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Sixteen years ago, when I was first on the blogs (under deep cover, with mustache and sunglasses) there was a lot of talk about the cold civil war.

It is only now that I understand the name wasn’t EXACTLY right.  Sure, there were two camps sharply divided, and the fact that we were geographically enmeshed meant that it couldn’t go hot in the traditional way.  But there were other factors too.

In the cold war, what prevented it going hot was Mutual Assured Destruction.  Sure, the Soviets were fanatics, but they weren’t the sort of fanatics who want to make sure they die TOO.  They wanted to win.  They wanted for various and complicated reasons, among them that the only way a communist society can be prosperous is through theft, to own the Earth.  We weren’t about to allow that and we had the nukes to enforce it.

Oh, they grabbed what they could, mostly because the left here were very susceptible to Soviet propaganda, and the idea MAD was wrong, and we should disarm first.  (Honestly, sometimes I think they’re aliens.  That’s not how the world works, that’s not how humans work.  That’s not how any of this works.  The one who disarms first is known as “victim” or perhaps “dead.”)

But in the Civil War we fought, they commanded all the positions of power.  It wasn’t just the arts, or publishing, just the press or universities.  If you were fairly wealthy, even back in the eighties, you made “left noises” because being leftist was aspirational and a positional good.  Their control of the rest of the culture had a hard lock on the idea that leftist ideas were not just right and good but “Smart”.  Opening your mouth in public and revealing right-wing (and right wing was anything non-left, like supporting Ronald Reagan) opinions was the equivalent of committing social suicide.  If you said you supported Ronald Reagan, all your acquaintances would SAY you were dumb, and whisper you were racist, sexist, anti-Semitic. (In fact I was reading a mystery by a very liberal writer, set in the eighties and the MOST unbelievable thing she has is high-class white people in the South being openly racist.  Oh, my, no, that wasn’t done. I know, I lived there at the time.  Forget saying racist things in public.  They wouldn’t even voice a support for free markets in public.  It just wasn’t DONE.)

This is not a Cold Civil War.  We were occupied.  The Vichy had full control of society, and we were the plucky resistance.  We didn’t even have a flight helmet, or an egg beater, but we were doing what we could, in the shadows.  Those of us in the arts ported seemingly incongruous bits into our stuff, at great risk of discovery or at least suspicion.  Local journalists sometimes broke with the narrative.  But none of this had a great deal of effect.  We were mostly sidelined, and when someone managed to break through, he or she was immediately demonized.  Even a hero of the gonzo right like P. J. O’Rourke had to refer to Reagan as “his dumbness” to prove he was cool and hip enough.  (No one referred to Carter as his dumbness, and having heard the man, this is a miracle of the controlled press.)

It is no longer like that.  Things have changed.  Now we are in a cold civil war with occasional flare ups.

There are two problems.  I’ve never condoned the wholesale condemnation of GOP stalwarts, partly because the press still had a bunchaton of power until … they didn’t.

What I’m saying is that if they could demonize a squishy left and frankly morally impeccable man like Romney as an uber-fascist, they could demonize anyone and anything.  Which meant for a long time, when the right got pressured, they buckled.  They had to.  It wasn’t a cold civil war.  It was a guerilla war.  If you’re caught running with a bunch of dynamite to bring down a bridge before the Nazis bring in reinforcements, you don’t die bravely.  That just neutralizes you.  Instead, you invent a story and heil Hitler with all your might.  Which is what the US right — btw, as far from fascists as it’s possible to be, while the left often uses fascist tactics — did.  They buckled and lived to fight another day.

I thought that’s where we were.  I thought that’s where we’d be for another hundred years.

Yeah, I’d heard of the power of online communication, but I didn’t buy it.  I thought it would be very gradual.

You see, I did this with ebooks too.  when I started writing in 1985, every conference and every writing magazine had a thing on ebooks.  And it made no earthly sense to me.  Who in actual hell wants to take a computer to the bathroom with them, or bring the computer to the kitchen while washing dishes, or…  No one.

For twenty years they talked about ebooks, and I thought it would never happen.  And then Amazon…

I don’t know what happened with this election cycle.  Perhaps it was that the economy is really, stupendously, bad.  We don’t know for sure, because the press would rather die than report on it until a year from now, when they can blame it all on Trump, and also because Obama played tiddly winks with our number gathering, making things mean not what they say they mean. But the signs on the ground, they suck.  I belong to a highly educated/trained/hard working set, and the best of us have been holding on for the last ten years (since the Dems swept the legislature in 06) without a raise, in face of growing, unacknowledged inflation.

Then there is the fact that the internet reporting MIGHT have achieved just enough penetration to start getting to people through the rumor mill.  People saying that Obama was the most ethical president ever were met with open laughter from friends and relatives who read the blogs, and who brought out chapter and verse on what really happened in Benghazi and the horror that was Fast and Furious.  The indication of this is the approval rating of the MSM.

Then there is the fact that so many of the left’s theories are self-exploding.  I’ve been telling lefties since Trump was elected that he can’t put gays in camps, because Bush has already done that, and in fact, Bush couldn’t even do it, because we all died in the war Reagan started by talking tough to the Russians.

Sure, we all know people who buy each one of these self-panics afresh, as if they never heard it before, but it has to peel off those on the margins.  It does, in fact.  Even in science fiction cons, the audience looks vaguely embarrassed when the idiotic boogeyman of global warming is trotted out.  I mean, you can only have eminent DOOOOOOOM and the urgency of socialist measures now for so long before people stop going “aren’t we supposed to already have baked to death?”

And there was the fact that during Obama’s presidency, the left thought it had ALREADY won (their fault.  By silencing opposition on threat to jobs or even lives, they lost sight of how big it was and wishfully convinced themselves there were only a few dead enders left) and acted at their most repulsive, from “I have a pen and a phone” to the outbreaks of SJWs trying to squish life out of the things people did for fun and demanding it all be “meaningful” and in aid of progressivism and by the numbers.

Then there is the situation with terrorism and Islam.  By shouting Religion of Peace and reclassifying every incident as workplace violence or disgruntled soldiers or need for gun control, they tried to convince people not to see what their lying eyes told them.  And they didn’t have that kind of power.  And there was the internet.

Because they’d made it impossible for people to speak openly and keep working, or keep their social position, people didn’t.  Not even to pollsters on the phone.  Trump’s election was not only a shock to the left, it was a shock to most of the right.  Metaphorically, I’m still jaw-dropped, sitting in Stephen Green’s living room, un-drunk cocktail in hand.

The problem with this is not that the cold war has gone hot.  It hasn’t.  I think instinctively that’s what the left fears.  They’ve been doing all this stuff to keep us down with the understanding there were few of us and most very old, and now a preference cascade has revealed we were just lying to them.  They’re afraid we’re going to, at the very least, do to them what they’ve been doing to us.  And they might be right on that.  But of course they can’t say that.  They can’t say “I’m afraid I won’t get job perks for mouthing the right opinions” or “I’m afraid that my job won’t promote me because of my aggressive SJW blackmail.”  Instead, they have to exaggerate their fears into extermination camps and women losing their right to vote, and other insanity that everyone (probably in their hearts of hearts even they) knows is insanity.

Hence the insurgence of the pussy hatters.  (BTW they’re calling it three million — rolls eyes — yeah, there MIGHT have been three million all over the country, many of them elderly women who don’t seem to be quite sure what they were protesting or why, or old progressives recreating sixty eight out of sheer nostalgia, but that’s counting the not-women not-march on not-Washington (since it had to take all self identified women, it was more of a stroll, and most of them never went near DC) )  They think if they make a big display of force, we’ll be scared to do to them as they’ve been doing onto us.

They don’t realize it’s having the other effect.  Because they are protesting, essentially, against election results, they have NO moral high ground.  People watching can only think they’ve lost their minds.

Sure the media is inflating them, like they did with the Occupy Wall Street astroturf.  Sure, leftist politicians will lend them credence and treat them as heroes.  BUT the media and the lefty politicians CANNOT make them sound sane and justified.  Nothing can.  What the heck are they protesting, with their symbolic genitalia hats, anyway? All they can do is make themselves sound crazy by associating themselves with the crazy.

In other words, the people calling them the Trump 2020 dancers are more right than not.

Also, btw, three million?  In a country of three hundred million, where we probably have fifty million aging hippies who long to recreate sixty eight?  And countless vile prog teachers who dragged their classes to this thing?  Three million?  We laugh at your puny numbers, your vile smugness, your crazy assumption of moral rightness.  And the vast majority who won’t answer polls or play your games anymore, laughs with us.

The fury of the left is the fury of someone playing by the rules, who has done everything that has ever worked before and yet finds themselves getting the opposite results of what they wanted.  It often happens in societal change.

We are now, actually, and openly in a situation of Civil Cold War.  The right has its own power to punish those who offend them, and who thought they were insulated by taking the command positions in the culture (often by skulduggery and by paying more attention to politics than competency, which is why every field the left takes over gets cacked.)  Are you going to boycott us?  We’ll counter boycott and take you down.  Or worse, we’ll buycott.  Remember Chick Fil A?  It should have been a warning sign to the left.  But it wasn’t.

They’re going to blow past all the warning signs, because people do.  People’s minds aren’t that elastic.  The situation they grew up with is the “right and just” one to which we’ll return.  Note all the publishers waiting for ebooks to disappear.

Only the left’s displays are going to get more frantic and even aggressive.  And I’m seeing signs, particularly among the young, that no one really cares about their sensitivities anymore.  Which will only make them more frantic.

What can we do? How can we prevent the cold civil war going hot?  And yes, as angry as we are, we really want to do that.  Because if it goes hot what emerges at the other end won’t be the republic we love.

I don’t know.

So you must prepare.  Prepare for disruptions.  Prepare for attacks.  Prepare for them to take our institutions down in a final attempt to destroy us.

Prepare.  Be aware.  Build under, build over, build around.

In the end we win, they lose, and we might get lucky and avoid the worst on the way.  But the water will get very rough, so you have to make sure to have life preservers.

And be not afraid, for the times, they are achanging.

It’s been three days since Trump’s inauguration and I haven’t lost it and bitchslapped anyone in public, but it’s a difficult thing, I’m always ten seconds from a righteous bitchslapping, and I must take it a day at a time.

It’s not his fervent supporters who are driving me to the screaming mimmies.  Sure, a lot of the more fervent ones are absolutely convinced he sits astride a white horse (with a golden saddle) and is coming to cure the world all their ills, but frankly, they don’t bother me, the same way that Obama’s supporters who thought he was the Light Bringer and sort of like a G-d, standing above the world and fixing all its problems.  (Oh, child of the morning, how art thou fallen.) It is a common human failing, and even our form of government isn’t going to erase that.  I deal with that the way I dealt with Obama supporters — by staying out of their drum circles — and roll my eyes so hard they almost fall off (but I’ve had little clips installed, so they can’t fall off.)  So, I’m cool.

Rather it’s his unhinged opponents.

I’ll level — and you don’t need to go very far to find out — and say I was scared when Obama was elected.  I’d seen other college room Marxists, and I knew the havoc they could wreak.  But I didn’t get seriously alarmed, or get involved in politics, or even speak out, until they passed Health Care Screwing Up Act with a procedural trick, until not only did we learn of Fast and Furious but the media swept it under the rug, until Benghazi happened, the administration lied in public and progressives were satisfied with the explanation that it “wasn’t a thing.”

I must say however that even in my extreme of losing my cool, I never even THOUGHT of marching on Washington wearing knit representations of genitalia on my head.  I considered running for regional office, something that’s still on the books, if writing stops paying or doesn’t pay enough to justify the effort, only I’d make a very bad politician because “Are you out of your frickin’ minds” is a terrible campaign slogan.

I certainly didn’t start demonstrating against Obama the day he was elected.  In fact, even in 2012, I talked back from the ledge friends who thought his election would destroy the future they had planned.  You can’t live through several revolutions or in a seriously corrupt country without knowing “there is always a way around the rules” and “Most political changes are undone.  Some just take longer than others.”  (Yes, even Venezuela shall be free-er and prosperous again, but that’s a different case as their culture really lends itself to Caudillo regimes.)

But I confess that the behavior of the left, since November, has me breathless.

Remember this is me talking.  I lived briefly (I think six months, but I could be wrong?  I try not to think of that time and the ages between 11 and 18 sort of run together in my mind) under a Maoist regime run by rich boys whose hobbies included painting exquisite socialist realism murals and shooting their AK47s randomly at people they thought were insufficiently enthusiastic supporters.  I’ve been in situations (weirdly not during that time) when machine guns were pointed at me by both amateurs and professionals.  I’ve been in public assemblies in which people were randomly shot from above, and it was luck of the draw it wasn’t me.  I’ve seen cars set on fire.  I’ve had to live with the awareness of what was going on nationally at any moment, because it might impinge on my little world.  And yes, I did things that got other people “disappeared” (though no one knew that for years, and the assumption was that they’d run abroad) and because I was an idiot teen who was going to live forever, got in the face of very dangerous people.  It wasn’t till years later, that I realized why my parents and brother were scared for me, and why my brother thought my parents should control me.  (Keep in mind that he didn’t know HOW they could do that, and the response was exactly that.  “You tell us how.”)

And now I’m more scared than I’ve ever been.  It started out as funny, but I’m now terrified.

It’s not just that I’m older.  It’s not that I have children and (for now) adopted grandchildren, and I’ve always been more scared for others than for myself.  (Some of those “Student Leaders” I outraged could even have got my lip service if they’d threatened my brother.  But they were stupid and threatened me.)

It’s more that I do not know if the country, as a representative republic, governed by the people can survive when substantial numbers of its people — and a vast number of them in positions of power in industry and culture — know so many things that just ain’t so and are willing to act on them without thinking.  In fact, it could be said that they’ve been trained not to think.  And that, particularly for people in intellectual professions, is a terrifying thing to behold.

My adopted brother, Charlie Martin, says his problem is that Trump has opened the bag of idiots.  My real problem is that any republican winning would have done so — yes, even Romney.  Even Kasich — the only difference being that instead of pussy hats, the women-against-objectification would have worn whole body vulva suits.  With Trump it’s genitalia head gear, because he used the word “pussy.”  This is so much worse than Clinton being a serial rapist and his wife enabling him for… reasons. Don’t ask them the reasons, because that would force them to think, and they’ll just scream things at you like “my body my choice” and “you are afraid of vaginas.”  I demonstrably am not, as I haven’t done anything drastic to mine, but those are the things they say to avoid thinking. Mantras.

Which brings us to cults.

I should have known something was up as I started reading about cults and cults deprogramming, and what happens to cults when disconfirmation of their beliefs happens.

My subconscious is the smart part of me.  When I start reading about something, it’s either for a book, or there’s a reason.

Cults are a fascinating thing.  Most of the people who join don’t join for the beliefs, which is what you’d think (right?) but for the sense of community, for belonging, or even for the benefits of it (house, food, money, a job.)

It’s kind of up in the air whether they believe in the tenets of the cult AT ANY TIME in the traditional sense.  Instead, they build blocks in their heads so they can’t think or do or even hear anything that challenges the cult.

The cult’s revelations usually include “and we’ll conquer the world” or some great event will happen that will give them control of the Earth.  When those are “disconfirmed” they scare the members because it makes the entire structure totter.  What they actually joined for: money or prestige, or even community, is at risk, but more importantly, the things going on around them threaten the careful habits of not thinking that they’ve built up.

And it’s much, much worse for the children raised in the cult.  It often takes them decades to escape the habits of non-thought or the vague paranoid fear that they’re going to be punished for doing what the cult disapproved of.

It is even worse if the cult (as most do) demonized everyone not of the cult.  Because then the kids can spend decades mired in the idea everyone is out to get them.

Which brings us to what is going on about us.

Some have compared the American progressivism implosion to how the Soviet Union fell, and they’re more right than not.

Yes, the Soviet union had secret police and a state apparatus, and yes, people were afraid of being arrested and thrown in jail, at least if they were people who had any sort of political awareness.

But most of the people didn’t.  Most of the people (talk to people who grew up there) just wanted to survive another day and get more food, and live a little better.  And for that they needed to mouth the beliefs of the Soviet cult, even if their lying eyes told them otherwise.  So, as in a cult you taught yourself not to think.

The interesting thing, when the Soviet Union fell, was the reaction of the cult members in the Soviet union, and the converts abroad. (And before you tell me that the progressives abroad were not Soviet converts, yes, I’ll explain.)

There was a brief period when everyone who could walk, crawl, or even drive a crappy soviet car away, did so.  But it didn’t empty the country.  And the ones who stayed behind eventually crawled back into the womb of authoritarian government.  Because it was the only way they could function.  (This too, as with Venezuela, might be their culture.  At least it’s what I told myself.)

The ones abroad, many of whom aren’t even aware of being Marxist converts — despite their belief that people are widgets inside their group (aka soviet) and that characteristics such as skin color, or genitalia, or profession dictate your thoughts; despite using terms like “consciousness raising”; despite not only narratives of victimhood, but the great and insane stealing of the Garden of Eden myth with the narrative of a primitive feminist paradise which not only left no archeological traces but also makes no sense with the realities of humans and life; despite their increased support for a centralized government that controls every facet of life — had a few wobbles, before they convinced themselves that the Soviet union wasn’t REALLY socialist (despite name) or communist, and that with the right people in charge, we could do it right.

This is typical cult behavior. The “progressive” narrative has a myth of the past (oh, that great communitarian past that also never existed) and a myth of the future, where the state they’ve been feeding magically withers away and we all sing in perfect harmony (but don’t drink coke, which is a capitalist invention.)  It comes through even when they’re not aware of it in their belief in the arrow of history; in their belief that you can be a race or gender traitor if you don’t believe in them; in their belief that the only reason you could disagree with them is that you’re evil.

If you posit they’re a cult, it all falls in place.  They’re just a very large cult who has done what cults have done throughout history and got control of the structures of power.  (I said that Heinlein was right about the First Prophet, he just didn’t realize what the “religion” would be.)

Having control of the structures of power, they could at least force people to PRETEND to believe in their nonsense.  They’ve managed this rather effectively across the media, entertainment, education, and a lot of other professions.

This week a young fan who works in music found out his beliefs and his blog cost him a lucrative career opportunity.  Us, old veterans of this war, could do nothing but nod and go “We know” and give instances in which we know the same happened to us. It’s everywhere.  Even in technical professions, the corporate culture, to appease the controlling cult, has enforced rigid adherence to things that contradict your lying eyes.

Having seized that control, the leaders of the cult could now proclaim anything they wanted, no matter how absurd, and be sure people would echo.  Some of them because they want to avoid loss of position and power; some because they were raised this way and have to believe, because otherwise they lose everything they’d been taught.

And then the fact that everyone, particularly anyone with any power (even though getting power is a function of mouthing the cult’s platitudes) “agrees” with them is brought out against dissidents, to call them stupid or mentally ill (they’re not that different from the soviet union, no.)

My younger son, shortly after the election, told me his colleagues were losing their minds.  I asked — sarcastically. I am STILL me — why the election of the most socially liberal Republican in decades was scaring them so much, and why they thought immigrants, women or gays would be sent to camps, and he said it wasn’t even that “they were taught, and believed it, that no Republican, ever would win again.”

Which is why they wanted to accrue ever more power to the government.  Because they thought it would always be their instrument.

They had reason to think so, not just because of the massive machinery of fraud (Dear hearts, only ONE party disapproves of measures to make our elections secure, and also your president lied to you.  Voter ID is NOT a function of America’s “racist past” EVERY COUNTRY THAT’S not a dictatorship has some for of assuring that the person voting is entitled to.  EVERY COUNTRY.  Even tiny, unorganized Portugal which is by and large mono-racial save for immigrants.)  No, they had reason to think this, because in every field they conquer the “enemy” disappears and never gets control again.  (More on this later.)  Look to the media, or publishing, or the arts.  They had a reason to believe their narrative of eternal victory.

This is why the election of someone who doesn’t agree with them, and who is not wholly committed to moving us towards the utopian future they envision is making them come unglued.

Women are protesting in the streets against a man whose wives and daughters are business women, with careers and independent lives.  They’re screaming about losing their right to abortion (and having been sold on this as a right is something else) when in fact he rather approves of abortion.  Like most men who sleep around, he likes not having to support any accidental products.  (What?  Did I say he wasn’t an asshole?)

Immigrants are convinced they’ll be deported tomorrow, even if he’s only talked of deporting ILLEGAL or CRIMINAL immigrants.

Gays are convinced they’ll be put in camps, because “he held the rainbow flag upside down and it was a dog whistle” even though my gay friends tell me there REALLY isn’t a formal up or down to the flag, it being a sort of ersatz symbol.  OTOH I’m becoming convinced a lot of gay people have fantasies about being put in camps with hot guards, or something, and feel guilty about it and must turn it into “fear” of being put in camps.  To my knowledge leftist gays have feared this since Reagan and it reached a peak under Bush who, also to my knowledge, never even mentioned anything about gays and whose vice president has a gay daughter whom he doesn’t shun.  (And for the one of you reading this who has my phone, yes, yes, I KNOW exactly the texts you’re going to send me about brawny camp guards in snazzy uniforms.  Just not in the middle of the night, okay, no matter how funny they are. I love you like a brother.  I don’t want to kill you.)

Keep in mind these same women said absolutely nothing when Clinton was credibly accused of multiple RAPES and in fact went all out to support his wife, who aided and abetted this behavior.

Keep in mind that gay students didn’t force the university to stop the speech of Iran’s Imamadjihad at universities, even though he’s known to hang gays or force them into sex change operations.

This is not rational behavior.  This is a cult.

I avoided most of the insanity this weekend, by being at a con (yes, think about that) and yes, I have con crud mostly because our room had no heating for over 24 hours.  (So much for getting a room and writing.)

While at the con, I found myself in the obligatory fairytale and myth panel which obligatorily attempted to go in the direction of “telling the old myths for the new society” — only it’s never for the real “new society” it’s rather to conform to this narrative where a character has to be feminist, one has to be gay, etc.

I confess to playing chaotic neutral in that panel.  Everytime the ball started towards the gutter of feminism, I punted it in another direction.

I did it not because it was offensive (though it annoys me) but because it would be boring.   I’ve been in these panels dozens of times, and could mutter the responses in my sleep.  I get bored with the services of my own religion (more and more rarely.  I must be getting old) much less the rites of a cult.

Then there was the panel where three people averred with perfect seriousness that we’re halfway through killing the planet.  Even if you get all your news from the mass media, how can you think that?  Unless of course you have no idea how big the planet is, or weren’t educated in science (which some of them were.)  And if you think that, why aren’t you putting every push possible towards space colonization?  And why do the measures you want to take to prevent global warming default to “mo’e socialism and less industry” just as it did to stop global cooling in the seventies?  And why are all of them profoundly unserious?  Years ago Greg Benford outlined ways you could cool the planet, if you really thing that’s needed, by positive change, like dumping iron fillings in the North sea.
The fact people like this never even consider such measures means that they’re not thinking about this; they don’t believe what they mouth.  They’re just mouthing it to stay on top, in good positions with the cult.  To the extent they “believe” in this bs, it’s as mantras to stop thinking.

At the same time, while I was at the con, a colleague of mine (probably between bouts of tears) posted that the way to avert any Republican getting elected ever again was to move to the benighted small towns and “educate” the locals.  This too is cult behavior.  “If only they saw the light.  We’ll go and preach.”

What do we do with this?  Civilizations have lost cults who controlled them, and reorganized, but I’m at a loss to think of any in which this happened peacefully.

I don’t think there’s that many of them, but they control the media and use it to inflate their numbers and their power.

They can’t hold on to us.  The people who called the demonstrators the Trump 2020 dancers are right.  Most of the country is looking at them like they looked at the insanity at the DNC (in sixty eight?  I was a kid) and going “Oh, hell no.”  And it’s clear from the polls that their suppression of people’s speech has simply insulated them from how mad people are at them.

They think their display of fervent belief will somehow scare us or convince us.  It does scare us, but not the way they expect.

What I don’t know is how to deprogram so many people who grew up in the progressivist cult.  I don’t know how to stop them from p*ssing off the people they demonize so much that they end up killed.

It’s not Trump they should be afraid of.  He’s in the end a rather conventional soft-left man.

But they should be wary of pushing the rest of us.  And instead they’re blissfully unaware that we exist as anything but what their cult leaders told them: backward, uneducated and evil people, who want to destroy everything they hold sacred.  Even when we were for some of those things, on principle, long before the darlings of the left were.

I’m sitting here wondering how we get the cult members to think.  It must be done, for the sake of our sanity, for the sake of our polity, for the sake of western civilization.

But I don’t know how to reach them.  I particularly don’t know how to reach them before people of less principle and more anger take the matter in their own hands.

And I’m scared.

Who ARE all these zombies?

 

 

 

 

 

 

You know what?  Ain’t gonna post today.  I’ve been at a convention  (Cosine, Colorado Springs) where I got a room so I could write in between panels.

So of course, the room’s heating didn’t work AT ALL for the first day and a half, causing both of us to be slightly ill, and also causing me to go into semi-hibernation where EVERYTHING takes forever.

I’m going to do my buying rounds of the art show (Robert and I also have art up there, and I need to figure out how to take it down/what the procedure is), go to my panel and go to lunch with an old friend.  Then it’s back home to be supervised by his Greebness while I finish the book.

BTW, after one of my complaints about Greebo, Stephanie Osborn wrote this poem for him.  I think it’s a work of genius:

Greebo the Fussy Cat – by Stephanie Osborn

Greebo is a fussy cat, he’s called the Wailing Voice.
For he’s the writer’s overseer who controls with all the
noise!
He’s the frustration of Household Hoyt, and Sarah’s great
despair,
For when she needs to take a break, well, Greebo’s always
there!

Oh, Greebo-cat, yes, Greebo-cat, there’s no one like the
Greebo-cat.
When overseeing writers, he is such an autocrat!
His powers of domination would make a king to stare.
And when the writer breaks for food — well, Greebo’s just
right there!
You can stuff him in the basement, you can tie him to a
chair.
But when the writer takes a break — well, Greebo’s just
right there!

Now, Greebo is a healthy cat, he’s plump and quite well-fed.
Writers know him when they see him, for their hearts are
filled with dread.
His fur is fluffy and well-groomed, his ears are very sharp.
And when a writer’s goofing off, his voice will start to
harp.
He goes face-down in his food bowl, he gobbles up the food–
But if the writer takes a break, old Greebo comes unglued!

Oh, Greebo-cat, yes, Greebo-cat, there’s no one like the
Greebo-cat.
He never spends his time in idle Facebook group chit-chat.
He sleeps along the hallway and he snoozes on the stair.
But when the writer takes a break — well, Greebo’s just
right there!

Now, Greebo has bright eyes, it’s true, yes, even for a cat.
There never was a feline who could stare at one like that.
It’s said he works for publishers, who pay him tuna fish,
And never, ever has he had an empty cat food dish.
If you’re not writing frantically, and the book is overdue,
Or you stop just for some coffee, or to knock back a light
brew,
Then you might look up to find — oh, yes! the Greebo-cat’s in
view.

Oh, Greebo-cat, yes, Greebo-cat, there’s no one like the
Greebo-cat.
And sleeping in a sunbeam is his daily habitat.
He practices his normalcy (well, he DOES live as a Hoyt).
And at the usual kitty stuff, he really is adroit.
But when the ‘puter comes on in the middle of the night,
Or the last scene doesn’t look the same, or the editing’s
not quite right,
Or some gibberish in the manuscript’s key scene has come to light,
Well, then all writers know they’re seeing Greebo’s last
exploit!

Or actually, they wanna be loved by government.  Or maybe not.  In the heads of the people on the left there seems to be a curious kind of confusion between government and all of us.

They didn’t snort-giggle when Obama came up with “Government is the name for what they choose to do together” (Was it Obama or Warren?  Those leftists all look alike to me.)  Instead they nodded their heads with pseudo-wisdom.

Well, brothers and sisters, I’m 54 years old.  In my life, I’ve chosen to study with people, to go to movies with people, to cook with people, to have sex with people (husband is demonstrably a people), to watch kids with people, even to have writers’ groups with people and to work with people.  I have never in my entire life sat around in a circle of friends on a Sunday, when there’s nothing good on the telly and said, “Hey, let’s set up a government and organize some sort of enforcement so we can tell people what to do.”

Maybe that’s just me.  Or not.  I don’t think most people decide to “do” government together, and please, don’t push me down the path of the multiple meanings of “do” because it’s early morning and I haven’t had coffee, and I’ll start giggling.

But in all honesty, it is important to be kind to our friends and acquaintances on the left and remember they have an unsteady grasp on the difference between government and society.

They don’t understand the American idea of government (which to be fair is not difficult since the rest of the world doesn’t either, by and large), they’re not aware of the protections afforded them by the constitution, protecting them from the things the government could do TO them.  (Which is why they continuously try to do things TO other people in the name of unicorn farts and utopia.)

They don’t get the bill of rights or the importance of negative rights.  The long list of things the government is NOT supposed to impinge on.  (To be fair, our school system never taught them that, or the importance of keeping a system that can put you in jail from sticking their nose into everything you do.  They also never taught them that countries who don’t have that protection end in mass graves.  To make it worse, the politicians they support also seem blissfully unaware of how we’re different from other lands, particularly hereditary monarchies.  Remember when Obama assured us he would be “ready to rule on day one” and thereby proved how little he understood of our form of government? Which ended in rule by pen and phone, which like passing health care was swept under procedural fig leaf but is still D*MN unconstitutional for the purposes he used it?)

Keep that in mind when you see them running around with their hair on fire because the whitehouse.gov website suddenly doesn’t have an entry for whatever the heck category they were taught encompasses all that they are and all that they do.

Yep, because an administration changed — have they no memory of other switchovers?  Are these summer children mired in perpetual now? — and therefore its priorities and what it promised people is what is highlighted on the website, they’re SURE armed men are going to start collecting them to put them in camps.

We can leave aside the insanity of expecting an administration to promote another priorities, and the insanity of believing that because Obama made a lot of noise about various minorities he did anything good for them.  (Listen sweetie, to the extent the alt.right exists (though it’s not right, of course) it is the creation of Obama, the master divider.  Did you really think you could make everyone else into a victim deserving of reparations and love, and keep “White cismales” as the perennial bad guy?  And not make them aware they’re also a group, they’re by and large unjustly accused, and they will realize the power they wield and form their own movement?  Be glad right now it’s just the wounded fringe, and the majority of people in America, whatever their color, still trusts our form of government, still wants rule of law and a “fair go” as the Australians say, [Yes, I had Austrians, but it was a typo caused by remote-linking.  It ate two letters.  It’s slower than my typo.  It wasn’t even a dig at ex-president Obama]  and simply want someone who doesn’t actively hate America at the helm.  If you keep up dividing Americans into arbitrary groups and assigning victimhood and blame to groups not people (Yeah, you think Obama’s daughters are more oppressed than a the white son of a single, unemployed mother?  You have rocks in your head.  They’re made of calcified stupidity.)

Division and giving prominence to any of your characteristics except “Americans” is not a recipe for uniting or healing the country.  It’s a recipe used for centuries by various tyrants.  Divide the people into tiny splinter groups at each other’s throat, so they’ll need the “good king” or in this case government, or president, to keep them safe from each other.  And none of them will realize Iegev– I mean, the ruler is a louse.  Any tyranny that lasted for more than a blink used that technique.

When I was seventeen and crazy (Ray Bradbury was right that the two often go together,) I used to be terrified of walking alone.

Not alone in the middle of a forest, understand.  There are tons of reasons a seventeen year old woman would be afraid of doing that.

Not even alone at night on city streets or alone in deserted streets.  There were tons of reasons in that time and in that place to be afraid of that, as I found out when I did it.  (Eh, I walked away.)

No, I was terrified of walking without a friend, a relative, someone who knew me and knew I was there.  I would walk in the middle of a crowd, at lunchtime in downtown Porto, and it seemed to me my steps sounded fainter and fainter, and that I’d vanish.  And no one would notice.

This was insane, and possibly an early sign I was supposed to write sf/f.  Or perhaps just insane.  But the point is that I needed others to know I existed in order to affirm my own existence.

I say this to explain that I DO understand why you’d feel you stopped existing because a whitehouse.gov tab went away.

But if your hold on your idea of yourself i so precarious that you must check a government website every morning, to make sure you still have a right to exist, you might want to read our founding documents, the declaration, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.  It should reassure you.  Sure, of course, the first is mostly magnificent poetry, and the others are the nuts and bolts of making that poetry into something solid.

I retain a bit of the seventeen year old.  I prefer the poetry:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

In our debased times, when you must be mentioned by name or you think you don’t exist, I feel compelled to note that “men” encompasses women, and children, and anything of the homo sapiens sapiens genus, including but not limited to those who are transitioning to the sixth gender of alien which uses tank pronouns.

The beauty of taking language at its root is to realize grammatically “men and the male pronoun” are different from having the genitalia of the male sex.  Very progressive of the language after all, to realize you couldn’t list every single gender, orientation and idea of self, and there was no point it it, really. This thing of taking offense at the structure of a language is a thing of “rich privilege.”  You are rich beyond the dreams of your ancestors, and you’ve come up with little hobbies.  Like claiming the language oppresses you.  We get it.  But understand that even the Founding Fathers couldn’t understand how wealthy and bored you’d be.

And their words still cover you.  Their words are what made this country.  you’re endowed with unalienable RIGHTS, rights which no government (or other person) can LEGALLY take away from you.  And we have the laws to stop them if they try.  And the people who will stand between you and any attempt to take these rights away from you.  Most of them are called army and Constitutional experts, but in the last resort there’s us, the citizens who swore fealty to that idea of unalienable rights.

Sure sometimes, for a little while, we stray from the path.  Though it’s been a while. The internment of Japanese will remain a dark blot, but notice it’s not happened again.  Yes, there’s also slavery — but the difference is this country STRIVES not to do those things, and that those words pull us towards the ideal of the founding documents. We the people have not lost our frigging mind. And if you’re going to use the times we fell short and didn’t cover ourselves with glory to scare yourself, do remember all of them were a long time ago, and generally we’ve moved away from such abuses. We have more protections than other nations, and our history shows it.

Even if the tabs on a website no one in their sane mind goes to very often no longer reaffirm your existence, you’re an American.  And that’s all the affirmation you need.  Everything is else you are is a right, based on the founding documents.

You are fortunate beyond and above the dreams of citizens of other nations.  You don’t need to be divided into groups and you can only be conquered if you allow yourself to be.

Now go on with your life.  The government can’t and won’t give you affirmation and love.  To do so it would need to oppress others not-like-you.  It can’t do that.

But you can find affirmation and love and purpose in your own life.  It’s under that “right to the pursuit of happiness” thing.  Go and pursue.

A glooming peace this morning with it brings;
The sun, for sorrow, will not show his head:
Go hence, to have more talk of these sad things;
Some shall be pardon’d, and some punished

This has been running through my head all morning, because it seems to be the mood of most people on Facebook.

It was made worse by the fact that we woke up to overcast skies, then drove to Colorado Springs, where Dan is right now at work, and I’m sitting in a coffee shop waiting for it to be time to check in to the convention hotel.  I’m attending Cosine, and if you guys want to see me, intercept me at my panels or Dan’s and we can plan stuff, because the rest of the time I’ll be in my hotel room, writing.  Because Darkship Revenge WILL BE DONE.  (Oh, yeah, and there’s my art and Robert’s in the art room, under Trouble In Mind Studio.)

Anyway, from the overcast skies at home, we hit flurries just before Monument, and the Springs are getting good and plastered with snow.

You guys know for whom I voted and why.  Or rather, you know whom I voted against and why.

I don’t buy the nonsense that the release of the emails won Trump the election, and if they had, the question is “why didn’t the press report on these emails? Or on the shenanigans behind the emails?  Or on the Clinton server scandal?” But until I see figures, I won’t believe it.  Most people aren’t even on line.  Those who are go to rather conventional sites and never heard of those emails.  Of those who heard of them, most never read them.

But I’m one of those it JUST might have put over the edge.  Mind you, my case is murky.  I was never going to vote for Hillary.  Her behavior over Benghazi (beyond setting diplomats to die/letting them die) would be enough to decide that.  She’s either malicious or not minimally competent.  (Or yes.)  And then there was teh blithering incompetence and malice of her email servers.  Look, guys, yeah, I know, she behaved like the computer-clueless grandmother.  I love my mom.  I’d never let her do anything in a computer that involved national security.  Same goes for my dad.  I don’t care about someone’s age, it’s the cyber-cluelessness that hurts.

However, everything I’d seen about Trump indicated that he was a conventional, old-style democrat, and, to quote my friend Charlie Martin “I don’t vote for democrats.”  Not since the Dems (pace Heinlein whom I’d trust against a wall of pundits and a brace of geniuses) were taken over from the inside by the communists starting in the forties.  Which means Trump isn’t “old style enough” was my conclusion.

I was going to go third party.  And then I read the emails.  It wasn’t even the corruption, oikophobia and casual malfeasance pretending to be sophistication.  No, it was that Podesta, as a member of Clinton’s inner team clearly was above reproach in his own mind.  It was clear from his tone and his attitude there was nothing he could do, up to and including eating live puppies on screen that would get reported in the media, if it was bad or even dubious.  And that —  That I couldn’t allow.

And that convinced me to put an extra strength clothespin on my nose and vote for the corrupt businessman over the corrupt politician.  Because degrees of corruption matter.

Since then my attitude has changed to “guarded optimism” in that he seems to be making the right appointments and the right moves.

And besides there is the psychological effect.  The left have lost their collective mind.  Their constitution-and-procedure ignorance is so amazing that they’ve been blaming Trump for what Obama has done, apparently under the amiable idea that the new president takes over right after the election. They have taken to complaining about Trump’s disrespect for the constitution before he does anything to show that, and after they wholeheartedly supported Mr. Pen and Phone.

And don’t get me started on the shabbies (they’re sheep, they’re babies, they’re shaaaaaabies) bleating about how Hillary won the “popular vote” and “it’s not fair” forgetting that a) there is no popular vote contest.  If there were, my friends in CA and NYC might very well have voted instead of staying home snarling “A pox on both their houses.”  b)The electoral rolls integrity of California MIGHT be as good as Chicago’s.  Maybe.  Only it’s not dead people, but illegal immigrants voting.  c) The rest of the country will NOT be ruled from California.  Just no.  Do you want a revolution? That’s how you get a revolution.

Then there are the geniuses.  Yesterday one of these said “But we’d have won the under 25 vote. If all the kids could vote.” Think on this a moment.  After 4 generations of controlling public schools, the left is telling us that after twenty five most people know they’ve been told lies.  So they’re saying they’d win the vote of children too young to know they were lied to.  They must think “stealing candy from babies” means babies are cunning and the best barometer of —  Oh, hell, I can’t even.  I’m all out of even.

Another flash of genius was the Swiss? German? Chick on FB telling us that women all over the world would be demonstrating against Trump today.

She could give us no reason to do this beyond “He’s misogynistic” (I doubt it.  The Much Married Mr. Trump clearly likes women.  Oh, yeah, but I forget that these days misogynistic means “does not swallow the cr*p from fourth wave feminists.”)  She was also unable to tell us why we should give a good goddamn what “women all over the world” think.  Considering the leaders “women all over the world” put up with, and the treatment they endure (and note they think Americans are worse off, because our snow flakes are CHAMPION whiners. Americans! We even win the loser competition.  We have the BEST losers*  * For definitions of “best” not actually found in the dictionary.)  chickie should clean her house first.  Even if she had more rational reasons to oppose Trump, she’s not here, she’s not American and we don’t actually give a f*ck what she thinks.  We kicked the English out and it wasn’t to allow the opinions of people so unconnected with ourselves as the Swiss and the Germans, not to mention the Serbians or the Indians.

This sheer amount of derangement — and really what do they think it accomplishes to lose their sh*t now before he does anything?  Even from the strategic pov this is as stupid as my cat Havey who routinely forgets how stairs work and gets “trapped” upstairs until we show him.  I mean, if they’re losing their sh*t now, what will they do when he does overstep?  And why do they think anyone will pay attention? — has forced me to defend Trump which in turn creates a psychological effect of attachment.

And yet, I remain cautiously guarded in my optimism, as should you.

Remember no matter who you voted for, the government got in.  And remember the government makes a good servant but a bad master.  Also remember we have empirical evidence that business men tend to get their lunch money stolen in the morass (and man, do they have *ss) that is DC.

Don’t start to form the misguided impression we elected a white knight sans peur et sans reproche.

What is sad is that by comparison to the opposition, Trump — Trump! — WAS a breath of fresh air.  Insofar as the democrats have a point when they scream that Hillary was the best qualified candidate ever, they are right.  She was the best qualified candidate to complete the project of turning the US into Europe light: sclerotic, strapped down by so many regulations no innovation happens, bowing down to international law, becoming “exceptional just like all the other countries are exceptional.”

Our rejection of her was the rejection of the whole blue (but really, really red) project that she’s devoted her life to.

The dogs just don’t like the food, no matter how well it’s sold.

In that spirit remember that Donald Trump is not an ideologue and grew up in a world in which being a leftist was virtue-signaling and status-signaling.

Maybe he’ll turn into the pragmatist we need.  BUT as someone raised under socialist assumptions, let me tell you that unless he’s capable of more introspection than I think he is, he’s going to do default left on at least some things.  More likely on a lot of things.  He’s also an egotist, which tends to translate  to statist when frustrated.

We earned ourselves a little breathing room, a little space to turn around the crazy train to socialism that has been running out of control for close to a 100 years.

If we work really hard now, our grandchildren might be truly free and live in a truly constitutional republic.

This is not the end, but it might be the beginning of the end for the internationalist socialist project.

Let’s hope it is.

In this glooming morning, after you get done eating your popcorn at the media reaction to the inauguration, roll up your sleeves and get to work.

Build under, build around, build over.  Minimize the reach of government into the lives of citizens at every possible opportunity.  Make sure it remembers it’s the servant, not the master.

And be not afraid.  Reality supports our assumptions, not theirs. In the end, we win, they lose.

Not me, well, not really, except that in the last three years particularly, as the wheels came off the health, almost any work was too much.

At any rate, I’m one of the lilies of the field, in that my work is not essential to continued life or civilization. Maybe.  I’m not as sure of it as I once was.

When I was young and raised in a socialist ethos, I was told the important thing was to “be good for something” i.e. to do something useful for society.  It was one of the things that kept me from even considering writing as a career.  It wasn’t “useful”.  Translating actually promoted commerce.

This is all bullsh*t more or less, because what you are compelled to do can’t be measured in utilitarian ways, and when you have a vocation, you have a vocation.  Sure, if I’d stayed in Portugal I’d probably be writing in the evenings, after work, but I’d also probably be teaching and have more time off. Maybe.

None of the paths not trodden matters, though, because here I am, where I am. And where I am is as a writer of fiction.  And I might think it’s good for nothing, except I get these letters saying I helped people through chemo, or helped them combat depression, or…  So I’m no longer sure book writing is useless and “just for fun.”  And, btw, guys, if any of you reads this blog, you’ve made me bawl like a baby when I get your emails.  One doesn’t know as one flings stories into the seemingly silent void when they hit.  Finding particularly that stories I wrote while ill or dragging or just because I’d promised were someone’s life-rope is astonishing and more than a little humbling.

As to those of you for whom Sword and Blood — aka oh, Sarah Hoyt, no (yes, I’m doing the sequels, geesh) — is your bedside book, we need to talk.  You might not be living right. (I wrote it in a deep pit of depression.)

But I came across something or other this week that made me sort of drop back in wonder and realize something: everyone still employed is overworked.  That applies to writers too, as the “still employed” is a fast-shrinking label, at least for old pros.

Sure in my case “overworked” is not by my standards, but the fact I have things stacked up into the foreseeable future because I took two years off to moving and being very ill is kind of odd, for a mere midlister.

People with more conventional jobs — my husband, my friends — on the other hand literally have more work than they can set their hands to.  A lot of them have two jobs, or are doing other things on the side.

Part of this is the socialist economy.  No, really.  What happens is that employing someone becomes so expensive you refine cost-to-work so much only the most competent stay on.

And even the competent get laid off as they get older because they’re either not as fast, or are perceived not to be as fast.

What this means is that the people still employed are all — every one I know, at least — shouldering the work of three, while the other two are unemployed and can’t get in.

And we’re not talking massive differences in efficiency (sometimes it’s just luck) just that when you pile on required benefits and protections for workers (all in the best intentions) you make it impossible for the businesses to keep on even “slightly maybe less effective” workers.

My best friend from childhood married a French man, and the last time I talked to her we had a political disagreement.  Must have been 12? years ago.  (Yeah, I miss her.) You see, her son was demonstrating against new French laws that made it easier to fire someone. While he was unemployed, as were most youth.  They were unemployed because the French companies couldn’t fire people who weren’t any good, not once they’d got in.

The kid viewed it as the protections he’d have once he got in.  But of course, what such a policy of “can’t be fired” did what our tenure does.  People would work hard at internships or whatever, but when they were hired they could relax.  Which explains the vibrant French economy.  Never mind.

The thing is that these rule for “protecting workers” sound good.  Minimum wage is a lovely idea, particularly when you’re young and stupid and think you’ll never rise above it.  But you don’t see the other end, where with minimum wage and mandated benefits, you’re costing that employer $30 an hour for…  well… if you’re only worth “minimum wage” are you worth $30?  Or will they just hire one person instead of three, and make that one do the work of three?

Much of the much ballyhooed ‘end of work’ is based on the idea that people are now permanently unemployed because of the increase in automation and blah blah blah.  And it’s stupid.  No, guys, listen, it’s rock bottom stupid.

Not only isn’t our automation that advanced — it’s not, you know? — but even in things where machines made us much more efficient, there wasn’t a real drop in positions.  Not from that.  I mean, I started work when everyone who was anyone had a secretary, though junior members of a company might share one.  They were needed because no executive could type.  I taught myself to type so I could write faster, but seriously, no one would teach me, because “you’ll have a secretary.”

Ironically I tried to get a job as a secretary in the US, and what held me back was the lack of short hand.  (I was stupid and never demanded they test me.  I could write at the rate college professors talked, so I probably could have done it, in my own horrible handwriting, but fast enough.) Who even does short hand now? And where are all those unemployed secretaries?

Computers genuinely displaced a lot of the work secretaries do, so how come there aren’t despondent secretaries roaming the streets?

Well computers also increased communications, and video conferences, and allowed people to work faster, which means they need executive assistants to do different work, like scheduling and organizing, and screening emails.  But they are still there.

That’s the nature of automation.  It changes what you do.  It makes you more efficient.  It allows you to try a different angle.

Unemployment is not the result of automation or efficiency.  Sure, each wave of automation and different technology hurt people.  And some were too old to change/adapt.

But most of them, in the prime working age, just adapt, change.

The permanently unemployed?  those are victims of socialism whose (well intended?) mandates make it impossible to hire anyone who isn’t working at peak efficiency and doing the work of three (at least) people.

This means you only get employed in your prime working years, btw, and anyone who is older, or has health issues gets sidelined.  And don’t ask me how we’re supposed to train the young if we can’t hire them short of peak efficiency.  Unpaid internships, I guess.

The funny thing is that those peculiarities get blamed on the heartlessness of capitalism.

The other funny thing is that being that overworked burns you out fast, which means Atlas is shrugging with increasing frequency and at increasingly early ages.  Fatigue, illness, aging…  No one is a machine.

And the people who would have followed? Well, they never got that beginner job when they were at less than peak efficiency.

Worse, as people find themselves unable to break into the working world or flung out at an early age, they get scared and demand more and more protections and more and more help.  Which burdens the few still working even more.

What can’t go on won’t, but there’s a lot of ruin in a country.  Western Europe has been playing this tune for a good 30 years.  Don’t look down.  It’s a long, long way to fall.

Or we can be Americans.  We can step off, we can go around, we can build over, build around, build under.

We can make use of real efficiencies, of real innovation, to do our job better and in a different way.

I have a suspicion the only way to circumvent this is a future of entrepeneurs and contractors.  Which is scary when you can see the wrong side of fifty within spitting distance.

Even in publishing, where we’ve always been contractors, I’m looking at indie and thinking I have to find time to do that TOO because well… it paid me double what my traditional books did, and besides it’s… it’s safer to have the belt and suspenders. The last two years of peak INefficiency scared me, and showed me how quickly a traditional career can die.  (Thank heavens for bestselling friends and  collaborations.)  But indie careers are never dead.  You can always revive them with a new book.

And for the rest of you, I suspect there are other paths you can take too.  If you look.  In your particularly situation.  (I know of a few of them.)

Yes, this means working even harder when you’re already overworked.  Yes, it means the horribly scary prospect of braving entrepreneurship  (even for writers.  Witchfinder scared me so much I delayed publishing it for six months.) But it means you can’t be flung off and discarded.  And it means that the ridiculous laws that are supposed to take care of you, but are really killing commerce and so by extension you, will become moot.  No one can demand you give yourself minimum wage. They can, alas, demand you guy yourself health insurance and pay both sides of social security.  BUT it’s still different, when you’re working for yourself.

We’re overworked and tired.  We’re sidelined or pushed.  But we must shamble into the future.

Build your path as you go.  Be not afraid.

There’ll be pie in the sky by and by.  To get there you just have to walk through fire.

I Don’t Agree With What You Say, But I Will Defend To The Death Your Right To Say It – A Lawyer’s Riff On The First Amendment. – Amie Gibbons

First thing’s first, basic disclaimer, because lawyers all so used to the legal world that we just assume people are waiting to sue us: These are all opinions and what we call “black letter law,” as in simplified and pretty set concepts, and none of this is to be taken as legal advice, merely the pontification of a lawyer who likes the sound of her own writing. You want legal advice? Go hire a lawyer.

This week is a damn good one for a post on the First Amendment, and it’s not just because I’m doing a blog tour to promote my new book.

We all know what is happening Friday, what will probably happen all over social media and in big cities across the country, and what has been happening the past year or so whenever we open our mouths.

I’m not going to say it’s just the special snowflakes on the left coming out of the woodwork and bashing everyone right of Lenin who are the problem, because I’m sure there are people like that on the more conservative side, but the snowflakes are the ones I’ve run in to so that’s mostly what I’ll be referencing.

And if I come off as condescending in this post, that’s directed towards the snowflakes who have been pissing me off lately, not at you, the reader. If you are a snowflake, you have it coming.

Okay, groundwork… and fairly roundabout groundwork at that, laid, now onto the Constitution.

The First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

First off, the Constitution does not apply to dealings between individuals. It is only applicable to the government dealing with others. So when you post your beliefs on Facebook and the snowflake blasts you, reports you, or blocks you, he’s not violating your rights. He’s just an intolerant ass. When Facebook and Twitter ban conservatives, it’s not a violation of their First Amendment rights. There could be a discrimination argument there, which is based in laws passed by Congress, not the Constitution itself.

(Yes, there is a difference. Congress can pass laws to protect people from others, but when they do, they have to make sure they are within their powers delineated in the Constitution.)

This also extends to employers. If you post something on social media and your employer sees it and fires you over it, it’s not a Constitutional issue unless your employer is the government. Now, this isn’t to say there’s not a legal issue, there could be something covered in employment laws (that whole Congress passes laws thing), but it is not the First Amendment.

So when the snowflakes go off on social media, in articles or, I don’t know, on stage at an awards show, yes, that is protected by the First Amendment, and all of us telling them to shut the f#*k up and go back to work is as well.

This is the main issue I’ve seen pop up on social media the past week. People keep invoking the first amendment when it comes to celebs shooting their mouths off or people getting into fights on Facebook, but none of that actually involves the First Amendment (unless you say the government couldn’t stop her from saying it). A celebrity voicing her opinion at an awards show with millions of viewers is distasteful, arrogant and stupid, and could get her in trouble with the network, but her saying it was protected by the First Amendment only to the extent that the government couldn’t stop her. Most of the time, when I see people talking about that, they’re saying something along the lines of people should stop bashing her for saying it since it was protected by the First Amendment.

Hahahahaha. No. You can be as pissed off as you want and call her whatever names you want and the First Amendment isn’t going to stop you. For some reason, the snowflakes have gotten it into their heads that the First Amendment is there to shut up people when they bash others for what they say.

Let’s get one thing clear. The First Amendment, and the Constitution in general, is there to restrict the government’s powers. It is not there to restrain the individual!

This may be a pet peeve of mine.

That is the beauty of free speech in America. No matter what the snowflakes keep trying to shove down our throats, free speech applies to all, even if you don’t like what the other side is saying, and it is not meant to be used to shut up the other side, even if they’re telling you to shut up.

Yep, someone telling you to shut up does not infringe your First Amendment rights.

This doesn’t mean there aren’t limits to these rights. There are. But they have to be very narrowly drawn and there has to be a good reason for them.

The basic example is you can’t falsely yell fire in a crowded theater. Not because this would be annoying or offensive, but because it would incite panic and cause a dangerous situation.

This is from a real court case, Schenck v. United States, where the Supreme Court ruled that the first amendment does not protect “dangerous speech.” In Schenck, the court ruled that language that was a “clear and present danger” was not protected when Schenck was passing out flyers urging people to resist the draft in WWI. The actual Schenck case was later overruled, and the “clear and present danger” standard was ruled to be an insufficient reason for restricting the First Amendment. It was replaced with the standard that speech had to do more than merely encouraging lawless behavior, it had to “incite imminent lawless action.”

So the people calling for trouble at the Inauguration on Friday are actually protected by the First Amendment, up to a certain extent. In very general terms, someone can post on Facebook that the president should be shot or they hope he is, but doing something that would count as actually inciting it wouldn’t be. What would count as inciting? Well, that depends.

By the way, it depends is every lawyer’s favorite answer. Courts in cases draw lines here and there around specifics to say what is or is not allowed, but so much has to do with context that outside of extensive research, I could not give a more specific example without risking giving too specific of legal advice that could get me in trouble if anyone followed it. If you rile up a crowd and get them to riot, that probably would not be protected. If you pay people to riot, that’s really not protected.

Which brings us to another part of the First Amendment.

“…the right of the people peaceably to assemble.”

This one actually is not as complicated as the media makes it sound. See, there’s this one little word in there that draws a nice line.

Peaceably!

We the people have the right to protest, not to riot. The second people start breaking the laws, as in attacking people, burning shit down, and looting, no, not protected by the First Amendment. And protesting on private property, no, not protected.

The laymen pretending to be lawyers on social media also may say the protests have the right to restrict traffic because it’s peaceful. Like when students park their asses in the middle of a busy street. No, they’re wrong, that’s not protected.

Yeah, let me say that again, when there is a peaceful protest, no, they do not have the right to interfere with/break laws, and that includes traffic laws. So those dumb kids from the private and very expensive university who decide they aren’t going to let any cars through the busy intersection during rush hour because their (queue the tears) candidate didn’t win, are actually breaking the law.

Now here’s the kicker, just because they break the law, doesn’t mean the cops are going to do anything about it.

Yeah. Let that sink in.

The cops can choose to not enforce the law and just let the brats throw their temper tantrum at the expense of everyone who actually work for a living and are just trying to get home.

So why? Why would they indulge these selfish children? Honestly, I can’t say for sure. I’d arrest their spoiled, useless asses and toss them in the brig till mommy and daddy sprang them. The best I can guess is the brats are louder and messier than the professionals going home from work and it’s just easier to let the brats scream because the pissed off professionals are too busy with lives to get back at the city for letting the interference happen.

And that’s the heart of the problem with dealing with these antics. The group of snowflakes screaming are loud and difficult and can make your life hell because they have nothing better to do, and the adults they’re pissing off and inconveniencing do.

So what do we do? Bend over and take it because we’re adults and you couldn’t pay us to throw temper tantrums in the streets because we have that little thing most of my generation has tossed aside called pride?

Of course not. This is what we do. We handle it like adults. We go around the roadblocks, we vote in local leaders who will give the kids a much needed spanking, we write to the masses to get them to see our side and not just the narrative that’s been shoved down their throat like… sorry, not that kind of blog.

One of the ways we get around the leftists and encourage people to explore differing views and actually think is by making our own art. And here is my not so subtle push of my new book, Psychic Undercover (with the Undead). Psychic Ariana with the FBI has to go uncover as a singer at a club to catch a serial killer… but things get complicated when it turns out it’s a vamp club.

Of Despair, Hope, and Climbing Paths- A Blast from the Past from September 2014

 

It’s not a secret to anyone that I’m of a depressive turn of mind. This does not mean I’m depressed – at least not right now – but that when faced with a stress, my mind tends to head down towards depression. When faced with a question of guilt, I tend to blame myself.

Now I hear you clucking and saying something about medicines for that. Of course there are.

But here is something our overly therapeutic age misses: guilt and fear of being terrible have a purpose.

I’m not going to link the book, because I think it would bring on us the mother of all trollings, but those of you who are on Sarah’s Diner on Facebook know EXACTLY what I’m talking about.

There is a man who wrote a book that he claims he’s been writing both since 75 and for twenty years. (We didn’t ask what year it is in his world, so it’s our fault.) He painted the cover himself, and the drawing isn’t bad for a 12 year old or so.

Anyway, he thinks the book is the best thing since sliced bread. You see, it’s not about one of them troubled teenagers. It’s about a good girl who does everything right. He thinks this puts it on a par with several greats of literature (though how he got there, since the greats of literature all write characters with flaws and the ones he mentioned surely didn’t write about good girls, is beyond me.) His book is so much better than all that trash featuring vampires and werewolves, because those are unimaginative. His is the first time that story got told. And it should be assigned to every high school student.

If you’re already seeing the several threads of delusion there, it gets worse. Though a lot of the comments made about his grammar do not in fact make any sense (and enlightened for me why so many people think that all indie books are full of grammar errors. It’s because they learned grammar on Mars or something) some are spot on. He certainly has typos. But beyond all that, his stuff is stilted and weird, impossible to follow and there’s no narrative line to attach to.

And then he put his magnum opus out. And waited for praise, accolades the Novel [sic] prize and the Oscar [?] to just roll in.

What he got instead was a whole bunch of people pointing and laughing. And he can’t understand it, because after all, his book is the most original, most uplifting, most everything EVAH. So these people must be jealous of his brilliance.

Some of the Huns had great fun baiting him in the comments, but here’s the thing: I could grin at their comments (and his behavior is horrible enough to make one want to hit him) but I also felt that little cringe one feels when one sees a bit of oneself in a crazy person.

Because I started out like that. Oh, not under the impression what I was writing was so original or that everyone who writes vampires and werewolves is “unimaginative.” I’d read way too much for that. (Which I think Mr. Original hasn’t.)

But I started out writing things that had no discernible plot, characters only I could love, and ham-fisted prose. [Okay, the last one was not so much “started out” as “last week”.]

I got rejected.

And then because I don’t have a healthy self-esteem (or much self-esteem at all, really, though the audience is helping me) I bought a bunch of books on how to do it, and I started analyzing it.

So, I couldn’t just self publish them, and yeah, that’s a difference. BUT I suspect if I had self-published and no one bought, and I’d got awful comments (except given what I was writing at the time it would probably sell on kink. Aliens. No I’m not telling.) the process would have been the same.

Because my idea of myself is not diamond-hardened and fire proof, I’d have gone “Oh.” And I’d have considered the idea that maybe my stuff really did suck and I only didn’t see it because it was mine. And then I’d have got the books/followed the same road.

So, to an extent, this depressive turn of mind, and this self doubt serve a purpose. The reason I run so hard is that me is following me, and I know the b*tch. If she catches up to me with all her doubts and insecurities, I’m going down for the count.

But sometimes she does catch me. And that’s an issue too.

My books take an average of two weeks to actually write – active writing time. In between there is a needed silence of two weeks to a month. The “battery recharging/ideation” time.

So how come I average two books a year (and some years I write six?) Well that’s the silences that aren’t necessary.

This is going to sound completely crazy considering I make a living at this, but I go through entire months of being convinced everything I ever write is drek. And then I can’t write at all. Extracting words from my mind becomes sort of like passing a novel out through a narrow crack in a wall, in papers the size of fortune cookie fortunes.

I could do without those silences. I could do without the fears so bottomless that I will accept any suggestion/criticism, no matter how ridiculous. I’ve learned over the years to do nothing to past works when I’m in this mood, and certainly not to read reviews/comments. Because if I read them at that time and then go and change my work, I will kill it. At best, I make it into soup without direction as I try to be all things to all people. At worst… You don’t want to know.

Now imagine someone with this turn of mind and the years of apprenticeship required to write something halfway decent. (I think I achieved that last week!)

Don’t nobody call no ambulance (yes, the grammar is intentional. Yes, I know. Nails on chalkboard) because it’s been years since this happened – but sometimes I felt I was spiraling down, with each level of shame/guilt worse, and constant memories of every humiliating/stupid mistake I’d made, to the point where often the only thing keeping me from committing suicide was knowing I had kids, and a duty to them.

It occurs to me that most of you are more of my stamp than of Mr. Greatest Thing Ever Written and You’re All Envious Hacks. And also that even for those who aren’t writers, these are tough times.

Not only are many of us struggling to make ends meet in Summer of (no) Recovery Six, but technological change is doing to the texture of our everyday life what hormones do to a pre-teen boy just before the jump.

You know the change is needed and largely beneficial, but we’re not a teen boy, and we don’t know where it leads. Everything is changing, and we’re caught in the middle of it. Unlike our “elites” we aren’t trying to take the world back (way back. Into feudalism) to where we feel more comfortable. But we do get scared and confused and wonder if what we’re doing is really for the best, like a beginner writer caught between two ways of writing and not sure which one is best (since it’s not just what he likes.)

In both cases: be good to yourself. Do the best you can. Few things in life are permanent. If what you are trying proves wrong, try something else.

And yeah, most of us have been tightening and tightening and tightening and cutting out all entertainment. And no, it’s not by choice.

But here is a suggestion: let that belt out a little bit. Shop advisedly. Buy bang for the buck. Amazon Prime furnishes us with a never-end of free movies and tv series, for instance. They’re a little old, but hey, we don’t have cable (expensive) so they’re new to us. And I’ve just joined Kindle Unlimited Lending Library. Now I know they pay a little less to writers, unless the story is 2.99 or under but here’s the thing: with it I read more than I could otherwise. So I don’t feel too bad for my fellow writers. $2 or so is better than what I would pay them otherwise (nothing, pretty much) and it allows me to read back up to the levels I like.

We also got a zoo membership and a membership to a couple of museums. These are expensive, relatively, but they give us a chance to run away every time things get to be too much. Weirdly, my family (each working three jobs or so) hits that wall at the same time. Most weekends we’ll all be working, catching up on things, maybe stopping for a movie in the evening (though not often.) And then one Sunday, usually dark and dreary with snow on the ground, we all go “this just isn’t working. I’m not getting anything done. Let’s go to—” And at that time it’s good to think “sure” and not “Do we have the money.” (Besides, when you have four people, one entry to a museum for all of us is half a year’s membership.)

That usually keeps the worst of depression away, while you’re working and don’t see an end in sight, and aren’t sure you are any good or will ever get anywhere.

When it doesn’t…

We humans are tormented/followed by the idea that our life must have a purpose. What I mean is, even the most irreligious of humans feels that he must be here for some reason.

Last week I posted the free book by James Owen, which I really do think is a wonderful pick me up if you’re trolling the depths. A couple of hours later, I had a thank you in my email. One of you – not a commenter, but a reader here – thanked me, because he’d been spiraling down the pit of hopelessness and trying not to think of doing away with himself. The book came just at the right time, and it stopped the spiral.

And suddenly I thought “Wow. What if my entire life, everything I’ve done, everything I am, was just for that purpose? To give a man a rope as he was slipping down the slope?”

Then I remembered an Agatha Christie story (in her bio) which I now don’t remember if it was a family thing or something that was told to her (I know she used it in a short story, later on) of someone who goes out to a cliff intending to throw himself down. Only there’s a woman there, sitting and looking out at the sea. And he can’t kill himself in front of someone. So he doesn’t. He goes back to life and it gets better.

I don’t remember how she explained it, but the thing is that the woman was also there, contemplating ending it all, and then (she somehow finds out what happened) she realizes if she’d killed herself before he arrived, he’d have been lost.

What I’m trying to say is even if your purpose in life is to just sit there at the right time and the right place (or if you don’t believe in purpose, your usefulness) there is something only you can do. It might be what you intend to do or it might be an entire accident (Glenn Reynolds, asked how he became instapundit “Like most things in my life, it happened by accident.”) But just by being here, you can become a lifesaver, and the life you save might change the world for the better.

In the same way, just by trying the best you can – at writing or life or whatever – you can sometimes become extraordinary. Perhaps most times. Yes, there is survivor bias in stories of “I tried, and I succeeded” but perhaps the arrow goes the other way. Perhaps if you really try, and are willing to admit you’re not perfect and to see clearly, you mostly succeed.

It’s just most people don’t. Because either absolute self confidence or its lack (yes, even that) are in a way far more comfortable.

But if you neither leap into the abyss, nor stand there frozen at its edge, telling yourself there is no abyss, if you learn the paths down and up the cliff, and if you lend a hand to those on the same road… perhaps, just perhaps that black cliff can become an enchanted cove where many find solace and life.

It’s worth a try.

Yep, you guessed it, Darkship Revenge isn’t done yet.  I can honestly say it’s taking me the longest on the “snip and integrate” pass, something I honestly don’t even do on most of my books, or at least only minimally.

It’s not just the moves, really, it’s the fact that this book has a cast of dozens, too, and I’m juggling at least five subplots all through the eyes/mind of a woman who doesn’t even know about them in the beginning.  It’s not impossible.  I’m not the sad naif with no more craft than talent who once tried to juggle a revolution with a cast of thousands (a book that will need to be rewritten sometime and put out, but probably not this year.)

And I’m starting to see the end, but the book finished short and I know where those last 20k words go and what happened and I’ve got the betrayal scene all wrong.

Part of the reason I think this book is so different is that it’s about children and parents.  Motherhood, mostly, and what a mother is.  For various reasons that’s a difficult subject for me, not the least because I had no clue what I was doing as a mother and because I never expected (I wanted to, but never expected) to be one, I had no preconceived ideas.

I ended up being the sort of goofy mom who would build railways with younger son all over the house, and play rousing games of aliens versus dinosaurs in world war two with him until he was sixteen or so.  (The dinosaurs were on the allied side.  As one knows.)

And Robert, being the older, just got integrated in “things mom does.”  Which included an unnatural knowledge of the hardware store, and knowing how to build a balcony by the time he was 13.

Which doesn’t mean I don’t have traditional domestic virtues, and the kids learned that too: cooking, cleaning, which means when they each went out on their own, they were pretty good at it.

From Dan they learned computers, programs, and a goofy interest in really corny movies.  (The younger one.  The older one learned to roll his eyes early.)

From the cats they learned bonelessness and snuggling.  I think.  Though Robert claims he learned cursing from Petronius the Arbiter (first cat ever) and bravery from Pixel Who-Walked-through Walls (Best cat ever.)

It’s possible.

The thing is I was never very good at “roles.”  For various reasons, but really mostly because I couldn’t compete with my mom (she didn’t take female competition very well.  Most of my attempts at doing things that were in her domain got the stuff taken out of my hands and me screamed at.  Yeah, openly it was because she couldn’t see me struggling with it and didn’t remember her own learning time, but mostly I think is that mom really didn’t like female competition.  She was still comparing my looks and feminine demeanor unfavorably to hers when I was in my twenties.  This went along with the “no man will want you” which in turn is why I never expected to be a mother.) I grew up more like a boy than like a girl.  I spent one summer assembling a radio from old parts of various other radios; an earlier summer was devoted to making rubber band powered cars (from matchboxes, which were made of balsa wood.)

Mostly I spent time inside my own head, which means I was completely detached from my body and what my external form gave people the impression I was or should be.  I think, from pictures, that my look was the “innocent baby doll” which considering I spent time in my own head building a detailed empire which put the Game of Thrones to shame (except that I didn’t kill for the hell of it.  I’m not 2016 or GRRM) always seemed weirdly at odds.  I was virtually impossible to shock, but I sure didn’t look like that.

In college I tried to be more “present.”  I’ve since realized, from reading other people’s biographies, that I used my imagination like other people use drugs.  I would withdraw into it and be somewhere completely different.  I think it was my Junior year in high school I realized this was a problem because I wasn’t really living, and limited the daydreams to morning and evening.  Tried to.  It was a process. Then I became an exchange student and tried to be really there, and tried to be normal.  Anyway, in college I found a good way not to be absolutely terrified to be out in public was to have “war clothes” and war paint.  For some reason most of the time (not always.  Sometimes I was very eighties) this consisted of thirties-style clothing, including silk lace stockings and stilettos, and hobble skirts.  Those of you who met my older son: he comes by it naturally, even though he never knew of my retro-style years.  Something there is in the genes that codes for the thirties? Who knew?

Though I dated — and got engaged — before, I never really expected to get married, and Dan’s and mine was sort of a whirlwind romance which grabbed me and threw me accross the ocean before I could stop myself.  Which was good, because despite my love for the US marrying Dan meant being utterly irresponsible for the first time in my life.  It meant leaving behind my family, their network of connections, but more importantly rendering my training irrelevant.

In Portugal, with seven languages, four of them fluent, and a college degree, I could have written my own ticket.  (Heck, a friend who never made college, with just semi-fluent English got a job escorting executives around Porto when they had to visit town.  Yes, we made jokes about her being an escort.  No, I’m almost sure that’s not what she was doing.  The almost part came from the fact that she didn’t… uh… she wasn’t the most chaste of women.  But at any rate, I’m sure it wasn’t part of the job description or expectations.)

In the US languages aren’t very useful.  The world speaks English.  And there was no internet for hooking up with freelance work, piecemeal.  There were three or four full time translator jobs that opened a year in the US, but you sort of needed connections (of the “went to school with you” type) to get them.  I had no connections and no job experience in the US.

Yes, once the world stopped spinning, the idea was that I would write.  But I was home all day and Dan was running the beginning-programmer gauntlet of 16 hour days and more during crunch.  Which meant mostly most of the time what I could do was cook and clean.  So I became a little obsessive about it, in a justify-my-existence type of way.

And when we had the boys, even if Dan was mostly mommy and daddy to Robert the first six months (because I was very ill and he was unemployed) after a while child care defaulted to me, without a blueprint.  In retrospect I obsessed about all the wrong things, like REALLY clean FLOORS. And carrot cake.  Because if I finished a chapter people said “Oh, good then.” BUT carrot cake got me enthusiastic grins.

We sort of fell into traditional roles because of our relative occupations.  I’m still — though doing better at it now the boys are grown and mostly moved out (yes, the older is in the basement, but it’s his apartment, not really our house) — struggling with the idea that writing is a real occupation, and that I’m not ALSO required to do all the house work and keep a spotless house, even on deadline.

I’ve since found this is not so much a “feminine” thing — falling into the housekeeping role — as a writer thing.  The writer in the house normally cooks and cleans, because he or she is there all the time, and their spouse is often out, earning the “regular” part of their living.

If you look back far enough our whole idea of the domestic role being feminine comes from women staying in the house and doing the tedious every day work, because they can bear children (and a pregnant woman can’t run for miles) and they’re weaker, relatively.  Men had the outdoor dangerous, difficult, unpleasant and often lethal work (I love how we talk about the historical oppression of women because we had to stay inside and do the boring, soft (relatively) work.  The  case could be made that women oppressed men throughout history by making them go out to war, or hunt, or protect them.  It’s only that for whatever reason feminism values male role over female.  I’m not going to pursue the rabbit hole as “feminism is a projection of women’s mysogyny. But a case could be made.  More easily than for the oppression of women, in fact.  Of course a case most of all can be made for contemporary intellectuals shutting their mouths about a past they haven’t lived and don’t understand.  In many things, really.)

In our case we fell into a very traditional role, but it was really “What can I do” which is why I ended up doing most of the remodelling on the two Victorians we lived in and fixed while living in.  Because I could.  (Dan did plumbing and electricity because though I could figure it out, I don’t like it.)

And away from mom’s eyes, I did an awful lot of sewing.  Taught myself.  Because we bought clothes at thrift stores that needed to be altered for the boys.  Or I made myself dresses because nothing fit and I couldn’t afford the store prices.

Only I spent a lot of the time feeling guilty about cooking and cleaning and sewing because my school-upbringing had taught me it was a mark of oppression.  Just like my family upbringing had taught me I wasn’t good at it and shouldn’t even try.

In restrospect that seems completely insane.  they were chores that needed doing, and I could do them.  What is there of more oppressive about them than, say, with my refinishing the thrift store furniture we bought?  In retrospect all that is crazy cakes.

I’ve settled into just being me.  Sometimes I cook elaborate meals (usually when both boys are here for dinner) and I don’t feel particularly opressed or feminine.  I just feel I want to show the boys love.  And most of the time I’m the one who cooks, though I suspect when we are really just the two of us alone, that will dwindle to maybe once a week, because we can get take out or grab a salad.

The elaborate almos tdaily meals are an expression of being a family of more than two, of getting together.  Perhaps in my somewhat damaged psyche, it’s easier to say “I love you” with food. This probably explains all of our weights.  (“Mom couldn’t say she loved me, so she baked me carrot cake.”  My husband says that both of us, growing up, displaced “I want to be loved” to “I want chocolate cake.”  Eh. And we’ve lived on diets most of our lives.  Don’t go there.)

In Revenge I find myself struggling with that, because Athena just became a mother, and she’s growing into being a mother in other ways too, as there are feral children who fall under her sway.  So she finds herself doing a lot of the feminine tasks.  Not cooking.  I don’t think she knows how (never asked) but just about everything else.  Partly because she’s not a biologist, which is what they need, partly because she has to watch the baby because her baby was already kidnapped once, so she tends to have Eris (yeah, I know.  Don’t blame me.) with her ALL the time.  Which limits what else she can do.

The conclusion she’s coming to is that she’s doing these things because love seeks an expression.  And the idea is as weird to her as it was to me, as I came to realize it, as the boys grew up.  “Because I can, and because I love them” is an still small voice with which to beat back the years of “female work is oppression.”  But it was all I had, and by and large it worked.  It seems to be working for Athena too.

None of which is nearly as difficult or as funny as writing Athena trying to teach morals and why we shouldn’t just kill babies to a feral young man.  Because Athena herself doesn’t have what you’d call a moral structure.  It’s sad and pathetic and funny and tear inducing all at once.  or it was for me.

Not to give you the impression the book is a delicate bildungsroman devoted to interior development and feelings.  I mean, it is that, but it opens with a battle and has explosions and the part I need to write which is missing, and which caps the emotional development is an all out raid, with fighting in tight spaces, explosions, sabbotage and deaths.

But that’s because I am who I am.

And I’m okay with that, domestic virtues, carpentry and all.  They’re all me.

And now me is going to drag her behind back to the work computer and go (G-d willing, please?) finish that novel.

 

Sorry guys, I did not close the book last night (mostly because I got in a fascinating biological talk about the research for it with older son.  SORRY.)  So today I’m working.

If you want to amuse me, and keep yourselves busy so you don’t blow up the world, I’m running low on “You might be a writer if….” jokes.  We used to have tons of them when I had a writers’ group, and it made great impromptu posters, but I can’t think of any now.

I’ll give one: You might be a writer if you spin up a “Zombie Nazi Sharks On a Plane” concept as a joke, and then realize you have three main characters in your head and the sharks are named Adolph, Hermann, Joachim and Cuddles.

Head>desk.