Born Free
I totally forgot I hadn’t posted today.
Yes, I have guest posts, some astounding ones, and I could have put one of them up, except I forgot I hadn’t posted. Until I was in the middle of the Baen road show.
Orvan Ox said to blame it on him (and also “moo”) I’m not sure how, but he says it’s all his fault. More tomorrow/later today, depending on liberty con parties and how alive I am or not.
So yesterday we got WAY more people than we counted on for our little improv party for #1 son. Not that this was a bad thing. I’m glad though that we decided to have TWO cakes, and 20 lbs of chicken legs, or we’d have been left in the lurch.
The party completely overrode our tiny little room and spilled out all the way down the hallway.
The last person left after one am — partly my fault as we engaged in conversation — and the boy is most thoroughly 25 now, which still makes me a little confused. He still has five to seven years to finishing his degree fully and be a fully productive member of society. Which is hard on the hyper-responsible young man who wants to pay his own way, but that’s the path he chose. (And he’s borrowing most of it, but we’re paying his living expenses, of course.)
Woke up way too late this morning, which means we just had brunch and we have a panel at four.
This is not how I intended things to go today. I have a Portuguese sf anthology I promised to read, look over the bilingual editing, and write an introduction for, which will probably mean I’ll be burning the midnight oil today as well. I intended to get that done by noon today. It won’t happen.
But it will hopefully get done by midnight — I got to talk briefly with Larry at the party yesterday and he approved my plans for Grant (mwahahahahahaha) — and I might get to meet with/talk to Larry int he meantime. IF not that will be tomorrow.
One day at a time. I won’t say I don’t often get furious at things going slow. The little time I’ve had to devote to writing in the last two years of packing and moving moving moving moving, has cut down on my production to ridiculous levels, on top of the slow down of illness the two years before that.
I get annoyed and impatient, but there isn’t a hell of a lot more to do than take it a day at a time. You know the thing about the journey of a thousand steps? And the only way to accomplish it is to take that single step and then go on putting a foot in front of the other. Just a foot in front of the other. Sure, sometimes you’ll jump back to avoid a tiger, or take a detour around an obstacle. But you try to generally keep moving. One step at a time. Towards your goal.
We all understand this in our private lives, even if sometimes the setbacks and detours make us despair.
Why is it so difficult to do in politics? Why do people start from “I want it all and I want it now” like they all become Freddy Mercury?
Oh, I know, it’s because the history we learned telescopes all those steps into “and then the glorious conqueror walked a thousand steps and won. The end.” And because movies and books have conditioned us to this, too.
But Narrativium isn’t life, except in very small and marginal effects. Life is a lot of boring, small things that push, push, push, getting us to the goal in steps so small that you sometimes don’t see yourself taking them.
And that’s what happens in politics, writ large. You push push push and sometimes you don’t see the results for generations.
Our current clusterfilk is the result of pushing that started more than 100 years ago.
To want it all now, no setbacks, not halting, no walk arounds is to have no concept of the rate at which societies move.
It’s to want to toss the baby AND the bathwater out, in return for — This is not clear as none of that will achieve the goal.
Though I suppose as a Latin woman I do understand how satisfying grand tantrums and dramatic exits are, in the end you just have to restart the journey again.
One step at a time.
It’s not grand or dramatic or interesting. It is however what we have.
One step at a time. One day at a time. You do the best you can and you discard regrets. And you move forward, though sometimes you can’t even see it, towards the goal that’s always far away.
One step at a time. Here’s my hand. I’ll help you on, if you help me on.
Towards those lofty goals.
Our lives, our fortunes, our sacred honor. We’ll bet them all, and we might lose them all. But we’ll move forward.
One step at a time.
Yesterday I spent the day in flying out to Liberty Con, which is funny since the actual flight is about 3 hours.
But you know how it goes. It involves getting up way too early, trying to muster luggage and cats, driving to the airport, standing in the security theater line — now with dogs! Coming soon, robotic probes! — for (in this case) an hour and a half, making a perfect target for terrorists, making it to the plane, crashing because you are too exhausted, then stopping for food, getting caught in rush hour on the way to Chattanooga, we got in late in the evening.
The actual travel portion of the day was miniscule, and yet it confused the entire day from getting up to getting our behinds back in bed.
I was thinking about this, as I realized our older son turns twenty five today. For perspective, that’s 3 years less than I was when I gave birth to him.
He just finished his first year in medical school, knows things I never even thought about, much less learned, and has an entire life which is none of our business, much less our not being a part of it (I don’t mean just romantic exploits, but his friends, their favorite restaurants, their favorite books/shows, the habits and traditions they’re starting to form, the things that fill his days and aren’t and shouldn’t be reported to mom and dad.)
And all I can do is scratch my head and wonder where time went.
Like the traveller who left home at six am, I find myself at dinner time, in a different city wondering where the time went.
I’m not complainig about the destination, mind you. I found myself singing “all the women call him treetop lover, all the men just call him sir,” after an interaction observed in the grocery store last night. And he’s — obviously — responsible and hard working, smarter than your average pair of socks, has this weird compulsion to want to help sick people, and is ugly as sin, in that undeniably masculine and not unattractive way some guys are.
BUT the question is, where did my cute little toddler go? He was here just a minute ago!
And we didn’t see him growing, not really, on account of we were busy with careers, and keeping the house sorta clean, and the occasional vacation, and how are we going to (help) pay for college?
So how did we arrive here? I’m not complaining, except why is the sun setting? We didn’t spend that much time in the travel?
This is apropos since I’ll be going to Portugal too, right after Liberty con, and I’ll be faced with the other side of this. You know how that goes. You’re a little kid, and you know you’re going to grow up and be your parents’ age. BUT all the time, they’re also aging, so that when you’re an adult the age you remember them at, they’re elderly.
This is not fair to them or you, or the multitudes of humans who came before. But it is yet true.
The act of living your life spends your life away. You can’t hoard time.
I’m a science fiction writer and can — and eventually will — write this in a a fairer way. And then see what results.
But until then happy birthday to #1 son, Robert Anson, and to the person we named him for, and whom we never got to meet as a colleague, due to that unfairness of time.
May you shine brightly, and your light be seen for generations and never fade.
Even if my son is what happens when you lose sight of your toddler for… I swear it was a few minutes.
Music and the Hugos: Accounting for Taste
by Alpheus Madsen
While I was in my early days, I fell in love with what I would now call “Symphonic” music, but what most other people would call “Classical”. I love the rich tones, the combinations of melody, and the wide range of emotion; I love the music that tells stories (such as “Symphonie Fantastique”, by Hector Berlioz) and music that is cerebral–music for its own sake–such as most of the works of Johann Brahams. And I wanted to be able to compose that music, too! (I still do, actually; I just don’t have the time to do everything I want to do…) With that desire, I decided to earn a Music Minor while in College.
Now, I have a confession I must make: much of the music I love, I was introduced to in my Music Appreciation and Music History classes. It is also, incidentally, why I call the music I love “Symphonic”, because “Classical” music is pretty much limited to the time period of the lives of Mozart, Hayden and Beethoven, while “Symphonic” includes Baroque and Romantic periods…as well as Rachmaninoff, and Movie Scores. Indeed, I say “Symphonic” because I specifically want to include movie scores, because movie scores are particularly what I have come to love in music.
The funny thing about earning a music minor, however, is that I wasn’t just exposed to the “Symphonic” music I loved. I was also introduced to “Atonal” music: music that deliberately took our expectations of harmony, chordal progressions, and rhythm, and threw it all out the window, in favor of experimentation. Arnold Schoenberg, Charles Ives, and John Cage were the leaders of this movement. Sergei Rachmaninoff was technically a member of this movement, too, although he eschewed atonal music, and insisted that he was born in the wrong era: he should have been a part of the Romantic era years before. Rachmaninoff was despised because he refused to reject tonality. He was also despised for being popular with his audience!
This isn’t to say that atonal music was completely useless. Schoenberg composed a lot of music for movies–apparently, it’s fantastic for inducing tension and fear in the audience. And it can be a bit of an acquired taste. At the end of a recital where I suffered through an atonal piece that I would describe as the warblings of a dying bird, I remember one of my professors telling this singer that she thought the piece was very beautiful. At another time, I remember two professors discussing a piece by Schoenberg that was written to describe life in the ghetto of Warsaw…and how a class that was required to listen to that piece over and over again, couldn’t believe that the piece they listened to at the end of the semester was the same one that they listened to at the beginning. (And no, I was not a part of that class, so I can only imagine what it was like!)
So, what does all of this have to do with the Hugos? It’s a matter of taste.
As I have looked over the controversy over Sad Puppies, I have seen many comments to the effect of, “I don’t see what your problem is. Don’t you like work X? What about work Y? Don’t you think Z deserves an award?” Well, no, I don’t like works X and Y, and I especially didn’t think Z deserved an award–at least, not a Hugo. Just because you like those works, doesn’t mean that I would. Tastes differ, and you shouldn’t expect me to like a work because you do. Indeed, if I started asking some of the same questions about the Sad Puppy works, what would your reaction be? Don’t they deserve recognition, too, might I ask?
The problem is even deeper than that, though: in order for me to appreciate “atonal” science fiction, I have to acquire the taste for it…but I don’t want to spend the time to acquire that taste! I enjoy science fiction because it explores new ideas, generally recognizes the intrinsic value of the individual, celebrates heroes, has a sense of awe and wonder, and has a generally positive outlook towards the future. Granted, I don’t mind the occasional dystopia (we need to remember that our actions can lead to dire consequences)…but I don’t want to be hit over the head, again and again, with such things.
(As an aside: this is why I won’t want to become a Graduate Student to study Music. I want to learn to compose music, and I want to compose that music in the styles of John Williams, Danny Elfman, Rachmaninoff, Berlioz, Brahms, Beethoven, Mozart, Hayden, and Bach! Even if my music will never become popular, if it languishes, I want it to languish because I cannot refine my skill to match the levels of these giants, and not because I deliberately sabotaged it for the sake of “art” and “academics”.)
Even beyond that, I want science fiction to thrive! In order to thrive, it has to be popular–at least, it has to be popular enough, that authors can make a living–and “atonal” science fiction isn’t doing that. Indeed, “atonal” art has almost killed off art, it has certainly nearly killed off “Symphonic” music (except in movie scores, heh), and it has pretty much killed off modern literature and poetry (I have yet to figure out how “free verse” is all that much different from “prose”). I do not want to see science fiction to fall victim to “atonality” as well!
And, incidentally, this is why the Sad Puppies will likely win in the long, long game: the Hugos are supposed to be the democratic “We are fans and this is what we like” awards, after all, and the Sad Puppy campaign’s initial purpose was to demonstrate that the Hugos have been controlled over these last few years by a small cabal of insular voters…and that, because of this, it is surprisingly easy to tip over the apple cart with a simple “get out the vote” campaign! It won’t matter how that insular cabal attempts to change the rules of voting, because our message is clear: “Here are works that are worthy of your time, and here is how you vote for them. Now go, enjoy, and tell all your friends!”
So let us go forth, and show that perhaps there is accounting for taste after all..
I’ve had it with bleating.
No, I’ve really had it with bleating.
Blame it on the steroids. Blame it on the fact that I have bags to pack for a con trip and an international trip, instructions to write for the house sitter, cats to take to boarding, clothes to process for the guys AND work to pack, because since we’re mostly going to see my parents, we’re mostly going to be sitting there, and I might as well finish books.
I should be attending to one of those, but instead I’m going to try to stop the bleating. Particularly the “doomed, doomed, doomed” bleating.
It never fails. It’s predictable. If I write a post with a modicum of optimism, like yesterday (Kindly read it: As long as we’re fighting we have a chance is not telling you that it will be easy or fast or simple), I get the bleaters. “You’re too optimistic” “you’re out of of touch” “Look at the candidates” “Elected Obama Twice” “Uniquely corrupt” Dooomed. DOOOOOOOOOOOMED.
Honestly, I don’t know if these people think that taking up Cassandra’s beat makes them interesting (I don’t think so, they’re all, afaict, over twelve), if they know absolutely no history (I don’t think so, most of them are readers), if they think that saying “We’re doomed” excuses them from the perilous fight, or if they’re simply getting old.
I hate doing this post right now, because US history is NOT my area of strength. I only started studying it 6 years ago, and the way I deal with history is that I will accumulate the feel of “how things worked” but not dates or names. I don’t accumulate dates and names, because I can ALWAYS look them up. However, in this case I won’t have the time. OTOH I can rely on RES to supply anything I lack in comments. Other people too, but RES and CACS have made the kind of study of history of the US that I made of Tudor history. They live there part time.
Some things though I can answer up front.
“We elected Obama twice. We’re done for.” Yeah, and? We elected FDR FOUR TIMES. Were we done then? FDR was kind of like Obama with more energy. He turned a recession into a depression. People thought he was anointed of G-d to lead the US. People had his picture everywhere. Even when I was born in 62, in a country far away, his name evoked reverence and awe.
Were we done then?
What we were was in worse shape then. (More on that later.) And the worse things get, the more people want a man on a white a horse to rescue them from reality and from themselves. So the worse he made things, the more he got reelected and worshiped.
Were you under the impression the American people were more than human? Not flawed? Our culture is better than most, but we’re still human.
“Our institutions are now uniquely corrupt.” Oh, please. That doesn’t begin to pass the laugh line. You could say our institutions are now uniquely BLOATED and you’d be right, since the left views them as a sort of welfare. But UNIQUELY CORRUPTED? You have got to be kidding me. Read any bio from 100 years ago. Read around the edges of Expanded Universe. Talk to someone involved in politics who won’t bullshit you.
One thing will come up “Machine politics.” Not only at the national level, where we still very much have them — at least on one side of the isle — but EVERYWHERE. Some cities were run by some machines. Do you think the machines ran the politics for no purpose? Oh please. Of course they ran them to enrich themselves/give jobs to their cronies. Patterson believed that Heinlein’s “had a silver mine” was his doing some “laundering” for one of the machines.
You can’t have power without the power attracting sharks and mafiosi. It is, again, a consequence of being human. The corruption has moved more from local (although we still have some. Hello DIA positioning) to national because the federal government has way too much fricken power.
“But that is what I was saying, Sarah. The feds have too much power. We’re all going to die screaming.”
Oh, please. No, what you’re going to do is get out of the way and let the rest of us continue to fight.
The people elected Billy Jeff twice. They elected Obama twice. The amount of fraud needed to get the second victory for Obama (and he was never at Clinton’s levels) was massive. If you worked the polls or if you saw people claiming to have “created” two million votes for him, you know that.
I also don’t see the encomiums of Obama to stick as did the ones to Clinton for at least four to five years after he left power. Also, no one is trying to make Clinton sound like FDR anymore. Because it won’t stick.
Had Clinton or Obama held power a hundred years ago, they would be revered as icons, people would be ready to vote Obama in for a third term.
“But they’re ready to do that for Hillary.”
Oh, please. The democrats — I still have some dem friends, and a lot of acquaintances — are as happy about her as most of us are about Trump. This is the election where no one wants to vote. “Let the least hated win” is not inspiring. Their party machine, which is corrupted as hell simply pushed a choice between Bernie, which the still sane dems don’t want to vote for at all, and Hillary. And Hillary is the SANER choice. And meanwhile OUR party machine decided to punish us for not taking to Jeb! by pushing Trump (no? Really? They were openly against Cruz until the end, but they can “do business” with Trump. They should be able to. The reason the man hasn’t released his financials is that he’s been a wholly owned brand of multinational banks for twenty years.)
Given the choice, yes, Hillary might win. Some of my conservative (more than I am) friends are voting for her. Some are voting for Trump. Some are going Johnson. Some are staying home. I’m either leaving the top of the ticket blank of voting Johnson, who won’t win and has that virtue. It’s not worth my immortal soul to vote for either Hillary or her twin with the toupee, Trump. Just no.
So yes, Hillary might win. But what will that do? That will cause even more lack of confidence in government among the people. And if the press try to push encomiums it might finish off the press’s credibility.
Because ninety percent of our problem is that we’re fighting with both our legs in a cement bucket
Assuming you guys are serious with the “uniquely doomed” bullshit, you are convinced of this because you’ve been gaslighted. Not just the newspapers, no, though that’s part of it, and they’re doing their best to sell “the people are united behind the progressive future” as hard as Pravda ever did. You’ve been gaslighted by movies, by entertainment, by history books that sell the past as kind of an upright moral utopia when it was in the hands of democrats.
Government by the people is never clean, perfect, virtuous. If you think the people are always disinterested and clean when it comes to politics INCLUDING THE POLITICIANS, you are a child and shouldn’t have the franchise.
If you think the American people are uniquely corrupt, lawless, evil, you are a progressive and should learn history — or go abroad without counselors, nannies and money.
Government by the people is messy, faulty, often corrupt. Down in the trenches, the mud gets all over everything. You have to fight with elbows and truncheons, even as a pundit, and you have to hit people you like but who are being idiots.
There is NO clean politics. There is no perfectly virtuous free people. The Founding Fathers themselves engaged in what we’d consider corruption, and fought in less than clean ways. The progressives view this as a signal our system is awful. If you want to join them, there’s the door.
Government by the people is messy, odoriferous, stuttering, halting and often counterproductive.
It’s an awful, awful system. Save for every other one.
Stop bleating. Yeah, we’re in trouble. There isn’t a year since the founding of this republic that we’ve not been in serious trouble.
You want to be rescued by a man on a white horse who makes it all work flawlessly? Yes, I kind of suspected that from the encomiums to Trump I hear even from supposed libertarians.
But reality doesn’t work that way. The man on the white horse becomes the tyrant we must depose. Because he’s still flawed, and working with flawed reality. And you picked one who is … well, a machine politician, or at least a man playing at politics, with both feet in the democratic machine.
No one told you it would be easy. This is not a game. Being a subject is much easier than being a citizen.
I understand you’re tired and discouraged. I’m tired and discouraged too. We thought that we’d defeated the biased press. And we’ve only taken away maybe a tenth of its influence. This is not how I planned to still be fighting in my fifties.
But we are discouraged because we were unreasonable optimists. It was just around the corner, we thought ten years ago. Yeah. Well, we weren’t right. And we’re not just fighting the press, but as what you guys keep saying shows, the entertainment, the history books, the–
As a civilization we were gaslighted by the unified lie. We’re just starting to have the tech to come out of it. And look at the strides we’ve made in gun rights, among other places.
Yeah, the carrying momentum of the left machine will still score it victories. You can’t stop it over night. BUT we’re starting to score SOME too.
I’m tired, I’m upset, I hate to have to fight those fleeing the battle, as well as the ones on the other side.
But hopeless? While there’s life, there’s hope.
And there’s still a lot of life in the constitutional republic.
Yeah, there’s flaws that must be mended. OF COURSE there are. It’s a human thing, built by humans.
So?
No one is going to mend them for you. Pick up your shovel and dig. Whether your trench is in the culture wars or in outright politics, there is a lot of fighting to do.
None of it will be solved by giving up.
Get to work.
Years ago, when I was particularly depressed about something stupid going on in government, I had to leave the office and go pick up the kids from school.
At the time, we lived in a tiny mountain town near Colorado Springs, and it was a fine late Spring day. As I walked to the school, five blocks away, I saw people out working on their roofs, people planting their gardens, people taking their pets for walks, people driving for a volunteer organization that drives the elderly around, people going about their lawful business in every possible way.
And suddenly, like an epiphany, I realized that our “elites” including the presstitutes and the supposed intellectual heights of academia, are among some of the most corrupt in the world, but the people? The people are all right.
This is the reason why, despite our terrible institutions we’re not Somalia or Venezuela or even Brazil. Our politicians are fully that corrupted, doing and saying anything for the sake of holding on to more power. But we’re different.
How different? I’ll give you the two ways that made me fall in love with America:
1- for now, in most places — this is changing and it’s a worrying trend — we are law abiding, and more importantly respecting of other’s property. Every time I go to Portugal, you can fold more of your car and take it away with you, to prevent people from breaking in to steal it: radio, gps, steering wheel. (I can’t remember if you could actually remove the steering wheel, or if I dreamed it after the last time.) In most places I’ve lived in the US, including some large cities, you could leave your car door unlocked all night and nothing would happen. In the place Older Son has been living (which is more than a little dicey) he couldn’t leave the door unlocked, because his car would get boosted, but even there no one is taking away the radio, or the gps from the car, for fear of having it broken into. And there are no extortionists threatening to scratch your parked car if you don’t pay protection.
More important is the stuff American-born people don’t even think about. You guys put out garden decor, and Christmas lights, and stuff, and it never occurs to you that it could be stolen. For instance, right now we have our entire patio set sitting up in front of the (full of stuff) garage. Why? Because it’s going in the back porch, which will be rebuilt in August or September, maybe. So, right now the stuff is on the driveay, which means ANYONE could just walk out with it without so much as a “by your leave.” In Portugal, the set (fairly expensive, we bought it back when we were well off, before the 2000 crash) would already be gone. Most countries in the world it would already be gone. Which is why people have walls and fences and gates.
I know it’s getting scarier some places, but so long as things don’t get stolen if you don’t nail them down, we’re all right.
2- We roll up our sleeves and do what needs to be done.
When we were first married, Dan did all the car maintenance, and I learned to do all the house maintenance. I had a leg up as I’m incurably curious and had followed ever workman around, when they came to repair something. But here’s the thing: what we did would have been considered humiliating and beneath our station in most places in the world. We were college educated and trained for jobs of the mind. We should have been sullen and upset at being “forced” to work with our hands.
Actually we both rather enjoyed it, and it often served as a break from my trying to break into publishing and Dan’s often grueling coding job, in those early days. We’d wonder around on weekends doing sweaty-work, with a song in our hearts (you don’t want me to have a song in my lips. No, trust me) because we were doing what needed to be done and taking care of business. When you’re young and low man on the totem pole in your job, or in my case, locked totally outside it, you need stuff you can control, and we controlled our home improvement and car repair. (I think I improved our starter home within an inch of its life. Never mind.) “Deal with that sh*t” became our watchword.
Now, I know that lots of people here, too, think they’re “too good to–” or that hard physical work will kill them. BUT the majority don’t. Not only do we have DIY solutions everywhere we turn, but our natural instinct on seeing something that needs done is to deal with it: not wait on someone better off/worse off/with the right credentials. We just “deal with that sh*t.”
Yes, our politics are a mess, a combination of the fact that we’re NOT as a rule a very political people, being too busy with the business of living and building something better for our children and grandchildren. Be serious: would you like every one to obsess on politics as, say, I do? They’d never get anything done. Surgeons and engineers would need to check instapundit in the middle of vital work. Be real.
So people who aren’t very plugged in let themselves be duped by the presstitutes and the power-hungry politicians. What else is new?
We are fractionally more awake and involved than in the early twentieth century, and believe it or not, this horrible election not withstanding, we’re much better off than we were 100 years ago, when it comes to not believing in collective solutions; when it comes to rolling up our sleeves and dealing with political cr*p; when it comes to finding other news sources and not going along with the majority. If you don’t think so, you’ve not read any memoirs from a century ago.
This country was founded on and will continue to be a struggle between those who want to give power to the government and those who want to be left alone. As long as the struggle continues, we’re fine. It’s when we go to sleep under the boot of the oppressor that we are done for.
As long as the people still do for themselves, as long as the answer to “my roof is leaking” is not “call the government” hope is not lost.
Yeah, our kids are a little more lost than older people, but be fair to them, they were indoctrinated like no generation here before (about like mine was, back in Portugal. BTW, after we hit our thirties we turned into the most ‘leave us the heck alone’ generation the country had ever seen. Which admittedly isn’t much, but you have the culture of the country to contend with) and they are the richest generation in the richest country the world has ever known. Compared to the rest of humanity, they’re all scions of nobility. And compared to those, by and large, our kids are all right. And they tend to find their way out of indoctrination before forty. We can’t ask for more.
So let’s go out today and celebrate the shot heard around the world; that sweet air of liberty which is still shaping us today and which offers us hope for the future.
Nations shouldn’t live under the grinding yoke of a foreign power. And individuals shouldn’t live under the dictates of an impersonal, far away government.
Both should roll up their sleeves and deal with their own sh*t themselves.
As our British “relatives” are finding just now. They too have discovered the joys of an independence day.
This could become addicting. For all the world. And it would be a good thing. Below is a hokey speech, from a hokey movie, both of which never fail to bring tears to my eyes.
To our blinkered elites, and everyone who thinks the “common people” can’t be trusted be it with guns, with words, with opinions, with free association, with life, liberty and the pursuit of independence:
Yes, we know the world faces many problems. This is why you should stop joggling our elbows. Leave us alone. Let us deal with that sh*t.
We were moving # 1 son from his apartment to apartment in our basement, which will save us a TON of money over the year.
We had this scheduled for end of July, but we come back on the 26th late at night, he needs to hand in the keys on the 29th, and while we can clean it, I doubted we’d want to come back from overseas and jump straight into renting a uhaul & moving stuff.
Also this gives us a shot at having house unpacked by time his classes re-start.
Rachel Griffin wants to know everything. As a freshman at Roanoke Academy for the Sorcerous Arts, she has been granted to opportunity to study both mundane and magical subjects.
But even her perfect recollection of every book she has ever read does not help her when she finds a strange statue in the forest—a statue of a woman with wings. Nowhere—neither in the arcane tomes of the Wise, nor in the dictionary and encyclopedia of the non-magic-using Unwary—can she find mention of such a creature.
What could it be? And why are the statue’s wings missing when she returns?
When someone tries to kill a fellow student, Rachel soon realizes that, in the same way her World of the Wise hides from mundane folk, there is another, more secret world hiding from everyone—which her perfect recall allows her to remember. Her need to know everything drives her to investigate.
Rushing forward where others fear to tread, Rachel finds herself beset by wraiths, magical pranks, homework, a Raven said to bring the doom of worlds, love’s first blush, and at least one fire-breathing teacher.
Curiosity might kill a cat, but nothing stops Rachel Griffin!
Before coming to Roanoke Academy, Rachel Griffin had been an obedient girl—but it is hard to obey the rules when the world is in danger and no one will listen.
Now, she’s eavesdropping on Wisecraft Agents and breaking a great many regulations. Because if the adults will not believe her, then it is up to Rachel and her friends—crazy, orphan-boy Sigfried the Dragonslayer and Nastasia, the Princess of Magical Australia–to stop the insidious Mortimer Egg from destroying the world.
But first, she must survive truth spells, fights with her brother, detention, Alchemy experiments, talking to elves, and conjuring class. Oh, and the Raven with blood-red eyes continues to watch her. It is said to be the omen of the Doom of Worlds. Will her attempts to save her world bring the Raven’s wrath down upon her?
And as if that is not bad enough, someone has just turned the boy she likes into a sheep.
Gefnen – troll-herald and hound for Koschey the Deathless – hunts life across the moors of the far north.
Not deer, not pheasant, not meat for the table. His master eats choicer fruits. When the piercing scent of youth tingles his senses, Gefnen focuses his chase. The prey – a boy – lacks guardians strong enough to best a troll. Swift triumph awaits.
But other seekers tilt the chances of this game. Spirit of storm, poignant memories of a sea-prince, and something more ancient than memory or the wind shape the looming tumult.
Gefnen hunts victory, but a darker victory hunts him.
(This edition of Star-drake includes Rainbow’s Lodestone.)
Urdaisunia, once favored by the gods above all other lands, now lies defeated and in ruins. The gods, displeased by the Urdais’ weakness, have turned their backs on the land and left it to die.
Rashali, a widowed Urdai peasant, has vowed to destroy the conquering Sazars and restore Urdaisunia to greatness.
Prince Eruz, heir to the Sazar throne, is driven by his conscience to walk a dangerous line between loyalty and treason to do what he believes is best for all the people of Urdaisunia.
When Rashali and Eruz meet by chance, the gods take notice, and a divine wager sends peasant and prince on intertwining paths of danger, intrigue, love, and war in their fight to save the land they both love – Urdaisunia.
So, this is a brief explanation of what is going on, the plans for the near future and why ALL THE THINGS ARE LATE.
Yes, I know I’m overdue on delivering Darkship Revenge, and getting Royal Blood finished and up. I had also hoped to get the first chapter of Guardian done and approved by Liberty Con.
I’m starting to believe this won’t happen. Any of it, though if I can get one to happen, it will be DSR delivery, because it was supposed to be done in February for sure. Then we got the “impromptu, totally uneccessary move, due to landlord (two houses ago) being an asshat” (How do you know he’s an asshat? Well, a) the house is not for sale yet. Reason he needed us out RIGHT THEN was that they were going to put the house for sale. RIGHT THEN. Pah. b) they kept ALL our deposit, claiming the cats had peed all over, and he’d have to replace the carpets. He also claimed that the carpets were brand new when we moved in. When we moved in the house smelled pissy, and one of the kids’ friends, who knew the landlord’s family pointed out they had very large, not even nominally house-broken dogs. Which would explain the huge yellow stains, which we actualy removed during our stay. Never mind. He owns a renovation company, so I’m sure he had a “receipt” for the carpets. Not worth a legal case, but definite ass hat. IF Kal Spriggs and his wife hadn’t taken a hit by agreeing to not sell and renting their house in the Springs to us for three months, we’d have been in a hotel for that time. As is, between two moves in three months, house cleaning, carpet cleaning, etc, I think all this cost us around 10k. Hotel might have been a wash. ONLY hotel we couldn’t have the cats, and also we didn’t know IF the sale would come through, so at least at the house the Spriggs rented us, we might have stayed, if worst came to worst house-buying wise.)
Anyway… The problem is that “Two moves in three months” or actually “four moves in a year and a half. My kitchen, bedroom and office are usable, if you’ve spent two years walking around packed boxes, and being used to “Oh, I still haven’t found that!)
The further problem is that we’re preparing for an absence of TWENTY DAYS. Yeah, part of that is that five days of that is Liberty con, from which we’ll be flying (early Monday morning) straight to Portugal. We’ll then be in Portugal about 2 weeks.
You know, the last time we stayed in Portugal more than ten days was before Robert was born.
The problem with this is that we have to have one of the kids’ friends housesit, which means making the house livable for a stranger. I need to set up the guest bathroom, finish unpacking the kitchen, find the bed clothes for the bed, and leave the house “livable”.
You won’t believe me, probably, but this is more complex than it sounds.
Most of all, though, the problem is the distraction. I can’t “BE” in the novel, when the back of my mind is going “I wonder if my sister in law would like one of those…” or “Make sure I don’t forget skin meds.” Or… “MY heavens, I do need a hair appointment before we GO.”
ad infinitum.
In a way this is the worst possible time for this sort of trip. Liberty con is survivable, twenty days absence, when we’re about (over the whole house) 25% unpacked, and need to clear the area where older son will be living, so he can be unpacked and settled before the end of the year? It’s insane. Add in this was a short sale and we need to schedule about ten repair jobs, a couple of them urgent. (Like the gutter issue, which is where water in basement is coming from. Rarely, but when we have a major storm.)
We wouldn’t do this now, we wouldn’t. In many ways we shouldn’t. I have two major collaborations coming up (Larry and Kevin J. Anderson) and one contracted book to deliver, plus three not contracted but bespoken books. (The dragon thing.) And all these moves have cost me enough time.
Also, I’m DEEPLY stressed to the point I’ve unearthed the good teapot and am having afternoon tea every afternoon, because it reminds me of grandma, and makes me feel saner.
A trip to Portugal is always stressful, let alone a trip to Portugal RIGHT NOW.
BUT this is the last year in seven older son can go with us. If younger son’s job comes through (he’s sure, but it’s a startup, and you know what that’s like) in September, this is his last summer for 5 years or so. My parents are in their mid eighties and my dad is the only survivor of his siblings. (And he wasn’t the youngest.)
We’d have gone earlier, but house issues, and moving out of the Spriggs home so they could put it for sale, (not being the asshole-landlord we dealt with previously, they REALLY are putting it up for sale) has made that impossible until those two weeks between Liberty con and some must do family stuff here on the 27th of July.
All of which adds up to: Yeah, we’re going. It’s going to make everything even later, and “full upacking” (except for some pesky boxes in storage) has receded to September with luck.
I hope you guys understand and forgive both late posts, and for the subscribers what will amount to years-late physical stuff. We didn’t plan on the last two years.
On the good side, my health is much better, despite all this and the latest autoimmune attack is finally receding. On the bad side, being an idiot, I wondered why I always gained weight through auto-immune attacks, until younger son said “DUH, mom, steroids” which is what they give me, when half my body is raw flesh. I hope after this I won’t have any major attacks, or I’ll look like a DDR women’s swim team member.
Oh, the “forever house” (Knowing us, I doubt it will be more than 15 years, actually, but I COULD be wrong) backs onto 300 acres of undeveloped land, and I have so far seen eagles, coyotes and wild turkeys.
Something with bright blue plumage is nesting under our (second story) porch. Thank heavens we won’t be rebuilding that till September at the earliest.
Anyway, there will be posts here, and I’ll try to be more regular with instapundit posting too, but the occasional late/weird hours thing might happen, because I’l be in Europe.
Also, I think it’s only fair to point out that when the Hoyts travel outside the country, international incidents happen/wars break out. I’m sorry. I don’t know why. It is reliably true, though.
And I promise I’ll report on it at instapundit, and babble about it here.
Now I need to go install a shower curtain and call my hairdresser to see if I can get my hair done before Wednesday.
So, yesterday, apparently, my post was taken as evidence that I was angry and “always angry.”
This shocked the living hell out of me, as the precipitating incident to yesterday’s post didn’t even rise above “annoying.” I’m fairly sure the person I was interacting with had bought the gospel of literature as social work hook, line and barbed sinker. I’m fairly sure that she didn’t realize the “write to change the world” is just a “social marker” of “real literature” (i.e. that the writer has had an excellent education and knows how to signal it.) I do know it because I not only studied literature, but I studied history of literature and literature criticism. Also, I grew up in a country with a long history. What is now signaled by this “concern for representation of the voiceless” (is this why you guys get so upset when the supposed voiceless shout back? Bah. You ain’t got nothing. Serious revolutionaries silence the “voiceless” before speaking for them. You’re Bush league.) and “writing for social change” is what used to be signaled by putting vast undigested classical quotes in your work, or (like Kit Marlowe) writing your stage directions in Latin. All it means is “I’m special and better than these people and I deserve special consideration and treatment.”
But it was clear the woman I was discussing this nonsense with had NEVER questioned it. Sweet mother of pearl, she admitted she didn’t know the difference between sad and rabid puppies. The practitioners of the big lie just say we’re all the same. She didn’t even know that.
So, no, I wasn’t angry. I was somewhere between annoyed and amused, kind of like when the kid gives the cat chocolate milk, and you know you’ll be cleaning feline diarrhea off the carpet for days, but hey, the kid doesn’t know any better and this is not even misbehavior, just ignorance.
As an aside, I find it very funny that these… Innocents Abroad aren’t even aware of cultural differences enough to understand the tone of my posts. I’ll paraphrase Bridget Correia, here (she was talking about Larry and the example she gave was buying tomato plants.) “Yeah, I sound angry. I was born and raised in Portugal. We get enthusiastic about things. Other times I sound angry — and am not — when discussing which type of tea to buy; when telling my kids about a book I enjoyed; when telling my husband we’ll go for a walk in five minutes; when declaiming poetry; when telling you good morning.”
I sound angry, that is, if you know absolutely nothing of the culture I was raised in. And of course, most of these people know absolutely nothing of any culture except what their professors told them, poor nibblings.
For Portugal I’m considered laid back, bordering on the boring. The first time my husband had a meal with my family he tried to dive under the table, utterly convinced we’d murder each other with the steak knives any minute. We were in fact discussing which shops I should take him to, to buy shoes. (I wonder if he realizes that somehow his kids have the same communication style, helped along by the fact I’m going increasingly deaf, so that I’m perpetually afraid that the neighbors will call the police when the boys shout at each other about their favorite comic books.)
But leaving all that aside, lets say I was really angry. So?
How does that invalidate my take down of their wanting me to write about “minorities” “by the numbers” each one the appropriate stereotype they were taught in school? And, mind you, at the same time, they tell me I can’t write about any minority I’m not (though I’m allowed to write about white, blond, American born men, even though I’ve never been one — go figure) because I can’t possibly put myself in their shoes, since they are apparently aliens, and mere empathy and human fellow feeling won’t do. Oh, and if I write about minorities (which I can’t do, remember?) I have to show them being oppressed forever. I can’t say, have a future in which most of the people in space are dark skinned and when a white man ventures into space he’s sneered at. No, because oppression now is oppression forevah, which is why the poor “voiceless” need crazy people to talk for them and tell other people they have to talk for them/not talk for them/shut up already/write more minorities or you’re a racist/how dare you write a minority when you aren’t one?
How does my reaction to their asshattery invalidate the fact that they’re wearing a stylish colon-hat?
It is the mark of the never thwarted child, who has attained what should have been adulthood without anyone EVER having had the nerve to tell them they are wrong, to think that someone being mad at their nonsense means the person is wrong. Because, I mean, speshull snowflakes are never wrong. Even when they’re being told by a Latina and an Indian man that, yes, they are wrong about what we want out of science fiction.
I wasn’t angry yesterday, just mildly annoyed. And, weirdly, also amused.
However, let me tell you things that DO make me angry:
I don’t get very angry about gatekeepers who try to impose their political opinions on the field when they don’t even know what they’re doing, and are just parroting what they heard at school and in their social circles. They just happen to think that this is the way everyone thinks.
But I get incandescently angry when they then use their bully pulpit to call in slanderous articles to major publications, saying that those who oppose their dominance of awards in the field oppose “women and minorities” writing science fiction. This when not only are those women and minorities organizing the resistance to them, but they’ve treated women and minorities who didn’t fall in line with their ideas like redheaded step children for decades. This is the school bully screaming he’s being harassed. I used to beat up school bullies. I’m much more controlled now, having grown up (you should try it sometime) but I still get angry.
Other things that don’t get me angry include innocent people parroting the cr*p you’ve been feeding them for years. People are people and homo sapiens are social animals.
On the other hand, I get incandescently angry when you use that crap to bully talented writers off the field, to besemirch the reputation of dead and/or older writers who had more talent in their little toes than you have in your entire bodies. If you don’t know damn well that it’s impossible to write more minorities and not to write them at all; if you don’t know that people don’t fit your stupid stereotypes; if you think that ANYONE needs to feel “represented” to read ANYTHING, then I’m sorry for you. There’s clearly some cognitive disorder involved.
But if you know those are idiocies of the first caliber, as most of you doubtless do, and wield them as a hammer to pound more talented people down? Then yes, I get incandescently angry.
You’ll know I’m too angry for words, because I will mock you with GIF posts.
Heed well, this is not a threat, just a reading of the circumstances and the current social mood: moderate your shenanigans. For I only mock you with GIFs, but behind me comes the mob who spanks you with axes.
I have a vested interest in not getting to that point. Superficially, coming from a Latin country, having a masters in language and literature, working in an artistic profession, if the mob doesn’t stop to think — and when do they — they could think I’m one of you and come after me too.
And you must know that I have the greatest attachment to my head. I think it looks best right on top of my neck.
So again I say, stop that crap. I know your parents never spanked you or even told you no, but it’s time you learned to say no to yourselves, and stop pursuing your mean-girl way (particularly if you’re guys) to the top.
You don’t know what you’re stirring.
And I don’t want it splashing on innocents.
