguls) and wanting the state to regulate everything.  Because they’re convinced without close and continuous supervision everyone is “dirty.”  Hell, they think of themselves as “the good guys” and look what they do.  SURELY the bad guys are worse?  (Rolls eyes.  Or, you know, those of us who oppose them, which is as far as their toddler-like understanding of bad guys goes, have internal moral compasses and aren’t out for all we can get.)

Given this, yeah, we have the sex scandals.  We also have an economically/governmentally/ideologically unravelling society.

Sure, it’s happened in the past — the French revolution; post-WWI, etc — and that’s what gave the left the chance to take over respected institutions to begin with.

So, are we going to do the same?

Well, the problem is when you take over institutions, whatever your political color, the people who take over are people who are attracted to power.  Now, some of them have moral compasses and are therefore better than the left. ****

But at the same time we’re caught in the middle of a technological change.  And at this point it’s hard to tell if the change is just technological or if the directions the technology took is being driven by the attempts of the left to push Marxian paradise down our throats and the resulting and concomitant chaos.

I mean, if the publishing industry had continued trying to make money (sure, but it’s subordinate to “hiring the right people” (meaning left) and “pushing the right point of view” which means they’ve been crashing print runs for forty years and calling it good) by any means available, and hiring and pushing the people most likely to do it, would Amazon’s ebook coup d’etat have succeeded?  Would it have so completely shattered the status quo?

And if the people who are still workingTM weren’t doing the job of three or four people as well as fielding the unreasonable regulatory burdens (on child care, on tax-reporting, on–) we are, would distance shopping or delivery of groceries be accelerating?

If our news reporting and our local social hubs hadn’t been thoroughly corrupted by left-politics would this forum even exist?

At some point it becomes an egg chicken, dinosaur thing.  If the respected institutions hadn’t decayed already, the meteor of new tech might have taken another form, and the current chickens might not have come home to roost.

But the chickens are here, the dinos are if not dead profoundly ill, and we’re in the middle of revolt, ferment and upheaval.

Should we take over the moribund institutions and make them respectable?  Or should we go our own way and do what we can?

Shake the magic eight ball.

My guess is most of us aren’t in a position to take over institutions.  But we’re in a position to work harder, smarter, faster, and to cast an eye to how things are evolving and how we can benefit from them to keep civilization going.

Just because we removed the active wrecker from the top of the pyramid, don’t delude yourself the rest will hold.

Between the left’s massive, breath-holding temper tantrum and their inability to build or create anything, or even to keep something going without undue mucking it up, hell is empty and all the devils are here.

Sure, we bought ourselves a little more time in November.  But it will take way more than that to sustain the shocks ahead.

Build under, build over, build around.  Build our parallel decentralized structures.  Be ready to take the weight of civilization when it rests on your shoulders.

Sure, Atlas can shrug.  But then it doesn’t go too well with Atlas either.

You got this.

Be not afraid.

*This morning, in the news pushed at us by microsnot, there was a professor of politics saying that civilization was a mistake.  Maybe for him it was.  In a tribe in the middle of nowhere, even if he’d been born, he’d probably have died/been killed long before proclaiming such nonsense.  But it’s come to this.  The big hope of the left now is “destroy civilization and we’ll have primitive communism”.  Which only exists in their delusions.

** When you’ve been trained to think that “good” means “preaches the social change we wish for” the end result is to train your tastes to stuff no one else likes.  Yes, it’s possible.  Humans can be trained to like practically anything, including the extreme conditions in Venezuela, if they’re convinced that’s what’s “good.”  Since for three generations our colleges have been preaching that “good” is “brings about social change” college-educated, non-questioning people have imported that into publishing and movie making and other entertainment fields.  Which leaves them rather pathetically flabbergasted that their “good” work isn’t appreciated.  Fortunately they also hook up on the myth of the misunderstood artist (not realizing that it’s a myth and that if artists were that misunderstood they wouldn’t be known centuries later) so they do have that to hug to themselves as consolation.  It’s lovely warm superiority, and since most of them inherited or slept their way into wealth, they ain’t starving, either.

*** That is, the prestigious educational institutions that were among the first victims of the long march, because those drawn to power are also drawn to prestige like ducks to water.  Makes since since the later used to lead to the first.

**** This is why Trump is better than Hillary.  It doesn’t even matter what his moral compass is.  It might just be “I love the US and want it to be wealthy” (in fact this is quite possible) but the fact he’s not suffering from the built in envy, resentment and opportunism of the left is enough to make him better.

Sunday Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike – Slim and Beautiful

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: petite

I’m sorry.  This is the first night real sleep I had in weeks, so of course, I have a ton of stuff that needs to be done, including stuff for Baen.

I’ll try to get a DF chapter up tonight or tomorrow.
And I promise to become better at posting regularly.