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Do not confuse “duty” with what other people expect of you; they are utterly different. Duty is a debt you owe to yourself to fulfill obligations you have assumed voluntarily. Paying that debt can entail anything from years of patient work to instant willingness to die. Difficult it may be, but the reward is self-respect.
– Robert A. Heinlein

I found this Heinlein quote yesterday, while working on the article for PJmedia (I know most of my Heinlein quotes at a remove, because I first read them in Portuguese, so I need to check every time to make sure I don’t mangle them.) At first sight this resounds a lot with Mister Obama’s statement that “Sin is being unfaithful to my principles” — which given the changeable nature of the left’s principles means that “sin is what I feel like it should be today.”

Of course, that is not it, and if you look at it, it’s quite a different sort of thing.  I’d never, at least consciously, come across that quote, but I’ve been living by it for years, partly because I absorbed its ethos from Heinlein’s books.  Stuff like, if you save someone’s life you’ve assumed a Chinese obligation for that life.  It was that principle that would not allow us, when we moved across the country, to do the common thing of giving away our cats, and just getting kittens after moving.  Instead, we orchestrated a three part move to a new city, with cats shipped in two batches after us (and Pete, the difficult case, moving with us, in the car.)

It causes us to pay on contracts, even when it’s not convenient.  It causes me to feel an obligation towards Baen, even in these days when Indie would pay me more.  It causes us to drive through the night to go help a friend, even when it’s the LAST thing we want to do.

This is because we’ve assumed those obligations voluntarily, as we did the obligations for our children, the obligations for our own upkeep, the obligations to employers and friends, to neighbors and places where we shop and the obligations to this country, like my freely sworn oath to defend the constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic.

What doesn’t it cover?  Well, it’s not my duty to make the TSA’s job simpler.  I might choose to do it, because the alternative is jail, but I don’t feel a DUTY to do it.  It’s not my duty to pay the maximum tax I can owe.  I can use deductions and loopholes (we don’t use loopholes, because we’re too poor to afford the lawyers, but you get my point.)  It is not my duty to “provide for those who make less.”  It might be my duty to exert Christian Charity, again freely assumed, but that’s QUITE something else from giving someone a portion of my paycheck simply because on paper I have more money.

We run into these situations all the time.  The public schools where my kids went tried to convince everyone it was their duty to volunteer.  No, it’s in fact not.  The schools get funding from our paychecks, and they should make do with what they have and not conscript parents to come copy papers or whatever.  It is my duty to see my kids educated to the best of their ability (and mine) but it is not my duty to do it the way the school wants me to, or to help the school fill their heads with mush.

It is not my duty to bear the burden of a society where other people who work less or make less effort want part of my earnings.  It might be the government’s bright idea that’s my duty, but it’s not.  I have not agreed to be conscripted to pay for others’ easy ride through life.

But if I still have to do things, even though they’re not my duty, because otherwise they’ll put me in jail, what is the point of saying that.

It’s a very great point.

At various times in history, humans choose to comply with force, because they don’t have the means to fight it.  But unless they internalize force as “right” they remain free to disagree with it, and free to overturn force in the future.

If the founders had thought that England had the right to impose taxation without representation and, as good British subjects, they’d thought it was their duty to comply with his majesty’s whim, we wouldn’t be here.  Sure, some people paid because they had to, and the road to the revolution was long and complicated, but the seed was there, as not internalizing  as your duty things you did not and would never agree too.

Fulfill those duties you freely assumed, yes, even unto death, because that’s the price of your honor and your adulthood.  But those obligations imposed on you by force majeure?  Accept the need to do it, if there is no other alternative, but do NOT under any circumstances internalize it as your duty or feel guilty for not fulfilling it.  Down that path lie socialized medicine and your obligation to die when the government wants to guarantee your “death with dignity.”

Living and dying free demand a lot of sacrifice, and for those of us of an honorable disposition, taking care of the weaker people in our sphere influence.

But they prevent your being a sheep for your betters’ shearing.  And they allow you self-respect.

 

 

I come from a strange time and place.  Most science fiction people are “strange” in that most people who read science fiction in the US are considered a little strange.  At least I’m reminded of this every time I go out in public, and mingle with normal every day people.  If they discuss books at all, it’s the latest bestseller.  In a gathering of women, you might get some love for romance.  But our stuff?  That’s coo-eee, out there and “why would you want to read that.

That’s fine.  I don’t expect science fiction and fantasy will ever be more than a bleep in the total number of book sales.  We’re natures little oddkins.  It’s enough for a writer to make a living, though, particularly in indie.

And yeah, it’s weird to be a woman who writes this stuff.  Not within the field so much.  We’ve been in the field from the beginning, we’ve shaped it from the beginning, and frankly geek-boys love any woman crazy enough to like the stuff they do.  The little girls (even those who are technically male) who try to pretend otherwise are sad, silly little things trying to make themselves seem brave and important.

But there are or were fewer women in the field, at least if the field is science fiction (fantasy is different and with urban fantasy, paranormal romance and urban fantasy, we’ve come a long way from that time my Mother in Law thought I had invented the writing of fantasy for adults (no, really.  She wanted to know why any adult would read my Shakespearean series, and enjoined me — for the thousandth time — to “write for children, because they’re the only ones with a mind as open as yours.”  (snort, giggle gasp.)

Look, it’s baked in the cake outside geek culture, okay.  Nine times out of ten when it slips out I write, in meeting a perfect stranger, I get asked “romance?”  and when I had little kids trailing along “Children’s books?”  Or even — my favorite — “Do you draw the pictures yourself?”  I’ll be honest, I think the last one is the result of “lady, you have an accent.  There ain’t no way you can write in English for grown ups.”  (The twin to this is “what language do you write in” and if my kids and husband aren’t around — it embarrasses them mortally — I answer with “Mandarin Chinese, but then I have to pay a translator, because I don’t speak it or understand it.”  I’ll note in all the times I’ve given this answer, the person just nods.  No one has gone “Uh?”  Sigh.)

But I think most women who write get the “romance of children’s books” particularly if they’re married and/or totting kids around.  It’s not exactly that people are heinous in assuming this, either.  Kris Rusch says stereotypes exist because they so often fit reality, and this is definitely one of those.  Most women who write write romance (look up and down a bookshelf someday.  And many women start writing because they want to tell stories to their kids. (Me, I find writing for children incredibly challenging, probably because my own children were… well… odd.)

There is absolutely nothing wrong with this.  It’s just betting the odds when meeting a stranger.  If it’s a woman writer, you assume romance, if it’s a man writer you assume thriller.  Most of the time, you’ll be right.  Sure, if he’s particularly cerebral-looking, you might assume science fiction, but look, there are so few of us over all, that we’re… well, not a good bet.  And women — even though we outnumber men in the field now — haven’t fallen into public consciousness as “science fiction” yet.  (Which is why the general public buys that there is ‘orrible discrimination against us.

But I come from a weird time and place.  That I read and wrote at all (I don’t mean being able to, but enjoying it) was very, very weird.  It will surprise no one that grew up in a Latin culture or is close to one, that I could be studying for finals, and/or doing translation work, and mom would feel free to interrupt me at random, for any reason or none  at all, but if I were embroidering or doing crochet — something I did very rarely because I didn’t have time, and which was a hobby (still is) — she’d tiptoe around me, turn on lights if it was getting dark, and refer to it as my “work.”

And don’t go judging her particularly harshly either.  She made her living designing and making clothing.  In her lived experience being able to sew a neat stitch or figure out the drape of a fabric made much more money than being able to recite ancient history.  (She made more money than dad until she retired because of one too many tight deadlines, and heart attacks.) Also, there might have been some idea that being able to do hand-work was feminine and attractive.  At least I can’t figure out why my classmates (my friends were odd, okay) were working on their trousseau from age six.  I’m not good at reading undercurrents if they don’t fit in my view of the world.

Anyway, reading and writing were frivolous useless things.  And reading science fiction was despised by all my teachers from elementary school on.

My elementary school teacher gave me Alice in Wonderland and collected fairy tales, I suspect to keep me off the silly stuff.  Other teachers, from middle school on, were more blunt.  “Why do you read that trash?” they’d ask, behaving exactly as if I were romances, with pictures of fainting ladies.

More than once, I shocked teachers by doing “free work” on Ray Bradbury, and once made my Techniques of Literature teacher revise her whole opinion of the genre by translating short stories.

But the point there is that I knew how to play them, and I knew what it took to make them respect sf/f: relevance.  The writing had to have some relevance for our current age, meaning it had to be a “critique” of some social aspect or other.

Granted, that has been a strain in the field since the field existed (I wonder how much of it was to justify spending time dreaming about other worlds.)  But there were others.  The “what if” strain can be a warning or a critique, sure.  BUT it can also be “wouldn’t it be neat.”  And particularly in fantasy, it’s often the joy of discovering a new world.

Discovering new worlds is why I read science fiction and fantasy.  Oh sure, some psychologist, given this information would mutter about an overly restrictive environment, and escapism.  Sure.  But what he’d miss was that EVERYWHERE is too restrictive, and the escapism is the joy of running free beyond the limits of this all to solid flesh, the limits of the place and time we happened to be born into.

An interesting thing — under the “this might be useful” — is that years ago, my husband found himself as part of a working team that performed miracles.  They were handed the projects other people had utterly fallen down on. And they pulled it off, time after time.  And one day they found out they all read — preferentially — science fiction and fantasy.  Perhaps it is a matter of flexible minds, and flexible minds like to flex.

What I know, though, is that both in reading and writing, I’m well beyond the “this must be relevant so people will respect me.”

As social critique, science fiction and fantasy sucks.  All the disasters we predicted — and no, not because we predicted them — from overpopulation to the machines taking over, are not only unlikely, but in some cases impossible. All the things we tried push — even the best of us — like the United Nations, have proven stupid schemes that only people who create worlds in their minds, and think people would act rationally all over the world, could believe.

In general had our schemes been adopted, we’d do more harm than good.

But as worlds to dream on, even the stuff we know is impossible, now, we’re champion, and we change peoples minds into more flexible ones, better able to cope with fast technological change or different perspectives.

So there is more merit, sure, in all this playing in worlds that never existed.  But, let’s not fool ourselves, ladies, gentlemen, dragons and sentient mice, mostly we do it because it’s fun, because we enjoy running free through a panoply of endless possibilities.

And honestly?  That’s all the justification we need.

Sure, if mom read my books (she doesn’t read English) she’d probably think this wasn’t real work.  Sure, she’d still turn the light on for me, when it’s late at night and I’m exhausted and just doing crochet to unwind.  But you know? At a little past the half century, I don’t need mom to approve of my occupation.  Or my professors.  Or anyone, really.

When I want to send a message, I write one of these posts, or an article for PJMedia.

When I want to dream and share my vivid dream with other lost souls who like exploring unlikely and impossible worlds, walking down streets that never existed, and tasting flavors not of this earth?

Then I write fiction.

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: person

 

 

Promo, Now With More Audio by Freerange Oyster

Pam Uphoff

Time Loop

How many ways are there to destroy the world?

And how many times must Time Traveler Dr. Augustus Sturm go back in time and save it?

Well, he’s a stubborn old man and he’ll do it as often as needed until it sticks. And he doesn’t need these nosy cops who snuck aboard, and why did he ever save the life of that child? Then those soldiers… and…

The realization that there’s a reason humanity always dies…

Peter Grant

Take the Star Road

The Maxwell Saga, Book 1

Steve Maxwell just wants to get his feet on the star road to find a better homeworld. By facing down Lotus Tong thugs, he earns an opportunity to become an apprentice on a merchant spaceship, leaving the corruption and crime of Earth behind. Sure, he needs to prove himself to an older, tight-knit crew, but how bad can it be if he keeps his head down and the decks clean?

He never counted on the interstellar trade routes having their own problems, from local wars to plagues of pirates – and the jade in his luggage is hotter than a neutron star. Steve’s left a world of troubles behind, only to find a galaxy of them ahead…

Now in Audio

Brings the Lightning

The Ames Archives, Book 1

When the Civil War ends, where can a former Confederate soldier go to escape the long memories of neighbors who supported the winning side? Where can Johnny Reb go when he can’t go home? He can go out west, where the land is hard, where there is danger on every side, and where no one cares for whom you fought – only how well you can do it. Walt Ames, a former cavalryman with the First Virginia, is headed west with little more than a rifle, a revolver, and a pocket full of looted Yankee gold. But in his way stand bushwhackers, bluecoats, con men, and the ever-restless Indians. And perhaps most dangerous of all, even more dangerous than the cruel and unforgiving land, is the temptation of the woman whose face he can’t forget. When you can’t go home again – go west!

Now in Audio

Sorry, got ambushed by various unavoidable situations, including a long call with parents (no, nothing wrong, just talking.)

And now it seems rather weird to put a post up.
To compensate, have a free short story (not proofed, though it will be up soon in a collection which is proofed.)  This story first came out in As Time Goes By, the Baen Valentine’s collection for 2015.

I was rather disappointed there wasn’t a Prometheus for short stories, as I this story took me forever and a day to research and write, as crossing between different timelines made my eyes cross.

So Little and So Light

Sarah A. Hoyt

©Sarah A. Hoyt 2015

I landed with a stumble at the foot of Calbeck Hill in England in 1066, during the Battle of Hastings when the English routed the Normans for good and all out of England.

The landing was rough, as it sometimes is. I half fell and my feet squelched as I instinctively spread them apart seeking for purchase in the marshy ground. No one saw me appear. The human mind is very good at censoring out the impossible.

I was dressed as a man. Not difficult for a woman of the 23 century transported back to the eleventh. More likely to pass as a man than as a woman. Wearing the uniform of a housecarl—a professional soldier—in woolen tunic, and trousers, with a straw padded surcoat under the chain mail hauberk, my breasts, never all that noticeable, were wholly invisible. The conical hat with face shield hid my features and my lack of beard. And the kite-shaped shield, the battle ax in my hand made sure no one got very close to me.

The man next to me made a sound at my stumble, something like, “Hey there, watch it,” but then turned forward.

Forward, as all the history books had taught, the forces of William the Bastard fled our side, their mounted cavalry decamping in ground that had never been suited for cavalry. As a trainee time-Hunter, in history of war, I’d heard all about the mistakes William had made. Still, wasn’t prepared to see them enacted before my eyes.

Few Breachers make it for battles and confrontations. The romantic mind that thinks the past a better place always goes for parades, for grand events, for triumph and celebration. But this was not a common Breacher. He’d been, before his transgression, a Satrap, a member of a good family, of an hierarchy unbroken for ten generations. And a director of the Time Corps.

Ahead of me, Harold’s forces were moving and presently we too started running, chasing the Normans as they fled. Before I’d arrived, already half the forces had abandoned the safety of Caldebeck Hill for the plain where the Normans were fleeing. I joined in the pursuit, excited to finally be in an event we’d studied so often.

For a while it was all a blur as I met the enemy, and had to counter their sword thrusts with my ax blows.

It used to be, back in the beginning, that people were afraid of time travel. They thought any misstep, any foot laid wrong, any butterfly trampled, made us all Breachers and changed history forever.

We’ve found of course that history is more elastic than that. It takes willful intent and major changes to make history take a different course.

So I lay about with my ax and a clear conscience. It’s hard to explain without believing in predestination, but I couldn’t kill anyone who hadn’t died. Not in a chaotic event like battle.

And to me they weren’t quite real, these men I fought.

What was real was the tracker and the time-tagger. The arrows and flashes, in lights, atop my shield, could pass by mere play of light, but I knew what they told me.

The Breacher was here. Very close.

And then the man facing me spoke, in Panlanguage, in a soft throaty voice that barely rose above a whisper, “Ah, Hunter. You’ve found me.” A chuckle. “But too late.”

I looked up and for a moment caught a glimpse of the Norman whose heavy sword knocked my ax blow aside. An impression of red hair, of soft red beard, of laughing blue eyes shining from either side of his helmet’s nose-piece.

I was so stunned at Panlanguage and at the smile on his eyes that I lowered my ax. He could have killed me then, but he didn’t. He only laughed, and then vanished, the bone scales of his armor making a sound as a soft rain while the time-current grabbed him and pulled.

I came to myself as another Norman rushed towards me, and I pushed at the pendant at my neck, the aten that disguised my retrieval mechanism, and which would have become inactive in the absence of the nanites in my living blood, so if I died or lost it, no one could use it.

There was the time current grabbing me like invisible claws, and pulling me, with force that made my teeth rattle.

And then I was in the mission room.

#

“You failed,” Alvin Windham said, even as I dropped my helm and weapon, and started tearing out of the sweat soaked, uncomfortable clothes.

I undressed completely, and went into the delousing room, saying to the room in general, knowing the pickups would relay the words to Time Command Center, “It was a bloody battle. And he faced me directly, instead of running. And he spoke to me in Panlanguage.”

I got out of the delousing room, my body stinging from the short shower of the disinfecting/cleansing solution. The Hunters called it delousing, but I knew it was something else, including inoculating against any virus, any bacteria, anything of the time that might hitch a ride back to the real, present world.

It used to be believed that nothing could attach in the short times a Hunter spent in the past, and then someone who had spent a day in ancient Egypt had brought back the first epidemic flu and killed half of the Hunters. Now we deloused.

The room I entered as I left the delousing was a dressing room, circular, with pegs on the wall. On one of the pegs hung my everyday clothes: short tunic and leggings in a fabric that neither scratched nor clung to your body with sweat. I wanted them so badly. I wanted nothing better than to put them on, to walk out the door into the world where I didn’t have to find a dangerous maniac bent on destroying history.

But then I read the words emblazoned around the room, “Time Hunter Corps. Saving the past for the future,” and I stayed naked, ready to put on whatever clothes I needed for wherever the Breacher had gone now.

Alvin stood in front of me, in his dark brown uniform, the clipboard in his hands. “We’re not faulting you, understand! This is not a common Breacher and this is why we chose you to catch him. We knew it wouldn’t be easy.” He frowned slightly. “The problem is that he could be anywhere. This is not a home-made time jumper. He stole our best.”

I grunted understanding and pulled back at my shoulder-length dark hair and glowered at Alvin. “How did I fail?” I’m nothing special to look at and he’d seen me – and every other Hunter – naked too often for it to occasion any surprise or any appreciation. Not that there was much to appreciate, as I was no fashion plate. Few Hunters are. Too memorable can kill you when you’re back in the past, and we can only take so many legends of the beautiful fairy up the hill.

But he noticed my frown.

He shook his head a little. “We are not quite sure how, but we think he got the ear of William the Bastard. He must have been in the time and place for years, without us seeing it. He must have confounded our tracers. And he … he advised William on the use of Archers, on the use of ambush. The retreat was a deception. Your momentary comrades were ambushed and massacred.”

“The Normans won England?” I said. “But that—”

“For now,” Alvin said. “For now. Inside the command we don’t change, of course, so we know the truth, and once history settles we will change it again. Ten years. Twenty. But first we need to catch him. We think he’s trying to create so many break points, so much instability that we can’t repair it; that even within Time Time Command Center the memories change.”

“Can that happen?” I asked.

He shrugged. “We’d think not. But Seth is a Cowden. Not only was he an expert in time and time-disruptions, but his family have been time-experts forever. He might know something we don’t.” Alvin consulted something on his clipboard. “Ah, there. We found him again.”

#

We were sliding down the Nile on a boat filled with dancers and servers. I was in the boat of Queen Nefertiti, principal wife of the great innovating pharaoh Akhenaten. Above us the stars shone on a velvet sky. I wore a linen dress with precise pleats, and a wig, having taken the part of a serving lady in the throng of the followers of the queen. Not a real server, but one of the daughters of provincial nobles sent to the court with the pretext of attending the queen and the real aim of perhaps finding an advantageous alliance.

All night my jewelry – the heavy lapis-lazuli looking necklace around my neck – had been communicating through slight shakes that the Breacher was near. But how near?

We were headed for the Heb-Sed of Akhenaten. He had many, having started in the third year of his reign with the Heb-Sed normally reserved by other pharaohs to celebrate thirty years in power.

It was generally acknowledged among historians that it had been such a bold move in celebrating the Heb-Sed, the festival of the tail, that had helped Akhenaten establish a monotheistic religion. And it had been that monotheistic religion that helped consolidate the Egyptian Empire under his son, Tutankhaten, and his sons’ sons.

Such a strong empire had Egypt funded that neither Greece nor Rome could dislodge it and little by little their confusing polytheism had been subsumed into the worship of Aten, which in turn had propelled the world into the new era.

Twice during the night, someone had touched me where my back was bare and I’d felt the necklace vibrate. But every time I turned around, I saw only Egyptians. Not the Breacher. And I doubted the tall, redheaded man I’d seen at Hastings could have disappeared in this dark crowd, even if he’d worn a wig.

Presently the boat docked where the preparations had been made for the Pharaoh to run the ritual course and do the dance that would prove both his ability to still rule the country and to have the approval of the gods to do so.

His boat had already docked and his retinue had disappeared past a series of refreshment tents set up to receive him. I had to wait until the Queen and her close attendants left the boat. From where I stood I could see her exquisite profile as she stood.

Near me a voice said, “You, girl,” and thrust a linen cushion fringed in gold at me. “Carry this.”

I took it. I hadn’t had time to establish an identity. Even my command of Egyptian was limited. My goal was not to intrigue, nor to carry on a careful subversion, but to find the Breacher, to neutralize him, to take him back with him or kill him, if I could not take him back for judgment.

Judgment of Breachers was always preferable, but in this case it might not be possible. The Breacher was far too clever and at any rate, if he died before being dragged to the twenty third century, it would spare his powerful family embarrassment.

On my turn I processed off the boat, holding the cushion to my chest, as though it were precious, which it was, since I’d be severely punished, I was sure, if I lost one of the Queen’s possessions. Worse than displeasing one of the Satraps.

We processed past the refreshment tables, and to stand under an awning while the priests pinned a tail to the king, since Heb-Sed or the festival of the tail related to an obscure wolf god. Akhenaten had said the wolf god didn’t exist, that all power belonged to Aten. But he still wore the tail.

Just before the run, he stumbled, as though he’d lost balance, and I thought that the sun must be exceptionally hot. After all, Akhenaten was supposed to reign another fifteen years.

A finger caressed my dress at the top. A voice said, speaking throatily in Panlanguage, so that anyone hearing him would think he was making mere, random noises. “He will be dead within the year.”

I jumped and tried to turn around, but couldn’t. Somehow the cushion – and I couldn’t imagine how – was holding me in position, holding me turned forward.

“That is right,” he said. “That cushion is a neutralizing device for your necklace and it has… other effects. You will neither be able to let go of it nor to turn, till I let you.”

I cleared my throat. I wanted to shout, but instead, I spoke in a whisper too, the whisper that prevented us from disturbing those around us. It was no part of the mission of a Time Hunter to create time disturbances. And I would not. “You are mad, Seth Cowden.”

He took a deep breath. His finger continued to trace the width of my shoulders, the dip between my shoulder blades. “Perhaps I am, Lady… what is your name? Your real name, not the assume Egyptian one?”

“Iset,” I said. “Iset Creuly. But I am not a lady. Not from a Satrap family.”

“Ah,” he said. “No. You wouldn’t be. They don’t risk their daughters in these runs.”

“I was sent because I’ve dealt with difficult Breachers before. If you return and turn yourself in,” I said, “we’ll make accommodations.”

This time it was a soft laugh that answered me, “Don’t lie to me, Lady Creuly. There are no accommodations for a Breacher who has succeeded. Oh…” He paused and seemed to think. “I suppose my family will make sure my death is painless.”

I should have told him that he could escape death, that he would be considered mentally disturbed and not fully in control. Surely he was mentally disturbed. Had to be. Why else would someone of a Satrap family run into the past to change it?

But I knew he had been in command, and probably knew the truth better than I did. He was right. Crimes such as his couldn’t be forgiven, not even in the Satrap families. And at any rate Akhenaten had stumbled again and I made an involuntary exclamation, lost in the sounds of those around me.

“I wonder,” he said, in the tone of a man who dreamed, “What your name was originally. And also why they made such a beautiful woman a Hunter. I thought they chose for lack of memorability?”

I opened my mouth to protest that I was unmemorable, but he only said, “Goodbye Iset. I wonder what that will be when I next see you. Iset is such a perfect name upon the tongue. Little Isis, a perfect miniature goddess.” He laughed softly. “No matter. Akhenaten is done. I have been in his court for years, slowly poisoning all his family in a way undetectable. Even Tutankhaten, soon to become Tutankhamun will die young and without descendants. If my calculations are right, Greece and Rome will supplant them and some other religion will give the world names that we can only imagine. And perhaps—”

I couldn’t breathe. I wished to believe he was bluffing, but something told me he wasn’t. I wished to believe his finger on my skin was an imposition and a boorish trespass, but I felt it was both the taunt of a man who knows in the end he’s doomed and the indulgence of a man who found me beautiful. Which was strange and miraculous both.

“Perhaps?” I said, curtly, trying to make him stop tracing arabesques on my skin with his fingertip.

“Perhaps we’ll meet again, Iset Creuly. In a freer world.”

#

I stood in the hall of Greenwich Palace, outside the queen’s bedroom. This time I had been there for three months, and managed to establish myself as Mary Wingfield, a relation to the Wingfield’s of Kimbolton Castle.

Alvin, after dressing me down, asking me, “What could you have been thinking, Mary Creuly? You should never have taken that cushion. Did it not occur to you it might contain a nefarious device?” had talked to me about how the Breacher had been traced to the time of Henry VIII, to be precise to 1535, when the king shared the crown with the beautiful and impetuous Anne Boleyn, his second and final wife, the ancestress of the Tudor dynasty which would retain the English throne until the twenty second century.

She’d given him a daughter, but no son, and in October 1535 she’d miscarried a son. Mid 1636 she’d have her second son, Henry, who would reign as Henry IX. Before he ascended the throne, England would reconcile with the Catholic church. Swayed by the health and vigor of the English heir, and by more material concerns, if the historians were to be believed, Pope Paul III would come to believe Henry VIII’s crisis of conscience over his too near relation to Queen Catherine was correct and had been based in divine inspiration.

Everything forgiven, by the time Henry IX climbed the throne on his father’s death, he’d be a most Catholic subject. Carefully juggling alliances with Spain and France, the ninth Henry had created the basis of a stable empire.

Queen Anne had given the king two more sons and another daughter, all of whom had been used as marriage fodder around the world. She was sometimes called the mother of kings, and it was true that everyone of royal blood, even all the Satraps in our time, had her blood.

For months I’d watched over her health. I’d managed to get assigned as a lady’s maid, and endured endless games of cards to make sure nothing was eaten by the queen, nothing came near her that wasn’t carefully monitored by my various disguised apparatus.

If the queen were poisoned, if she died, that would destabilize the future enough that the pieces would be hard enough to put together again. But not on my watch.

As for the Breacher, all my various tracers told me, time and again that he was nearby, but never close enough to the queen to make a difference. Never close enough to hurt her.

The only times I left her alone at all were while she was sleeping, usually watched over by her women, or when she ordered me away. And even then I kept my tracers on her to make sure the Breacher didn’t come near.

It was during one of those times, while I walked in the courtyard at Greenwich palace, my tracer telling me the Breacher was nowhere near the queen, and was in fact quite near me, that I realized he was walking towards me.

As at the Battle of Hastings, he was tall and redheaded, with grey-blue eyes and the shadow of a smile on his lips.

That he recognized me was obvious. I reached under my kirtle for the burner that I kept handy if I came across him. I’d shot men before. No. I’d shot simulations of men before, in exercises. I’d brought in all my captured Breachers alive. I didn’t want to shoot him. I wanted to capture him. But he was a difficult one.

“Seth Cowden,” I said. “You are under arrest for stealing a time device, for violating the ban on unauthorized time travel, for trying to change the past in order to—”

He grinned at me. He made no effort at all to go for his burner. “Am I, Iset? Is that your name?”

“I am Mary,” I said. “Mary Deven.”

He smiled a little. “Ah, Mary,” he said, testing out my name as though it were an exotic confection upon his tongue. “I must have forgotten.”

His smile, his lack of concern with my trying to arrest him disturbed me. “Seth Cowden,” I repeated. “You are under arrest. You can let me hold your wrist for transport, or else I will terminate—”

“Yes, yes,” he said. He made a gesture with his hand as though dismissing the burner I was pointing at him from under the folds of my kirtle. He had to know it was there, and also that I could shoot through fabric and burn him through the heart. But his eyes were unconcerned. And though I was tall for an Elizabethan woman, he was a giant, as he was tall even for the twenty third century. He was in fact every bit a Satrap, tall and broad shouldered, with perfect teeth and a look of complete self-possession. “But first let’s walk in this garden. Let me tell you why I did it.”

I hesitated. “Tell me—” I said, and then, decidedly. “I don’t need to know!”

He shrugged. “Oh, perhaps not. But don’t you want to know? You know who I am. The Cowdens have been in charge of the government of Earth and the twenty worlds for centuries. Why would I throw it all away?

“You are disturbed. Your mind—”

“Do I look like a madman to you? Give me your arm, Mary, and I shall walk with you in the garden.”

“It is raining!”

“So, you are not a real Elizabethan, whose clothes will be ruined by a little rain, and who can be killed by a cold. Walk with me, Mary. I will tell you why I did what I did, and if you still think I deserve arrest, you can take me back. Or shoot me for all I care. If I still exist when we’re done talking.”

“If you still exist?”

“Ah, in the multi universe each individual’s life is such a small thing, isn’t it? So little and so light. It counts for very little even under the empire, does it not? And the slightest shift can make it vanish.”

#

It was madness of course. What can I tell you, but that Hunters are human too? Aye, and in my case a woman. A woman who had never been rich or connected or, for that matter, beautiful.

I’d been born to a clerk in the Imperial administration, and my rank in life was restricted. That a Satrap wished to speak to me was a little intoxicating. That he’d called me beautiful had to be a ruse, or a trap. But there are traps so seductive we would fall into them willingly. I followed him to the garden, under the fine rain, and he put my arm in his. I could have held his wrist. I could have activated the transport. To this day I don’t know why I didn’t.

The garden was sad under the rain, but you could tell where things had been planted that when green would make the place delightful. We walked down paths I didn’t very well mark, and he talked. “Have you never thought, Mary, that the Empire perhaps cares a little too little about people? About each person?”

“The empire preserves people,” I said. “Lines, families, groups of people. Surely individuals are preserved too as part of it.”

“But only as part,” he said. “And only in their proper ranks.”

“The empire is stable,” I said. “Over the generations, the families have perfected their peculiar specialties. Each of them is good at what it was born to do, clerks and Satraps, commanders and planners.”

He gave me a look, sly, out of the corner of the soft grey eyes. “So, Mary, how many Hunters in your family?”

I shrugged and blushed. “Does it matter then?” I said. “The Hunters are not a clan nor a family specialty. They come from every family and every class, provided a taste for adventure, an interest in history, a quick mind.”

He grinned. “Aye, then, Mary, from every class. And have you thought, perhaps, that in every class, in every specialized family, there are individuals born whose talents differ from that of their family, that if they were allowed to use their talents, to create their own path, the world might be unimaginably richer?”

“No,” I said. “That is madness. Anarchy.”

“When I was younger,” he said. “I was a Hunter. And on a field mission after a Breacher, I pursued a man who created so much instability that for a few… moments? Days? Years? However you measure inexistent time, a society was allowed to exist where the empire had never come about. In it, men were free. Individuals. It was a beautiful— Oh, it was scary,” he said, probably having seen my expression, “and maddening and fast and chaotic, but that world, as it was, was also beautiful. No ordered ranks, no classes, no exams for advancement.” He sighed. “Their interactions were mad things, with no rhyme or reason. Then the repairers and tracers from headquarters got to cleaning up the time line, and reestablishing it, and I was brought back, and I became one of the planners, and I never saw—” He paused suddenly, both in speech and as though his feet had brought him to an unexpected place. “We,” he said. Then stopped again, as though that beginning had no end. He sighed. “When I saw you, the first time you came into the center, a Hunter, newly minted, I realized—” He paused again. “But no, I could never explain it to you, could I?”

And I realized we were standing in the middle of the kitchen garden, where vegetables, stunted by the cold of winter still remained enough to see what they had been. “I didn’t know there was a kitchen garden here,” I said

Which was when the screams echoed, loud, from the main part of the palace, and suddenly, as suddenly as my startled wheeling around to look at him, Seth wasn’t there, and there was just me, standing, under the fine rain, my French hood plastered to my hair, my gown sodden, my heart thudding, thudding, thudding.

He’d done something. He’d evaded my careful surveillance. He’d—

I ran. I ran in the direction of the screams, to stand outside the Queen’s bedroom. From inside came the screams, the sound of a woman sobbing.

Suddenly the crowd parted, and the king, King Henry VIII in all his majesty came thundering down the corridors of Greenwich, and into the door of the Queen’s room before we had so much as time to curtsey. From inside the crying of a woman stopped, and now came the voice of a man – the king – raised in scolding.

Minutes only, and he came out, saying at the door, “You’ll get no more boys from me.”

The crying resumed then, quieter. And then minutes later a woman came, carrying something in a folded towel. She looked at us, and she looked at the floor, and she said, “Queen Anne has had a miscarriage of her savior.”

I blinked, realizing in shock this was Henry IX, the Great Harry of English history, the ancestor of most of our Satraps. And he’d died. He’d died unborn.

History was tilting on its axis, and I knew the Breacher had done it, but I didn’t know how, and I reached for my bracelet and pressed to return to control center.

#

I was in a room. A broad room, wide round, that looked a little like Time Time Command Center, and yet wasn’t. I looked up, and there was no inscription around the door.

And then Seth Cowden appeared, from an internal door, and smiled at me, “Back so soon, my darling,” he said. He extended both hands to me, and took me in his arms. “How was the expedition? Did you find what you wished?”

I was mute for a moment because my first thought was to tell him I knew how he’d done it. Henry IX had died in utero due to something added to his mother’s food. I’d monitored the food itself, from the kitchens on, but not what had grown in the kitchen garden. Some fruit, some herb, some winter vegetable had grown with the nanites already upon them that would stop that life, before it was born, that would send history into a different path.

The other part of my brain told me it was all no sense. There was no Time Time Command Center. There was no Henry IX. England had remained the excommunicated child of Europe, separate. Because of its less rigid adherence to religion, it had spawned a much different culture, one that tolerated different kinds of thought.

The empire that united all the lands of Europe had never coalesced. There was some thought too that a certain rigidity of Egyptian religion, encased in millennia of tradition had never occurred, and the thought that the England itself was very different from the land of Saxons. It all flitted through my mind, like a whirlwind, like scraps of a dream half-remembered. And then it crashed into the thought that I’d been sent to retrieve Seth, that Seth—

But there was no Time Time Command Center. Time travel was regulated, in a way, in the sense that it was overseen by several scientific bodies, and that people had to be trained before going back. But the time stream was free to archeologists and sociologists, to investigators and historians.

I was an historian. I’d just gone back to study the Tudor period and to copy some documents relating to Anne Boleyn’s trial for witchcraft.

Looking up at Seth, my world solidified. He was my husband of three years, and a chair of history in the University of New America, a planet in Alpha Centauri. It was a new colony, funded after the old Earth country, a free colony that took all those wishing to join it from the heart, and willing to contribute to its mad whirlwind of invention and innovation.

“I found the documents,” I said. “And copied them.” I removed the French hood and the dress. This was our very own antechamber. Seth was quite wealthy, being older than I and famous in his field, and he had built a time-travel-chamber onto our house.

Naked, I allowed Seth to envelope me into his arms, feeling his red beard tickle my face. “I’m so glad we live in a world where I can’t have arbitrary charges brought against me, and everyone will go along with a despotic king. I’m so glad that the rights of the individual count for more.” I frowned, as a feeling of uneasiness persisted. “It could so easily have been different,” I said.

“Very easily,” he said, and gently kissed my forehead.

“And in a different world, I might never have met you, even,” I said. “Our families being from so different a level of wealth.”

“Oh, what does wealth matter, or class,” he said, and kissed me again, this time intently, as though kissing me were the only thing of importance in the universe.

Then he took me within, by the hand, into our chamber.

Hours later, we were lying together on our bed, dozing. “I had a dream,” I told him. “I think it was a dream. But it is so strange. And the world was quite different. I was hunting you down because you were bent on…”

“On?”

“Disrupting the time stream.”

He laughed. “Foolishness. Disruptions tend to heal.”

“Yes, but not for a while, and I remember it was odd that you… I have an idea you killed your own ancestor, in that dream.”

“That is madness,” he said. Amusement made him narrow his eyes, an expression I knew well. “And quite impossible. Given that women are women, which man can be sure who his ancestor was?”

Just then the communicator played a sharp note, calling our attention. Seth groaned. “Alvin,” he said.

Alvin was his assistant, the man who kept all the paperwork in order, the man who made sure that all the events of the day happened on time. Not brilliant, not innovative, but faithful and exact. I had a feeling he bored Seth a little.

Seth pressed a button and a hologram of Alvin appeared in the middle of the room. He was dressed very oddly, in a golden tunic, and strange molding pants, not at all like the loose, informal clothes favored in New America.

He glared at Seth, too, for what I’m sure must be the first time. “You thought you’d been so clever,” he said.

Seth sat up straighter, and said, in a tone of deep loathing, “Oh, it is you!” and I got a feeling he wasn’t talking about Alvin or not the Alvin I knew at all. “Very clever sending her after me. You knew I would not hurt her.”

“And very poor planning, very unworthy of a Satrap,” Alvin said. “To change the whole world for a woman. And a common, low born woman at that.”

I opened my mouth to protest, and I might have said something about Alvin needing counseling. But neither of the men paid attention to me.

Alvin said, “Fortunately I found your real ancestor, the Lute player. Did you think I didn’t know? Your ancestor looked just like him.” He spoke in a low, vicious tone, and I remembered a lute player accused of consorting with Queen Anne, but Queen Anne had been executed and—

Seth grabbed at my wrist. “Whatever happens,” he said. “Remember that I love you.” He put something in my hand. It felt solid and small. And he closed my fist over it.

Alvin didn’t notice the small gesture, he was ranting, “Fortunately I retain my memory. It will take centuries for us to clean up the time stream, but until we do, you will be punished for your actions. Even now, the assassins are destroying your true ancestor, before he can—”

#

There had been as though a sick twist in my guts, a momentary dizziness. I lay in bed in my small apartment, which overlooked Kansas, the capital city of New America. Outside my window the bustle of the largest city in the system went on. A reflection of light from a passing flyer sent lights chasing into my room.

And I opened my hand and found I was clutching a ring. It was so wide, it would only fit my thumb. I slid it on, hesitantly.

Suddenly I remembered. Hastings and Egypt and Tudor England. But with it came a feeling of Seth, too. And I realized he’d worn this ring that created a bubble of stability in the time stream, a mental barrier against the changes to the past, and allowed you to remember all the adjustments.

An expensive bauble, but then, in the original world we both came from, Seth had been a Satrap. Wealthy beyond the dreams of common people.

And he’d had this bubble, and he’d become a Breacher . . . for love of me.

The memory came with the ring, of the world accidentally created in which we were lovers, and of his despair, until he’d seen me again, in the real? Original world.

I got up from bed and went to the window, and looked out at the tumultuous world outside that would never have happened but for Seth’s meddling.

In that first world, it had been ordered, with palaces and slums in very different areas, with castes, with rituals, with rigid control of every individual action.

Individuals. So little and so light in the stream of time, in the pageant of history, in the swirl of the worlds.

But he had roiled time and history for me.

And I remembered too, this world, and our three years together, and the way he laughed, and his teasing look, and the sudden, unexpectedly vulnerable glances he gave me, that spoke of love.

So little and so light.

I clutched my hand in a fist around the ring on my thumb. Alvin had missed something when he’d not destroyed me, when he’d not seen this ring being given to me.

I remembered.

How hard could it be to go back in time and save a man from death? Oh, sure, I knew that scanners and fixers, planners and reweavers of time would all be at work even as I spoke.

But there was a good chance Alvin himself was gone, and any number of his helpers. Satraps had all been descended from Henry IX and who knew how many times Henry IX’s wife, Queen Catherine, had been unfaithful.

And yet, even if they all still existed and arrayed themselves against me, they couldn’t stop me. Sure, there were many of them, but that just meant I must fight them all.

I remembered our love and our marriage that had only existed in that world created by Breaching the past. Our love for which he had sacrificed all.

I must plunge into the time stream and from it rescue and bring back the one life that mattered and to me.

So little and so light. It outweighed all the possible worlds.

Pursuing Liberty – a blast from the past from July 4, 2011

The United States of America is the most revolutionary land based on the most revolutionary idea in the history of mankind.

A year before I married my husband, my best friend from childhood married a Frenchman. She became a French citizen the year before I became an American citizen, and for her that meant that – in her little town – she got to open the Bastille-day ball by dancing with the mayor.

I remember being happy for her but, at the same time, both feeling the vast superiority of my journey to becoming an American citizen (even if I never danced with a mayor) and the vague uneasiness of celebrating bastille day.

Because America was founded in a revolution and because most people writing our entertainment are historically illiterate in that way that only Americans (prosperous and secure [still. Relatively] within a vast country can afford to be) movies and many books tend to resonate with sympathy for other revolutions: the French and the Russian revolution foremost.

They should not. They should not even if the temptation is understandable and even if some of the founding fathers were at first sympathetic before turning away in horror at the results.

Oh, I’ll grant you both revolutions looked similar up front. They were both the work of the educated middle class (the sans culottes were a blunt weapon, not the real revolutionaries) and they both originated on the ideas of the Enlightenment.

The similarity ends there. The French revolution, the Russian revolution and the endless revolutions throughout most of the twentieth century are of a kind and kin with much, much older uprisings. Regardless of the clothes they wear and the names they partake, they have more in common with what the iksos did to Egypt or what the Germanic underclass did to Rome. (An invasion? Well, kind of… only we’ve found that this is not necessarily true. Actually, in Rome’s case at least, it had been trickling over the border for centuries.) It was an uprising of the “formerly powerless” and what they wanted was to seize the place of the upper classes and rule as the upper classes had ruled. This always ends with the new upper class devouring each other and rivers of blood drowning all vestiges of civilization until a dictatorship takes over to impose order.

This is because the revolutions are fights over power – not fights over liberty. As with most human trouble, it starts with the words. The words at the beginning.

The French – and most other revolutionaries – fought for ideals of an abstract and high nature “Liberte, fraternite, egalite.” It doesn’t seem to have occurred to any of them – Lafayette included – that by mandating fraternite and egalite they were denying the liberte. And the fraternity and equality one being a lofty feeling, and the other an absolute measurement always prone to more and finer adjustment, both could be used as levers for the new upper classes to get more and more tyrannical power, until you could be executed as an “aristo” because you knew how to read or you wore glasses. Or you had one plate more than your destitute neighbor.

Americans, on the other hand, based their revolution on life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. You are free to pursue happiness. You have equality under the law on your right to pursue it.

No one guarantees you will catch it or that you’ll be happy when you do it. Well, at least we didn’t use to. In the twentieth century the statist excesses have infected even the US, and we’ve regulated more and more how equal you have to be and how much happiness you can attain and how much is “good for you.” This is a wrong path.

It’s impossible to look at this and not think of a quote from Heinlein, in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. It should surprise no one I can’t find my copy, because that book moves all over the house, though I own something like five copies of it, I swear the kids are playing smuggler (from Canticle for Leibowitz) and burying them in the background against the hard times. However, I read it recently.

After discussing the Luna declaration of independence, Prof Bernardo de la Paz admits he stole the words from Thomas Jefferson and asks Manny if he remembers who that was: “Yes,” Manny says (I’m not quoting exactly) “He freed the slaves.” Prof responds, “Could be argued he tried to, but they caught him at it.*”

The difference between life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and liberte, equality and fraternity is the difference between being a wild-eyed revolutionary or simply playing one (or being manipulated into becoming one) to get a new class into power.

Because once you mandate equality, you fall into the trap of another Heinlein quote. You see, men weren’t created equal, and as I’ve pointed out at length there is only a creative minority and of that minority there is only a minority actually willing to work hard. But it is those minorities that advance civilization. The genius of America has always been to let those minorities do the work. This revolutionary arrangement has led to the freest and most prosperous nation in the history of mankind, a nation that has lifted the whole world out of poverty.

Good job. Now don’t get cocky. Remember:

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as “bad luck.” (Robert A. Heinlein.)

Happy Fourth Of July. Keep on Revolting.

*anyone bringing up nonsense about Jefferson and Sally Hemmings is subjected to the penalty of having Lin Wicklund explain the facts of life to them. If you don’t know who Lin Wicklund is, you’ll find out. Also, judging great men by the standards of a much later time is a device of midgets on stilts, trying to piss on the heads of giants. You only make yourself small.

 

*Crossposted at Classical Values*

I’m also, honestly, not trying to see how late I can be before I check in here.

The day just sort of took a weird turn, or I’d have put on a Blast From The Past.  No, nothing bad, just I knew I needed to do some things today, and they necessitated driving, only I’m not driving yet, and it was easier for son to drive me before I’d put the post up, so…

Anyway, speaking of things in the air, that aren’t exactly a conspiracy theory, because it would take too much effort to coordinate across thousands of sites and classrooms, etc but which are everywhere, because they fit what people are taught, even when what people are taught is complete, laugh out loud nonsense.

Going through the Viking exhibit, for instance, we kept being told time after time how powerful women had been among the vikings, and also there were things like treasure troves, which in one case they said “was a woman’s treasure trove, probably to honor women in her ancestry.”  At which point I looked at the case enquiringly, because these idiots don’t seem to understand someone’s unearthed treasure trove is someone else’s panicked burial.

I do because it’s not unusual in Portugal to find “treasure troves” while doing house repairs or digging in a field that “has always been a forest.” (actually aerial photography of the village shocked me by showing that the “immemorial woods” had at one time had buildings in them.  Look, we knew there had been buildings here and there and the occasional mill.  One of the things dad and I did, while walking in the woods was read Roman inscriptions, many of them (now utterly meaningless) boundary stones.  And you often tripped on mill wheels and such.  No, the weird thing is that the entire “forest” was once upon a time a village, larger than the village.  So those mill wheels and other things left in the middle of the forest were not places where the owner died without descendants and left it to rot, but places where some catastrophic disruption occurred.  And the population of the village was once almost as large or as large (assuming they had no multi-story buildings, not always a good idea with Rome) as today.  I’d guess either the fall of Rome, or the Black Plague shrunk the village.)  Usually too small to warrant calling the authorities, most of these troves contain five or six coins, and were someone’s whole fortune before an invasion, or a catastrophe.  I don’t and can’t imagine the householder pausing to hide certain objects to “honor” certain women.  There is no way to even get in the mind frame of whoever wrote that card, except to say that they never new privation, need or threat in their entire lives.

Which brings us to the next part.  All through the exhibit, people told us over and over again that the Vikings were — contrary to legend — peaceful, peaceful I tell you.  Most of the Vikings were, after all, farmers and householders.

I wasn’t buying it.  Yeah, sure, most Vikings, if you count women, children, and people to old to go aViking, just stayed put.  But no civilization where dying in bed gets you sent to Hel (which was cold rather than hot but much like our Hell) is a peaceful one.  In the same way I didn’t buy the continuous reassurances there were as many women as men aboard those ships.  Cooeeeeee!  Really?  The men saddled themselves with a liability likely to get pregnant, give birth, etc AND be weaker in battle?  That’s…. amazing.  Oh, I forget.  The idiots writing these cards think women are naturally as strong and physically as fast as men and that the “patriarchy” is a six thousand year old conspiracy to hide this.  Sure, there probably was the occasional female in a male role.  Contrary to much bleating on the left, the patriarchy didn’t enforce strict gender roles, life generally did, and there are always outliers, and Helga the Ugly who could lift a pig under each arm, probably was allowed to join the guys in their expeditions.  For one, who was going to tell her now.  For another, no guy ever got drunk enough for her to be at risk.

Other than that, sure, there were as many women as men aboard Viking ships.  Coming back from a raid.  They called those women “slaves.”

One thing that surprised me (though it pretty well put paid to the “peaceful Viking” image they’d been trying to build, was the skulls and the list of healed injuries, etc.  A lot of the skulls or fragments of skulls showed just how hard life was, from the health point of women.  Women’s skulls probably in early middle age, around their early thirties, showed osteoporosis we’d expect in an elderly women.  All the bones showed signs of someone headed for the grave in their forties, if they weren’t killed by a violent illness first.

This shouldn’t have surprised me, except that one of those “not a conspiracy but they all believe this” lies going around seems to be that life expectancy hasn’t expanded, that all the increase in life expectancyy is do to less child mortality.

And this is poppycock.  It might have applied to “average age at death” but not to “life expectancy”.  Life expectancy when I was little was around early sixties for the village.  This was not so much a calculation as a “no one is surprised if you die at this age.”  Keep in mind we were reasonably prosperous, in historical norms, and reasonably well fed, again by historical norms.  And yet when someone died in his sixties people went “well, he was old.”

OTOH when my cousin died, in his early sixties, five (?) years ago, it was a horrible shock to the whole family.  It was like someone dying in his thirties back in the day.  The words “so young” were in everyone’s lips.

Sure, some people lived longer.  Like my family, which had a tendency to live to their eighties or nineties.  BUT even then, eighty now is not like eighty then.  My parents are in much better shape than their parents at eighty.  They look and act 10 years younger, easily.  And older son, when he worked at the hospital, told me that it wasn’t rare to see people 100 and older.

When I was a kid, turning 100 was a joke, and most of the people who “did” didn’t, as the birth records were imprecise. (We’re still not absolutely sure when my father was born.  What we know for sure is that he was either not born on that date, or not in that year.  Because Grandma’s stories of his birth involve giving birth on a Sunday when a festa happened in a nearby village, and she was alone in the house.  His birth date was not a Sunday for the year he was supposedly born in.  And like most people his age, in the area, grandma got around to registering his birth when he was school age.  We don’t THINK she lost track of his year of birth, because she had a kid less than a year older and one less than a year younger.  If she miscalculated dad’s age, she miscalculated ALL of their ages.  Which is POSSIBLE, because our family runs to large and precocious and she might have convinced herself they were all a year older, because the oldest was reading.  But it’s more likely to be that it was a different date, probably by a month or two.)  Still, it was a big enough thing to get your picture in all the papers, and it happened every few years.  If they did that now, they’d never publish anything else.

However, I have had arguments with earnest academics, most of them very, very leftist, that if you survived childhood then you’d live “about the same time” you live now, and with the same degree of health.  One of them told me she had dug a village in Germany in the 19th century and knew this to be so.  (Turns out it was a very wealthy area.)

No, you couldn’t expect to live the same time, certainly not with the same degree of health, because you’d have vitamin deficiencies, not enough protein, and honestly, a lot of infections that had to run their course, due to not having antibiotics.  Anyone who has lived in a time or place where vegetables and fruit were not plentiful in winter, where there was no temperature control in human habitations, and where antibiotics were difficult to obtain, knows this “they were just like us” bullshit deserves a bullshit medal with d*ck clusters.  But most of these people have never had a day of privation in their lives and think their good fortune is how human life has always been.

The side effect of this is that they are like stupid little romantics, seeing everything that’s “wrong” with human life (anomie, artificiality and the heartbreak of psoriasis) but not how much better, how amazing our life is compared to past generations.

Because of this, they think we can give up the gifts of science and industrialization and all we’ll lose is our “capitalist shackles” of having to actually earn a living.

They imagine we could live in the middle of the forest and be as healthy and strong as we are now.

And thus they facilitate the Socialist power grab via bleating about crisis, be they crisis of the “environment” or of redistribution.  They believe in the same idiocy as Mr. Obama who thought “At some point you’ve made enough money.” Because money is just money, nothing else.  It’s not health and longevity, and sufficient food of the right kind not to be malnourished.

It’s tempting to think these beliefs are being disseminated in order to push these bah lambs to the slaughter with their enthusiastic cooperation.

But no, like the beliefs in powerful women Vikings, (who apparently can ONLY be powerful by pillaging and plundering.  Being mistress of a farm is not enough), and in peaceful Vikings too they’re simply an upending of long-held beliefs about something.  I.e. if Western culture has long believed something, progressives will believe the opposite, because that’s about as hard as any of them can reason, and congruent with their initial mission to topple civilization so perfect communism will emerge.

Note that whether it’s a conspiracy or not, disseminating and believing in these lies still has the effect of corroding civilization.

May G_d have mercy on their souls, because the world is merciless, and their beliefs are counter-survival.

 

 

Humans are curious things.  I once read a description of the human mind as an instrument for bringing order out of Chaos.  (Which puts the story of the creation in a whole different light, but never mind that.)

It might very well be the mechanism responsible for our success in becoming the dominant species on Earth.  We can take hints and signs, and weave them into a complete whole, so that grandma G’u’g who can no longer see very well can add up almost unheard rustle in the bushes, a certain smell and the way the birds went quiet to: Predator is after me, and end up saving herself and grandchildren just in time.

This sort of thing is great for individual survival, but it puts an odd kick in our gallop.  We also add up rustles and intimations and whispers and make up conspiracy theories (supernatural or not) that would make your head spin.  What’s more, we LIKE them.

I realized this morning, as I had to fight myself into not buying a book about how CERN will bring back demons (with notes, and proof!) that all of us like that kind of thing, and I’m just LUCKY I can buy such things for research (it fits rather neatly into the background of a novel I’m noodling.  Though I didn’t buy it.  I think I can find most of it for free on the net.)

Other people, who aren’t writers, end up believing in grand, arching conspiracies that “explain everything.”

It used to be I hied away from any site at one of these words: tri-lateral commission, masons (unless a history of masonry), Rockfellers (unless an history ditto) and others that won’t come to mind now.  If you add in Russians for the present day, you start understanding how pervasive this stuff is.

The reason it satisfies an old human craving is because we know the world isn’t fair.  We can deal with that.  But the world also isn’t logic, and things happen in reality that no novelist would dare write about.  To explain it, our brains try to forge these immense, convoluted conspiracies, involving centuries and thousands of people.

The sanest among us realize those are nonsense.  Yes, there are unified “pushes” across the world, but mostly they’re the result of people raised in the same few institutions, believing the same thing, and all of them trying to do what they think is right.

You don’t need a conspiracy to predict what a fourth generation red diaper president will do, because you know what he believes, and you can extrapolate from there: he’ll hate America, because he inherited his ancestors’ inchoate resentment that America won the cold war, never bowed to communism, and by our very existence proved communism wrong; he’ll try to import as many immigrants from third world countries as possible, because the Marxist idea of the proletariat never dies, it just goes to other countries and becomes exotic; he’ll think that if he depresses American economy the world will get richer, because to him economics is a fixed pie and it’s all a matter of sharing it out.  Etc.

In the same way you can predict what the progressive-infested institutions like publishing, the arts and the news will do.  It doesn’t take a conspiracy.  It takes all their heads running the same malware, and communism having become a sign of “high class” in the west.  Which happened because the people with money thought they had to convert to escape the massacre, when “inevitably” communism won.

But we LIKE conspiracies.  And in my case, at least I admit, the more loony the better.  Partly of course, I like the loony ones, because they keep me from swallowing them whole.  Partly because the larger and more encompassing they are the more they activate the “wow” feel.

It’s a great part of what makes MHI so much fun.  And it’s encapsulated in the moment in Galaxy quest when the pseudo space captain says “It’s all true” and the kid says “I knew it.”

We all want it “all” to be true because a grand conspiracy controlling everything absolves us of personal responsibility, allows us to dismiss our failures and the way in which the world disappoints us, and is just… neat.

The point is to remember that that feeling of neat is deceptive.  It’s very hard for more than three people to keep a secret.  And keeping a secret — a real one, that matters, not a secret handshake — through generations is almost impossible.  If you work on the idea that it’s all a grand conspiracy your actions won’t match with reality and you’ll often act crazy.

But if you keep that in mind, and particularly if you write, a good conspiracy theory read or two can lend that much more depth and strangeness to your world, and readers will probably like it.

Now if I can find a way the people tracking searches, and the Amazon algorithm won’t peg me under too crazy to live.

The Free Market versus Death Panels by Alpheus Madsen

A few days ago, I encountered a question on the evil time-sucking website called Quora that I wished I could answer, but I had lost track of.  The question in question was something about wondering if the Free Market could provide health care, and the answer that I wanted to counter said, essentially, “No, because the profit motive doesn’t belong in health care, because the value of any given life is infinite, so doctors will charge millions of dollars to save every single life.”

On the surface, the argument makes sense, but it’s not hard to find a good example that will show that something about the reasoning is very flawed:  food is far more necessary for life than medical care.  Why doesn’t a farmer charge $1.5 million for every apple?  Indeed, for every grain of wheat?  Or even for every particle of flour?  The answer is complicated — thousands of people get PhDs of perhaps somewhat dubious value in their attempts to answer this question — but clearly, things like competition and “marginal utility” work together to make food affordable, and it’s altogether not clear at all why these same forces shouldn’t cut medical costs as well.

Furthermore, the answer ignores the biggest problem with socialized medicine in all its forms — indeed, the problem that any government controlled resource has — the exact same problem that develops every time the Government steps in and tries to “fix” market forces:  you get shortages and surpluses because bureaucratic meddlers cannot predict what people will want, or even what people need, or how people will respond to the price controls, incentives, and punishments they set up in their infinite lack of wisdom to provide health care to “all”.

The Free Market is the only way we can balance costs in a reasonable way.  I want to go a step further, though, and make the case that the Free Market is the only moral way to address these issues as well.

Consider the case of Charlie Gard, who has been in the news recently because the courts of the United Kingdom have declared him brain dead, and wish to pull the plug on him.  The parents would like to seek treatment, and barring that, would like to take him home so that he could die in peace with them — but bureaucrats insist that he must die in the hospital.  The bureaucrats only have the best interests of all involved, after all — not just Charlie, whose life, apparently, isn’t worth trying to save, and who shouldn’t be allowed to continue to live on account of the pain he is suffering — but he can’t receive care, because of all the people in Great Britain’s health care system who also need the resources that could go to Charlie.  The Bureaucrats have made their decision, and they will enforce it.  And according to many people, this is the most humane outcome that we can receive in this situation.

Compare this to the alternative that Charlie’s parents seek:  they have asked doctors who wish to help, some of which have said “Yes, I will, if you give me money”, and others who have said “We’ll even do it for free”.  They have asked friends and strangers alike for donations to pay for the treatment, and people have responded, to the order of about £1.7 million, last I’ve heard.  Yes, it’s possible that Charlie might now be braindead, but doctors have been wrong about this before — and besides, the disorder is rare, and even treating a braindead patient can help doctors understand the disease better, and allow them to be better prepared to address this disease in future patients.  It may even help doctors understand the human body a little more, and thereby help patients suffering from other diseases, some seemingly unrelated to the rare mitochondrial disorder that Charlie suffers from.

No one is being forced to help little Charlie.  Every person who donated money, did so knowing that they can afford to do so, and if not, they did so knowing that a little bit of sacrifice is acceptable if it can be used to save a little boy.  Even the doctors who won’t do this for free are willing to offer their services, and as the number of doctors who can provide such services grow, the price of the services will naturally come down.  (Probably not too much, in this case, because of the rarity of the disease — only 16 people in the world are known to suffer from it — but it’s also clear that it’s not all that hard for strangers and friends to come together to donate to the rare child who is diagnosed with this disease.)

The friends and strangers who have donated money get to take pleasure in supporting the care of a child in dire need.  The doctors who receive money get to put food on their table, and pay for shelter for their family; those who don’t accept the money will treat the child for the pleasure of doing so as well — and in both cases, these doctors will be better prepared to help others.  And while the parents might not be able to save Charlie — and I suspect that Charlie’s condition has likely deteriorated during the months that his parents fought the courts and the hospital for treatment, in their efforts to do everything they could to save their son — in the end, they will have the satisfaction that they had done everything in their power to save their child.  Well, not <i>quite</i> everything, but only because Bureaucrats barred them from certain actions that any compassionate soul would have allowed.

Charlie’s case is not an isolated incident.  I still remember the testimony of a cancer patient who explained that she was sentenced to die because the National Health System would not approve in a timely manner breast cancer drugs that would have stopped the cancer (if I remember correctly, she was eventually allowed the drugs, and the National Health Service even paid for them — but only after it was too late:  the disease had progressed to the point where it couldn’t be stopped) — and they would not allow her to buy the drugs herself, unless she were willing to pay for all  her treatment, which she could not afford to do — all in the name of equality (because it wouldn’t be fair to the poor souls who couldn’t afford those drugs, you see), and of keeping NHS costs down, and doing the greatest good for the greatest number of people.  I don’t know how many cases like this occur in Great Britain; sadly, most of these cases most likely never make it into the news, and likely even have a hard time making it into statistics.

The irony here is that everything we’ve been told about why the Free Market is evil — that treatments would be prohibitively expensive, because we all will pay anything to save the lives of our children from hypothetical illnesses — is exactly the evil that Socialized Medicine Bureaucrats impose on actual children, even when the parents are literally willing and able to pay $1.7 million for the care of their son.  And yet, for all this, those who defend the cold-blooded, heartless, and soulless Socialist Bureaucrats have the gall to accuse the Free Marketers of cold-blooded heartlessness, and insist that they only have the best interests of everyone in their hearts, all because it’s somehow evil for a doctor to charge money for his services!

George Bernard Shaw is known for insisting that we should have a panel, where every person has to go before the panel to justify their existence — and if the panel finds the justification wanting, they will have the power to take the person and make sure that they are eliminated in a humane way.  (I have always suspected that Shaw imagined himself on the panel, and never imagined himself standing before the panel, trying to justify his own existence…and being found wanting…)  This is literally what is on display in Great Britain.  And this is what Socialists consider to be humane.

But consider an alternative:  that every day, each of us must justify our existence to others — through job interviews, and through appealing directly to friends, strangers, and charities for support — and if we are found wanting, rather than be eliminated immediately, we get to make more appeals the next day.  If our ability to do things is hampered by injury or disease, there’s a good chance that people will take pity on us; if we are able-bodied, and can find a little bit of time each day to improve ourselves, we might very well become useful in ways that we weren’t before.  Granted, we are in danger of dying in an inhumane way — we’re in danger of starving — but this is countered by being given a chance, every day, to prove our worth.

Which is more humane?  To have your life held at the mercy of the whims of Bureaucrats, who alone will determine your worth?  Or to be free to make the case that you are worth something to everyone you can talk to, and if found wanting yesterday, nonetheless might find you worthwhile today?  I will not answer this question directly, but I will simply suggest that you look at societies that embrace the former, and compare them to societies which embrace the latter, and then ask yourself:  which type of society prospers more?  And I would propose that you would then have your answer.

(Alas, it is too late for the tiny victim of socialism. The End of Charlie Gard’s Story)

 

There are two times that movies made me and a friend who is also a writer laugh so loud we were almost kicked out of the theater.  This was made worse by the fact that the lines weren’t particularly funny.

Not to anyone not in our business.

The first one is from sliding doors, when the girl tells her no good writer-wannabe boyfriend “I know you’ll finish your novel and we’ll be rich, but…”

Yeah.  It happens.  Look at the mountain who is buying a a mountain.  Of course it happens.  But it takes so many things.  Talent, that’s a given.  Under the old system, many were pushed, few had the staying power.  It takes push, too, so it takes a house believing in you.  The debacle that was my first trilogy kind of did for that.  Sure I could get a house to pick me up, but not to pick me up with any sort of push because I’d “failed” once.  (Oh, yeah, and “fail” in this field is interesting too.  I “failed” while earning out the advances on all books.  But, oh, it was SUPPOSED to have push and go big.  The fact it didn’t actually GET push didn’t matter.  It’s all still my fault, as per rules of traditional publishing.)  But once you get push you have to have the talent there, to back it up.  And you had to have the sort of book that is just right for that place and time.  And… and…. and…

Someone says it’s like one in a thousand in this field that even makes it to making a living (yay, me, I’m a winner) and perhaps a tenth of that that makes it to “rich” by any definition.

I was once told that Heinlein ran scared (financially) his whole life.  It seems impossible, for someone who had millions of dollars in advances, but million dollars in this field is qualified.  Usually those are benchmarked to this and that performance and paid over ten years.  In the end, you get the kind of money you’d make at a normal day job, but with twice the work and the hassle.

So my friend and I laughed and laughed at that line.  Years later, while working nights at Target, she got told that she must be there to do research.  Her books were still on the shelves, so surely she had millions.  I don’t know if she laughed or cried.

Then there’s the other line.  It was at the end of Chicago, the musical.  One girl had told the other she wasn’t sure they could do their act together because they couldn’t stand each other.  And the come back line was “Well, honey, this is the one business where that doesn’t matter at all.”

Is this true of writing?  Oh, brother.

It used to be way worse.  I get a feeling it’s still worse for other people.  For me?  Once I realized I’d always have indie and proved with witchfinder that indie would pay me at least as much as I made from trad (or in this case more) I stopped clenching, stopped minding my words, stopped being envious of my colleagues, and just generally started liking the people I liked and hating the people I hated and not generally giving a damn.

But it used to be you watched yourself and your back all the time. If a friend were in bad odor, particularly if you didn’t know why, you distanced yourself, because there might be a whisper campaign, and it might rub off on you.  If someone you hated were a bright rising star, you at least tried to be nice in public.  And if you got a chance to work with someone you purely couldn’t stand you did it if it was good for your career.  (I’m an oddity.  All three collaborations this year are with long-time friends who-are-like-family.)

There were currents running through the field that fans never saw, and you tried not to let them see.  After all they might love you and what’s his name who is always sticking a knife in your back, and you didn’t want to disappoint them.

Perhaps it is this way still.  I suspect for most people it is.  Particularly for newbies who don’t seem to view indie as quite true, since they suffer from the velveteen syndrome and want to be “real.”  (A lot of them after being ‘real’ once regain their senses and hie off to indie again.  But some don’t.)

The problem is that unless you’re one of the darlings, right on top of the heap, with book tours and ads in Times Square, it’s kind of hard to read if you’re in favor or disfavor at the publishing house.  I had an editor that, while I was earning out, would often completely cut me dead at cons, not answer my emails, and treat me like trash, and then sometimes, when I was in trouble (or not) out of the blue would be my bestest friend.  Never figured out why, but she was a hell of a strain on the nerves.  Around here we called her “the hot and cold running editor.”  Possibly it corresponded to the stage of divination of my political leanings that week.  Who knows?  Or perhaps to the birds she saw out her window in the morning.

This reduces most writers to the state of teen girls with a middle-school crush.  “My publisher sent me an email this morning, so they probably like me.”  Or “I didn’t get invited to dinner at Little Con so they probably are about to punt me” or the truly crazy making “my editor only had three minutes for me and turned off my pitch like a faucet, but she spent an hour with that new chick they just hired.  OMG, they love her and hate me.  They’re going to give her my promo money.”

It’s crazy making, and if you ride it it will make you crazy.  Don’t.  I was only able to do this when indie became a possibility, but indie is a possibility.  Even if you are hell bent on traditional, you have other options.  Relax.  Be nice to newbies, even ones who look like they will take your promo.  If a colleague tries to stick his knife in your back, he might be a dick.  Or he might be completely insane at the moment, from trying to read the tea leaves of his career.  File whatever he did as in the realm of possibility with this person, but don’t retaliate.  Shrug and smile.  Get over it.  Try not to have an enemies list.  Yes, of course, I DO have one, but those are people who have sunk more than an incidental knife in my back.  No, you may not know what it is, nor what the knives were.  None of your fracking business.  And the biggest retaliation I’ll do against these people is not work with them.  I.e. they won’t get invited to anthos I edit, and should I become big, I will not offer a hand up.  In a business as shaky (and getting shakier) as ours is, that’s punishment enough.

Be nice to those above you, unless you really, really, really can’t stand them, and then just avoid them.  Be nice to those below you.  Offer help.  Shrug off the shallow cuts to the back.  Make note of the deep, and don’t take it too personally.

Writers be crazy.  And part of it is business induced.

Which brings us to the other part: relationships outside the field.

Years ago, when I was green AND cabbage looking, Kevin Anderson offered me friendship.  I was shocked and said something along the lines of “I don’t know why you’d bother with a newbie.”  His answer was that I had written three books in two years, so I was probably in it to stay “and writers end up only having REAL friends who are writers, because they’re the only ones who understand our crazy business.”

Boy.  Howdy.  Was he ever right.

So far this business has cost me two outside-the-field friendships, both more or less the same way.  This might not seem like much in 19 years, but you have to understand I don’t make friends easily and as one of my long-term long-suffering friends put it last time I talked to her (oh, hell, Court, I need to call or text or something.  Was that a year ago?) “you have friendships that are more like platonic loves.  Friends are not just people you hang out with.  Friends are people you have feelings for.”  And she was right.  And that insight is probably why she puts up with my being the world’s worst correspondent.

The last of these friendships I suspected was lost but confirmation came of course during the last week, now known as “week from hell” for various family reasons that aren’t mine to tell.  I suspected so because this person had intimated as much, but not WHY.  We found out why last week.

Yep, it’s the old “you don’t care about us.  You never make time for us, and this project I’m interested in helping with you keep putting off.”

With the exception of the project (more on that later) I got this in the last friendship I lost.  (The other two were political, yes, even the one at 18.)

The last straw in that one was when my friend called me in the middle of the day, three days in a row and “just want to talk.  We haven’t seen you in so long.”

This was 2003, the summer of paying two mortgages, finishing the house we’d moved out of to sell, and no one (NO ONE) touching my stuff.  I was hanging on and making mortgage on SHORT STORIES by the skin of my teeth.  (Bless the late Marty Greenberg of the old Tekno.  If you told him you were in trouble, he’d put your name up on the list of people to call when there were holes in anthologies.  At that time I was on call and could get “we need 10k word story on fairies in three hours.  Can you do it?”  and hell, somehow I did it.

At the same time, I had a new agent, and she wanted to submit my stuff, but we needed a blitz if I was ever going to work again.  Yep. That was the year of the 17 proposals and two ghost written novels.

The third time my friend called, I pointed out it was my working time, and I REALLY couldn’t talk.  (Back then my working time was when my kids were in school.)
I got hit with a tirade, half of it tearful, about how I was too greedy and I was trying to “roar everyone off the field with my sheer volume” and I didn’t care for anyone or anything but writing.  And she could see she and her spouse had never mattered to us, and I had no decent feelings for anyone.  It was all about my career and my ambition.

Keep in mind, at the time I was very nearly completely broke and she knew, or should have known that.  But that image of the “rich writer” is so powerful, that in her head, the only reason I could want to work that hard is because I wanted more millions to roll in.  Or something.

In this later case it was complicated by our friend coming over, for a scheduled thing, in February, also known as death-month.  Neither Dan nor I had our heads on straight, and we must have come across as imbeciles.  But if you think of writing as really high status and suspect people are looking down at you, then, oh, yeah, you’ll think we’re being snooty or something.

Then there was the side order of “this project I’m really interested in, you keep putting off.”

Which is when I sigh.  I’m really interested in the project too.  If it’s the one I think it is.  And at least three of my fans email me about it weekly.  But you know…

I’m a midlist writer.  Yes, I know, this mean I work for myself and I’m free as the birds.

No, no, really.  It’s okay, it only hurts when I laugh.  And I ain’t laughing.

I’m grateful for the collaborations this year.  REALLY grateful.  These guys are my friends and in two cases I’m a fan of their world (in the other it’s a new world.)  One of the paths up for people like me appear when bestsellers share their worlds and their fans.

I’m not a natural collaborator.  Hell, I’m not a natural series writer.  I get really nervous I’ll forget details or mangle them.  So, I’m doing the work, but it’s slower than it would be without the fear of f*cking it up (particularly for series I like.)  But yeah, those collaborations come first, because people count on me.  And you don’t disappoint your friends, much less friends who are extending you a hand to climb up.

After that come the series continuations, which means another three books I’m hoping to do for Baen this year, and three for the indie side.  Yeah.  Because, you know, I not only owe it to my fans (and I do.  You’ve been extraordinarily patient through my years of illness and moving.  And yes, I’m mailing loot out.  That too has been back burnered, partly because I still have unpacked only HALF the office, because well… 5 moves in two years.  Some stuff I can’t find at all and might have to re-order, like t-shirts and mugs.) I owe it to the house.  Baen is re-issuing DST, so I owe them a “future history” post-scriptum, to distinguish the edition, but the investment calls for my also giving the series continuation asap.  Hell, the series has suffered from long hiatuses.  If it’s ever going to recover I need to hit it hard.

There are books I want to write, practically climbing their way out of my head, but you know… this is my day job too.  And there are considerations beyond “what I really find oh so exciting.”  EVEN when you have friends who’ve done research for you and are waiting.  Because you’re a midlister.  You can’t just say “Yo, publishing house, there are these books you’re waiting for, but I want to write THIS instead.”

I probably actually shouldn’t have been surprised — and I actually wasn’t, because as I said, there’d be allegations and intimations — because under those lost friendships (only they weren’t really friends, more like friendly acquaintances) we could add a fifth: a couple Dan and introduced.  She was my college friend.  He was Dan’s college friend.  We introduced them and they got married before us.

They happened, pure happenstance, to be at our wedding.  But they were never exactly friends, because they wouldn’t stay in touch.  We called when we were near.  We spent years trying to call and didn’t have their number.  That kind of thing.

After one of those hiatuses, when Dan was working on assignment near DC (they live near there) we called.  My first book had just come out (and sank without a ripple) and I knew my career was in serious trouble.  No, this matters for the story.  We called, because we had a day in the area and thought we’d visit.  They weren’t close friends, but they were college friends.  We thought we’d talk.

Turns out the girl worked at the time in an airport bookstore and had seen my book.  When we called we got screamed at and told we were looking down on them, because she worked in retail, and I was a rich-and-famous writer (given the area they lived and worked in, she probably made as much in a month as I did from that book) and they knew we didn’t care about them, and get lost.  Then we got hung up on.

That one didn’t hurt much, though it still sort of did in a hurt-and-perplexed sort of way, because other than the college connection, we didn’t have much linkage to these people.  But it should have impressed me as a warning of things to come, instead of leaving me staring at the phone in a hotel room, wondering if the world had gone crazy.

The other two… the other two hurt like hell, and the last is still hurting like hell.  This too shall pass.  And it would probably not have hit as hard except for the Murphy week for this family.

If you’re friends with a writer, cut them some slack.  No, they really aren’t horrible human beings (well, some of them might be, but most probably not.)  Yes, we forget lunch dates.  Yes, we spend months not calling.  Doesn’t mean we don’t think of you.  Yes, you might live three blocks away and we never see you.  At least with writer friends, you often (though not always) see each other at local cons.  KJA and I average twice a year for face to face meetings, and we usually have to make an effort.  He lives… 45? minutes away.

But in the end he was right.  Only other writers fully understand the crazy business we’re in.  Only other writers get that we don’t think we’re massively important because we write stuff.  Holy hell, people, we get paid about as much as a secretary.  And that’s the ones who are LUCKY enough.  And there’s a reason I used to cry when I heard Billy Joel’s “running on ice”.  I no longer remember who said that far from being a series of plaudits and triumphs a writing career more resembles a series of kicks to the teeth.  (It might have been Jerry Pournelle.)  Whoever it was, he was right.  I could tell you of the year I wrote six books and NOT ONE made it to the shelves in ANY bookstore.  (And yes, of course that WAS my fault, duh.)

If a writer even TRIES to keep up a semblance of contact, you’re probably massively important to them.  Yes, I know, we’re incredible pains in the ass and more so as friends, but don’t attribute to malice what can more easily be explained by a crazy making career.  Don’t count on us, but don’t count us out either.  Because more kicks in the teeth, we don’t need.

And meanwhile…

And meanwhile, I have a future history to finish.  I’m late on the collaboration with Larry and I HAVE to send him chapters today (and again on Wednesday.) Week from hell with side-order of sprained ankle as mom would say “emburked” everything.  (Always wondered if that came from Burke and Hare.) And I’m hoping the week from hell is past, and I can get some work done and catch up on what was lost to Drama!

I’m grateful for indie, which makes my relationship with my publisher WAY more relaxed, but I still owe them a modicum of professionalism (we owe it even before we are professionals, which is weird) and reliability.  Not much of which has been in evidence the last five years.  And for that I’m sorry, and I’ll seek to improve.

There’s books to write and places to be, and no time to mourn for lost friendships.  And this too shall pass.  It only hurts when I laugh.

And I ain’t laughing.

 

 

 

 

 

Another Tiny Promo By Freerange Oyster (Write more, guys)

Stephanie Osborn

A Very UnCONventional Christmas

Division One

It’s Christmas in NYC, but for Alpha Line it’s anything but a Silent Night: The Agency has a mole, leaking classified information to toy manufacturers and film producers alike, and the Agents are in danger of losing their anonymity. To complicate matters, the Prime Minister of Lambda Andromedae III, complete with entourage, has arrived to negotiate a new trade agreement with Earth. Worse, the more paranoid Division One field agents look at Omega’s recent history with the Agency and suspect they have identified the mole!

<p.Simultaneously, the discovery of a grim countdown in the most incongruous place possible – the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center – augers the threat of horrific events on Christmas Eve itself.

Meanwhile, Omega is struggling to adjust to her very first Christmas in the Agency, made more difficult by the exposure of parts of her past long hidden from her conscious mind.

Will Omega be able to refute the accusations, or be punished for crimes she did not commit? Will the internal conspiracy expose the Agency? Or will efforts to thwart it see Echo – and Fox – caught up in the accusations as well? What is the meaning of the countdown to Christmas Eve?

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: wonderful.