Category: Uncategorized

It never fails.  Someone gets in a discussion (yes, on Facebook. Where else? It’s where the fossilized stupidity of ages past has come to die and decay, forming a substratum not unlike oil, but far less useful.  Well, unless you’re a blogger in need of post ideas.) about some of the latest misdeeds of the press, like say CNN’s bizarre pivot from all Russia all the Time to threatening posters for funny memes (Yes, of course I can barely resist the GIF posts when I see that.  Unfortunately they take more time than writing.) and someone comes on and laments the days when the media was “objective.”

This is when I’d dent my desk with my head, except I have one of those standing desks that’s made of plastic which pops right back up.  Good thing too.

I too would love the mythical times when kings were just, ordained by G-d and pulled the sword from the stone.  They are as real as the days of “honest” media.

Look, take it from someone who went through journalistic training.  EVERY good journalist (a minority as in all other professions) TRIES to be unbiased.  This is relatively (but only relatively) easy when writing about the incident on first and main where a dog bit a man.  It is far less convenient/easy when writing about a politician who embezzled something.  And since politics touches everything these days, the result of the media’s obsession with makign the personal political, it’s becoming impossible to report ANYTHING objectively, including the dog/man incident.  I mean, do you want to get mobbed by PETA? What about people who love leash laws/  What about the lobby to eliminate pit bulls?

Having training in journalism, and friends in the profession, I can tell you those “great” long ago times when all newspapers spoke with a unified voice, the narrative made sense and “everyone agreed” on what was sane and sensible, were anything but bipartisan, or impartial.

What they were was UNIFIED and totalitarian, in the sense that your entire media experience came from a very small number of people, who mutually vetted each other, and who had all been educated in the same colleges and believed the same things.

Two of the things most of them believed was that the purpose of journalism was to improve the world (not just to report news) by leading people in the direction of justice and peace, and all that good stuff that progressivism promised (but never delivers.)

In the days where to reach an audience you needed a newspaper gig, to step out of that line got you labelled a bad person or a right wing extremist with the same fervor that a gonzo group of women, men, all colors and shapes, and very definitely libertarian, if anything got labeled nazis, white supremacists and sexist and homophobic by the national press, when they dared question the holy science fiction zeitgeist.

So no one did.

I will not go into the several media misdeeds from that time of “unified” opinion.  Ask any veteran about the Tet Offensive and the Vietnam betrayal by the media.

I’m simply going to say, like Heinlein did, at about my age, that I’ve never seen any event I was witness to reported with ANY degree of accuracy.  In fact, often they are completely and insanely wrong.  But the report fits the left wing “narrative” in which they are good and moral so there’s that.

Prior to the industrial era, and the unification of newspapers and the distribution of some of those throughout the nation, shaping the opinion of all the smaller wanna bes, media was gloriously, loudly, obviously biased.

Stands to reason. Being humans we can’t hope for “no bias.”  No, listen to me, it’s impossible.  My husband and I are as close as two human beings can be, and have been married for over 30 years.  Yet if we both witness something and describe it, our different backgrounds and natures come to the fore.

So pre-mass-communications, each newspaper had its slant.  And readers could choose to read in their comfort zone or out of it.

In the end, though, they knew what slant the paper had, which is the next best thing to the impossible “unbiased.”  You can then discount the slant if you wish.

The new media is taking us there again, and it’s a beautiful thing.  It means that dissident voices can be heard again, and those in positions of power have to be afraid of public opinion, even if they are anointed “progressives.”  It’s the only thing that keeps the progressives in check.

Stop lamenting the days of “objective” news reporting.  There was never any such thing.  There was “unified” news reporting, which is almost for sure a give away that someone is playing with it.  There is no such thing as an unbiased human being.  There never was, there never will be.

Revel in the multitude of voices and perspectives.  It means you’re more likely to be able to find out the truth.

 

You know what?  I’m sick and tired of whining brats.

And if you’re looking at me, just now and wondering what I’m talking about since the sons are 26 and 22, you haven’t been reading newspapers, or even doing an unprotected turn of Facebook, beyond the confines of the friends you trust not to be completely insane.  Because it’s a crying, whining, feet kicking fest out there.

The proximate cause of their insanity is obvious: their chosen candidate didn’t win.  Not that they knew much about the candidate, mind you.  But they were told that she was wonderful and would bring ice cream, and give them everything they wanted.  So, like all children who have been denied candy, they’re metaphorically speaking on the floor, kicking arms and feet and holding their breath.

How is this different from what we did when Obama won?  Oh, it’s markedly different.  The thought process and attitude is different.  We knew what was in Obama’s head — the crazy Gramscian cant taught in all the best schools — the strange idea that by bringing down America the world would prosper.  And we’ve been proven more than right to be afraid of what he would do, if you look at the dog’s breakfast he’s made of international politics, of the economy and of culture in general.  We were afraid of what he’d do, and we prepared in our way to take the impact.  Many of us retrenched and retrenched and retrenched again, in our financial and professional lives and therefore suffered less than could be expected if we hadn’t.  Others for the first time in their lives took to the streets, in what the tea party used to be: a movement of the taxed-enough-already.

Note that there was no property destruction, no shooting of representatives, no long-sustained, breath-held screaming from all quarters, and certainly no sanctimonious signs in front of our houses saying we’d joined the “resistance.”  We had, honestly, but we’d done so long ago, most of us before Clinton even.  We’d seen through the veneer of compassion of the left to the chasm of crazy beneath, and we’d realized what they aimed at was nothing less than the destruction of western civilization.

It’s not what they think they’re doing.  Like deluded missionaries for a doomsday cult, they think they’re fighting for paradise.  Of which more later, and which is why you should pity them.  But it is what they’re doing: biting the hand that feeds them, pulling up the planks from under their own feet, generally making it impossible for the prosperity they were born to to exist.  And in the process taking us down too.  So we’ve been resisting.  For a long time we resisted inside our own heads, then we resisted in our friends’ group, in our tiny blogs, in our news reading and oh, very much in our voting.

What we didn’t do is put up big signs in our yards and throwing noisy fits.  Why not?  Because we’re not spoiled children.  If we screamed, cried and held our breath, we’d just get pulled along by our arms.

The entire society is a machine for patting the back of “progressives” and tell them how great they are.

It was organized that way by those in power: progressives.

It’s not what they MEANT to do.  Or at least not what their ancestors meant to do.  Back in the early twentieth century, when “scientific” everything was shiny and chrome, they were “scientific” governance.  All that bs about semantics, and psychology as a hard science you find in early Heinlein books?  Yep, that was loose in society at large.  We were going to deconstruct the “machines” that were humans, and from that organize society so “scientifically” it would be a paradise.

You still find that a lot in really early science fiction, together with the righteous indignation of “smart” people who knew they were right and couldn’t understand why people weren’t listening to Marx, a smart person, who was “obviously” right.

Of course, the reason they weren’t listening to him was that the little angry ink blot, stewing in his own juices in the library, had no clue what he was talking about.  The injustices that outraged them were already naturally mitigating, by the time he was writing about them.  He didn’t know distribution from a hole in his elbow, so his economic system would always end up delivering a million baby shoes for the left foot only, and his idea that without indoctrination people would naturally have free-love and no families was one of those ideas so stupid you have to be massively smart (and taught to ignore reality) to come up with.

So the bright men and women who embraced Marxism for all things, particularly as a cure-all to the “greed” and “hatred” that had led to world war one were destined to be disappointed.  The working class they counted on to destroy the system were by and large sane people, with their heads on tight.  They knew that, harsh as the industrial revolution jobs were, they were better than looking at the South end of a Northbound mule or the other “earthy” jobs available back on the farm.  And they knew that things were getting better, already.  And they had ambitions, which didn’t involve giving jumped up intellectuals the right to dictate their lives.

So the left turned to deconstructing the society they lived in in terms of “oppressed classes” and pointing out that we weren’t perfect.  For a while, they had their pattern of perfection, the Soviet Union.  Those of us who took the trouble knew how bad things were in all the communist countries (guys, seriously, healthy countries build walls to keep interlopers out (even if those can be ineffective when it’s an armed invasion) they don’t build walls to keep their citizens IN.  They don’t shoot people trying to escape.  There is a name for that yes.  The name is “prison.”)  Then it fell and revealed itself for what it had always been, a cesspool of misery and oppression.

Which brings us to why you should pity the left (even while refusing to give in to them)

Why?  Because where they’ve gone since then, makes it perfectly clear who they are.  The current left is not the defender of the working man.  Hell, they’re not even the defender of those they claim to defend: women, minorities, etc.

What they really are are the spoiled brats all of us know from kindergarten.

You know the ones as well as I do.  They’re the ones who, when told they can’t have the third cookie, when all other kids were given one, tell you how you oppressed little Timmy last week by not giving him a cookie (even though Timmy’s mother as him marked down as gluten intolerant) and how you don’t show pretty pictures to Heather (who is blind) and how you don’t speak Serbian with the twins who are just arrived from Serbia and so aren’t fair to them.  The brat is going to hold his/her breath and/or scream until you correct all these injustices.

Half the time, given the brat being loud enough, other kids, intimidated by them, or thinking that it’s logical that you should be all things to all people, will back the brat up.  Faced with rebellion, the kindergarten teacher who is not paid enough for this, and just wants to get on with teaching the colors, will give the brat another cookie.  And then the brat will shut up, because that’s what he/she really wants. And then more kids will side with the brat, because they want extra cookies.

That is the left in a nutshell.  They are spoiled brats, eternally hiding behind their causes, when all they really want is more power and control, and even though it’s been proven that when they’re given any power, their causes (and everyone) lose.  Which tracks with the metaphor.  How many of us knew those brats growing up?  How many have gone on to be happy, fulfilled human beings, without some great bit come-to-Jesus moment?

I can’t think of any, honestly.

Which is why we must be the left’s come-to-Jesus moment.  We need to confront their nonsense and their hypocrisy.  We need to return their insults at their level “we know you are, but what are we” should be about right, since these are the privileged accusing us of privilege, the tyrants accusing us of wanting to put them in camps, the straight-up nazis calling themselves anti-fascist.

The one thing the spoiled brats need is “No.”  Say it often enough and loud enough, and they might eventually realize their tactics aren’t working.

And if they call you privileged tell them they’re right: Damn right you’re privileged.  You’re privileged to have had to dig behind the barrage of lies of the mass-industrial-communications-complex for the truth; you’re privileged to have had to work twice as hard, because the teachers to whom you didn’t virtue-signal in the left way never gave you a pass, you’re privilege to be shut out of a bunch of careers in fields dominated by the left, you’re privileged to be held guilty for things that happened before you were even a glimmer in your great-grandfather’s eye.

You’re privileged because all of this broke you out of the futile counting of “victimhood points” as it’s taught in schools today, and forced you to learn real things, work at being smarter, and faster and more resilient.  You’re privileged because you live in a time when you can use the internet and know for a fact you’re not alone.  You’re privileged because your thought isn’t cluttered with a bunch of nonsense put there by highly paid spoiled brats.

Most of all you’re privileged because you can work and create and all the spoiled brats can do is take over an institution or an industry, gut it, then wear the skin demanding respect.

You’re privileged because if we ignore the screaming brats and just go around working and building and being happy (man, they really CAN’T stand THAT) they have no power over us.

In the end, we win, they lose.  And that’s why we’re privileged.  The poor spoiled darlings never had the privilege of being told no and don’t know how to take being laughed at or even being argued with.  They need safe rooms, and for everyone to avoid the trigger words, and stop making them cry.  Because they’re not prepared to cry.  They were never told no.  And if they hold their breath and stomp their feet and come up with JUST THE RIGHT WORDS, we’ll give them what they want, won’t we?  It’s always happened before.

Pity the poor darlings.  They are only that which passes.

 

 

Yesterday I was talking to one of my younger mentees about a reading list I intend to drop on her.  She was half joking when she asked if I also could give her some time.

Look, I get it.  She has a full time job and is trying to break into writing.  In fact, part of the reason for my interest in her is that of everyone I’ve taught ever she’s putting out more work in less time than… well, than anyone but me.  And only me when I’m not fighting illness or depression.

I get completely how tired you can get.

Weirdly, I was also talking to a successful peer yesterday.  He’s just slightly older than I, and he was talking about how every year he gets busier and has less energy.

In my experience, this has been my story, too.  If I could have the work I have today, with the energy of my twenties, I’d be fine.  Unfortunately life doesn’t work that way.  And adults buckle up and do what they must (which neither my mentee nor my friend were arguing against, btw.)

However, I think a lot of this is embedded in the current ethos of “that’s not fair.”

Look, like has never been fair.  EVER.  Granted, for some and at some times, it’s more unfair than others. Right now, a lot of people are working more than they should have to, partly because of the socialist illusions that have controlled government for over 100 years (yes, even when Republicans are in power.)

Expensive government means it sucks the vitality out of the economy, makes it harder for the young to start careers (and demands they have more and more expensive and often useless education) and makes it harder to retire with any semblance of comfort.  So my older friends are still all working: often working like crazy at five or six jobs, because ageism means they aren’t easy hires particularly in tech fields.  And my younger friends are struggling to break in, and be paid, well… anything, since particularly in the “liberal” industries interns are supposed to work for nothing, even as their bosses agitate for a higher minimum wage.

None of this is fair.  It really isn’t.  Earlier generations had it easier.  Yes, sure, most of mine went through the hell of rotating temp jobs before we found our path, but at least it wasn’t being unemployed and held out.

… but life isn’t fair.  As long as you understand this, you’ll be all right.

Our monkey brains have this illusion of “fair” and that things should be evenly distributed or whatever.  It comes from this being a good way to keep a simian band happy and fed.

But society and life in general aren’t a simian band.

And some people will always have it harder.  That’s okay.  With great hardship comes great opportunity.

One of the disheartening things when I visited Porto last year was the “arts and crafts.”  Look, the city has gone touristic, and makes good money, good for it.  The fact it obliterated the places I liked is neither here nor there.  The city owes me nothing.

The disheartening thing is that tourist shop after tourist shop sold practically the same things (which a high ration of pseudo-folk penis and vaginas in various uses.  Probably because they sell well to Germans, in chess sets, and folk scenes, all of it done in lumpy clay, of course.)

The reason this was disheartening is that I remember the seventies.  Most people in my brother’s generation left school with degrees and there simply were NO jobs.  So many if not most of them took up doing something.  Most of them were UNLICENSED vendors on the street (it was a treat watching them pick up stakes as the police approached.)  Their sales were unlicensed, and unsanctioned.  But the thing is walking down the streets where they clustered, there was an immense variety of arts and crafts, most of them looking REALLY polished, (not lumpy clay) and really creative.

One of my brother’s friends made (unlicensed, natch) drawings of Disney characters, and wrote little motivational things at the bottom, for people’s birthdays and stuff.  He was always backed up on orders.  Another painted scenes in glass, from little ones used as desk ornaments, to wall or window ones.  Sold on the streets.  Others did everything from painted rocks (many, many in the beach, and I wish I’d then known the trick of painting them to look like animals.  Could have cleaned up.  Sleeping dragons or something.)  Others made hanging figures in balsa wood.  Picture frames (I still have some) in leather and wood. Stuffed animals (I might yet revive my business in lucky frogs ;)), jackets.  Jewelry, from the conventional beads, to this guy who made earrings of tiny flowers embedded in resin drops. You name it, they did it, and the inventiveness was amazing.

Now, none of these people were in art school.  Most of them were engineers of some stripe.  Were they making crazy money from these odd jobs?  Well, no.  Particularly because the city wasn’t particularly touristic back then.  But many were making car/gas/apartment money, as opposed to staying in mom and dad’s house, in eternal childhood.

And the products were good and filled a niche.  Of course they were also untaxed, for obvious reasons.  And of course it wasn’t an ideal situation.

But it was very much making lemonade out of lemons.

In 2008 I remember Jerry Pournelle writing an article that said something like: if you’re unemployed and can’t find work, DO SOMETHING.  Find something you can make and sell or do and get paid for.  Find a niche and fill it.  And if you can’t find that, then clean.  Make things really clean.  Because when you find a job/get to work, you won’t have time to clean like that.

He was right, you know?

If you let go of the idea that life is fair, or should take a prescribed course, or that your degree “entitles” you to this or that, or that government should take care of you, you can accomplish great things.

As you let go of the “expected” your eyes open to “possibilities.”  This might be a great main chance, or “Multiple, tiny streams of income.” (Lucky frogs!)

But whatever you do, brace yourself.  The way things are right now, we both have to pay for the illusions of the past, and to build on the quicksand of fast changing tech.

Yes, our generations (the one before me, mine, the one after me) might have it harder than most because we, by definition, life in interesting times.

Did someone promise you a rose garden?  Well, they were lying.

It’s going to take sweat, tears and toil to right this ship and maybe make it easier for our grandkids.  Particularly toil.

Open your eyes.  Then roll up your sleeves.

No one said it would be easy.

Build under, build over, build around.

Get started the sooner you can.  You’ll have more energy.  And the work will only get heavier with time.

But, hey, you’ll never be bored.

Now go to it.

The Oyster Returns to Promo Town

G. Scott Huggins

A Doctor to Dragons

Everyone says it was better in the Good Old Days. Before the Dark Lord covered the land in His Second Darkness.

As far as I can tell, it wasn’t that much better. Even then, everyone cheered the heroes who rode unicorns into combat against dragons, but no one ever remembered who treated the unicorns’ phosphine burns afterward. Of course, that was when dragons were something to be killed. Today I have to save one. Know what fewmets are? No? Then make a sacrifice of thanks right now to whatever gods you worship, because today I have to figure a way to get them flowing back out of the Dark Lord’s favorite dragon. Yeah, from the other end. And that’s just my most illustrious client. I’ve got orcs and trolls who might eat me and dark elf barons who might sue me if their bloodhawks and chimeras don’t pull through. And that doesn’t even consider the possibility that the old bag with the basilisk might show up.

Mary Catelli

Through A Mirror, Darkly

What lies behind a reflection?

Powers have filled the world with both heroes and villains. Helen, despite her own powers, had acquired the name Sanddollar but stayed out of the fights.

When the enigmatic chess masters create a mirrored world reflecting her own home and the world about it, it’s not so easy to escape. All the more in that the people of that world are a dark reflection of all those she knows.

RD Meyer

Akeldama

Seth Gendrickson has worked for the Catholic Church’s Order of Mount Sion since his initial encounter with a vampire during seminary years ago. Finally working his way up to the rank of Hunter, Seth’s first assignment is to investigate a spike in vampire activity in Kansas, an area previously quiet. The region between the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi River had been a kind of neutral zone for the two main factions – The Assembly of Cairo and Los Muertos. The Assembly hails from Europe, and although few in numbers, is the older of the sects and far more powerful. Los Muertos saw opportunity in the New World, so they established themselves in the Americas and began to multiply. They are young, aggressive, and passionate.

And they’re moving east.

Seth is under orders to figure out what’s going on before an all out vampire civil war brings knowledge of such supernatural creatures into the open and causes societal panic, a situation the Church is keen to avoid. During his mission, Seth captures one of the enemy and interrogates it, but he soon finds that the movement east is less an invasion than it is an influx of refugees fleeing a greater threat. Something is hunting the vampires out west, something more terrifying than the risk of conflict. Seth tracks this threat from California to Japan and across Europe to discover the heart of a conspiracy that stretches back 2,000 years and threatens the future of the world.

Anthology

The Fantastic Flying Saucer Stories

Lights in the sky. Strange visitors. Clashes between the FBI and a mysterious group of men clad in black.
For as far back as history goes, there has been one unanswered question that just won’t seem to go away: What are those unidentifiable flying objects in the sky? And furthermore, who are they?

With stories spanning the past, present and future, this anthology focuses on this question that has made Science-Fiction great for the better part of a century. Enclosed in this book are stories of survival, as children under the care of a church group rebel against authorities in hopes of reuniting with their family, as well as tales of friendship, as a hunting instructor finds his strange visitors to be not quite so fearsome as the town thinks they might be. Tales of simple curiosity are found here too, as a young couple set up recording equipment in hopes of finding answers, and learn that just maybe this abduction business isn’t for everyone.

Jon M. Jefferson

The Black Medallion

In an age of steam, the world is divided by the power of aether and the shapers who can pull power from crystals. Little magics define the course of lives for those who can use them and those who can not.

Tisdan Thinkledor, a thief from lowtown has never thought of the politics or games played by those in power. His days have been planned from the next purse he can cut to the next mark to be tagged. A life led from station to station along the path of the trains that connect the lives within the city.

Sometimes, it is the little things that change the world around you. A matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, can change the future.

Henry Vogel

The Recognition Run

Recognition Book 1

Jeanine is on the run from someone very powerful. She doesn’t know who wants her dead, or why. She only knows they have already killed her family, and if they catch her, she’s next.

Drake’s family was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Now, he drifts from spaceport to spaceport, searching for cargo and running from the grief he can never escape. When Jeanine barrels into Drake’s life, he must push aside his grief and run with her.

But time is not their ally. When they cannot run from their enemies, Jeanine’s and Drake’s only hope is to run toward those enemies. Their only hope is to make The Recognition Run.

 

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: rotten

I should be writing a real post, I should, but I’m still in the con crud preventing portion of our program.  So far so good, but I think it requires a lot of laid-back rest or at least not fretting right after an exhausting con.

And I’ve only been able to do that a little, seeing as I’m working on Guardian (as fast as I can.  No, you can’t see it yet.) and finishing 4th Dyce, and writing for PJmedia (just corralled the rest of the ideas for this month at breakfast.  Unless something massively important happens in the news in the next few weeks, I have a few topics.  Often, after writing blog and fiction, I just find myself empty of topics for PJM.  This is a way to stop it happening.)   We also celebrated older son’s birthday.  (Really? That old? I’m officially scared.)

So right now I’m taking it easy.  This afternoon I’ll be getting together with local Huns at Pete’s Kitchen in Denver.  If you can’t find out when from tom tom de Hun, and want to attend, ping me or email me. For those of you who insist on reading everything I write for other sites, I had a new article out this week:

Being A Usaian

It is a bit of a pain in the behind to have to mollycoddle myself, but I’ve learned to make compromises with the crazy body that is trying to kill me.  So I will take it easy, have a second cup of coffee, do a bit more on Guardian, maybe do some painting, before going off to dinner.  Yes, seeing people is stressful and tiring and I’m still peopled out from Liberty con.  No, I won’t avoid it when it comes to meeting you guys.  Yes, this is a monthly event but USUALLY the first Saturday.  Not this week, only because we were at Liberty con first Saturday.  We’ll probably cancel September altogether for similar reasons, but the rest of the months we’ll try to make it.  Hey, I get three weekends to hide in the cave and recoup, I can have a weekend with you guys.

Coming to terms with being an introvert — something I lied to myself about for years (because I’m not as introverted as my brother —  makes it easier both to engage in human contact and to understand I need a break afterwards.

Things I need to do — I badly need an assistant — and which might or might not happen in the next week: I need to do another Grant chapter.  I’ll try for tonight, but really NO promises.  I need to do a free short story for here.  I’m totally open to suggestions.  What world do you want this one in?  I need to put some push-work behind Dyce book 4.  I need to get Guardian to 50k words (rough draft.  Larry is doing the next draft.)  I’m sure there are about a million — Oh, yeah, mailing things out.  No, I didn’t forget you guys waiting for books, t-shirts etc.  It’s just the house isn’t completely unpacked, so things get moved looking for other things, and I don’t know where some things are I need to mail (clear as mud?)

No, reminding me is not a bad thing, and I’ll really try to get it done this week.

Other things I need to do: lay down flooring on the house, but I don’t see how to start that before tomorrow.

Oh, and btw (yes, this is totally scattered.  I told you the writer is in a state.)  On that article on PJMedia, someone pinged me saying that Usaians sound like Jews.  There are commonalities, sure.  But there are significant differences, too. However, in terms of prosecution and distrust, sure.  They are.  Maybe more so, as they’re outright outlawed pretty much everywhere by the time of the Darkship Books.   And yet — coff — they persist.

As should we all, even when making allowances for the body.

Back soon with more interesting stuff.

Sometimes I tell people I’m not an author.  I work for a living.  It might seem I’m making a joke, but I’m not.  The word author evokes for me the halls of academia, the rewards of spouting the party line, the preening and showing off of the latest intellectual fashions.  Intellectual fashions are like clothing fashions.  Some of them might suit you very well and look great on you, but you can bet most of them will look pretty awful to people in fifty years.  And yet wearing them marks you as part of the in crowd.

When you say “the author” you conjure images of someone sitting at his desk, noble brow furrowed in the act of creation.  This is someone who produces maybe a book every two or three years and cares more for the opinions of reviewers and award-givers than for how much money he makes.

You see, he doesn’t WRITE for a living.  The real reward of his writing is tenure, or a raise, or simply an increase of his status among other academics his peers.

Meanwhile writers, workaday writers are the people these “academics” sneer at.  Even those of us who are bestsellers are never really accepted by the intellectual community.  And that’s fine, because what would they do with us, or us with them?

Despite the recent invasion of science fiction by “authors” who care more about their academic standing than whether their books entertain anyone, most of the academic establishment still looks down on all writers of genre.  I’ve stopped more than once in the middle of an how-to book (the latest being a book on writing immediate fiction) because the author says if you’re one of those people writing science fiction and fantasy, or romance, or mystery, you shouldn’t be reading his book.  Your readers will read anything.  You don’t need craft.

He was wrong.  He was also a shining example of the “academic authors” who can insult their audience because their REAL audience are academics and other authors.

He was wrong, because — and I can’t find the exact quote from Heinlein — a writer, one who works for a living, has to compete for the reader’s beer money.  This changes how the writer writes and what he chooses to do, and it — I think — increases the odds that he will be read many centuries into the future and (ironically) considered a gem of literature.  Like, say, Shakespeare, who worked for the greasy pennies of London apprentices.

Somewhere, Heinlein said something about his reasons for writing.  I can’t find the d*mn quote to save my life, but when one of you does, I’ll insert it here.

It was something about first writing to feed his family, which necessitated his writing to entertain.  A distant third (or more, because there might be things I forgot) was to write to make you think.  If he failed at that, he was still being entertaining and feeding his family.

It is amusing — well, to me, but I have a dark sense of humor — that trying to seek out that quote I came across various people telling how they wrote to improve the world and — the laugh out loud moment — an essay entitled “so you want to be a college professor.”

Why this is relevant today, besides the fact that it is Heinlein’s day (Happy birthday sir, wherever you are): Yesterday on facebook, on the page of a very popular author, someone took offense to Larry being in an anthology (not me, though, d*mn it.  I must strive to be more offensive) because he wants to push all women and non whites out of science fiction.  The laughable and unsubstantiated declaration, (at war with reality, again) devolved into someone telling us how we “need” “representation” in genre fiction, because minorities are reviled and put down every day, and they need to be represented.

She is right, you know? Minorities are reviled and put down every day.  Just not the way she thinks.  What I mean is, how much more reviled and put down can you be than being told that you can’t have individual opinions, and that you must forever be a representation of the “othered” and reviled minority?  That everything you write, everything you think, your very existence are nothing more than a waving of the bloody shirt by some Marxist academic, who knows more than you do about being Latin, or black, or even a woman, the CORRECT way?

Sounds pretty reviled and oppressed to me.  In fact everyone who thinks the only “authentic” writing I can do has to do with my being reviled and oppressed is a stone-cold racist.  So is everyone who thinks you can only write what you are.

This denies the very purpose of story telling which it to allow you to be and live what you can’t be or live: to break you out of your confines and show you humanity at large.

After all, some of Shakespeare’s best characters are women.  They’ve spoken to women throughout the ages.  And if you think Shakespeare was really a woman, we’re going to have words, and you will not enjoy this.  I am not your professor.  Shakespeare wrote immortal men too.  And you will eventually grow past the pap they fed you in school.

But if you are a college professor, who is an “author” because publish or perish, there is an advantage to being conspicuous in portraying “the other”.  Correctly, of course.  Which has convinced a lot of well meaning and not particularly bright trend-followers that this is a rule of writing fiction, even — the good Lord help us — genre fiction.

Hence all the magazines and publishers, which compete with each other to “give a voice to the voiceless” thereby leading sane people to wonder how they can be voiceless when everyone gives them a megaphone.

There is nothing wrong with being “an author” or with sporting political correctness as a sort of fashion to show how good and important and “smart” you are.  I mean, it’s probably less trouble than the incredibly complex coiffures of French ladies before the revolution.  Less likely to grow physical lice at any rate.

Pretty bad for intellectual parasites, though, who carry with them the idea that writing is a sort of holy pulpit, from which you can preach to the masses who will, of course, listen in rapt attention to what you have to say, since you’re so self-obviously smart.

They won’t you know.  Or as many memes proclaim “Do you want a populist revolution? Because that’s how you get a populist revolution.”

People who work for a living will roll their eyes at your intellectual coiffures, even the six feet tall ones with the battle ship in it.  If you’re lucky, they’ll ignore you.  If you’re unlucky, that’s when madame guillotine gets fed.  Because at the end of the day, people outside your bubble know to believe their lying eyes, not what you tell them.

Which is why I’m glad I learned from Heinlein, and that he was a working man.  He grew up in unimaginable poverty.  If I grew up poor as Job, he grew up poor as Adam after the angel with the sword kicked him from the garden.  We didn’t at least ever have to fight over pillows.  Cloth was not that expensive, and we had a kapok tree in the backyard (never understood why we didn’t make pillows out of feathers, but the Kapok fruit gave us filling enough.)

But both of us come from a background of “root, hog or die.”  And I instinctively understood his command to “first feed your family.”  That means writing entertaining things.  If, after that you want to write to expound your pet theories or make people think, that’s fine.  BUT your job and your craft is all devoted to entertaining FIRST.  Because no one gave you a pulpit from which to preach to the benighted masses.  A writer earns his living and his readers one by one, beer pack money after beer pack money.

A writer writes for a living.

Keep in mind that still keeping with his mandate, Heinlein managed to counter a lot of the ideological fog of his days, and speak real truth to real power.  His inclusion of then “reviled and oppressed” (for real) minorities, like Irish, Italians and Jews and his insistence that they could be real Americans earned him problems with his publishing houses.

But he still managed to publish those books, and to carry his message, because he was FIRST OF ALL entertaining, and he sold well enough for people to allow him his oddities.  If you sell well enough FIRST people will allow you unpopular or even what they think at first are crazy notions.  And you’ll have a chance to influence them over the long run.

That is all predicated on earning their attention first, though, not in singing in the choir of their “betters” and therefore claiming authority over them.

There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.  Not for those of us who work in the vines of words and story.

Happy Heinlein Day.

 

What I did on my Summer Vacation: Or Historical Research for Fantasy Stuff – Alma Boykin

So, by now everyone knows I’m back in-country from three weeks in Germany, more or less. Part of what I was doing over there was research for a book and a short story that may well become a novella or book if I’m not careful, and for some long-term non-fiction projects. The primary research target is a fantasy novel.

But this is a fantasy world without elves, majestic heroes, and so on. There’s no great quest, no dying empire. It’s nog high fantasy, which means I can’t pull pre-packaged story bits off the shelf, so to speak, and expect readers to follow. The world is roughly high medieval (1100-1300), and it needed to be built from scratch. Which means research below the usual kings-n-bishops level of medieval popular history. The fun part was having a good excuse for going to old cities and looking at how buildings were constructed and used, and following trade routes (did you know that stone for mill wheels and construction was a big-ticket trade item? Me either.) The not so fun part was economics and the politics of trade. Business history makes me twitch.

When I say build from scratch, it includes currencies and weights and measures. Fortunately, coins tend to survive, especially because people buried varying quantities of them, and there is documentation about who minted what and what the exchange rates were, more or less. But fantasy novel prices tend to be seriously inflated as compared to real world prices. Not even at the famous Champaign Fairs would someone pay a pure silver coin for one night’s lodging, unless he was taking the entire inn and stables. Assuming he went to an inn and not to one of the buildings set aside for people from his city or confraternity. Most people rarely saw large denomination coins, like a gold solidus or a Lübeck mark. They saw smaller, thinner silver coins, or pieces of coins and bits of jewelry. Broken rings were the small change of Europe, as it turns out. You valued metal by weight, based on your local system.

Your local system? Oh yes. Six years ago, I was in Bernkastle-Kuse, a pair of small, old towns in western Germany on opposite sides of a river. Embedded in the wall of one of the buildings facing the market square in Bernkastle is a piece of metal, sort of like a yardstick. It was the local cloth measure. Visiting merchants or people selling cloth from out of town had to abide by the local measure, and there it was, for all to see and readily available to sort out disputes that arose. Weights also varied from place to place, although a few became standardized relatively early, like the herring-barrel. One herring-barrel weighed about a thousand pounds and remained comparatively unchanged for several hundred years. And yes, it held herring. Herring was one of the major trade items, up there with dried and/or salted cod, salt, and fabric. Oh, and wax and honey and grain. Russia’s greatest exports were furs, honey, and wax, and goods originally from Central and East Asia that came via trade to Novgorod. Tons and tons of wax, because Christendom needed candles for worship and for every-day use. And for documents, and for medicines, and other things.

So I had to start with the big picture, meaning an overview history of the largest “international” trading group at the time, the Hanse. Once I got that sorted out, I could look at specific products that my protagonist might deal with and in, then what sort of transportation he had access to. I decided that luxury goods would not do. He’s to pragmatic for that, and his parents couldn’t afford to apprentice him to a fur-dealer or silk-merchant. So he deals in leather and hides, and is glad because while he doesn’t make the money, he also has lower risk. Everyone needs leather. And most lords and robbers are not as interested in hides as they are in silk and spices.

What does his world look like? That required a combination of archaeological reading and ground-truthing. Not much remains of true early-medieval cities and ground-plans today. Cities grew and changed, people improved things, tore down and recycled old things, and in some cases there was the Great Urban Renewal following the 1939-1945 period. For example, in all of Hamburg, there is one row of perhaps seven buildings tucked away near St. Michael’s church that show what the city looked like before 1900. Even Bruges Belgium, which seems at first like a town trapped in amber, expanded and has been modified, the streets widened, the largest building torn down and its internal canal filled in because the space was needed for something else. You have to look at smaller cities, in pockets and corners, and the overall shape of things, literally. And add several layers of plaster and dirt.

Once inside town walls, Tycho Rhonardia’s world is narrow and smelly, often muddy. He wears wooden platform sandals over his shoes to avoid the dirt and ordure, as does everyone else who can afford leather shoes. There are few open spaces, aside from a market space near the temples (this is a pagan world). Fire is a constant danger, and night is when honest people are indoors unless the moon is bright. He stays in his confraternity’s section of his Free City’s merchant house in the merchants’ quarter, at least in the city where the story starts. The traders arrange themselves by place of origin and which patron deity they follow, but follow pre-agreed rules and organization when they travel overland or by sea, or if they have a group dispute with a local lord. This is very much what happened in the North Sea and Baltic between around 820-1400, as traders from the Low German region and surrounding formed protective associations that became the Hanseatic League.

If you’ve made it this far, and are not drowsing, you can understand why most of this is deep background that won’t be “seen” in the book. Tycho is a fish in water, and he knows this world inside and out. And it all sounds dreadfully like that boring economic history class your advisor put you in because you were late registering one semester. Where’s the fantasy part?

Ah, magic. This world is full of small magics, and mages are bound by guilds just like craftsmen and merchants were. You have preservation mages, weighing mages, scribe-mages who confirm the authenticity of documents and serve as notaries of a sort, transport mages of varying strengths, mages who assay metals and confirm the validity of coins, mages who make things fire-resistant, who heal animals, and so on. A mage certified in one specialty is not permitted to work in another, even if he has the ability, unless he goes through a second apprenticeship and journeyman period and pays dues to both guilds. Very few mages bother with the trouble and cost. And magic doesn’t work on large bodies of water, only small ones and then it doesn’t “stick” too well. But magic is every where, and ninety-nine out of a hundred people use it and see it in action. Tycho doesn’t. And keeping this secret shapes a lot of his life, including remaining faithful to his wife and not taking a trade-wife while he is away.

Because he can’t use magic, he uses his other senses. And he’s a bit eccentric: he collects coins, the strange and rare ones. He’s amassed a large collection over the years. And when odd coins begin appearing, coins that the mages can’t detect as counterfeit, he’s one of the first to know. And he knows what coins can tell you, and what they can’t. Meester Tycho also knows who to ask about the grain trade and foreign herbs when mages begin dying from contaminated bread. You see, there is a connection between the two…

Really, what the h*ll happened?  When did I become a name writer, one whom fans travel hundreds of miles to attend?

I’m still spinning and peopled-out from that con, and need some time to process.

It started badly.  We hit Atlanta, and the restaurant at which we normally have lunch which is 17 minutes away from the airport took us two hours to reach.

The con, which normally takes three hours driving, took seven.

The highway was down to six miles per hour at times.  Now visualize that moving speed and trucks trying to change lanes to a packed lane.  I’ve never been that scared on a highway with Dan driving since our honeymoon when he drove in snow in Boston after two weeks in Portugal, jetlagged and half asleep.

All the way there, my phone was beeping with texts of people giving me their room numbers and asking if I was going to be at x, y and z.

As we crept closer to the one event I’d set up at 10pm, I was getting frantic.  Particularly as I was getting contradictory tweets where the con suite (where I’d set it) was open/closed.  It was WEIRD.

We had to pick up Robert’s girlfriend at the airport at Chatt. too, at 9 pm, and for a while there, I was arranging backup plans, in case we didn’t get there in time.  We did.  Barely.  We offloaded suitcases and number two son, and went to pick her up.

I was a little nervous about that too, because Robert insisted she meet the “extended family” before they decided they were serious and I was going “What a horrible thing to do to a girl, even a writer, to drag her to her first SF/F con when it’s one where we know everyone, and she’ll be watched?  What if she doesn’t get our jokes?  What if she hates our friends?  I mean… I was nervous.

Then we picked her up and on the way back from the airport, I told Dan “Be careful, don’t run over the jaywalking couple!”  And she said “Aw.  But we get extra points.”  And I knew she’d be all right.  So I was free to start on the con worries.

It started with the reading.  No, not my reading.  Well, sort of.  My reading, but not my book, rather an erotic SF tale, which halfway through degenerated into an instructional time on how to write and what not to do.

–Do you guys want a mini-workshop for next year?  I can ask Rich for a 3 hour block or so, to go over how to hook the reader, etc.  Yes, no?

There were a lot more of you there than I expected, and I got to bed much too late.  This was to become a theme.

I swear, I couldn’t go ten steps without tripping over fans stacked ten deep for autographs, or introductions or just to talk.

— WHEN did this become a thing with me?

Anyway, I had a panel to promote the Tombstone antho, and skipped the reading because Dan was inexplicably on a zombie panel.  He’s never REALLY written zombies.  So he didn’t want to go it alone, and I ended up going with him, to help and to talk about Black Tide.

Sorry if any of you missed me at the reading.

I didn’t have any panels to promote Darkship Revenge, because the one Space Opera panel on Sunday was… odd, and went mostly into movies and what we’d read.  So, do a writer a favor and consider buying the book.

I also apologize if you went to the signing party for Four Horsemen looking for me.  I wasn’t in the anthology because at the last minute, I ran out of brain and time.  So, I’m sorry.

The Huns breakfast was profoundly weird, partly because the owner of City Cafe was unable to understand “loose group, sit us in waves, as close as you can to our friends” and insisted on sitting the dozen or so I came in with as a group, which meant he sent us to the back room to wait.  In the meanwhile there were already 5 tables of our people, in various stages of breakfast completion and he got testy when I went out to greet them.

When you consider we were supposed to have two breakfasts, I think we’ve outgrown the City Cafe.  If/when they know where LC will be next year, I’m going to try to get one of the banquet rooms and have breakfast catered, if possible by Jonny LaForce.

It will be announced “in the councils of the Huns.”

The “if there is one” is because we have a hotel for 2020 but we might not secure one for 2019 in time.  So be patient, you’ll be informed.

The con ended with a mass dinner at Rodizio, with Speaker and a bunch of friends.  Well, a large bunch.  Two sets ended up in separate tables.  There too, a banquet room is being contemplated.

We came home on the third and when we arrived I thought I was fine and could do a party.  Glad saner heads prevailed, as that party was an hour drive away.  We went to a diner for dinner, and by the end of it, I was nodding off.  I barely made it home before falling asleep.

Yesterday I was scattered with a chance of weirdness.  Because the last thing we wanted to do was brave Downtown Denver for fireworks (the traffic, the time) we went to one of the little neighboring towns to watch them.  It worked really well, as on the way we watched something like seven firework displays all around, some obviously professional.  And even though I’m fairly sure we parked in a cow pasture, to watch the fireworks, and it was probably illegal to do so (not absolutely sure.  It was dark!) it was a wonderful display.

I came home with just enough awakeness to make it to bed.  Which again, is why I’m late this morning.

I still don’t understand my bewildering popularity at the con.  It’s never been like this before.  What happened between last year and this?  Who knows?

Loved seeing all of you though, and sorry for the ones I missed.  I really was overwhelmed.

 

 

This is a weird fourth of July.  Perhaps we should have stayed at Chattanooga one more day, instead of traveling all day yesterday to get here today.  But we were away last week, and I just wanted to be home.

It didn’t give me time to prepare a fourth of July post, so I guess we’ll have to do with this.

My family will probably watch 1776 and The Patriot.  We’re aware both are flawed as to history, but both capture a feel we like on the fourth.

And then we’ll get Chinese take out.  This is a tradition that started 21 years ago (Marsh was in a playpen) when we moved to Manitou Springs and found that our front balcony faced the fireworks.  Because the house didn’t have a stove or refrigerator that worked, we didn’t have food in the house, and we got Chinese takeout, then sat down to watch the fire works.

For some reason, this because a tradition with the boys.  If we’re not having a 4th party (we used to, but lost the habit while living downtown CS) we have Chinese takeout.  Yeah, in a weird way it is oddly American.  I mean, now it’s fairly available in Europe, too, but it used to be — believe it or not — Chinese take out was an American thing.

Tomorrow I’d do a Liberty Con AAR, but for now, I’ll leave you with a link to a post by Nicki Kenyon taking out the (euro) trash.  It can’t be emphasized enough how little anyone “not of us” gets us.  I can’t even explain us to my family.

I wrote this (over at PJmedia) to try to explain to people here why I neither think we are a “nation of blood” nor a nation that requires no assimilation.  And why I think open borders are wrong, too.

Also, of course, we’re like nothing they’ve seen before or after.  If they don’t get that we’re different from their nations, they don’t understand us.  And they regard all we are and all we achieve as a sort of magic or perhaps an evil trick they don’t know how to replicate.  This fascinates about us.  I can’t find P. J. O’Rourke’s quote, so I’ll paraphrase: We’re a ravishing twenty year old woman.  They’re a pimply thirteen year old boy.  They love us and hate us.  They think about us all the time, and can’t understand that we barely notice them at all and then mostly with benevolent amusement.  Sucks to be them.

But we?  We’re the most fortunate of people in the most fortunate era the world has seen.

They ain’t seen nothing like us yet!

Spiritually we were slaves called out from among other nations.  We bled and died for a hopeless cause of Liberty.  We starved and despaired at Valley Forge and we’ve come through to the glorious day of freedom.

Many battles lie still ahead of us.  And we might very well lose that life, that fortune and the sacred honor we pledged to this endeavor.

Every generation must fight for and win Liberty anew.  It is our duty and our privilege.

But today we honor our fallen, give thanks to those who paid the ultimate price through the centuries, and celebrate our incredible inheritance.

Go and enjoy being an American.  And it’s okay to cry when they play the Star Spangled Banner.  I do.

 

 

 

Even More  Books – Amanda S. Green

Here are some more books and short stories for your reading pleasure.

Polly

by James Snover

When a slight problem of some missing mountain range threatens to have Rex Mason thrown in jail, what does he do? He creates the Excentrifugal Engineering Youth Internship Program! The first partcipant: 13-year-old Polly Madison! But it won’t be easy, and confined to a wheel chair, it may be too much for her. Join her as her intelligence, creativity, perseverance and courage are all tested as never before in her life!

*

Taking Flight

by Sam Schall

Taking Flight is a short story set in the Honor and Duty series universe.

Duty, honor, sacrifice. That motto meant everything to newly commissioned Second Lieutenant Ashlyn Shaw. She thought she understood the meaning of those simple words. Little did she know.

Challenged by those who believed she made it through the Academy on her family’s coattails, a roommate who just wants to see “some action” and a gunnery sergeant determined to make a real Marine out of her, Ash soon realizes what it means to be a Marine. As the signs point to war on the horizon, she is determined to do everything she can to serve Fuercon and do the Corps proud.

*

Sabercat

by T.L. Knighton

Despite his rich-kid roots, Tommy Reilly is struggling to make it as a freighter captain. Despite a universe of possibilities, he finds himself running afoul of both pirates and corrupt bureaucrats who seem determined to get in his way at every point. It’s like karma for his bullying past is smacking him in the back of the head.

All of that changes when a figure from his past asks for his help.

Now he’s finding himself at odds with a greedy and overly ambitious business owner who has government backing who happens to be the same man who impounded the very load he needs on his ship. The fact that the load is only the first step in securing information that could bring down the status quo might have something to do with that, however.

Tommy and his crew of misfit rejects have to use skills most of them would rather forget to secure their load, all with eyes watching them everywhere.

*

The Morning the Earth Shook

by JL Curtis

A year after Calexit, the last US bases in Southern California are under siege, with their power and water cut off. Their perimeters are under constant probes by a now hostile nation. There is intelligence the government of California is planning a final all-out action to overwhelm the last bases and claim the spoils of victory for their own…

But the men and women in uniform aren’t going to let their bases be overrun, especially after the murder of their dependents. This is their story, a novella of the last military withdrawal from California. And if there’s one thing the Sailors and Marines are not going to do, it’s go quietly!

*

The Big Blue

by David Burkhead

When an accidentally detonated nuke from a stolen submarine releases something never before seen, Sea Hawk pilot Lieutenant Steve Pomerantz is sent to investigate. He finds a blue-green monster ten times the size of the largest Tyrannosaurus Rex and seemingly impervious to every weapon in mankind’s arsenal.

Earthquakes in the South Pacific, at a location dubbed as the most remote spot on Earth, raise tsunamis all along the West Coast. Air Force Captain Jamal White, pilot of a C-130 Hercules is pulled off of search and rescue duties to ferry two scientists to investigate. What they find is a new continent arisen from the deep. And on that continent something stirs, bringing terror and madness in its wake.

Two monsters, one from the frozen North Atlantic, one from the remote South Pacific, on a collision course with the survival of mankind hanging in the balance.

*

Hunted

by Ellie Ferguson

When Meg Finley’s parents died, the authorities classified it as a double suicide. Alone, hurting and suddenly the object of the clan’s alpha’s desire, her life was a nightmare. He didn’t care that she was grieving any more than he cared that she was only fifteen. So she’d run and she’d been running ever since. But now, years later, her luck’s run out. The alpha’s trackers have found her and they’re under orders to bring her back, no matter what. Without warning, Meg finds herself in a game of cat and mouse with the trackers in a downtown Dallas parking garage. She’s learned a lot over the years but, without help, it might not be enough to escape a fate she knows will be worse than death. What she didn’t expect was that help would come from the local clan leader. But would he turn out to be her savior or something else, something much more dangerous?

*

Drumlin Circus/On Gossamer Wings

by Jeff Duntemann

A starship malfunctions and strands its 800 passengers on a planet eerily like the Pleistocene Earth, complete with prehistoric mammals including woolly mammoths, dire wolves, and smilodons. And something else: tens of thousands of abandoned alien machines consisting of a bowl and two pillars that respond with drum-like sounds when touched. Tap 256 times on the pillars in any combination, and…something…coalesces in the bowl. It might be a spoon or an axe or a twisted lump of silvery metal. These artifacts (dubbed “drumlins”) help the unwilling colonists survive, but there’s something a little weird about what comes out of the “thingmaker” machines. High-pitched sounds sometimes make drumlins twitch and combine into more complex things. Stranger still, what drumlins do seems to depend on the thoughts of nearby humans. Wish hard while you whistle just so…and something amazing may happen.

260 years on, the castaways have created a civilization resembling late 19th Century America, based in part on coal, steam, iron, and hard work–and in part on the mysterious drumlin artifacts. Both short novels in this volume are set against this background.

Drumlin Circus: Every spring, Bramble Ceglarek takes Pretty Alice’s Wonderland Circus down the dirt roads of the west country, dazzling townfolk with clowns, acrobats, calliope music, and trained animals — especially trained animals. His wife Julia trains them with a drumlin whistle, and they obey with peculiar precision. The cultlike Bitspace Institute, hoping to train animal assassins, sends agent Simon Kassel to steal the whistle. Unknown to him, Kassel has been set up to fail by his Institute rivals who want to be rid of him, and after Julia and her apprentice Rosa are abducted by Institute thugs who attempt to kill him, Kassel switches loyalties and joins the circus as a very scary clown.

He returns to Institute HQ to rescue Julia and Rosa, only to discover that the training whistle is much more than merely a whistle: a mysterious “function controller” that compels animals, human beings, and even the alien drumlin artifacts themselves to obey its bearer.

On Gossamer Wings: From out in the dry rye fields of the west, rumors have come to the Bitspace Institute that someone has drummed up something valuable from the alien thingmakers: a large sphere of pure iron. Institute agent Hiram König rides out to investigate, and discovers the strange, mute young woman who has done the drumming. He also learns that the Big Ball of Iron is just the beginning of the previously unknown drumlins that she has discovered in the vast “bitspace” of the alien thingmakers. Despite the slow progress of technology in the Valinor colony, where steam locomotives and the first primitive hydrogen airships are state of the art, Natalie Bishop is using her talents with the thingmakers to seek out the drumlin parts she needs to build a heavier-than-air flying machine. For her, the flier is her masterpiece, the work that will prove her worth to the people she cares about.

The race is on for König to extract Natalie from the pressure-cooker of a small town that is her home, before it blows up around her and before she takes the dazzlingly risky final step and tries to fly.

*

Alpha & Omega

by Stephanie Osborn

Dr. Megan McAllister was already a pretty unique human — NASA astronaut, professional astronomer, polymath — when she encountered the man in the black Suit that night in west Texas. What Division One Agent Echo didn’t know, when he recruited her to the Agency, was that she was even more special.

But he’d find out, soon enough.

*

Sarah has the following books on sale.

Death of a Musketeer

by Sarah D’Almeida (Sarah A. Hoyt)

When D’Artagnan, Athos, Porthos and Aramis discover the corpse of a beautiful woman who looks like the Queen of France, they vow to see that justice is done. They do not know that their investigation will widen from murder to intrigue to conspiracy, bring them the renewed enmity of Cardinal Richelieu and shake their fate in humanity. Through duels and doubts, they pursue the truth, even when their search brings them to the sphere of King Louis XIII himself and makes them confront secrets best forgotten.

*

Dipped, Stripped and Dead

by Elise Hyatt (Sarah A. Hoyt)

A Dyce Dare Mystery

When she was six, Dyce Dare wanted to be a ballerina, but she couldn’t stop tripping over her own feet. Then she wanted to be a lion tamer, but Fluffy, the cat, would not obey her. Which is why at the age of twenty nine she’s dumpster diving, kind of. She’s looking for furniture to keep her refinishing business going, because she would someday like to feed herself and her young son something better than pancakes.

Unfortunately, as has come to be her expectation, things go disastrously wrong. She finds a half melted corpse in a dumpster. This will force her to do what she never wanted to do: solve a crime.

Life is just about to get crazy… er… crazier. But at least at the end of the tunnel there might be a relationship with a very nice police officer.

*

Ill Met by Moonlight

by Sarah A. Hoyt

Young Will Shakespeare is a humble school master who arrives home to find his wife and infant daughter, Susannah are missing, kidnapped by the fairies of Arden Woods, the children of Titania and Oberon. His attempts at rescue are interrupted and complicated by a feud over throne of fairyland, between Sylvanus, king regnant, and his younger brother Quicksilver who is both more and less than he seems. Amid treachery, murder, duel and seduction, Shakespeare discovers the enchantment of fairyland, which will always remain with him, for good and ill. (This book was originally published by Ace/Berkley 10/2001)

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Witchfinder

by Sarah Hoyt

n Avalon, where the world runs on magic, the king of Britannia appoints a witchfinder to rescue unfortunates with magical power from lands where magic is a capital crime. Or he did. But after the royal princess was kidnapped from her cradle twenty years ago, all travel to other universes has been forbidden, and the position of witchfinder abolished. Seraphim Ainsling, Duke of Darkwater, son of the last witchfinder, breaks the edict. He can’t simply let people die for lack of rescue. His stubborn compassion will bring him trouble and disgrace, turmoil and danger — and maybe, just maybe, the greatest reward of all.