Category: Uncategorized

Excerpt from

Division One book 1,

Alpha and Omega – by Stephanie Osborn

* * *

* * *

“I don’t get it,” said Romeo from his seat in the training observation room. “Y’all didn’t put ME through all this testing crap. Creativity testing and obstacle courses and puzzles an’ junk. I know we’re shorthanded an’ all, but…what gives? It’d be way simpler an’ quicker to just put her through the old testing.”

“We’re getting ready to start up a new department,” answered Fox, across the small conference table from Romeo; next to the younger agent sat his new partner, India. “Echo’s already agreed to head it up, while you were laid up with the leg. Good to see you off the crutches, by the way.”

“Damn good to be off ‘em. Still hobblin’ around a little, but that’ll go away eventually; ‘s why I’m keepin’ a cane handy for a while. So tell me about this new department. If you can, yet.”

“I can. It’ll be a kind of combination SWAT team and commando unit. Teams from this department will take the point whenever we have the really dangerous situations—the interstellar terrorists, the galactic invasions, things like that. We think, with her background, she may have what it takes to make it in this department. We sure as hell can’t send her back where she came from. She seems intrigued by the idea, at least. And no family complications to worry about. Single, only child, birth family gone in a car accident.”

“But, Fox, what if she can’t hang?”

“I don’t know yet, Romeo. We’ll cross that bridge—”

“We won’t have to,” interrupted Echo, coming into the testing observation room and moving past the table around which the others were seated, directly to the observing window. “She’ll make it.”

“But how do you know?” asked Romeo. “‘Got a feeling’?”

“Yup. Same one I had about you, junior.”

“WELL, the lady’ll hang, then.” Romeo sat back in his chair, satisfied.

“Damn,” muttered India.

Echo shot her a hard look, then returned his attention to the observation window overlooking the course.

“Have we started yet?”

“No,” Fox answered. “We’re still getting set up. And we were waiting for you.”

“I’m here. Let’s get rolling.”

“Done.” Fox hit a button on an adjacent control console.

Romeo, Echo, and India watched as the observation window, as well as a hooded monitor on the command console, showed several aliens of various types entering the obstacle course. Romeo gasped as he recognized a Betelgeusian giant arachnoid, possessing, by his estimate, a good fourteen-or fifteen-foot leg span—accompanied by several Division One agents sporting flamethrowers, lasers, blasters, and disintegrator rifles, entering the course. Two heavily-armed guards in black armor moved into position at the entrance. Romeo and India noticed then, with a shock, that they were FACING the course, as if the concern was from something inside.

“Hope she’s not afraid of spiders,” Echo remarked offhandedly.

“Hope she’s not afraid of death,” Romeo murmured to India. “Shit.”

* * *

Megan came into the observation room just then. She was wearing black workout leggings and sports-bra top, but the rest of her attire was somewhat odd: menswear-style black lace-up dress shoes, a black tie, a dress leather belt, and a pair of the special goggles-cum-sunglasses strapped to one hip. An unusual device, like a large plastic bangle bracelet, was fastened around her right ankle. Sensors attached to her head and torso connected to a small transmitter pack on her back. Echo met her and led her to the command console.

“All right, Megan,” Fox began, waving a hand at the view in the monitor, which now only depicted a door and two guards, “this is the obstacle course. When you go through that door,” he pointed to the image of the guarded door on the monitor, “you will enter the first of a series of six rooms, each of which has various…impediments…to your progress. Your objective is simply to reach the exit of room six as quickly as possible. The tracking device on your ankle will enable us to monitor your progress. You may make use of anything on your person, as well as anything you find along the course. In addition, you may select from one—and only one—of the items on this side table.”

Megan eyed the monitor display in detail before Fox led her over to the table. On it was an eclectic collection of items: a Phillips-head screwdriver, a small glass bottle, a pair of wire cutters, a coil of rope, a pen knife, a jar of cheese spread, a pocket-sized Winchester & Tesla Mark II death ray, a packet of facial tissues, and a chocolate bar.

Megan was in no rush. She scanned the table carefully, considering, as the four Division One agents watched. She looked herself up and down, fingering the items she already carried. Echo watched as she flipped over the tie and checked to see what was on the label. He smiled inwardly, pleased as he followed her mental processes, realizing he understood how she thought. Finally she reached out, picked up the pen knife, and clipped it to the belt at her waist.

Echo raised an eyebrow in carefully-hidden surprise and looked at Fox, who returned his gaze unemotionally. Romeo and India watched the whole scene in amazement.

“Ready, then?” Fox asked Megan.

“As I’ll ever be.”

“All right. Follow me.”

As Fox led Megan out, Echo turned to the console, put on a headset, and began entering commands. Romeo and India walked up to the observation window, and Echo hit a button. Blast shutters on the window began to close.

“Sorry, kids. Can’t watch this one; you’ll have to go through this yourselves soon enough.”

“Oh, joy,” India muttered.

“You can monitor her progress on this schematic.” Echo hit another sequence of commands, and a panel opened on the wall. It showed the layout of six variously-shaped, interconnected rooms, a number on each room.

“How are you gonna evaluate her if you can’t see what she’s doing?” Romeo asked him, as he and India sat back down at the table, across from the schematic.

“I didn’t say Fox and I couldn’t watch. I’ve been through it. You haven’t. Yet.”

Fox re-entered the room. “She’s ready, Echo.”

“All right, then.” Echo handed Fox another headset, then keyed the microphone switch. “Megan? GO!”

* * *

The door opened, but Megan was in no hurry to charge through it. Any obstacle course that had a funky-looking little weapon like that strange pocket-sized ray gun as one of the equipment options was not one into which she intended to go running headlong. Let alone the armed guards stationed around it. So she eased around the left side of the doorframe, surveying the room from the threshold.

How odd, she thought, as she scanned the room; it looks like an ordinary study: hardwood floors, bookcases lining the walls, cozy fireplace on the far side, with a wing chair and decorative wrought iron side table next to it.

A heavy walnut desk with granite top stood in the center; a lamp and crystal decanter sat on one corner. Waterford crystal, it looks like. An EXPENSIVE study, then.

The door into the next room was in the far wall, to the right of the fireplace.

She stepped forward into the room.

* * *

Romeo and India watched the display as the first block lit up with a big red ‘1.’ Echo and Fox leaned together over the screened closed-circuit monitor.

“She’s in,” Echo observed.

“Aaannd the timers have started,” Fox noted. “Both of ‘em.”

India and Romeo exchanged glances…and thoughts. BOTH of ‘em?

* * *

Megan had taken no more than two steps into the room when she heard a faint, almost inaudible click off to the left. Quickly spinning, she saw bookcase holograms fade away to reveal a blank wall with horizontal slits halfway up. Oh shit, she had just time to think. She dropped flat on the floor as a flurry of projectiles whistled through the space she had occupied fractions of a second before.

Suddenly the fireplace roared, belching a tongue of flame into the room. She rolled to her right, out of its reach, in the barest nick of time. Another projectile barrage opened up. Scanning the room, she swiftly combat-crawled over to and under the desk, where she caught her breath as she analyzed her situation.

* * *

“She actually heard that,” Echo remarked in surprise. “Damn. I knew her ears were pretty sharp, but wow.”

“Pulse, one-twenty and steady; blood pressure, 130 over 90,” Fox read off the sensor readouts. “Respiration, twenty-three. High left hemispheric encephalographic activity. Trigger the plasma jet, Echo.”

Romeo and India spun around and stared in dismay at the two calm men. Plasma jet?!

* * *

A faint whine was the only warning Megan got before the plasma cannon behind the right-hand wall opened up. She crouched farther back, under the desk, until its initial salvo was complete. Then, in a momentary lull between projectile bank, flame-throwing fireplace, and plasma cannon, she reached up with her right hand, over the desktop, and grabbed for the decanter she had seen there. Miraculously, it was unbroken, having been below the level of the projectile barrage. She unstoppered it and sniffed the decanter mouth. Brandy. Perfect. She put on the special glasses.

She timed her next move carefully. In the split-second after the projectile weapons fired, while the plasma cannon built to discharge again, she emerged from her cover and flung the stoppered decanter with all the force and accuracy she could muster, straight at the plasma gun, then she turned and pushed with all her might against the back of the desk.

The desk slid across the polished floor just as the crystal decanter crashed into the now-firing cannon…and exploded. The improvised Molotov cocktail melted the circuitry and ignited the fuel tank, sending a geyser of flame out into the center of the room. But the desk was no longer in the center. Instead, it was now overturned, with its substantial polished granite top largely blocking the flame-throwing fireplace.

Megan held her breath, closed her eyes, and crouched in the desk’s opening until the flames from the plasma cannon subsided and the current round of projectile barrage ceased. Then, slightly singed, she scuttled on elbows and knees behind the wing chair. She overturned the marble-and-iron side table, heedless of the useless trinkets which tumbled off it, and caught it up in her left hand, holding it by the wrought iron pedestal. Using the tabletop as a shield, she moved up into a crouch, ducking behind it when the next round of missiles opened up.

“Aahh! Dammit!” A ricochet off the nearby marble mantelpiece winged her right shoulder. But she had reached the exit door. Still shielding herself with the table, she tapped the door handle warily with her right hand; no booby traps. She opened it; stepped sideways to her right…

* * *

Block 2 of the schematic lit up.

“Pulse, one-thirty and rising; BP, 135 over 92; respiration twenty-five. Hemispheric activity high and equally dominant,” Fox called out.

“Staying calm, thinking fast and getting creative. Great. Fox, did we get the fumes vented properly?” Echo asked, glancing over his shoulder at the two younger agents, so very intent on the largely-blank schematic, with a grin. Good idea Fox had, letting them see only a small part of the test. Ups the ante for ‘em, and gives us a chance to see how THEY react to the pressure.

“Yeah, no problem,” Fox responded. “Didn’t want it building to potentially dangerous levels, anyway.”

* * *

Fumes? What kind of fumes? Romeo and India sat staring, unbelieving, at the schematic while listening to the two men. WE’RE gonna have to go through this?

“How’s she doing?” Echo asked.

“If she maintains this pace, she’ll equal the record,” Fox responded.

“Dayum! Who set it?” exclaimed Romeo.

“I did, about six months ago,” Echo remarked, offhanded, his attention never wavering from the lithe figure going through its paces on the monitor.

* * *

This room was a formal dining room, of all things, complete with chandeliers and elegantly-set banquet table. Funny notions they have about obstacle courses, Megan thought. Whatever she had been expecting, so far this wasn’t it.

Megan discarded the side table and moved cautiously into the room, on the lookout for booby traps now. Her nose caught it first: an acrid, pungent odor. Then she saw the wisps of vapor rising from the floor.

“Acid!” she cried out in horror. The flooring was being eaten away underneath her.

Do they really want to kill me? I didn’t think that Echo-guy would’ve…but at least they would be rid of an eyewitness. Damn. Is this all just a set-up, then? An excuse for knocking me off? I am in such trouble…

An adrenalin-propelled standing leap took her to the near end of the banquet tabletop, irrespective of china and crystal, which tumbled this way and that, shattering. The way out, an open archway, was at the opposite end of the long table, but the opening was far out of reach of her ability to jump. The floor was now out of the question; large holes were starting to appear in it, a bubbling fluid underneath. She looked up.

The row of chandeliers ran almost the entire length of the oblong room, and were of the ornate Victorian candelabra style. Jumping up, Megan caught onto the one overhead and swung on it, tugging, testing. Strong enough, but not far enough, she thought, easing back down to the tabletop. If they only hung a little bit lower…

Abruptly, the table dropped out from under her, lowering by a full six inches, as what was left of the floor gave way. Megan lost her footing and fell, smashing china and sliding across the polished wood, over the edge. Digging her fingernails into the wood, she halted herself, her bent knees mere inches from the acid that now pooled around the bottom of the table. She slowly clawed her way back onto the tabletop. At least now I know how deep the acid is…

Suddenly, she whipped off her tie and belt. She threaded the leather belt through its buckle, making a loop, then used the pen knife to enlarge the last belt notch. Replacing the pen knife securely on her hip, where it clipped to the waistband of her leggings next to the glasses case, she quickly threaded the small end of the silk tie through the hole in the belt and knotted it firmly, jerking it hard to test it. Then she ran to the far end of the tabletop. She didn’t know if it would hold, but there was no time to change her mind. The table legs were starting to disintegrate now.

“Hope the farm skills are still with me,” she muttered as she swung the makeshift lasso.

The leather loop caught a prong of the chandelier, and Megan jerked it tight. Backing up as far as her improvised rope would allow, she made a running start, then swung forward.

No time to check the next room, she thought as she swung through the air. I just hope I hit the door opening straight, or this is gonna hurt bad…

“BANZAI!” she yelled as she reached the top of her arc and let go, flying head-first, arms stretched out in front, hands fisted, through the open doorway.

* * *

“Wow. Nice Superman jump,” Echo noted with a grin.

“Yeah, I liked it too,” Fox agreed, nodding.

Romeo and India just stared at the two men in consternation.

* * *

As soon as she was well through the opening, Megan realized she was in a bad way. Landing hard, she rolled, looked up, and blanched. At the far end of the room crouched a giant, hairy, black spider-like creature, with a leg-spread of at least fifteen feet, in a huge cage. To Megan’s horror, the front of the cage began to slide slowly up.

“Spiders. Dammit. I hate spiders. Why did it have to be spiders?” she muttered.

* * *

Alpha and Omega (Division One)

First in an ongoing series about the adventures of Alpha Line available now for preorder on Kindle with a release date of January 10, 2017.

Buy here

Alpha and Omega

© 2017 Stephanie Osborn

ISBN 978-0-9982888-1-9 (print)

ISBN 978-0-9982888-0-2 (ebook)

Cover art © 2017 Darrell Osborn

Fiction

First electronic edition 2017

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent publisher. All trademarks are property of their respective owners.

This is a work of fiction. All concepts, characters and events portrayed in this book are used fictitiously and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.

Chromosphere Press

P.O. Box 3412

Huntsville, AL 35810

www.chromospherepress.com

Of all the ways people have come up with to avoid thinking, I like memes the most.  They are so ridiculously easy to fall into.  You see the words, you see the picture and you go “ah ah, that’s so true.” Even when on a minute’s reflection it makes no sense whatsoever.

I think in a way it follows the same pattern that proverbs followed in more ancient cultures.  My dad was a great believer in proverbs and some of the ones he would pull out at all times or no time were old enough I later studied them in Latin.

While proverbs were ways not to have to think or short cuts around thinking, they weren’t, by themselves, pernicious.  When you think “A dollar saved is a dollar earned” it might give you the strength to avoid buying whatever cute thing just caught your eye, by reminding you how hard it was to earn that dollar.  BUT its effect is not bad.  It makes you in fact more likely to succeed in life.  The same with “Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy wealthy and wise.”  It might not do any of those things (False advertising for the win) but in the times when it was coined it kept you from going out drinking with the boys till all hours, which at least avoided your getting sickly broke and acting foolish.  So it was almost the same thing.

Proverbs are in a way, the encoding of societal wisdom into short cuts to lead people into ways that have worked before.

Memes are similar, but you have to remove societal wisdom and put in “the commanding forces of culture and mass media”.

Look, I’ve posted here before how hard it is to acculturate, and even sometimes when you want to fit in to a new culture, it feels like dying.  Humans, by preference, don’t think everything anew.  They bring with them mechanisms of habit and tradition and, well, culture.  Things are supposed to match what you were taught.

And that’s just the problem.  For four generations now, most people were taught Marxist/progressive shibboleths as though they were the revealed truth of the universe. Even teachers who don’t realize that’s what they’re teaching tend to drip through concepts like class struggle and the idea history comes with an arrow pointing at a progressive future, and even the idea of the Government as a benevolent entity that solves all things and fixes all things, from society to science.  Of course most of all the educational-industrial complex sells the idea that it’s wonderful, indispensable, and you should definitely give it way more of your money.

The problem is that when people go out into the world, they keep being forced into situations where this isn’t true, and where their nose is rubbed into the fact that what they were taught is nonsense.  Some (most perhaps) avoid thinking about it or acculturating by becoming bitter and cynical and deciding the world is irredeemable because it doesn’t match their head-picture.  And some fight back with memes.

Memes are perfect for this, because, like proverbs, they have the feeling of revealed truth and therefore stop the discomfort of having to face, you know, real reality which doesn’t match received culture.

Yesterday someone posted a typical one of those.  It was something like “People considering homeschooling should ask themselves if they would cut their own hair.”

A minute’s reflection (and five minutes of pointing and laughing) reveals the falacy in that.  I don’t know about you but the main reason I have never cut my hair is that I can’t see all around my head, and I’m not good at thinking in three dimmensions and reversed, so a mirror won’t do it.  What the heck this has to do with homeschooling YOUR KIDS is beyond me.  You could say “people considering learning by themselves should ask themselves if they would cut their own hair” — it still doesn’t make any sense, but I could see where you could say “you have blind spots, which you won’t investigate because you’re uncomfortable” (like the guy posting this, say.)  It would sort of make sense, even if not really (since most of us have taught ourselves a considerable amount of the specialized knowledge one needs for one’s job, because no school teaches it.  Hint, no, creative writing classes don’t teach you to be a writer.)  Or you could say “If you are considering homeschooling, ask yourself if you would cut your kid’s hair.”

Of course the reason he didn’t do that is obvious.  This particular “stop thinking” meme was about defending credentialism and people who’ve been “trained” to do this or that being superior to simple parents.  But the truth is that every parent has cut his or her kids hair once or twice and many do it all the time.  Take for instance when we were really young and broke and couldn’t afford anything but supercuts.  Some of those trained professionals aren’t as good as an untrained parent.

The same is true for homeschooling, where kids who are homeschooled, unless they are unschooled, where the results are mixed, are consistently better at… well… school things than our school taught kids.  (Yes, I know the canard this is due to parent involvement.  This canard is to try to get parents to volunteer more at schools.  Let me tell you, no, it’s not true.  Yeah, parental involvement like we did it, where we taught the kids at home after school works like homeschooling because DUH we’re teaching the kids, the school isn’t.)  This is because our schools have decided to emphasize “fitting in” “obeying” “playing the game” and “not sticking out” over learning.  In fact, many elementary school teachers will candidly tell you (particularly if your kid is gifted) that their main job is to “level” the kids so they’re all more or less at the same point before they enter middle school.  This explains why they worked so hard at getting both my kids to unlearn reading in first and second grade (didn’t work with the older, almost worked with the younger.)

The meme gets around that, and it is very popular because — even though it takes no time at all to demolish — it stops the pressure to acculturate and makes the person seeing it feel better and like their “truth” trumps reality.

Other memes that are as grating include the one about Jesus being a socialist, because you know, “though shalt take all your money and give to the government who will take some of it and give to the poor, but mostly use it to grow a massive and repressive bureaucracy” said no gospel, ever.

Then there’s the meme about how all whites here are illegal immigrants, a piece of nonsense that doesn’t take in account Neolithic-level civilizations don’t have borders as we understand them, and that if anything the fate of the Amerindian tribes would make us clamp border controls so tight not a mouse would get through.  This meme works on the “ahah, you’re also a poopyhead” system that every idiot learned in elementary.

This also explains why the right isn’t as good at memes.  We’ve not under terrible pressure to acculturate, because reality by and large accords with things like cause and effect, responsibility for your actions, longer time preference, and the broken nature of man.  So we really don’t need pseudo-clever memes that get around thinking and stop us feeling bad.

And it tells you that when you see memes, or an “everybody knows” that was coined after the nineteenth century, you should pause and examine it.  Because it’s been produced by a culture afraid of itself, it’s not likely to be a “useful workaround” but a palliative against acculturating to the real world.

In the end, we must all live in the real world.  (I just work elsewhere.)  Avoiding adapting to it is not a survival strategy.

 

So, to begin with and much to my shock, I DO have a brain.  Yeah, you could have knocked me with a feather.  Up till now I thought I thought with my belly-button lint.

First of all, there are two thingies in the brainy.

The first one is a meningioma.  Pretty sure it formed exactly where I hit my head hard when I fell on ice 3? 4? years ago.  It’s PROBABLY not cancer, because it’s somewhat calcified, which doesn’t happen to cancerous varieties.  OTOH if it continues growing the mass effect (size pushing on things) could be an issue.  Or it could not.  It might very well grow so slowly that nothing is needed on it for the rest of my life expectancy.  That’s fine.  if it needs surgery, the good news is that it’s in “a good place” that’s “very accessible.”  We’ll continue monitoring every few months.

The second one is “white matter abnormalities.”  

These are probably demylianation events.  Not for sure, but LIKELY.

This means either Multiple Sclerosis, or “Weird autoimmune attacking your brain.”

Being that this is still me, I’m going to suspect “weird autoimmune.”  (Couldn’t it attack something less vital, like my pancreas?  Never mind.)

In either case, we’re still on the very early stages of whatever it is, and it was therefore good that Dan dragged me in, even if it’s just my body trying to kill me as usual.

IF I get a positive diagnosis on either MS or “weird autoimmune crap” it can be held at bay with medication till I die a natural death, or stop needing my brain, whichever comes first.

The next shake of the magic eight ball involves blood and spinal fluid tests in a week or two.  So in a month I will know more about this.

Until then, I write.

Hi guys, the post won’t go up till this afternoon.  I have a doctor’s appointment in a little over an hour and need to get ready.

I’m hoping very hard the appointment will tell me this is nothing, and I feel sure that’s what they’ll say.  Which means I feel stupid about having slept VERY badly.

So, because I slept very badly and can’t think of anything to write about, I’ll give you the plan for this year:

Right now I’m closing in on finishing Darkship Revenge.  Yes, I know it’s taken forever, but that’s because the more you interrupt a novel, the harder it is to keep it together.  And this novel got interrupted by year from hell… five times, and I’ve had to reconstruct lost parts three times.  I’m now just making sure everything hangs together before I send it to Toni.

After that I’m doing the novel with Kevin Anderson, the one I’ve been researching in the background for three months.  I can never remember the title, because it’s long and complicated, but it’s something like “Lewis and Clark and the magical territories of the West.”  At any rate, enough to give you a general idea.  And after that, G-d willing and their telling me it’s nothing today, I’ll be doing Guardian (all I have right now is a couple of chapters.)  Because in my head that’s tangled with Dark Fate, I’ll be doing a lot of that on this blog then.

When Guardian is in, I’ll be doing the Dragons trilogy, the one I’ve excerpted here before.  That will get flung at Baen for good or ill.  If they want it, it’s theirs.  If they don’t, it goes out indie, probably mid-summer.

I’m going to try to finally finish The Brave And The Free to go indie the fourth of July.  No promises, as I can’t be sure of my health.  BUT I’m going to do my d*mndest.  Now that I’m no longer depressed, it should be possible (worst novel to write while depressed, since it takes place in a total police state.)

I also have, newly reverted, all of the furniture refinishing mysteries, and TRULY I can do one of those in a week (it’s how they were all written) so I’m going to try to release them all (Jack Wylder made AMAZING covers for them) and then do the fourth “A Well Inlaid Death”.

Also reverted, and edited, but needing my go-over is the entire magical British Empire Trilogy.  I’ll be working on that and the mysteries in the evenings, in lieu of a life, though I still want to take date night with my husband and probably “reading Sunday” once a week.

To the long suffering fans of the Musketeer mysteries, Musketeer’s Confessor is almost done, and would have been out in December, if I hadn’t collapsed in the shower and then entered a roller coaster of doctor’s appointments (most of it to tell me I’m healthy, except there is a thingy in my brainy.  Apparently.  Two thingies actually, which seems like an embarrassment of riches.)  I need to write the final third and do a thorough edit.  As I said, thank G-d I don’t have a life, and the boys seem to be settling into lives of their own, in which they don’t need much of our time.  At least they seem to be so after the holidays.  No promise on date, but I’ll try to get it into your hands ASAP.

The same for Rogue Magic and Elf’s blood and probably Witch’s Daughter, all of which are substantially written.  Witch’s Daughter, like Darkship Revenge got impacted because of a move just in the MIDDLE of it.  But once I have the Baen work in, I’ll return to it and it should be a quick run through, though a little awkward, since it’s a YA.

There’s two secret projects, which you’ll know about when I tell you they’re done.  I suppose they’re both, if you squint, mil sf, but the first is a reprise of the first world I ever created and which I couldn’t sell, because it was too weird for words.  Weird is easier when you have craft.

There’s also collaborations with two sons, the biological elder, and the adopted (at thirty or so) eldest.  The first is “Harry Potter in Space” and the first book is The Curse of the Gypsy Child.  The second is Signals in the Storm, a military fantasy.  It was started at Liberty con three years ago, and then both of our lives got weird.  But it is a priority now.  Both will be flung at Baen and if not accepted brought out indie.  (Though I might offer them to Wordfire first.)

I’ll be — G-d willing — attending three cons, and hopefully at Denver comicon.  The first con is CoSine in Colorado Springs, at the end of January, then there’s Liberty con and I hope Dragon con, which will be a first.

Now go on, yell at me about crazy schedule.  Oh, yeah, to leave room for fiction, I’m ONLY doing three new articles here a week, the rest will be guest posts or excerpts or other, lighter stuff.  Hope that’s okay.  I mean three columns a week is more than professional columnists do, right?

Oh, yeah, I’m hoping to do something with PJM again, which means I need to send them a proposal.

Now let the yelling begin.  And keep your fingers crossed this brainy thingy is nothing, or the schedule gets upended again.

 

 

*This post is mostly about writing, but it isn’t REALLY.  I’ve said for years that the main difference between us and the left is that “We Build” — while they mostly wreck.  I grant you a lot of the reason they wreck is that their prophecy promises that if our system falls perfect communism ensues.  But I think it attracts the sort of people who like to wreck.  Like the critics I mention here, they are people who feel incapable of creating or dwarfed by others/the past, so they must tear that down, because in a flat landscape their little molehills look like mountains.  I think this is ULTIMATELY why they must tear down every great figure of the past, in our field and others and why — who the heck said it?  I have no memory — the left takes over an institution, guts it, then wears the skin demanding respect.  I think at the heart of it is this wrecker instinct. – SAH*

The Builders And The Wreckers – a Blast From the Past Post from 1/4/2012

Recently there has been some furore over a review of Dave Freer’s Dog and Dragon.  After Patrick Richardson posted his excellent and quite accurate review, not only did a gentleman (note I use the term loosely) feel the need to throw a big hairy hissy fit over the fact that no good fantasy has been written in the last twenty years and that since his writing idols wrote all possible plots twenty years ago no new ideas could be written BUT another gentleman (again a very loose term) felt the need to write an entire article on the grammar and typos in an UNCORRECTED ADVANCE READING COPY.

This is not designed to highlight the fact that some gentle– oh, heck – some cranks didn’t like Dave’s book.  The first didn’t read it, and the second read it looking for things to throw snitt-fits about.  Also, since the first took the time to comment on how wretched that Pratchett creature is, I think Dave should be rather proud of hanging with the good people.

No, this is designed to illuminate a type of person all of us, published, unpublished, wanna bes and serious workers at the word-vine will come up against, whether we want to or not.

Reading the screaming hissy fits above, what struck me was the pointlessness of it all, and it reminded me of an incident back when my husband and I were very young (a condition that’s often covalent with stupid, but in this case it was a good-stupid.)  After about six years of infertility treatments, when we were twenty eight we decided to take the option that had been suggested by everyone: take a long vacation.  Dan took a month unpaid break and we went to Portugal to get away from our normal environment for a while.  (This didn’t quite work as we didn’t conceive then, but we conceived shortly thereafter, so perhaps it was delayed effects?) A lot of this time was spent at the beach and one day in a fit of silliness, we decided to build a sand castle.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that an excess of geekness made this a whole day project and therefore caused us to build turrets and ramparts and an artesian fountain in the courtyard.

Towards the end of the afternoon, as we were finishing, we noticed a group of kids glaring at us – by which I mean glaring.  I wondered if it was a cultural thing since adults in Portugal rarely play in public or do anything that seems less than dignified.  But I was wrong.  As soon as we packed and turned our backs – and I mean, before we had gone three steps – the group attacked the little castle screaming and gleefully destroying it.

To this day I’m baffled by this behavior.  Yes, I know tearing down the castle is part of the fun when you made it for that purpose, but this wasn’t it.  They acted as if the castle were evil and had offended them in some way.  Besides, the castle wasn’t that type.  It was the type that I’m always delighted to come across, usually as the waves are starting to take it, and examine what people did and how.

I didn’t understand their anger or their impulse until years later, when I was trying to write for publication and we had a writers’ group.
There was a gentl– oh, heck, a crank – in the very first formation of our writers group who started every critique with “To begin with, this didn’t work for me.”

Now, I will be the first to note that when that group started, almost nineteen years ago, we were all green as leeks and twice as wet.  Sometimes, by blind groping, one or the other of us would produce a fully functional short story, but most of our poor efforts were truncated, deformed and went lurching into the night of unpublishable.

That said, none of us deserved the critiques this critter gave.  After that hopeful start, he would go page by page noting every time we’d misplace a comma (yes, dears, it IS a wonder he ever got through critiquing my stories.)  Then he’d open with something sweet like “Your grammar is a mess too” after which he would give us every single typo that might be misinterpreted as a grammatical mistake.  (What, you never left an apostrophe before the s in a plural?  Then you’re lucky.)  From this he would proceed to tearing down your character’s motives.  One of my characters, who was confused and rather paralyzed by a situation got classed as “supine”, doubts were cast on the character’s masculinity and, oh, yeah, do not dare in any circumstances to have a character who is anything but heterosexual because then the critique would include YOUR moral shortcomings.  This, by the way, even if the character was an alien from a species with three genders.

By the end of this spittle-flecked tear down, most of us would feel like never writing again.

Curiously, this person rarely brought anything in.  When he did it was usually a short short of such a startling lack of originality as to sound like the slush at any hundred magazines.  While competently written for the most part, the stories would provide plenty of fodder for those of us who wanted to go after commas or typos and, oh, yeah, by the way, the moral implications of some of these just-so stories, if you wanted to explore them, were … uh.

Fortunately he was so in-your-face poisonous that the rest of the group – fumbling and inexpert though we were – got together and decided we could not take it anymore.  As such, we tried to gently give him hints.  When that didn’t work, we changed the meeting time and day and place and told him the group had dissolved.  After which the group continued with what he had stigmatized as a “love in” – amazingly, we didn’t want to tear each other or even each other’s stories to shreds.  Who knew? – and shortly thereafter (two, three years) we all started getting published in turn.

Since then I have met variants of this gentleman everywhere, from local writing groups to reviewers.  They are not all as openly poisonous as this person or even the commenter and “reviewer” mentioned above.  Those are openly wreckers and though their motives might puzzle those of us on the creative side of the equation, their aggression and poison is as obvious as that of those kids on the beach.

Some commenters and reviewers are semi-reasonable and will be taken seriously at least for a while.  Take the “published author” who joined our group five years after this incident (she had a book published ten years before and had written nothing else.  We failed to take in the implications of this, because, duh, young and stupid.)  She was not so nakedly transparent in her tear downs, but she would say things that we felt we should understand, and which paralyzed us just as effectively, such as “Your story has no engine” or “your grammar is a mess” or… all of it with no specific examples.

I can honestly say she delayed our learning a good three years, until she left the group, after which we started writing more and getting published more again.  And it wasn’t until I had sold my first novel and told her about it that I realized she’d been just like Mr. “To Begin With This Doesn’t Work For Me.”

I realized it at that point because it was obvious.  First, she couldn’t process that the book had SOLD, even though I told her that first thing, and it was WHY she’d asked me to send her the manuscript.  Second, she simply didn’t GET it.  Third, she tried to tear it down as she had things in the workshop.  Her note back started with “You’ll never sell this book” and then told me that the story had no engine and that it read like a romance (a withering criticism coming from her) because of all the interior dialogue and the feelings.

Later on, through gossip (this field gossips) I found out the reason her career was benched was that, having been selected for a collaboration with Anne McCaffrey, she’d told Anne that her plot was all wrong and that she couldn’t plot.  Even Anne, who had a reputation as a gentle mentor, couldn’t take that.

BUT that in a way is almost endearing because it shows you how strong the compulsion is, to the point of being self-destructive, and how little it has to do with a wish to advance one’s career or even to help one’s fellow writer.

And that is where we must start to understand the wreckers.  I never knew those kids on the beach, though I wouldn’t be surprised to find any number of them are now hardened vandals – though frankly that wouldn’t make them much different from their age group in Portugal, the whole thing having to do with lack of jobs and possibly lack of supervision – but every other …  Let’s call them “Wrecker” I know is an unhappy, bitter person whose problems extend to far more areas of life than writing.  They’re also, almost to the last one, startlingly unproductive in terms of creativity, though claiming that they are “artists” or “creative.”  Oh, and when they do “create” the stuff tends to be pap and so generic as to need a white wrapping and a bar code.

That is part of the problem, I think.  These are people who were brought up thinking they were creative geniuses.  They have tried to be creative, have fallen short of their own ideals and want to – no, need to – tear down anything else anyone else builds, to salve the gaping wound in their ego and self esteem.  Unfortunately, they feel drawn to environments like writers’ groups where they’re forever reminded of how short they fell of their own expectations, and that frustration fuels their anger at anyone else who dares create and PARTICULARLY at any work that is particularly good.

Because these people infest the creative professions and often take over writers groups, and because in the new age of self-publishing they are gravitating to “reviews” I will give you a way to recognize them, deal with them and counter them.  Like vampires they can be relatively harmless if you know how to deal with them.  Like vampires too, they seem to be incurable.  At least I never heard of a single one who reformed and started creating.  It seems like once the wrecking urge sets in the pleasure of destruction feeds upon itself, and creation becomes impossible.

I will however also give you a way to combat your wrecker tendencies, in case you feel yourself going that way.

How To Recognize A Wrecker

1 – minute critiques of a story, even if you asked explicitly for an overall feel.  (You are excused if it’s your first time betaing, you’re overwhelmed and try, desperately, to do something useful.  We’ve all been there.)  If you asked for plot coherence and you’re getting typos, you’re either in the presence of a wrecker or your critiquer couldn’t find his/her own *ss with two hands and a seeing eye dog.  The later is curable, the first isn’t.

2 – Critiques that go beyond the manuscript to your personal traits, sometimes descending to over-the-counter Freudian.  This can range from “you know, I could never write a character that cowardly.” which subtly implies you can do that because you lack moral fiber to the fist-in-face blunt “I see you have another dumb character, just like you.” to the implication they know you better than you know yourself “Ah! Another species with three genders.  I wonder what that means about your sex life.”

3- Pointless nitpicking and sweeping generalizations.  You’ll get for instance that “your character lacks consistency” which turns out to be that at one point in your manuscript you wrote down he was blond instead of saying his hair was brown.  (Possibly because you heard “blond” off the corner of the room as you were typing.)  The critiquer will open with something like “your character kept changing and I had no idea who he was” and you think “Oh, I messed his personality” and it turns out to be something totally irrelevant that you can fix by changing a word.  Or “Your grammar is attrocious in this manuscript” and it turns out you have a dozen misplaced commas. *(Commas are a favorite nitpicking thing for wreckers, partly because they’re so easy to get “wrong” that each House has a different comma manual.  More on that at the end in footnote.)

4 – Stunning failure to produce, or really trite output, while, at the same time being deeply involved (often increasingly involved) in critiquing and reviewing and seeking out every opportunity to do so.

5 – Failure to be pleased with or admire anything they read since late adolescence or anything that is not universally considered a classic.  Even a few of those will bring out the sneers.  These are the people who sneer at Agatha Christie or well, tell Anne McCaffrey she can’t plot.  Yeah, I know my opinion of Dan Brown doesn’t bear repeating, but I’m willing to admit he must have done SOMETHING right.  (Just don’t pretend it was historical research, mkay?)  And I don’t care enough that people love his stuff to devote TIME to tearing him down.  There are many, many books I don’t like in the world.  I’m too busy writing MY OWN books to give much of a hang, frankly.

6- A new but consistent trait is the call for gatekeepers in publishing.  These people, as reviewers, rant, moan and bitch about the need for someone to keep the “sludge” out of the sacred halls of publishing.  This is particularly puzzling since by their own admission, publishing hasn’t produced anything worth reading for twenty years.

Yes, critique is important, but if you find the critique is both sweeping and detailed and always negative, you are in wrecker territory.

If someone’s critiques routinely shut you down, take a look at what you’re actually getting: is it important stuff you couldn’t get otherwise?  Some insight or detail that you’d never have seen (like in A Few Good Men Sanford noticed inconsistencies relating to clothing which I’d never noticed and were actually important.  Or Patrick went out of his way to research the behavior of a punctured oxygen tank.  While these are detail-oriented they are USEFUL.  And neither of them opened the critique with “First of all, what universe do you come from?” or “You have some serious inconsistencies” or… you get the point.)  Or is it an accumulation of nitpicky details and inconsistencies, some of them not real (a contest judge kindly informed me, for instance, that my vocabulary wasn’t up to par because when I used stolid, I meant solid – i.e. the judge didn’t KNOW stolid, so she assumed…) all presented in a way to make you feel dumb and incompetent and to elevate the critiquer to authority?

If the second be aware that this is a person who NEEDS to believe him/herself an authority.  The things to understand are the following:

1- this person can’t create.  Either he or she started out that way, or he or she has become that way, but in either case, he or she can’t create.  When in the presence of something that they feel is better than what they could do (which in terminal stages of the disease is EVERYTHING) they are driven to assuage their wounded ego by showing they’re better than the creator and giving themselves justification.

2- if his/her fury is particularly fierce, your work must be particularly good.

3- You MUST cut them out of your writing process.  Leave the group, or if the entire group complains, have him/her leave; stop giving them beta copies; stop reading their reviews.  Even totally misguided critique can cause the type of self-doubt that makes writing grind to a halt.  And if you become frustrated enough you could turn into a wrecker yourself.

This is another way in which wreckers are like vampires. Stay in a group full of them long enough and you will turn into one.

Part of this is learned.  You learn to see “flaws” because you’ve heard them pointed out so often, and, of course, in group critique sessions you want to prove you’re competent, even if you have all those “issues” they keep seeing in your writing.

Part of it is psychological.  By tearing down your confidence (however small.  Most writers have a hole where their confidence should be) they destroy your ability to create or to show what you create.  And then you have to salve your self-esteem by tearing down others and showing that really, it’s not just you…

IF you find yourself having wrecker- behavior: you find that a story is making you pick at flaws and point out everything the person did wrong.  Or you find yourself incensed at a story…  Walk away from that story.

Look, there are stories that will p*ss you off.  Some even written by friends.  There are published, award winning stories that make me froth at the mouth.  This usually has more to do with their theme or plot than their execution.

It is better to excuse yourself in those cases, than to vent your misguided fury on little things.  Because the wrecker behavior is an habit.

There is another thing – particularly with those you mentor – sometimes someone will write a story so startlingly and wonderfully perfect that you want to find a flaw in it SOMEWHERE.  It is a form of envy too, and a form of assuaging your wounded pride.  Don’t let it.  It is common, but it is wrong.  Just keep in mind that writing ability/careers criss cross.  The mentor today might be the pupil next time.  Compete only with yourself (unless you’re competing to produce MORE which is valid.) And rejoice when your friends make a big leap in craft.  Or, if you can’t rejoice, keep it to yourself and go and practice your own craft.

While I don’t advise staking wreckers, they are exactly like vampires.  They can no longer walk in the light and the sun, and they’re trying to drag you down to their own bitter state.  Let them go their own way, and you go on creating.

* Commas are a favorite target of wreckers.  Most of us – except me, and there are reasons for that – think we know how to place commas.  Most of us can advise people to diagram sentences or some other solution.  The thing is that, except for extremes, commas are highly individual.  We can safely say my mother – who uses them in lieu of periods, which she reserves for the end of the letter or essay, I suppose to signal the missive is over and you should avoid continuing to read what’s not there (and yes, we all tease her about this.  She ignores us.) – is wrong.  We can also say I tend to overuse commas.  (The reason I do so is that my first instruction in punctuation was in romance languages.  The way you separate clauses and parentethicals and emphasize bits of the sentence that English language doesn’t.  And even though I know the rules for commas in English, the instinct to use them is older than that.  I can “glue on” comma sense by doing grammar exercises obsessively in my free time.  And I would if I didn’t have so much else to do.)
But even for native speakers, commas can be QUITE individual.  If they weren’t then each house wouldn’t change them in different ways (Baen tends to add commas to my writing, while Berkley takes them out to the point that some sentences are incomprehensible in my opinion.)

Being subjective, commas of course attract wreckers like honey attracts flies.  In fact an obsession with critiquing your commas), (unless you’re Amanda, to whom I’ve given control over mine because I KNOW I need a minder and she’s generally sensible on those :-P   And note, though she teases me as I do my mother, it’s NEVER a tear down) is a sign of a wrecker.  Particularly if that’s all they find, or almost all they find, and if they make a big deal out of it.

Yesterday I was musing about how good Americans are at exerting a sort of glamour on the rest of the world.

Take this movie for instance (please nobody else wants.)  The room was made (and written and directed, and possibly conjured) by its main star an immigrant from Eastern parts unknown.  It is a pretty terrible movie by all accounts, possibly the worst movie ever made (a position for which it strives with The Postman and Waterworld, but never mind.)

Knowing The Room is one of those peculiar fascinations of mine (like an aching tooth kind of thing) Chris Chupik put me on to a book “The Making of the room.”  Which I read in fascinated horror, and which survived the great book purge of 2015

It is through that opus that I know things like that Tommy Wiseu  is an immigrant from parts unknown who is sometimes unclear on how things like buildings, roads, cars or indeed people work.  In fact, Occam’s razor dictates that we assume Tommy is a centuries old vampire, whose brain is starting to go.  But that’s not the point right now…

The point is that his move is pretty d*mn depressing.  The main character is being cheated on by his fiance and best friend, has just been fired, and (no, trust me, it’s not a spoiler) ends up killing himself (I almost typed itself.  You’d have to see it to understand.)

BUT the thing is that through all the movie (and the book about it) you get this sense the whole thing is … aspirational.  That this pretty horrible situation is what Tommy wishes he had.

I understand this somewhat, because we watched shows from the US that in retrospect were practically slander against American society.  And all we could think was “I’ve got to get there.”  Murder, manipulation, horrible drug habits, public crime.  “I got to get there.”

Why in heck is that?

Well, part of it is that we’re good sales people.  We make it all look so gosh darn INTERESTING that people can’t help reacting.

The other part is the stuff that leaks around the intended message: Abundance and the freedom that allows it, mostly.  Which get even into the mind of those who would be insulted if you suggest that Americans are any better than their countrymen, and makes people dream.

Unfortunately that “aspirational” quality means people want to imitate the US, and because the image of the US they’re being sold is this distorted fun-house mirror thing, it is, in no small part, responsible for a lot of the corruption and sheer craziness in other countries.  (Not to mention the obsession with living in apartments because that’s “modern.”)

A lot of crazy American left ideas are treated FAR MORE seriously abroad than here, because they get a lot more of it, their governments by and large encourage their dissemination (not the least because they think it makes America look bad, but also because it accords with a lot of THEIR … for lack of a better word thinking.)  How crazy?  Well, “We’re all going to fry up” (My brother thought Al Gore was smart, for ex) or “no borders is a great idea.”

I’m not saying we’re responsible for the mess that is Merkel’s Germany, understand, but I’m saying our far left is, and through their hijacking of the media and entertainment, they’ve projected their insanity as a thing to aspire to to the rest of the world.  They THINK they’re maligning America, but they’re really making the world a horrible place.  And they don’t even know it.  And if they knew it, they might fail to get it.

Which brings us to why we have a lot of work to do.  If the nature of what we have here creates an aspirational movement in the rest of the world, even while our intellectuals hate our country and are trying to slander it, imagine how much better everything would be if we just wrote about the country as it really is, and as we’d like it to be.

Aspirations and dreams are a great force.

Happy new year.  You have work to do.

Year of the Black Swan by Christopher M. Chupik

How messed up was 2016? Let’s put it this way: Chuck Tingle getting a Hugo nomination
doesn’t even make the Top Ten of Crazy.

If 2016 were a TV show, you’d be thinking that the writers have lost their ever-loving minds in their determination to jump every shark in the ocean. Most years toddle into the world like the New Year’s Baby. 2016 exploded from the torso of its predecessor like a chestburster and soon grew into a full Xenomorph, bent on the destruction of all human life. Mostly, celebrities.

Not all deaths were tragic losses, though. Fidel Castro’s oft-delayed departure from this world finally happened, the dictator leaving behind a legacy of misery and economic ruin best exemplified when the vehicle transporting his earthly remains broke down during the funeral procession.

Along with the deaths, the progressive status quo has been dealt a number of crippling blows.

The same people who mocked Mitt Romney for stating the obvious about Russia four years
ago are now freaking out and seeing Russian conspiracies everywhere. The “permanent
Democratic majority” which left-wing pundits once openly hoped for perished in a mere eight years, destroyed by a perfect storm of angry voters, a bad economy, a backlash against the far Left, and Clinton’s general unlikability. The EU, which once appeared to be the future of Europe, is now in serious trouble with Brexit and nationalist rumblings across the Continent.

And of course, President Trump. It’s entirely possible that by the time this blog is posted,
something else will have happened. It’s been that kind of year. Even though I remain skeptical of Trump, at least I have the solace of knowing that the Clintons are finished. Probably. I do expect an attempt to push Chelsea Clinton as the Great Left Hope in a few year’s time, but I don’t think it’ll happen. Mind you, it worked here in Canada, where our current PM is a photogenic mediocrity who was elected solely on the strength of his family name, so who knows?

So, what can we learn from this amazing and terrible year?

The most important thing is that ordinary people are sick to death of the status quo. They’re also sick of being lectured by the elites. Nothing outside of politics shows this better than the controversy over Sony’s Ghostbusters reboot.

When you’re remaking a classic, there’s always a lot of hurdles to clear. When the trailer
debuted, it was met with an almighty “Meh”. The problem was a muddled concept and an
agonizingly unfunny trailer that did nothing to address the concerns people had about
rebooting a beloved classic. But how did the studio respond?
By accusing all their critics of being motivated by misogyny, of course. And the media,
always ready to create a “controversy” that props up their narratives, followed suit and pretty soon every media outlet was telling us what evil woman-haters we were for not finding the trailer funny. This was the dominant narrative week after week, until finally the movie debuted to oddly uniform good reviews which all managed to suspiciously strike the same note of “Suck it, trolls!”

But the movie itself? One of the year’s biggest flops. And all those who championed the film at it’s release? Oddly quiet. Nobody will be quoting from this Ghostbusters thirty years down the line. Hell, nobody’s quoting from it now.

Did Hollywood learn anything from this disaster? Well, as of the writing of this post, they’re going do a Barbie movie . . . starring Amy Schumer, so no.

I should have realized from this controversy and its aftermath that the election was going to go badly for Clinton, but I still thought that the media had just enough power and influence remaining to force her down the voter’s throats. I was wrong, and I wasn’t the only one. The old power structures are failing fast. They can write the narratives, spread them across all their media outlets, but fewer and fewer people are buying into them.

As we saw with GamerGate and Sad Puppies, insults directed against people voicing their
concerns don’t work. When you dismiss large numbers of people with blanket condemnations, when you treat their concerns with contempt and mockery, you turn those people into enemies.

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. This is as much true in human
relations as it is in physics. The Left’s unhealthy obsession with race has spawned an equally perverse counter-reaction: the white nationalist wing of the alt-right. Now this is a topic and movement too complex to be dealt with here in full. Suffice it to say, some of the alt-right definitely are racists. I have had personal encounters online, as I did when I tweeted about Holodomor Remembrance Day and got re-tweeted by a bunch of white nationalist anti-Semites trying to use the event to promote their vile creed. Others don’t seem to be obsessed with race at all.

By cheapening the accusation of racism by hysterical overuse, the Left robbed their greatestweapon of all its power. When you accuse people of racism for objecting to Obama’s healthcare bill, somewhere a shark has been jumped. “Racist” has become a bad joke and it’s become hard to tell anymore if a person has been accused of it because they really do promote race-hatred or because they disagreed with a liberal. Words used to have meaning. Take that meaning away, and you have intellectual chaos.

Sarah talked a while back about how Marxism was entering its final phase. That may be thecase, but don’t expect it to be easy. Make no mistake: it will get uglier before it gets better.

No movement which has enjoyed decades of unchallenged power gives up that power without a struggle. We’re already seeing the beginnings of it now: the post-election riots, the various attempts to game the Electoral College to appoint Clinton in place of Trump which, as of the day I sent this to Sarah, failed hilariously. Expect insanity, threats and violence in 2017 and beyond. I fear it’s going to be the early ‘70s on crazy pills. Buckle up.
Things are an unholy mess at the moment, but in a way, it’s good that things have taken such an unpredictable turn. The future is wide open. With the failure of the Clinton Dynasty we’re in uncharted waters.

Will Trump be the disaster his detractors say? Maybe. Will he be worse than Clinton would have been? No idea. Will he suddenly turn into the greatest president ever?
Unlikely, but I could be wrong. Please, prove me wrong.

The Left had a plan for the future. That plan is now ashes. So now we have to find our way
through a future our media didn’t prepare us for. But maybe that’s good. Certainty is the path to stagnation and extinction. Have we made good choices or bad ones? Time will tell. But at least our choices still matter.

It seems like at this time of year one can think of nothing but how to do some sort of speculative “what the year was” and “what the year will be.”

This is not strictly true.  I thought of another theme for this post, then I took a shower and it washed right out of my hair.  It might help understand how my mind is — isn’t! — working that yesterday I forgot to comb my hair.  ALL day.  This morning I had knots…

So I’m going to go with the kind of year 2016 was.

It was a year of changes…

Everyone and their brothers keeps telling me “It’s just the baby boomers dying.”  This is nice.  Kind of.  Except it’s not, not really.

First of all, let’s discuss boomers and the fact my generation isn’t.  Not really.  We’re a good seven or eight years sandwiched between boomers and xers, not by demographic reasoning (though by my time the “boom” had been descending for five years) but by life experiences.  In the summer of sixty eight I learned to write (I could read before that) and in the fall I entered elementary.  I suspect I spent the rest of the year harassing cats and annoying my family, which was the description of my life at the time.  BUT though I had hair past my butt (didn’t get it cut till five years later, at 11.  And be fair, have had it that long again about ten years ago, because I FORGOT TO CUT MY HAIR.  I finally had it chopped when I realized what a pain it was to gather it all when I had to go to the bathroom in the night.  Yes, hair you can sit on is an hazard.) the “summer of love” means only that I got to cuddle all the cats.

Second, people my generation are joining the parade of death.

Yes, a ton of these people did hard drugs/sex/anything they could do.  But still.  It seems we’re simply not washing and wearing as well as the WWII hard smoking and drinking generation.  And given all the crazy in health studies in recent years, would any of us die of shock if we found out that the jump in longevity was BECAUSE of hard drinking and smoking?  Be honest now.

But beyond the parade of death (remember to watch all the exits until past midnight, because I suspect 2016 is lurking behind the door with a knife, silent movie style) the truth is that 2016 wasn’t so much a bad year as a year of changes.

For us perhaps most of all, caught between the last year (probably) in which we have at least one kid in the house, and hopefully getting kids off payroll two years from now, and because of a concatenation of circumstances, we moved TWICE to very different houses.

The thing is that we ended up where we wanted, even if it still needs work, but good LORD it’s been trouble.  Most of the year I squeezed out writing by the two hour a day or so, while giving my all, and all my energy to things that needed to be done.

Things are not so much starting to settle, as achieving a higher state of of equilibrium.  I.e. we are settled in the new house and things are starting to get organized here.  And Dan’s schedule and mine is shaking out, though we’re still more or less enmeshed with one kid for another six months and he eats with us often enough I can’t plan for just two.

This is not settled, but I can see it from here, and I’m trying to establish new habits that allow me to make the most of the new equilibrium.

Only…

Only I think for a lot of us the changes will continue.  I know what brought about my crazy year, but I swear everyone else is complaining of these macro changes and it makes no sense for everyone to be in this half-step-to-somewhere-else mode.  It’s enough to make you believe in astrology.

It’s enough to make you believe in astrology if you don’t understand the other stuff going on, that is.  It’s not that the planets are in turmoil, but that this planet is.  Sure, part of it was the misguided attempt to bring about an apotheosis of the progressive ideology here, while it failed everywhere, in the real world.  Yeah, sure.  Regulations and the crazy stupid health law are sending out economy into a spiral past the s bend.

But part of it is… well… to quote someone though I don’t remember whom, the fact that progressives take over institutions, skin them, gut them and then wear their skins demanding respect.

This has been going on a long time, in media, in publishing, in any art, and in the last few years in industry and science.

The industries that were taken over earlier would have died.  They would have.  But the free market is not a political position, but a law of nature.  It’s like blocking the path of a river.  The water doesn’t just disappear, it finds a new way (even if that involves a lake that then overflows.)

So we have indie publishing, indie music, indie journalism and I’m fairly sure from the feel of things, very soon real indie films with power.  After that the sky is the limit.  I mean, I once helped crowd fund a scientific study on the penis of ducks (What?  Like you wouldn’t!  It was called Duck Force.)

But as other industries get hit by change in ways I don’t even fully get because I’m not in them, that means changes hitting everywhere at once.

Judging by myself, even if changes are for the better, the result of a series of them in a quick succession is wanting to curl up and cry like a baby.

And I think we’re all for a lot of these over the next few years, besides a continuing parade of death, because yes, baby boomers, but also because one normal reaction to change is stress and stress kills.

So — what to do?

I can’t promise this will work, but I encourage you to see the best in things.  Spend a few hours every week where instead of focusing on what went wrong or how scared you are, you think of what is going right, and how you can take advantage of it.  It’s not perfect, but I try.

The other thing is: Forgive yourself.  When things are changing quickly and unexpectedly, you can’t expect to always make the right decision.  So, forgive yourself when you don’t.  And keep trying.  You’re not defeated so long as you are still in the ring, or above ground.

Keep going.  At the end of this there’s pie in the sky by and by, but you have to get there.  The only way forward is through.

Keep an eye on the changing road, and walk on.

In the end we win, but it’s not all easy or simple.  You have to get there first.

*Sorry to readers and to Stephanie that this is so late.  Our neighborhood is plagued by a pack of coy-wolves, and in the middle of the night they were all making beautiful night music in our backyard, which interfered with sleep a bit. Yes, I should have scheduled it last night, but it was my 31st anniversary, so we were a little busy- SAH*

History of the Division One Agency

By Agent Sigma (∑)

[Formerly known as Stephanie Osborn]

 

History of the Division One Agency

Text © 2016 Stephanie Osborn

http://www.stephanie-osborn.com

Fiction

First electronic edition 2016

This document is a publication of Chromosphere Press.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent publisher.

Disclaimer

This document is classified Maximum Security PGLEIA and may not be shared with the general public. This document and/or its contents may be shared only with members of the Division One Agency, members of the Pan-Galactic Law Enforcement and Immigration Administration (PGLEIA), and their duly-appointed representatives. It may also be included in the Alpha Line Agents’ Handbook, Galactic Division One Agency for the PGLEIA, Sol System, Milky Way Galaxy.

Under limited circumstances, potential recruits may be shown the information, provided the Cerebellar Holographic Mnemonic Re-Encoding Induction System is used upon them after reading.

All other uses are expressly forbidden, with or without the written consent of Agent Sigma. Failure to abide by these restrictions will result in permanent memory re-encoding to a level deemed sufficient by the Agency Director and/or the Ennead.

 

1.0     Visitations

Aliens have been visiting Earth for many thousands, if not millions, of years. This much is demonstrable from the many sightings documented in ancient manuscripts, from the vimanas of the Bhagavad Gita and other Vedic writings, to the Judeo-Christian Bible testifying of Ezekiel’s “wheels within wheels,” flaming chariots, and more.

This rich history in ancient literature includes events during the Siege of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 AD; Flavius Josephus reports, “There appeared in the air over the whole country chariots and armed troops coursing through the clouds, surrounding the cities.”

The records of Plutarch, still earlier, noted that “all of a sudden, the sky burst asunder, and a huge, flame-like body was seen to fall between the two armies. In shape, it was most like a wine-jar, and in color, like molten silver,” in Phrygia, Asia Minor, or what is now known as Turkey, in 74 BCE immediately prior to a battle between the Roman Army and that of Mithridates VI of Pontus.

Livy also recorded, in Ab Urbe Condita Libri, that “an appearance of ships had shone forth from the sky” over Rome as early as 214 BCE.

From this it can be readily deduced that Earth and its superpowers have been closely watched over the course of human history. However, there is also evidence that we have not only been visited, but possibly colonized, at least for a short period of time.

For, going back even farther, it must be noted that the structures under the ice cap in Antarctica, while bearing strong resemblance to those of the Maya and Aztec cultures, certainly predate those cultures by a substantial amount, and likely were, somehow, the inspiration for same. There is evidence to indicate that they were already in place when Antarctica was still in subtropical climes, possibly as early as the era in which the Antarctic plate was part of the Gondwana supercontinent. Yet all indications are that the workmanship required high precision execution and sophisticated machining and placement, the techniques and tools for which were far beyond the capabilities of proto-humans such as Pierolapithecus, Nakalipithecus, and other members of the family Hominidae.

 

2.0     The Modern Age

The modern age of UFO sightings began with the saucer crash in Cape Girardeau, MO, USA in 1941. The US military arrived, took charge of the site and its debris, and swore all witnesses to silence. In the wake of this and other such similar events, the military developed a small cadre of investigators and ‘handlers’ from the US Army Air Corps, which later became the US Air Force. This cadre’s highest priority, even during wartime, was the investigation of UFO and extraterrestrial sightings, the confiscation and analysis of material therefrom, and the maintenance of national security over all. Its original, classified name was Project Signpost.

Ongoing reports of ‘foo fighters’ by both Allied and Axis observers occurred all throughout WWII, notably during the ‘Battle of Los Angeles’ in 1942, but became especially prominent in 1944 and running through the end of the war, as off-world observers took note of the planet-wide conflict, watching and waiting to see what would happen. The use of atomic weapons to end the war drew galactic attention, and UFO sightings continued to increase, as the Pan-Galactic Law Enforcement and Immigration Administration maintained intelligence and strict quarantine of Earth. While we swiftly matured into a space-faring planet, later reports from these observers indicated that there was some doubt in the minds of these off-world entities as to whether or not that would happen at all — there was, in fact, considerable concern that the species would destroy itself.

On Earth, the handling of UFO evidence was spun off to a black operation, dubbed Project Grudge Match, in the years after the war, coming to particular prominence with the 1947 crash in Roswell, NM, USA. This event was handled — somewhat inadequately — by the agents of Project Grudge Match.

Over time, this black op buried itself so deeply that even the originating US Federal Government forgot its existence. This produced some degree of consternation and intrigue when the USAF later opened up Project Blue Book; the two organizations began to cross paths frequently enough that the black op risked being discovered. To solve this problem, Project Grudge Match recruited scientific consultant Dr. J. Allen Hynek, charging him with diverting the Air Force from investigating more deeply, thus avoiding the potentially disastrous public revelation of what was really occurring.

For in the process of its investigations, Project Grudge Match began linking up with — or founding — additional subordinate organizations in other countries, all with the purpose of determining what was going on and why, and protecting the Earth from any external threat. Eventually the old US military name was dropped altogether in favor of a more ambiguous, and more international, reference: the Agency. It must be emphatically stated that this was, however, not the Agency we know today; Division historians refer to it as ‘the pre-Agency.’

As time went on, pre-Agency contacts began to be made with various extraterrestrial groups. By the time NASA was formed in 1958, a well-structured, world-wide organization had coalesced, and was actively pursuing contact with what it was coming to realize was a pan-galactic civilization. Unfortunately, that same pan-galactic government still maintained its hands-off-Earth policy, so attempts to negotiate a more sweeping galactic agreement on behalf of Earth were stalled.

Also during this time, the pre-Agency had developed several trade agreements with member systems of this pan-galactic government, enabling the import of certain advanced technologies in exchange for more esoteric items to be found only on Earth, including entertainment videos (film and television), bacon, lava lamps, and diet sodas.

 

2.1     Franz Levy and the Six-Day War

This status quo was maintained through the next forty years, except for one incident in 1967:  During the Israeli Six-Day War, an aging Mossad agent, Franz Levy, inadvertently and unexpectedly found himself protecting an alien potentate — visiting Earth on vacation as a tourist — who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Despite discovering the obvious alien nature of his fugitive, he recognized that the extraterrestrial was an innocent, caught up in a conflict not its own, and at risk of perishing as a result. Levy’s personal background dictated that he assist the stranded being.

 

2.1.1  Levy’s Personal History

Levy had himself survived WWII as a child in the Majdanek concentration camp. He was the only surviving member of his family, who were among the first interns of the camp in late 1941. He was freed in July 1944 when the Soviet Army captured Majdanek. He was then 14.

Recognizing that the Soviet regime was unlikely to be much more beneficent than the Nazis, he used the skills he had learned to survive in the concentration camp to slip past the Soviets, and made his way into Western Europe before the war ended. There he spent the next three years living hand to mouth as a street urchin refugee, moving from town to town as necessity dictated. As soon as the United Nations partitioned off the new, modern nation of Israel, Levy promptly stowed away on a ship bound for Tel Aviv from the French Mediterranean port town of Villefranche-sur-Mer, making aliyah in Israel twelve days after his 17th birthday.

He was welcomed with open arms by his fellow Jews, but the lone boy quickly found himself falling between the cracks as the new nation was flooded with immigrants, many of which were extended family groups. As war loomed on all horizons, the young nation began preparing for war, and Levy found his calling.

Enlisting in the Israeli Defense Forces, which not only gave him a sense of purpose but a means of living, Levy quickly moved through the various levels of military training and found himself a military field intelligence agent during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. There, his street urchin skills stood him in good stead, as did the fourth-level black belt in Krav Maga he obtained in the course of his military training. He successfully executed several missions, bringing back important intelligence information for IDF Command each time. For this he was awarded the War of Independence ribbon and the Haganah ribbon. He was also ‘posthumously’ awarded the Medal of Distinguished Service (this award was not instituted by the Israeli Knesset until 1970).

Having thus distinguished himself during the war, he continued as an IDF intelligence officer, emerging from the War of Independence at the rank of First Sergeant, and later being promoted rapidly through the ranks until achieving First Lieutenant.

He was recruited by the HaMossad leModiʿin uleTafkidim Meyuḥadim (Hebrew for “The Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations,” aka the Mossad) upon its founding in 1949, where he again served well and honorably, through the Sinai War and other, lesser skirmishes and missions, until the events of the Six-Day War.

By that time, he was 37, and becoming somewhat long in the tooth to execute the job of a field intelligence agent, especially given the hardships of his youth, the deprivations of which were beginning to catch up to him in the form of medical problems — the Mossad physicians gave him only a few more years before multiplying health issues would force his retirement.

Two weeks before the war’s outbreak, he was notified that he had Stage Four lung cancer, presumed to be as a result of long-term exposure to dilute levels of Zyklon B in the air of the concentration camp where he had spent a significant part of his youth. Doctors gave him less than a year to live.

 

2.1.2  Pulgey Entiyti Intervenes

In order to successfully extract the potentate, who proved to be no less a personage than Pulgey Entiyti of Emdali, the then-head of the Pan-Galactic Council of Nine (otherwise known as the Ennead), Levy opted to make what was essentially a suicide move, acting as a decoy by stepping into the path of a Syrian force invading the Golan Heights, and opening fire with two Uzis in double-tap mode. (When asked about his decision, Levy was heard to remark that he thought it would be faster, and prove more useful, than “letting the cancer have me.”) This enabled Pulgey to reach its spacecraft and crew in safety, but Levy took several rounds to the torso, at least one of which nicked his descending aorta, as well as causing considerable internal lacerations. He managed to stagger to shelter in a back alley before succumbing to his wounds, and his cover identity is listed as the only Israeli officer to die in that skirmish — with certain changes to the details made, in order to hide the involvement of a Mossad agent.

However, Lord Entiyti, in gratitude for its rescue, ordered its crew to use all its ship’s devices — to include active cloaking and tractor fields — to capture and bring aboard Levy’s body. When Levy awoke — much to his surprise — three weeks later, he found himself not only healed of both cancer and bullet wounds, but rejuvenated, now a perfectly healthy human with a physiological age of approximately 28.

More, he was on Entiyti’s homeworld of Emdali, and on retainer to Entiyti as one of his personal bodyguards, a position he filled for some three decades. This was much to Levy’s liking, as he was fascinated by all the new worlds he visited, learning everything he could on each planet, and leaving behind a myriad of friends and contacts. Over time, he became Entiyti’s chief and favorite bodyguard — and its friend.

 

2.2     The First Envoy; The Agency Forms

In March 1998, NASA’s Galileo spacecraft, orbiting the Jovian system, transmitted data to Earth indicating that Jupiter’s satellite Europa had a liquid ocean under all the ice. This in itself was a fascinating discovery for the humans, but the same historic event was seen in the Ennead as a potential threat, since a mining colony from the water world of Ivalde, in the Groombridge 34 system, existed below the icy crust. This, at last, provided sufficient impetus for the Pan-Galactic Council to act.

A carefully-coded signal was sent to the concomitant head of the pre-Agency, codenamed Oboe, instructing her to bring a contingent of her most trusted agents to a low-population area in west Texas, outside Ozona, there to meet with an envoy from the Pan-Galactic Council that summer. Oboe followed instructions to the letter, and brought a contingent of seven agents, including herself.

The location was chosen for several reasons, including its low human population density; the relative flatness of the area, suitable for several spacecraft to land; and the presence of certain ore bodies in the geological strata which tended to result in a natural cloaking of spacecraft entering the area.

There, the seven agents were met by a specially-organized team from the Ennead, led by Entiyti itself, with Levy along as bodyguard; it would be his last mission caring for Entiyti. The galactic leader had decided that it was time for Levy to return to his homeworld, and had given him one last round of medical rejuvenation treatments; upon his return to Earth, Levy had a physiological age of approximately 32, but a chronological age of 68, with the corresponding experience and knowledge of a seasoned galactic traveler. Entiyti put Levy into the hands of Oboe, instructing his faithful, curious bodyguard to work with the organization they were forming, and serve as a kind of formal liaison between it and the Council.

The meetings lasted several Earth days. A considerable amount of detail had to be thrashed out, and the UN Secretary-General at the time, Kofi Annan, was brought to the negotiations in secret, somewhat to his surprise. There, he ensured Earth became a signatory to what would later become the Sydys Concordat, the governing treaty for the Pan-Galactic Government as a whole.

During the course of negotiations, a 17-year-old boy, the son of the recently-deceased rancher — one James Robert Bryant — on whose property the First Contact took place, made the rounds of the fencing on the ranch in order to effect any needed repairs, and accidentally encountered one of the spacecraft; he wandered aboard out of intense curiosity. Inside, he found negotiations actively under way, and Alexander Ian Bryant was promptly co-opted into the organization; Cerebellar Holographic Mnemonic Re-Encoding Induction technology had not yet been introduced to Earth. It would be another five years before this technology was given to the young Agency for general use.

[Once the mnemonic re-encoding system technology was in common use within the Division One Agency, the Agents gave it the handy nickname ‘brain bleach,’ due to the unwieldiness of the formal name, ‘Cerebellar Holographic Mnemonic Re-Encoding Induction System,’ when used on a daily basis. And, as has been pointed out many times by virtually every new recruit to the Agency, the acronym — CHMRIS or CHMREIS — is not much better. —∑. ]

The story was given out that young Bryant had been attacked by a rogue cougar, or possibly a chupacabra; the mangled body was then scavenged by a pack of coyotes, with little left in the way of identifiable remains. Nalin Iyaaye Bryant, the boy’s grieving mother, now bereft of husband and son, returned to her family on the Lipan Apache reservation, ‘selling’ the ranch to a holding company owned by the Agency. It was thus held in trust for the boy.

By the end of July, the former Galactic Territory One had been officially re-ratified as Galactic Division One, to be headquartered on Earth, Sol System, as the most central and densely-populated area of the division. The covert international organization which had previously handled all matters of interplanetary interaction and commerce with excellent coordination and method was confirmed as the newest branch of the Pan-Galactic Law Enforcement and Immigration Administration (PGLEIA), for Galactic Division One.

 

2.2.1  The Originals

The seven original human agents, plus Levy and Bryant, became known as The Originals within the Agency, referencing their status as the first official Agents of PGLEIA Division One. They included:

1. Oboe
2. X-ray
3. Pip
4. Duff
5. Ink
6. Golf
7. Union
8. Fox
9. Echo

Oboe took Fox in hand as ordered by Entiyti; Fox became Oboe’s assistant, as well as the first Agency liaison to the Ennead. Fox also wrote most of the techniques and training handbooks that were eventually used across the Agency, and was heavily involved in the development of the Diplomacy department.

X-ray, the next-highest ranking agent present, took the very young Echo as his partner, training the boy and treating him as his own son. When Echo came of legal age, he was able to designate the family ranch as a safehouse/site for fellow Agents; its cover story advertises it as a guest, or ‘dude,’ ranch, and it remains an active, working ranch, run by the Agency and carefully-chosen adjuncts. Though it is not well-known, he visits occasionally, choosing to stay there when in the region, for business or relaxation. The property is held in trust for Echo by the Agency in the event of his retirement.

Echo and X-ray were still partners at the time of X-ray’s demise in 2013, when the older agent sacrificed himself so that his partner and other colleagues could take down an interstellar terrorist that had just wiped out a young family, including two small children. The terrorist did not survive the altercation.

Of the nine Originals, three still survive as of the writing of this document:

• Fox (current Agency Director, stationed at the Headquarters Office, 31 Division Avenue, Brooklyn, New York City, New York state, USA),
• Echo (new department chief, Alpha Line; also designated Agency Director successor, stationed at the Headquarters Office, 31 Division Avenue, Brooklyn, New York City, New York state, USA), and
• Pip (McMurdo Office chief, retired to Sydney, New South Wales, Australia).

 

3.0     Agency Expansion and the Future

By the time of the writing of this history, Division One has offices in all of the major cities of Earth, on all continents and subcontinents as well as two deep-sea offices — one in the Atlantic, outside the ruins of Atlantis; and one in the Pacific, near the Muan capitol Naacali. Consideration was given to establishing an Indian Ocean/Lemurian office, but no seismically-stable site has been found as of this writing.

Ongoing trade agreements continue to be negotiated with other stellar systems, to the benefit of Earth and the rest of the Galactic Confederation.

The Agency has also participated in at least one interstellar war, during which an attempt was made by the Klydonians to invade Earth itself. The PGLEIA Division One Agency successfully repelled the invasion without substantive physical assistance from outside the Sol system; however, intelligence information was supplied by the Council, and put to good use. They were assisted by the firepower of Earth’s major armies, which were subsequently subjected to the Cerebellar Holographic Mnemonic Re-Encoding Induction System to ensure matters remained classified.

 

3.1 Headquarters

The Headquarters for the Division One Agency is at 31 Division Avenue, Brooklyn, in New York City, in the state of New York, USA. This site dates to pre-Agency days, when it was the New York hub for pre-Agency activities, though not its headquarters. While the exterior comprises some four stories in a modest brick building, the installation of a local space warp inside allows for no less than three sub-basements, an extensive underground evacuated-tube maglev train station, and well over two hundred floors, including expansive, comfortable housing for numerous Agents on the upper floors.

Many departments are included in this facility, including Logistics, Diplomacy, Engineering, Sciences, Weapons Development & Testing, Medical, and more.

In addition, lower floors are set aside as interstellar embassies; each system wishing to place an embassy on Earth is allotted half of one floor. The total number of embassies at this time is 83.

Fox was heavily involved in making this the Headquarters location, due in part to the symbolism of the street address, and partly because of its location on the edge of a substantial Jewish population, which allowed him to feel a sense of connection to his old life. Ease of transportation was an early consideration, with its proximity to the East River.

The area also provides ample apartment dwellings for Agents interested in living off-site, as well as numerous convenient markets and delis for hungry Agents on the move.

 

3.2 The Los Angeles Office: Cover And Entertainment

The establishment of the Los Angeles Office enabled the laying down of additional layers of cover for the Agency, in the form of various film and television scripts written by Agents at that Office, and often produced by the Office itself, under one or more of several fronting corporations. These include a long-running television series; at least two film franchises, each of which spun off animated series; numerous video games based on each franchise; and even several novels and comic books.

The office has since become a hub for entertainers throughout the Galaxy who are interested in breaking into film.

 

3.3 Alpha Line

Consequent to the Klydonian Invasion, Division One has seen fit to inaugurate a new department, the Alpha Line, an elite unit intended to provide the ‘point’ in the event of future interstellar disagreements of such virulent nature. Application is open to all agents; however, each must pass rigorous qualification testing before they may be assigned to Alpha Line.

This new department is headed by the youngest member of The Originals, Echo, with the assistance of his most recent partner Omega, an augmented human recruited from the NASA Astronaut Office. Together, these two comprise the successful prototype team, Alpha One.

Echo’s previous partner, Romeo, an ex-Navy SEAL who replaced X-ray during the events of the invasion, and Romeo’s current partner, India, a former ER physician, comprise the Alpha Two team.

Additional teams and sub-departments are being created as Agents qualify and need arises.

 

 

Alpha and Omega (Division One)

First in an ongoing series about the adventures of Alpha Line available now for preorder on Kindle with a release date of January 10, 2017.

So, I’ve been thinking about 2016.  It’s not been so much bad — other than the death toll — as profoundly weird.

For us, there were some bad things, one of them very bad, which was having crazy landlord asking us to move in a month, when he’d previously agreed to let us stay through May and we were waiting on a short sale (our fault, being off lease).  (Which came through in July.)  That was the bad.  Moving a three bedroom, four people, three offices household in a month is trouble enough but our move had been delayed three years because of finding a place that would rent to us with 4 cats.  (And btw, selling a house with 4 cats was a no go, hence the move to a rental while we re-finished, cleaned and staged house for sale.)

There were weird career things, too, about which the least said the better, because on top of the sudden move, they brought me as close to a nervous breakdown as I ever expect to come.

But there was the good: one of you offered to rent us his house, for as long as we needed it, so we didn’t end up as we expected with the storage/hotel/cat boarding solution.  (Of the three the cat boarding would be the most expensive one.)

And the short sale on the house of our dreams did come through.

There was other bad.  But mostly the year was CRAZY.

Just to give you a glimpse of what has been going on since we moved into this house: we moved in and were immediately away for a month, between Liberty con and Portugal.  Another month was lost to “where the hell did I put?”

September I started to settle in.  And then someone else in my household needed surgery.  There was a lot of work up to it, and then the surgery and a considerable disruption in our household.  And then in October girl-cat got very ill.  She died at the end of October and sent us for a loop.  And then younger son moved out, with attendant disruption of routines and crazy stuff in household.  We were just settling in early December, when my body decided it was a really good time for me to collapse.  Since then it’s been holidays and doctors appointments.  (Neuro on Jan 3) and then I thought I had two weeks to write in peace.  And we’ve been caught up in admnistrivia relating to all the moves.  Stuff like closing out safety deposit boxes.  Oh, and younger son is ill. And we don’t know what it is, so he needs a specialist.  And then Derpfish died the day after Christmas.  It didn’t have the same impact as a cat dying (cats are people) but it still stole a day from me, because I was bummed and feeling guilty I couldn’t save him.

The stress has been so bad that I was on prednisone four times this year.  JUST to stop walking around with open sores everywhere and unable to breathe.

The end result of all this is that I’m heavier than I’ve ever been, and … well, thank heavens one of you gave me clothes that fit, but I don’t recognize myself in the mirror.

On the other side … the good: Younger son moved out, and is behaving like an adult.  Not on his own financially yet, but we hope in the next 2 years.  He is looking for part time work, preferably related to engineering.  His brother is doing well in medschool and growing more independent from us, which is also good.

Dan and I found a house we love and we enjoy being relatively near the Natural History Museum and the zoo.  We’re looking forward to more afternoons off in the new year, particularly if he can work from home.

My long-standing thyroid problem is FINALLY getting taken care of.  We’re organizing the house in the expectation of an at-least 10 year and maybe forever tenure (if at least one of the kids stays in CO.)  And the writing is coming back.  (Thyroid destroys word-competency, which has been getting slowly worse for 10 years, and you can see how that affects my writing, right?)

The end result of all these changes is that I’m getting “remodeled” as I told Dan.  Sure, it’s a pain going through it, but the end result is better.  After two years of sheer turmoil, we’re out of a house that never worked very well for us, and we only stayed 13 years in because were tired/ill/not functioning. A growth that could have killed me was removed while encapsulated so I didn’t need chemo.  My weird thyroid issue is getting taken care of.  I have no idea what the brain thing is, but the collapse is worth it if we can take care of it early.  There is no scenario in which waiting would have been better.  And the “things to come” are beginning to take shape, the Dan and I working and being happy in this house.

I feel roughly used by the year, just because the changes were so hard and fast.  But I also feel like I’m being kicked out of my comfort zone and into trying new things.  In the new year, there will be a book with Kevin J. Anderson, and one with Larry C.  And if things just slow down a little, so I can sit down (okay, treadmill walk) and write, I’ll be happy.

The changes suck, but the end result of most of them is positive.  (Yes, even poor Miranda and Derpy. They were both very ill and I couldn’t help them, which depressed me.  I hated losing them, but they’re not in pain now.)

Let 2017 be the year I get things done, even if means reaching beyond my comfort zone and doing difficult things.  All I ask for is that I can finally work.

And that you continue to be around as my support group.  Because without you I’m not sure I’d have survived these very interesting times.

Let’s make 2017 productive AND happy.