Category: Uncategorized

*Before we begin this post, management has a small announcement:  New cover and free on Amazon  Where Horse And Hero Fell. This is one of the weirdest stories I’ve ever written, not in what it is, but in the sense that I’m not sure how it happened or how I thought it out, or….  You see, it was… (counts) 11 years ago, and I’d just passed out in the bathroom (we’ve never figured out why, but pure tiredness might have done it.  I’d flown to a trade show — courtesy Berkley — to promote the Shakespeare series — and came back to a notice it was being taken out of print, but never mind — then came home to organize and set up the younger kid’s 8th birthday party.  And then, after the party, I sat up for a while, and had a glass of wine with husband.  When I went up to get ready for bed, I collapsed.  The problem is I hit my head and gave myself concussion and added a diopter to my glasses prescription.  Anyway, for about six months, I was also completely … weird.  Not that I’m not weird normally, but I don’t normally careen between dialects of English or even foreign languages mid-sentence.  And I don’t normally have fugue states lasting hours.  The scariest part of this was driving through this REALLY nice neighborhood and thinking “I’d love to live here” before realizing I was a block from home.  As for what I did in my fugue states?  Mostly grocery shopping.  Anyway, in the middle of this I got a phone call asking me to write for Places to Go, People to Kill on short notice, because they had a hole.  So, I did.  Six months later, I got the contributor copy, and I had NO clue what I’d written.  I mean, not one word.  So I read it.  Not a bad story.*

You know the old saying, about man not being an island onto himself?

It is wrong, of course, in many ways. In many ways, we are islands onto ourselves. Look, no matter how much I write about other people, how much I love other people, even how much I live with other people; no matter how much I struggle to develop empathy, at the end of the day, it’s just me, Sarah, in the voice behind the eyes.

I can by an intellectual or emotional exercise, see and feel what other people are seeing and feeling. I can say “well, I’ve been there, and it was awful, so if the kid has just had his heart broken, I’ll do my best to ease his life these next few days.” I can say “Well, you know, the people who were just hit by the hurricane need food and clothes, and I’m going to make sure they get it.” But this doesn’t make me them. And what I think they want might not be what they want. Heck, what I think they need might not be what they really need. (Which is why the old pablum about “To each according to his needs, fromo each according to his abilities” is not just stupid but also evil – because who decides what your needs or abilities are, tovarish? Your level of unhappiness, perhaps your very survival hinges on the ability of some bureaucratic stranger to know you better than you know yourself. Would you care to lay a small bet on the results?)

For instance, while we were living in South Carolina, with a baby and two mortgages, and coming up short every month, someone might have thought what we really needed was baby food (someone did think that, which made me sigh at the box of it) but we didn’t use baby food at all. Robert was breastfed till one and a half. Someone might have thought what we really needed was baby clothes, but I’d got a couple of boxes from Portugal, and I was good. Someone might have thought what we needed was adult food – we did need that. But there were farmers’ markets almost year round and cheap fish markets in the least savory parts of town. We survived.

No, what I really NEEDED was a $40 book of Leonardo DaVinci’s art. Because we had no TV, couldn’t afford any entertainment, and I was circling the drain of post-partum depression. Fortunately my husband knew me well enough to buy it for me, and it did more to get me functional again than all the food and clothes in the world could have. But that’s because it’s my husband, and we live as close as we can (but still not one person) – not some government bureaucrat who’d never met me.

So to an extent we’re all islands. But whoever coined the thought had an odd idea of islands as perfectly isolated. They aren’t. There are boats, and there is radio communication, and there are, occasionally, bridges. In metaphor, the bridges would be really close relationships, like my husband and I. He’s lived with me for years, and just by observing me and my reactions, he has to have a pretty good idea of who lives there, behind my eyes.

Radio and boats are our friendships, but more importantly – or perhaps, but also – books. I tend to joke I had to learn to be a woman from books. In a way it’s an exaggeration, but to learn to be a modern woman and not a village termagant which is what was modelled to me, I did have to learn from books. Note the fact that I had a vagina didn’t confer upon me instant understanding of such things as the games women play. Flirtation was an unknown art. Conveying to someone I liked him (other than by a real close attention to everything he said) and the other things that go into the game between men and women – or even between women in a public relationship of work or power – was a complete mystery. Reading about it in books told me how someone else (often male) thought about it, and it was the beginning of realizing that ignoring guys did not tell them I was interested. (Who knew?)

Which brings us to the current politically correct handwringing, moaning and general bitching about how we are both supposed to write more people of color and different sexual orientations, but how doing that – if you’re not of those colors or political orientations – means you’re “exploitative” and “imperialist” and the Lord alone knows what.

Twaddle. Racist/sexist and homophobic twaddle at that.

Oh, yes, I know, in the glittery minds of the idiots (some of them well known authors) proclaiming this nonsense, the idea is not that more white people (or whatever) should write these characters, but that writers of these backgrounds should write them.

At which point one scratches one’s head and wonders what passes for thought and logistics inside their minds.

Look, no matter how many “opportunities” you provide and welcome mats you extend, the DESIRE to write (let alone the ability, since the two aren’t always correlated) and the desire to write more than one book are not evenly distributed.

Hells and damnation, I’ve been known to say I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy and I was only half joking. For the amount of time and effort I expend on these boks, if I put that into any other business, I’d be at the top of the ladder, and have a beach house in a tropical island.

I know this comes funny from someone who always has half a dozen mentees trailing, but those people, when they come to me are already lost cases and I can’t talk them out of writing. Same for the sons. And if you can’t dissuade them, they might as well make money from it.

So if what these warriors for the proper distribution of characters mean to distribute literary INTEREST let alone talent evenly among all minorities, I wish them luck. It’s a little more mad than a government program to place tarts in lakes to hand out magical swords, and the sheer magnificent insanity of it would make it funny to write. I’m not sure it would mesh with real life, though.

Even if it did, the distribution would be skewed. I mean, minorities are minorities for a reason. (Except women who are actually the majority and used vagina-foo to get classed as a minority.) I’d guess that even if proportionally distributed the number of lesbian writers of Polynesian ancestry will be vanishingly small.

So, what if you want to read about a Polynesian Lesbian and there’s no books available? Well, don’t even think about writing one, because that would be racist and also stealing victimhood.

It’s that stealing victimhood that brings us to the knot in the thinking of these supposedly rational people.

See, it’s perfectly acceptable for me, as a straight Latina to write books about straight white people (and Latinos, I presume.) But if I write about a gay person, or someone of a darker hue than I, then I’m a racist. People of other “more oppressed” races are totally opaque to me and besides I’m exploiting them by writing about them.

WHAT?

Either everyone is completely opaque to everyone else – we’re not – or we’re all equally transparent in the same amount.

Unless the people who spew this nonsense can truly and rationally believe that white people are never discriminated against (they do) which means none of them ever heard of the skinny, non-athletic boy getting pounded into the ground at recess, or of the cute girl being presumed to be stupid, or….

They can’t believe that rationally, in the sense that they can’t reason themselves into this. No one could.

The idea behind this is that there is a hierarchy of oppression; that you can understand it upward (towards lack of oppression) but not downward (towards greater oppression) which is a Marxist idea, BUT also that your exterior characteristics dictate your interior ones. That is, from navigating near the island, you can tell what the thought pattern behind the eyes is.

This is the old idea that culture is genetic – something Adolf Hitler would have loved – but with a new twist. According to the ah… shibboleths (no one can call it thought) behind this theory of “exploitation” by “writing the other” is the idea that your culture is conferred by your appearance.

How many kids do you know who are a different apparent race from their parents? Believe it or not, these kids (adopted or not) are supposed to have a different interior life from their parents and (if darker) be completely opaque to them. (This reminds me of the Latino group – never mind, there’s more to it, but not for the blog – who was recruiting at an event where both Robert and I were in line. They picked him out and said “Hispanic?” He said “Half Portuguese.” They said “Portuguese counts.” He said “My mom is Portuguese.” Keep in mind, I’m standing RIGHT BY HIM. And they look around, bewildered and say “Is she here?” – by the rules of PC, my son has a completely different culture from me, and is more oppressed than I am.)

The insanity of this is obvious. Say you are a very pretty and slight young man, whether you actually like women or not, you’ve been endowed with gay culture. (Until you reveal yourself straight, which immediately puts you in the never discriminated against bracket. Sorry.) Or say that like me at 14, with an affro (it was popular) and after a month at the beach, everyone thinks you’re black (my features are actually like a collision between the Middle East and Africa), does this confer black culture on you, or doesn’t it?

Where the rats got in the heads there is the whole idea of “group victims.” This is distinctly Marxist and like most Marxist ideas hinges on treating people as things.

To an extent understandable. They thought it was a “scientific” way to run society, which means that they had to have scientific classifications of people. Always tricky if you go person by person.

So they went with historical oppression which generally moves in the direction of darker skin color and smaller minority. (Every society always treats its smallest groups worse. Even those you’d think would have power, like geniuses. Because society is always geared to ‘average.’)

The problem – do I need to point that out? – is that who you are is only marginally influenced by your skin color, your orientation, your external characteristics. I bet all of us have known people whose life history, etc, dictated they should be helpless victims sobbing on the floor, and who were, instead, standing tall and holding a pretty effective cudgel for self defense.

I know that I, personally, as Latina, immigrant, with a liberal arts degree, have never now nor will ever be a victim. Some people have victimized me, but that doesn’t mean I’m a victim. It’s the willingness to lie down and take it and assume you can do nothing about it that makes you a victim. (And those who’ve taken advantage of me weren’t doing it because of my skin color or gender, but because they could.)

Anyway – so, some better known writers than I are wringing their hands about how difficult it is to write minority characters without offending people, and about how you can enver know someone else, and is this stealing their victimhood or their culture, or…

They should stop wringing their hands and start typing, and forget all that politically correct claptrap.

Look, I write the characters as they come to me. Some will be darker, some will be gay, some will be women, and some will be men.

Will they be real men, as they exist in the real world? Real gay people? Real—

Oh, please. Books aren’t REAL. Books are an intersection between how the voice behind your eyes views people and the archetypes of how society views people. For the longest time, I couldn’t write women, because my experience of being a woman is so weird, that people went “what?” or (my favorite) told me I’d never met a woman (I was using a male pen name for that one book.)

I’ve learned. I’ve learned by observation, by talks with my female friends, by reading other people’s idea of women.

BUT my women aren’t that archetype, either. They’re the intersection of who I am and what people expect (just enough of what people expect to make it understandable.) And so are my men, who are my observations, what the story needs, and just a little bit of archetype.

The same goes for any minority I write.

Will my gay men mortally offend some gay guys? Probably. But my fan mail and the many whispered “thank you for Nat and Luce” I get at cons tell me that for a large amount of gay males, they are just right, too.

This is because humans are not widgets. Being gay, or black, or brown, or purple or polka dot doesn’t make you the same as everyone who is gay or black or brown or purple. (It might make you the same as everyone with polka dots, because you might be a minority of one.)

And being gay or black or brown or anything doesn’t rob you of your essential humanity. When I write a character who is different from me, I’m not trying to make him/her something of a culture which never did get genetically transmitted (or we’d all be living just like in Ur of the Chaldees) but to make him/her human and to connect with him/her at that fundamental level of humanity.

What I’m doing in fact, is the same thing I do when I try to help my kids or be a good wife. “I’m not him, but this is going on in his life, and so—”

Interestingly, this whole idea of other races/genders being opaque to everyone else and of trying to bridge the gap being exploitation, negates the collectivists’ ideas of government from the top. If we can’t know each other, how can we be governed?

And curiously, I’m the one telling you that’s bullsh*t. While you can’t know people well enough to dictate their every need and want, which is why government should be small and stay out of people’s lives as much as possible, we can know each other well enough to connect at the level of fundamental humanity and to experience friendship, love, and yes, common human empathy across genders, races, and everything that divides us.

Because we’re human. As someone or other said “If you cut us do we not bleed…”

In other words, every man might very well be an island, but thank heavens, there’s telephones, radios, telegraphs, row boats and occasionally bridges. And writing and reading are definitely ways to navigate the space to the heads of those people who aren’t us… no matter their race, creed or gender.

There was a – communist as it happens – Portuguese song that ended with “To navigate is needed, to live is not needed.”

I’m not sure what they meant by living not being needed. But I’m all with them on the navigation.

Send a flotilla, a barrage of radio signals.

Carry forth the message of our common humanity. And let the idiots who think that race, gender, orientation make people into inhuman widgets eat their hearts out.

If they’re good, someday, we’ll send them some coconuts to their barren little islands.

As much as I don’t like trigger warnings, apparently I can be triggered. No, it wasn’t a PTSD thing. Well, unless hearing the same unsubstantiated claptrap over and over induces PTSD, in which case, this particular piece of claptrap I’ve been hearing since I was seven or so, and first aware of the existence of something called the United States. (It will tell you what a woman of quick decision I am that at eight – the next year – I announced when I grew up I was going to be a writer and live in Denver. Mind you, at the time I thought Denver was by the sea, so quick decision and truly spectacular geographic ignorance.)

What I think it was is the same thing that caused me to throw shoes at the head of the Portugal-Russia speaker who was telling us about the glories of Soviet Life in my 6^th grade geography class. Over and over and over again. As in, I’d throw a shoe, then the other, then limp up to get them. Then throw again when he crossed the line of what I was willing to tolerate. No, the teacher COULDN’T do anything with me. The Russian tried. He took the shoe that had hit him on the head and held it and said “What if I didn’t give it back.” “Then I’ll throw dictionaries!” He gave me my shoe back. To be fair, I didn’t hit him often (though that time I had.) Mostly I hit the podium and made him flinch, or just missed him and made him duck. Again, to be fair, I’d told the teacher I didn’t want to be there. Also, to be fair, she couldn’t send me to the directive council again. Because they’d call mom. And mom would take my side and terrify them to boot, by telling them just what kind of spineless life forms they were, and detailing the horrors of the Soviet Union. They’d learned in the past that I was a pain, but mom was trouble.  At the time she had a radio show and wrote for a lot of newspapers. Also, the teacher might or might not have had permission to have Comrade Stinkface speak to the class. At least THEORETICALLY the school was a non-political zone.

Anyway… moving right along. What motivated me to a really inadvisable outburst was the same feeling about that particular panel speaker as I had about the Soviet Speaker. It was like being trapped in one of those nightmares, where people are saying crazy things and nothing makes sense.

The difference is that this poor woman, on a panel with my friend Kate was probably on the balancing edge of maybe being on our side. (The maybe is very maybe. While people can and do change their political stripes, it takes more than knowing things are wrong and what would fix them. As has been observed here, people can be startlingly libertarian in their private lives and total statists when it comes for what they vote for. Heck, I come from an entire country like that. Portuguese merrily ignore the laws, but are convinced there should be MORE laws… for other people.)

But still and all, she wasn’t Comrade Stinkface. Otoh, neither did I throw shoes at her head, so perhaps we’re even. (Though the high heeled crocs would never, at any rate, have made the impact of the steel toed ankle boots I wore at the time. Yes, I know what bearcat said about steel toes causing you to lose your toes. But I bought them not for work (I wore clogs for work in the dirt, or any other place I might get crushed toes.) Work boots were strictly for kicking. Stop laughing. Athena totally ISN’T autobiographical. I get along with dad. Also, how many times do I have to tell you I have no sense of direction?)

Anyway, so there I was, late at night on a Saturday, after signing, Baen Roadshow, panel, dinner, taking in the last panel of the evening, before crashing, and this woman starts talking about the death of meritocracy and how tough times will teach special snow flakes they’re no entitled. So far so good, but it’s really hard to understand her (I thought she had a speech impediment, but Dan tells me she was from … New Jersey? Something like that.)

And out of her mouth comes the words, “America is an empire, and I guess we’ve hit the decline. Empires don’t last forever, and this is a decline—”

At which point, my mouth, with no notice to my brain erupts into “We have not yet begun to rise.” And when she tried to protest, I might or might not have said “Bullshit” (I thought it) but I did say “We are not an empire and we are not in decline. I come from Europe, I should know.” Oh, yeah, the voice was like the voice of the Metatron, splitting the clouds.

If Sarah – Mrs. Kilted Dave – hadn’t grabbed my arm, yanked me down and talked me down, I suppose I would have proceeded to March to the podium, take the microphone, possibly climb on the table, and start shouting at the very sleepy dozen of people in the audience. I don’t know. I honestly was just a spectator at the back of my head at that point.

Yes, I know some of you are going to argue, but no, we are not an empire. The Soviets, weirdly, were an empire, with occupation of other lands and feeding of products (and riches) to the mother land. A predatory empire at that, since they never gave anything comparable to what they took. Instead, they protected the colonies from the imaginary “imperialism” of the US.  (Which is why they accused us of it, and that piece of propaganda is still around. They needed that boogey man.)

You know, the same “imperialism” that made our client states filthy rich and quite able to call us names.

Yes, sure, we have economic influence. Or had, at least – frowns – we did. And sure, we have on occasion installed if not puppet governments as close as makes no difference. But we don’t occupy/claim territory, and no matter what the no blood for oil idiots had to say, we’ve never seized the natural riches of other lands.

We were… at best, the facilitators of a commonwealth.

Again, I know there will be all sorts of protests. Americans always feel guilty over the few times they fought for their own national interest, instead of for things that couldn’t benefit them at all. This comes, I think from not having studied history to any marked degree. Each country is SUPPOSED to defend its own interests. It’s part of the functions of a nation. If you don’t look after your interests who will? The international community is not a kindergarten, and there is no benevolent, all-knowing teacher.

However, I still agree with Dave – and I do know history – Americans are horrible imperialists, all they want to do is go home.

As for decline…

Well, my dears, and I won’t deny we’ve caught the Marxist virus. We let it infect our schools, our universities, our journalists, and our so called “elites.”

However, people don’t die of trifling little colds, and nations don’t die of Marxists taking over sectors that used to be vital and which are now being superseded by technology. We might have got “penicillin” of new technology just in time. I think we have.

I’m not saying it will be easy. I’m not saying it won’t take your lives, your fortunes and your sacred honor. (For some of us, at least. When I came out of the political closet, I knew I might be signing my life away.) But that’s neither here nor there.

Empires enter decline and die, sure.

But America isn’t an Empire. America is an idea – a new idea unleashed upon the world. This is why she scares the lackeys of the old and busted statist ideas, the servitors of the old territories and the old feuds.

Sure, we have problems. But when haven’t we? Since 1776, when has there been a time that our liberty was completely assured and we knew we’d not have to fight for it?

We’re here because the idea of individual liberty will not perish from this world – no matter how much the precious snowflakes cry.

We’re here because the idea of special snowflakes, the idea of an aristocracy of any color or class is repugnant to the very core of our souls.

Yes, if we have to fight on the streets we’ll be scarred, but I hope (and pray – oh, boy, do I pray) it won’t come that.

But here’s the thing: a nation under stress reverts to its fundamentals. Not the fundamentals of that generation, mind, but the fundamentals of the nation, the fundamentals of its founding, its myths, its glorious legends.

When shocked Russia reverted not to the proletarian revolution/anti-capitalism its latest generation had been raised in, but to the glories of the Russian Empire. While Putin might be an ex KGB man, he has been seized by the national ethos and become tzar Putin.

Our nation is – that the woman talking was right about – going to hit the wall. (SPQR linked an economic article on the thread yesterday. Apparently our growth for the first quarter was 0.1%… which is essentially stopped, particularly since figures are always revised downward. Oh, but don’t worry, because they PROMISE us that the economy is/will grow by 0.3% this quarter and also that we’re at the roaring start of a recovery. And if you believe that – they say it’s because of the better job numbers. Brother. They don’t live where I do – I have some swamp land in Florida. Almost no alligators, and I sell it cheep. – and I wish SPQR wouldn’t post those articles. No, I don’t, really. BUT he does owe me money for wood putty for those dents on my desk.) You can’t really screw up a massive sector of the economy all the while printing money in a fiat currency (so every new bill takes value and trust away from the existing ones) so you bolster a stock market into a bubble, and not cause a massive crash. (Oh, but fear not. Consumer spending is up… because of rising energy prices. Yes, yes, I knew it would cheer you up. Me, I’m crying for joy. Well… crying anyway.)

I predict we’re going to hit the wall and it will be both more terrifying and far less impressive than people expect.

Your tech isn’t going to vanish in a poof of smoke. Your knowledge won’t vanish either. Those of us who are even minimally resourceful might lose a lot, but, health holding up and us not being in one of the areas where there’s physical violence (and there might or might not be such areas) we’ll be okay. BUT the ones who expect everything to be smoothed for them, and the disciples of “equality” and “fairness” that consists in giving special things to special snowflakes are going to hurt.

And we will find new ways, but the ways we find are likely to leave the Marxist-infected sectors in the dust. (No, that’s not wishful thinking. See, the problem is that the creatures can’t be creative. They can try. But as Hollywood and most of traditional publishing proves, they just can’t CREATE. And also, because they drink their own ink and believe their own lies, they stink as managers, even in the good times. In the bad times… well…)

And then the ethos of this country will reassert itself. You know, the fundamental ideas of our founding.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

We have not yet begun to rise. Our greatest days lie in the future.

So I went to Ravencon over the weekend and it was much fun. RES, Laura M., CACS, physics geek and some people who read this blog incognito, as well as Speaker, Kate, Dave Pascoe and his lovely wife came out and hung out with me, which means my horrible sense of being exposed to strangers was gone, and I felt all warm and fuzzy, like a family reunion.

In fact, finances improving we would like to put it at least on a every-other-year rotation, because that way I can see these people more often. (Unless they get tired of me.)

The panels weren’t bad, either. Okay, I lie. There was the humor panel at 9 am on a Sunday, aka the morning after party night, but never mind. I’m going to assume the person who booked it didn’t realize how difficult it is to be funny at that hour. (It’s either that or catch them and make sure they die laughing.)

For the full report for the con, sashay on over to Mad Genius Club. This is going in another direction.

I found myself on a panel on Matrons and Crones. I have a vague memory of indicating that I wouldn’t be totally opposed to it, but heaven alone knows why. I usually have better sense than that. However, Through Fire has had me so turned around and upside down that well… maybe I thought it would be okay.

By the time I was at the con of course, I knew it wouldn’t be okay. Let’s just say there was quite a bit of glitter in the air that didn’t come off Kate’s outfit. Of course with a theme like Women in Science Fiction what else could we think.

We’ll avert our eyes from the panels support for the “Women destroy SF” and apparently Fantasy now, anthos and their belief that because the kickstarter funded “there’s a great hunger for this out there.”

Oy. In the ghetto that science fiction has become, maybe, though I don’t think even there. I mean, a question for the audience, how many of you have EVER had trouble finding an sf/f book written by/featuring women? None, right? Because since the eighties, I’ve been going up and down bookshelves muttering about how women shouldn’t be allowed to write.

…Which usually causes my husband to choke with laughter and make gestures that indicate I too am a woman. Yeah. Aware of that. Like it even. My fetish for lace stockings and really high heels would make me even odder than I am, had I been born male. But the thing is not that the people writing are women, but that they’re… enamored of being women. Like the poor people who dressed themselves as vaginas for political events, they seem to think what’s between their legs is THE most interesting thing about them. Alas, I don’t share the interest, so most of their books leave me cold. I want to read about space and the future, about magic and strange events. Inchoate paens to the specialness of women and the evilness of men leave me cold. Partly because I was RAISED on the specialness of women and they quite mistake the matter. But we’ll leave that for later. It’s entirely possible that there is a great hunger for even MORE inchoate vagina-praising in the reading public that remains in the ghetto that’s now science fiction. I doubt it though. Considering how kickstarter works it’s possible for people to spite-fund something to “show them” without their numbers being very high.

I wish the ah… destroyers well, I just wish they’d cool their jets. You see, I work in the same vineyard and I’m getting sick and tired of having people WHO FOLLOW THIS BLOG or who talk to me on Facebook tell me they’re ONLY NOW reading Darkship Thieves and are surprised they love it because “I got tired of reading all the female-written science fiction, because it tends to be about how men are evil and everything sucks.” So, to the extent they’re polluting the waters, they annoy me, but hey, I don’t own the field and unlike them I don’t confuse the wrapper with the gift, so I don’t even think taking back SFWA would help.

I wish them well, and I’ll make my way on my own and prove myself – which, er… I do.

We’ll also gloss over the audience member who thought she was being so … thoughtful… in telling us that Robert A. Heinlein couldn’t write women. I was very tired which can do one of two things to the berserker. Right then because I’d been prepared for clever stupidity, the berserker was “dulled” and I didn’t leap across the room screaming “Yeah, he was so terrible, he’s the one who broke SF out of the ghetto and it took you clever boys and girls about fifty years to chase off all the normal reading people and lock us back in as a place for weirdos and people who think the world is NOT full of binary gender, and other genius insights.”

This was probably to the good. I hear throttling fans is very bad for business.

I’ll confess the panel irritated me at a low level gradient, including the question on who was our favorite matron or crone character. (Rolls eyes, which are conveniently on a little chain, to avoid becoming cat toys.) Do people do that? Keep little charts of “my favorite sex/age character?” Or do women read to look for women characters? (It reminds me of this writer I used to know, raised in Colorado Springs which is, ah, rather lacking in minorities, and in an upper middle class environment. Young man was black, though, so his books were completely full of black people. Because he thought he was redressing oppression. The fact that he had known fewer black people than I had, and was therefore drawing from (bad) movies and TV series was just icing on the cake. Pity too. One of the greatest raw talents I’ve ever met. Wonder if he ever got over the fact he had a congenital tan.)

You see, I don’t read that way. I read for characters that impress me. Vimes and Granny Weatherwax are filed somewhere in the same place as “Guardians.” The putative gender doesn’t matter, though their source of power is different (and we’ll go into that too) which is one of the things that Pratchett does very well at an instinctive level.

I was so beffudled by the question I couldn’t even think of Granny, or of Granny Aching (as close to a spitting image of my grandma, except we weren’t from a sheep shearing region and grandma didn’t chew tobacco) or for that matter of Mimi from The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. If I hadn’t taken the precaution of having a Kate in the audience, I’d have gawped like a gold fish.

Then we went to the question of which historical women we admired, and I realized what was wrong. Very, very wrong. The people they admired were people like Queen Elizabeth or the Empress Matilda, or…

Women who were queens and at least nominally commanded armies. Women who in fact, exerted masculine power – the sort of power that required armies and force, which is not a female sort of power.

These women, all of them “feminists” were in fact enamored of the idea that to be powerful women must be men. That sound you hear is my head hitting the desk. Hard.

I started by trying an experimental sally on the other error of their premise. They were picking people who were prisoners of their role, and who were therefore not “women” in any sense of the word, but symbols, rulers, functions, ranks.

The reaction convinced me there was no point further challenging their fundamental beliefs. Besides the main offender was the guest of honor at the con, and I have a policy of never beating the guest of honor about the face and head with their mistakes of reasoning and logic, no matter how much I want to.

So I went inside and took a little nap while uttering platitudes. I did at one point mention that women pretty much ran the village I grew up in. They took this as brave resistance from prisoners of the patriarchy, so there was no point. Again, they quite mistake the matter.

You see, I grew up hearing lectures about how superior women are to men. I think I heard these lectures more than other girls, because I was a tomboy. I think I started hearing them around three as I was being dragged away from some boy-group and told “Girls play with girls and boys with boys.”

We’ll leave aside the fact that clearly the society was too bi-gendered for words and unenlightened to boot, and skip to what I learned in the kitchens, while sitting around and pretending to read while women talked, or what was told directly me as I got older.

I was told women were superior to men and more powerful too. I’m almost afraid of telling these stories, because I’m afraid the league of women will come out and take away my woman card, as the feminists have already done. Never mind. It needs to be explained.

I think it is this sort of story and “feeling” that has become the poisonous anti-man and “all men are stupid” stuff in our culture – because most women are raised away from older female relatives and because their teachers are full of stupid feminism that thinks men have all the power and therefore want to take it away.

I’ll start by saying that I do disagree with a lot of the provisions in the Portuguese law when I was very small, such that a married woman could only get a job if her husband signed a permission form (and since this was a shame for him, families starved rather than do it,) women had to be part of a “family passport” with either parents or husband, and women couldn’t vote. I disagree with them, but I’m not particularly exercised about them. I once asked my mother – a feisty independent woman, whose income from her self-started, self-created business (she had a 4^th grade education, too, far less than dad.) supported us until I was about ten (dad’s job was white collar but poorly paid) – if she minded those things. She said, well, she didn’t want to make dad sign the paper for her to get a factory job, so she created her own business. And she had never had the money to travel anyway, but if she wanted to she could have got the family passport and got dad to sign the paper saying it was okay. As for voting she said any married woman who can’t make her husband vote the way she would have, doesn’t deserve a vote.

And that’s where we start. You see, it wasn’t that women didn’t believe men were smart or good at stuff. They did. They would actually brag about their husbands. Qualities such as ingeniousness, ability to climb the job ladder (such as it was. In the village most people were self-employed craftsmen and small time farmers) and to make money, ability to hold their own in a discussion, etc. all of these were highly valued. Women also valued men as protectors (they ARE bigger) and as influences in the kids’ lives.

What they didn’t think – and forgive me, I’m just reporting what I see – was that men were competent to run families or groups, or, frankly themselves, at least in some regards. For instance, if a guy appeared in public in utter disarray (or drunk) it was considered a grave fault on his wife’s part. Unless his wife was beaten and abused, in which case it was considered a REALLY grave fault on HIS part and often something the village women decided to do something about. (Meeting a bunch of very upset women in a dark alley at midnight cured some of them – if not all.)

Women were in fact supposed to manage money, manage kids and manage men. By extension they managed life. If you wanted to rent the vineyard rights to someone else’s property you could argue it with him till you were blue in the face – the smart person asked his wife.

This wasn’t subversion. It was simply that by making life pleasant and comfortable, women held all the power.

They were, btw, sternly opposed to lifting any of the restrictions on women, so this wasn’t subversion. The gender role thing I so often fell afoul of were enforced BY THE WOMEN. This was not for the men to do. The men concerned themselves with the external world, not the people management. I think the older women viewed it as an intelligence test.

Now, am I proposing this as a role model for a society? Oh, h*ll no. As I’ve pointed out, I came to America for a reason. And in America, we’re supposed to start anew. And that’s fine.

But here’s the thing – women should keep in mind what is their NATURAL source of power. I don’t want to hear any frigging nonsense about gender being a social construction. Some gender behaviors are, but gender itself isn’t. And though individuals vary markedly, the general trend of genders has been shaped by evolution.

Oh, sure, there were women fighters in the middle ages (not nearly as much as our glittery friends think) but the bulk of the armies was men. Oh, sure there are women who do the hard, dangerous, unpleasant work. In the village these were usually “to ugly to get a husband” though not always. When they married, their husbands tended to be small and meek, though. BUT in general, if you drop in to a group of people cow-punching, most of them will be male (as Dave Freer pointed out.) Most construction workers? Male. Most long distance truckers? Male.

In the same way I have a number of friends who are house husbands, partly because they are writers, and so of course stay at home. However, even in our small mountain town when we lived there (we doubled the heterosexual population of the town by moving in. Okay, maybe not that bad, but the general sense is right) Dan was looked askance as a kindergarten mom (for a couple of years, he worked from home and I was teaching in college.) Not because these people were sexist (probably 80% of them were gay) but because it was odd.

In general, the genders were shaped by evolution so women do the indoor, group, persuasive, word-oriented (as in rabble rousing) work, and men do the outdoors, difficult, painful, dangerous work.

Not saying that women should be kept from that, understand, or men for that matter. Just saying that where I grew up, women would be chased away from a wood-cutting party, and men would be chased away from laying out the dead. (Both unpleasant, in different ways.)

I’m not advocating for a return to rigid gender roles. See above where I never fit in. (I wasn’t ugly, but I was a moose compared to Portuguese women my generation, and a hundred years earlier would probably never have married, because I didn’t FIT and was taller and bigger than most guys, which it turns out is a turn off for them.)

All I’m saying is women had a source of power too. In these older societies that women, now, imagine were patriarchies (and were, in outward form) women had their power too, and often more power than the men who were nominally ruling. Yes, they stood in danger of the man finding out. See Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. Yes, the law often left them unprotected. But women could do things and arrange things and often got to positions of prominence if they wished to. And they were often the holders of the line.

Sexual persuasion? Sometimes. Look, no one said it wasn’t a weapon. Oh, okay, idiots convinced young women it’s empowering to just give it away. Tell me, if this were a plot of men to get ah… laid without any ties, how would it be any different? Right.

But there were others. “Woman” in man’s mind has incredible power. Elizabeth I used the power of the “Seductive but untouchable virgin” to get what she wanted not a few times. In fact, by dint of makeup she kept it up into her old age. Because those archetypes have power over men’s minds.

As does the fact that women nursed them as children and likely women will look after them as old men. I found a thing in a book, can’t remember where “We start out surrounded by women and we end surrounded by women.” If you think that doesn’t have power you don’t understand human psychology.

Trading it all in for being shouty and saying “me and my army?” Ah… that is throwing away the gift and keeping the wrapping.
Even Elizabeth the first didn’t do that. She played the game as well as she could, in her very restricted role, and she shamelessly used her femininity to play both foreign princes and her subjects, which was no small part of her success. (That said, do I admire her? Not really. Like Isabel of Castille, she did some truly horrendous things, and it’s hard to tell how many she HAD to do. Power on that scale deforms the mind.)

If I had a daughter – which I don’t – and if I ever have a granddaughter, what I’d try to teach her is that women have power too. Yes, by all means, move in the world of men if you wish to; perform a male function if you want/need to. But never forget you’re not a man, and that you have more power over them – ultimately – than they have over you. Use it wisely and kindly, and not as a whip to drive them. And never assume they’re stupid. They’re not. Yes, they have their blindnesses (my mom’s favorite trick when she’d blown money on something dad would disapprove of, like a new piece of furniture, was to put it in an inconspicuous place for months, before moving it to its intended location. Then, when he noticed it, she said “Oh, that? We’ve had that for months.”) We have our blindnesses too. To assume that only women are smart or accomplished or capable is a mistake. Yes, I can see how easy it is to do, because of course, you see your strengths and their weaknesses so well.

But I bet you from the other side, it is easy to see the opposite.

So, treat your male friends and colleagues with respect, because they see things you can’t see or aren’t interested in. And in return use your powers for good. Don’t use them to guilt males for being males. Don’t use them to try to turn yourself into an ersatz male or them into females.

It’s a good thing we come in two varieties, and for more reasons than how much fun it is in bed. Making us all alike would – besides being impossible – leave us with some serious cultural blind spots. And it’s not needed. Also it might be evil.

Treat people as individuals. Know the powers within you and be aware of them.

And if you ever feel tempted to say something like “Well, women are smarter” remember that yes, they are. And men are too. Just in different ways.

And if you push your way too far, theirs will inevitably come back at you. We’ve seen the end result of the male form of power prevailing and I don’t want to live in Saudi Arabia, thank you so much. We haven’t seen the end result of female power prevailing and I have my suspicions as to why, but before you think it’s a utopia, let me assure you I went to an all girls’ middle school and high school and paradise on Earth, it wasn’t. Nor peaceful. In fact, the boys’ school across the street had far fewer fights, let alone battles.

Don’t throw away the gift for the wrapper. Be a woman, not a man manqué.

 

 

 

 

Yesterday night I had one of those moments when you feel like you should get up from the computer and go look in the mirror, to make sure your consciousness hasn’t – somehow — transferred over to another universe, and you’re not, by any chance green with poka dots and perhaps antennae. (I always wanted antennae.)

First let me point out that I’m one of those people who only links other people on facebook when either I know them extremely well or the matter I just raised is either something that will interest them.  Of course, sometimes I’ve just accused them of something heinous in jest. For the later this is usually my very closest friends and the joke is somewhat of an in joke.

So it always surprises when people I’ve never traded even two words with tag me on something. Note I said “surprises” not “upsets” me. Normally what I get tagged on are con pictures, a quote of something I said while running my mouth, an echo of a post of mine or of course cat pictures. And I’m not so foolish as to wish to deprive myself of cat pictures.

Sometimes my friends at Baen tag me on something when they wish me to engage in a discussion because my opinion – say because I grew up abroad – is valuable. Sometimes I answer, sometimes I don’t depending on how busy I am, because those threads go on forever and a lot of them seriously damage my calm. But again, it’s not that I mind as such, it’s that I’m surprised because I wouldn’t do that. (Well, okay, sometimes I call the Baen League.)

So, when I get tagged I always at least look at it, even if it’s to say “why is someone linking a cartoon about having small kids on my timeline? Oh, probably tagged in error” and not approving.

Yesterday I had a tag from someone I’d never seen before with “I particularly want the opinion of Sarah A. Hoyt and X because—” X was a colleague of mine who is so far to the left of me that I’d need powered binoculars to see her. We’re not talking one of those “wrote a conservative book once, so everyone thinks she’s a conservative”, we’re talking pretty much everyone knows she thinks Stalin was a bit of a wet blanket and if he’d just had some firmness, we’d already have our earthly paradise. So even though I’d just landed back home from Ravencon and had something like 200 notifications, I had to go look at it and see what this person could want both our opinions on. (We’re actually both very interested in renaissance history so I thought it might be that.)

The tagger was someone I don’t know. Note, it doesn’t mean I haven’t seen her name or even shaken hands at conventions. I have a horrible memory for names and faces. I know most of the regular posters here, but if you are a lurker who introduced himself at a con, (and you know there’s five or so of you at every con I attend) don’t be offended if you have to introduce yourself again and again. I usually remember people on the third introduction. It’s not you. It’s that in cons I meet so many people, it takes a while to stick.

As for remembering people from internet arguments, unless you did something so out of the ordinary insane as to make me laugh like an hyena – such as think I’m a white supremacist – or were so incredibly persistent with stupid attacks as to stick in my memory, sorry.  I won’t remember you and you’re safe from my vengeance (which usually consists of not lending you a hand when you need it). I’m not so much good-natured as vague and too lazy to be bothered much.

So, this person was no one I knew. The thread was the whole thing about whether we should have politics in science fiction and what measures should be taken so only the “right people” got in. She seemed to be you know, at least at the edge of the crowd that thinks it’s terrible that Larry Correia is on the Hugo ballot. (Later Amanda Green did a search and confirmed for me that she is indeed one of the many young politically correct writers who think that science fiction must be made safe for the special feminist glitter, and if males are allowed to talk at all these poor precious blossoms will find themselves back in the kitchen and pregnant. A feat for the young men in this crowd, but I’m sure they’re afraid of it, too.)

And then came the moment when I had to go to the bathroom and look in the mirror to make sure the antennae were properly glossiferied because you wouldn’t want to go around with your antenna kerflected.

The comment I was tagged on, by the originator of the thread, was “I particularly want to know the opinion of Sarah A. Hoyt and X because I don’t want to work with authors who are difficult or are going to cause trouble.”

I looked at the name again, looked at the picture, scratched my head, thought “Well, some houses are hiring them practically out of the cradle these days and maybe she’s younger than she looks” – but even then I had the “Ahahahahahah!” building at the back of my mind. (And I’ll explain why.)

Then I went and looked at her home page. She’s the editor of a micro press, the sort it’s just the person and a few friends. Say Naked Reader Press. Maybe smaller.

At this point the “Ahahahahaha!” is getting louder.

I go and look in the mirror and check my antennae, and come back and think about this. What in hell do my political opinions have to do with my being trouble as a writer? I’m actually so laid back as to be practically supine. I’ve protested exactly three edits in my life, to any marked degree, and even then, all the times, after the edits had gone WAY beyond what other writers would have jumped down people’s throats for. As for the other side of this, when I worked as an editor, the two worst types of trouble a writer has given me have exactly zero to do with politics. (And weirdly, I never got a “my words are just too precious, don’t change a single one.) One of them was asking me every ten minutes if I was going to accept the story (weirdly, I did buy one of those. It was that good.) The others were people who sent me corrections every day, even after the short story had been delivered as part of an antho that had gone to press. This had absolutely NOTHING to do with where the writer was on the political spectrum, but had to do with being a neurotic pain.

So the fact this woman considered my (and I presume the other woman’s, but who the heck even knows) political opinions to be a problem caused me to answer with “Oh, it’s okay. I’ve decided I won’t work with any editor who thinks I should go back in the political closet on either side, so we’re all good.” (Then she went and “liked” this comment which flabbergasted me even more.)

What I should have said, of course, was “What? You want me to reassure you I’ll stay quiet on politics so I get to work with your micro press? WHAT IS THIS? THE 1980s OR a parallel world?” (And I knew it wasn’t the later. I mean, my antennae are jus’ fine.)

Yes, there were much bigger people on that thread, including editors for a lot of big houses, but do I look that stupid? I’m already on their black list and they wouldn’t publish me ever unless I reached J. K. Rowling level, in which case their corporate bosses would make them.

But here’s the kicker: they weren’t publishing me even before. And they weren’t publishing me on the political color line – because I was insufficiently vocal with the leftist tropes. (No, this isn’t having a big head. I’ve seen what they publish. On both competence and entertainment value, I’m way better than most of their stable. But I always had a whiff of possible wrong think about me. In fact, they agree on the competence. One of the funniest things this week was to hear one of them concede that Larry and I “can write well enough to win a Hugo.” This same person, five years ago, though I was too incompetent as a writer to buy. Have I grown that much in five years? Well, I’ve grown, but not that much.)

So by this point the ahahahahahahahahahah should be perfectly clear.

Look, when I broke in, I KNEW – I heard enough conversations, caught enough of them in unguarded moments that I knew – that they would not knowingly publish someone they considered right wing or libertarian. And “right wing” as well as “libertarian” meant someone who was slightly (very slightly) to the right of Lenin. They were, by and large, a left-academic bubble, and had been so steeped in Marxism, some of them from the cradle, that they thought “reasonable” opinion started with Lenin.

I knew this, but there were no other options, and no one had answered my submissions to Baen, and I’m a writer and writers will do almost anything to be read. (It’s part of the stories screaming in your ears.) I couldn’t be vocal left. I just couldn’t, not and look at myself in the mirror. But I thought if I stayed quiet and kept my head down, I could make my way on “fun stories” and make a living, which is all I ever wanted.

I was wrong. As we’re finding out, push, awards and recognition go to those who VOCALLY endorse the same dead (and stinking) platitudes that have caused 100 million dead around the world. Because only “the good people” should be endorsed, pushed and recognized.

And that’s fine. That’s peachy keen. I’ve known that for years.

Would I have remained quiet if they’d allowed me to reach the upper echelons of my profession by staying quiet? Maybe. I have decided opinions, but the flesh is weak. Though even then the dream was always that I’d get to a point I COULD talk.

However, who knows? Baby needed college tuition. Maybe I’m more corruptible than I think.

But that’s neither here nor there. It didn’t happen. They would never even consider it. Not unless you’re of them. (Which reminds me of the math teacher who said she’d give me an A if I joined the communist party. At 13, my answer was: “Madam, for good or ill, I believe I have an immortal soul. I’m not saying I might not eventually sell it, but for an A in math – even if that means entering Engineering school? – The price is way too low.”)

So when I stood on that wind-blown ledge, deciding whether to come out of the political closet, to jump into the maelstrom of public argument, I knew PRECISELY what I was doing. I knew that I’d become a leper. I knew the most heinous things would be said about me and that half the people would believe them without checking. I knew people would read my non political books – Noah’s Boy – and find right wing messages (which is a treat, given I’m a small l libertarian and half these people are European where “Right wing” means something completely different.)

I knew.

I knew if my books with Baen tanked, all I could then do was be indie. And I knew this would mean a diminution in lifestyle. In the same way I knew to the extent that the main houses of publishing could confer on me the ability to not struggle anymore – and they still can to an extent – I was blowing that down the wind.

But there was never much chance, because I couldn’t even pretend to be a communist and wake up in the morning and look in the mirror.

I was more afraid that readership in the mushy middle would eschew my books because if there’s one thing the left propaganda machine can do is make one untouchable. Or could do. I’m not so sure now.

In the moment before I jumped I considered that. Then I looked at what has happened because people like me have stayed quiet. In a way those young people who think Marxism is valid could curse us and the generation before us. Those of us who stayed quiet, at least. And if they ever realize to what extent they’re mistaken they will, too. Because we should have been dissenting voices so they realized this was not the default option, as their professors were telling them. Even if our voices were small and barely heard, we should have been there.

And you know what? If I stop selling altogether? I can write tentacle porn or something. (And then with my other tentacle…)

And then I jumped. When I jumped, I said goodbye to any chance of awards, any chance of recognition, any chance of ever being published by a traditional house other than Baen.

But now someone is trying to push me back in line with the threat of not publishing me in her micro press? Ahahahahahahahah.

Look, I could see this in the seventies or eighties, when if the other doors shut on you this was your only option.

But how is this for failing to get it? If I were capable/willing to abjure, then I wouldn’t ever need the small presses. I do have the craft. I can write. Even if I never got the big push, I could make a living in any publishing house today if I were willing to do that. I wouldn’t need the little presses.

AND if it got to that point that I needed a micro press? Well, that’s why G-d gave us indie. Where if I’m going to sell only 200 copies of a book, I’ll make a lot more out there on my own, with my own micro press.

It was just such a surreal moment, I had to write about it. My thought was “Oh, my heavens, you didn’t realize that we GOT the stick before, right, and that that’s why we were quiet? You thought you were hiding it in velvet and that no one knew there was a political color line? And now that we’re vocal you thought you could push us back in line with THAT STICK? It never occurs to you that we thought through our decision to come out and that one way or another we’re no longer afraid.”

Sweetie, that stick is made of liquorice.

It’s much too late for the stick. And your carrot has precious little power. You’re going to have to come out and debate the cherished ideas that were foisted on you with people who disagree with your mentors and guides and the people you were taught to revere.  You might even find yourself in the “not cool” group.  Just mouthing platitudes won’t get you through.

Welcome to the human race. Welcome to adulthood.

Oh, and also ahahahahahahahahahahahahah.

UPDATE: Welcome Instapundit readers, and thank you Glenn Reynolds for the link.

 

 

UPDATE: The Sarah has landed.  I’ll have to see what’s been going on around here.

Blessed Are The Stirrers — by Cedar Sanderson

I’ve been watching the whole Hugo brouhaha with a rather detached eye, not really being “of” fandom, besides the small and Odd group that is the Baen Bar. Honestly, until a couple of years ago, I had never heard of the Hugos. But it did bring something to a head for me, as I mused on the behaviours of people who called themselves professionals and acted in strange and perverse manners.

 

There have been attacks, counter-attacks, and in general a lot of very bad words used all across the spectrum, and as I read some of it, a few things occurred to me. One, the fine art of stirring the fecal matter has its uses. Bear with me here, because I know some of you have a vivid imagination and it’s not a pretty picture. Dung can tell you a lot about the creature that left it: healthy vs sick, dietary preferences, parasite load, and so forth. I’m equating some of these blog posts to this dung… For one thing, poke at fresh droppings and see movement, then you know the creature was infested with parasites. I’m going to quote John C Wright here, not just link to his blog, because his take on a human parasite was breathtakingly beautiful usage of the English language.

 

“The simian creature does not write in his non-work hours, as do I; he is a beggar. An aspiring beggar. Nay, let me insult no beggar. The creature is not an honest beggar. Honest beggars asks and accept only alms freely given.

He fawns and licks the bloodstained hand of Caesar, and suckles at the bloody teat of Caesar, drinking up the wealth and labor of honest working men like a vampire. The creature is a slave and less than a slave: a sycophant. He is a catamite literally, but, worse, figuratively, and plays the role rumor says Augustus as a boy played to Caesar.”

Vox Day, someone I do not know at all, nor had I read anything of his previous to about a year ago when he was himself the center of a controversy, is one who seems to take great pleasure in flipping over the leavings of those who react without rational thought. It’s interesting, I learned as a girl that if I were being pestered and teased, the best way to make it stop was to ignore the gadfly. There are those who haven’t learned that lesson, and at their age, seem unlikely or incapable of learning. But by their reactions and venoms, they make themselves out clearly to be what they are. Vox may be as abrasive as coarse sandpaper, but at least seems to be honestly so. Those who bullied him out of their organization have shown themselves utterly without couth. Brad Torgerson in an online conversation stated it best: “ The thing with Vox is discouraging because basically it’s following the rules of political radioactivity: get enough people to agree that a man is “untouchable” and suddenly anyone who dialogues with him becomes tainted by default, and also untouchable. This is about as far from LIBERAL as it gets. Liberal means having an open mind and not declaring people untouchable. That was the whole thing from the 1950s through the 1990s: pushing to get more and more “off limits” people included in society . . . . only now they’re turning the tables and drawing up lists of people for eviction. Hypocritical barely describes such thinking. Illiberal and patently Marxist is how I’d put it.”

Without even looking very hard, I found this comment, by someone who chose to use a nom d’ plume rather than a real identity: “In better days, people were easily thrown out of the city and the gates were locked behind them, let them starve. We need a system like that today, people like Vox Day need to die on the vine. Anyone who holds such opinions should not be allowed in society, it doesn’t matter what the quality of their “art” is. I’m sure that there were many people who thought Hitler was a good painter.”

So stirring the, er, pot has its uses. Rough on the stirrer, at times. That, and reading through the blog droppings to try and diagnose the parasites and diseases can be tiresome as well. Frankly, I rarely have the stomach for it, and I was raised on a small farm shoveling the real stuff. It begins to be very depressing, when you see rant after rant with no basis in truth or reality, and you wonder what the human race is coming to.

But they are only words, right? It’s not like they are sticks and stones being thrown. Perhaps, for now… That edge between meatspace and cyberspace is knife blade thin. When ‘hitting’ online spills over into the real world, what then? The manners are corrupted online and it’s going to have repercussions outside the internet as people forget what kindness, empathy, and decency really are. I have seen on this blog, in comments, a commenter suggesting that perhaps someone ought to rape the hostess so she would know what it really felt like. I have seen blog posts that called for the actual bodily harm of those who disagreed with them, like the comment above suggesting people he doesn’t like should be exposed to the elements for death.

It’s easy to say, oh, they are just blowing off steam, they wouldn’t hurt a fly… but I am suspicious of that. I see the people who are armed, trained, and have seen the elephant being abrasive, sure, but not threatening. They know what could happen, were this wretched hive of villainy to spill over into the streets. They won’t lift a finger until they are forced. While those who would have us all stripped of the slightest defenses scream, rant, and threaten grievous damage to those who oppose them.

Manure is a good thing. You can feed your garden with it, properly aged and prepared. But when you flip a piece over and find the wriggling white things, then the proper reaction is to recoil. It’s not going to end well, if you argue. There’s no mind there, to argue with, only a voracious appetite that will devour, and never cry enough!

Now, you may be wondering why I refer to the fine art of stirring what most of us prefer not to think about, let alone see. Because it’s a difficult job. Larry Correia, with his Sad Puppies campaign, embarked on an epic level of it. And they are flinging that which has been stirred up at him. But without the blogs and comments being brought into the light, and that light shone on them, so a larger audience could see what is wriggling in it… we might not know, until the infestation was so dire there was no recovering from it.

Larry points out in the post I’ve linked above: “If right wing authors share their opinions, they will be openly chastised and attacked by very vocal, very angry people. Any deviation from the approved narrative is met with scorn, mockery, character assassination, and because the author doesn’t want to damage his career, he will usually fall back into line and shut his mouth. Basically if you step out, they form an angry mob and attack you until you roll over and apologize for something that shouldn’t be apologized for. Once you’re apologizing for your principles, they own you. They really don’t know what to do about people like me.”

It isn’t just here, in our tiny little corner of the world, either. While the Hugo furor might have seemed like a big deal, it really isn’t. It is merely a microcosm of the world around it, where the bigger badder predators roil the global waters, draining the life from those who work for their living, and trying to hide in their own odure. We need people with metaphorical sticks, to poke, and reveal, and hopefully to provoke actual thought, not just poo-flinging.

It’s a horrible metaphor, I know. But blessed are the shit-stirrers.

 

 

Confessions of a reformed liberal – by Tom Knighton

*Reading this reminded me of the conversion stories in If This Goes On.  If we could just figure out what causes it…*

I am a libertarian. I wasn’t always one. I used to be a liberal. The story of how that changed is kind of odd, but it also kind of makes some sense that I now find myself among the diehard fans of science fiction.

When I was young, I liked Jimmy Carter because he was from my neck of the woods. Yes, that’s a pathetic reason, but I was still in diapers so please cut me some slack.

As we all know, Carter was replaced by Ronald Reagan, and the country began to improve. I liked Reagan just fine, though I didn’t really consider myself a Republican. Of course, my liberal mother jokingly compared me to Michael J. Fox’s character on Family Ties, Alex P. Keaton, who was a proud Republican.

As I reached high school, I found myself concerned about things like the environment and how the government had treated American Indians through the years. I was drawn to the Democratic Party.

More and more of my teenage years were spent looking at liberal politics as a panacea of solutions to most of the world’s problems. It just seemed to make so much sense. Taking care of the poor was the humane thing to do. Limiting gun rights obviously would reduce crime.

I was a rare creature. I was a liberal who enlisted. This was during the Clinton administration, and boot camp in Great Lakes Recruit Training Command had a fair amount of my Company Commander belittling our Commander in Chief. I said nothing though, not wanting to rock the boat.

For years, I continued to support liberal ideology. Ironically, it was possibly the most unabashedly liberal television shows in history that started my slide.

The show was The West Wing, which told the tale of the White House staff of a Democrat administration. As a counter point, they included a character named Ainsley Hayes. The character of Hayes was hired after she schooled Deputy Communications Director Sam Seaborn on a talk show.

In one episode, an argument outside the Chief of Staff’s office has Sam Seaborn berating Hayes for her party’s alleged belief that there was only the Second Amendment. She immediately countered as to how Democrats think there are only nine amendments in the Bill of Rights.

I was struck. She had a hell of a point. After all, there are ten amendments there, and if I wanted to protect some of them, I needed to protect all of them. At that point, I was a pro-Second Amendment Democrat.

That continued on for quite some time. It was comfortable and I knew it well. I was the outlier for the Second Amendment crowd, but I was fine with that.

One day, while looking for something to read, someone on a gun board suggested I read Atlas Shrugged. “Why not?” I thought. I ran to the bookstore and bought a copy.

I devoured the book. Seriously. I read it from cover to cover in a week, though I admit to skipping most of John Galt’s speech. It truly was a life changing book.

However, it wasn’t the final straw. You see, Ayn Rand showed me the flaws of my thinking. She showed me how people react to handouts and talked sense in that way. However, she didn’t show me how we could replace it.

Even Galt’s Gulch was a poor example. After all, the inhabitants of Galt’s Gulch were handpicked by Galt. If you pick the right people for a small scale community, any system can be made to work.

It was shortly after that when someone suggested I read Freehold by Michael Z. Williamson. Where Rand warned of what would happen with handouts, Williamson showed what a libertarian society might look like.

That was the moment when I became a libertarian. Gone was the idea that people should be free so long as they wanted to make good decisions. In its place was the understanding that while people will occasionally use their freedom to be colossally stupid, it was their God given right to be colossally stupid if they chose.

I’m not the flavor of libertarian who simply believes that if we would embrace libertarianism as a nation, everyone’s world would be all puppies and daisies. It won’t. For some people, especially at first, there will be a high price to pay.

However, the end result is that people will be free to make or break their own lives. If someone fails, they fail. If they succeed, they succeed. It’s not anyone else’s responsibility either way.

Being a libertarian has lead to some pretty awesome things. I started blogging about politics. That lead to some local coverage, including apparently being the first blogger to ever buy a newspaper. It didn’t work out so well, but it’s still something no one else had ever done. I was quoted by Judge Andrew Napolitano, who I’m a big fan of. I contributed to TheBlaze. All cool stuff.

Now, I turn my attention toward fiction. Maybe I’ll make something of myself there as well. Maybe not. While a certain amount of that may depend on other people (editors, publishers, etc.), it’s still ultimately on me. All those other people can do is say “no”. It’s up to me to actually take that and accept it on face value.

Of course, the old me didn’t realize it. I’d have been convinced it was all on them. Honestly, this feels so much more empowering.

 

 

 

*I met Doug at the Superstars Writing Seminar this year.  I haven’t yet had time to read through his work, but it is on my virtual to be read pile and I hope to get to it next month (at which point likely there will be bloggage.)  Meanwhile, I asked him to tell us something about his journey to publication. I don’t know if there will be book plugging today or not, it depends on my access to wireless!  I forgot to tell the Clam to email early.*

How I Became an Overnight Success in Fifteen Years. -by Doug Dandrige

 

First off, I would like to thank Sarah for allowing me to do this guest blog. I have found so many authors to be very helpful to others with the same mental illness (obsessive writing), and Sarah is one of the best.

I guess in some respect, I always wanted to become a writer. I was told in high school that I had a knack for story telling. One of my earliest works was a story about terrorists taking my home town of Venice Florida, which is built on an artificial island with three bridges connecting it to the mainland. I wrote for the school newspaper, and later for the brigade paper in the Army. I finally got my chance in 1997, when I was fired from a job at a drug treatment clinic for making the observation that the clinical director didn’t do real therapy. I stormed home, sat down at my PC, and wrote an 80,000 words expose’ on the Mental Health Industry in two weeks. It came very close to selling. Next I worked on a well researched and poorly written alternate history. I had scored a 790 out of 800 on the English portion of the Graduate Record Exam, but still didn’t seem to know the difference between its and it’s. I followed that with a 260,000 epic fantasy set in a Universe I used much later. I was scammed by a fake agent on that one, and $300 later, which I understand now to be cheap, I learned to run away from scams. I also didn’t submit to agents again until 2010.

The next thirteen years I was an on again, off again writer. Some years I would write four books (seven in 2010). Other years, nothing. I kept sending them, and all the short stories I wrote, to magazines and the publishers that would accept unsolicited manuscripts. In 98 or 99 I received a rejection letter from Marion Zimmer Bradley that said, although she liked my elf vampire story, it violated three of her principles. 1) It featured vampires. 2) It featured elves, and 3) It featured elves that were vampires. She asked me to send her another one and promised to buy something from me, and then passed away. I also met Charles Sheffield and Holly Lisle online. Both told me I had the talent, and definitely needed to keep putting the effort into it. So I kept plugging away, trying to write the novel that would get me that traditional contract. Non-sparkly vampires, a steampunk fantasy, another fantasy based on my first epic, Refuge, hard scifi with strong female characters.   Tried everything I thought might break me in to what seemed like a closed inner circle of authors. The rejections got better, most of them. Some were actually two page letters with enough references to let me know they had actual read the manuscript all the way through. Others were the standard form rejections. I was told that one was better than the other, but to my mind they were both failures.

In 2010 I tried agents again, making sure I only sent them to the legit ones. Again I got some good rejections, some requests for something else, some notes stating that I was obviously talented. But no real success. The most humorous one was from an agency that replied three hours after I submitted electronically that after careful consideration they had decided to pass on my novel. I was very thankful that day that they didn’t jump to a quick decision. Most of the rejections I got said, after some obligatory compliments about my ability and how well written the books were, that it wasn’t for their list, or there wasn’t a market for it. In 2011 I learned about self-publishing at a local writer’s conference. On December 31^st, 2011 I put two books, The Deep Dark Well and The Hunger, up on Amazon. A week later I got my first review, which stated that the book, The Deep Dark Well, was a page turner, but so poorly formatted that I got three stars. That was a part of the learning process. For the next nine months I sold forty books, and kept putting out my backlog, hoping one would be the breakout.

In September of 2012 I offered The Deep Dark Well as a freebee on Amazon, and gave away 4,100 of them. The book has since sold another 4,600 copies. I did a couple more giveaways, then published what turned out to be my breakout indie novel, Exodus: Empires at War: Book 1. I was planning a promotion, but when it started selling a hundred books a day in November 2013, I left it alone. It was really fantastic seeing books one and two selling two hundred copies a day in January of 2013. The series of five books has now sold over 58,000 copies, and has 550+ worldwide reviews with a 4.4 star average. I have college professors, military officers, even an astronaut as a fan. That was when I decided to quit the day job. I have lots of other books on Amazon, and all of them are well rated, even if some haven’t sold that much.

I went to Superstars Writing Seminar this year, and was lauded and applauded for my success. But, like the man climbing the mountain, I had stopped on a ledge and was looking up at the true giants on the peak. People like Kevin J Anderson, who runs the Seminar. I came home with a depressed attitude, and didn’t do much of anything for the month of February. Until I received an email from a retired Marine major, who told me how much books like mine did to relieve the stress and boredom of a combat deployment. That email got me going again. I realized that it wasn’t about becoming a New York Times bestseller, though that would be nice. It was about entertaining people who needed to be entertained. Right now the sky is the limit, and maybe after another decade or so I may have finally arrived.

Humanity’s worst nightmare has come from the stars, as the Ca’cadasan Empire, which the human race had escaped two thousand years before, finds the species they have sworn to exterminate. The Ca’cadasan Empire is twenty-five times larger than the New Terran Empire, and has rolled over all opposition for thousands of years. While the human Fleet, which has never lost a war, has had to fight tooth and nail at every juncture, advancing as the ultimate fighting machine of the Perseus arm. A war of extermination is in the making, a war that neither side can afford to lose.

The Exodus series has to date sold over 58,000 copies, and has over 550 worldwide reviews on Amazon, with a 4.4 star average rating. Books three through five have made it to number one in Military Science Fiction and Space Opera on Amazon UK, and has hit the top ten in those categories in the US, book 3 actually reaching number two in both categories. Book 6 is coming out on April 27^th, and in celebration book 1 is free from April 25^th through 29^th.

 So, get it.

Biography

 

Doug Dandridge is a Florida native who grew up in the space age. Stints in the Army and National Guard, as well as entirely too much time in higher education at two Universities, have given him a very unusual outlook on life, making him really unfit for any political party. Doug currently has 18 books on Amazon, all self-published, and sold almost 79,000 copies to date. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida with four cats, and attends just about every sporting event at the local University he can. He has also discovered the joy of Cons, having attended Dragon*Con last year, and found a multitude of other people as crazy as he is. This year he will be attending the Alabama Phoenix Festival, Liberty*Con, Dragon*Con and Honor*Con. Book 6 of the Exodus series is due out April 27^th, while book 3 of The Deep Dark Well trilogy and book 4 of the Refuge fantasy series will be out later this year.

When you read this, I’ll be miles above you. Or at least I hope so because the alternative doesn’t bear thinking about, and you guys know I don’t like flying anyway. Not so much because of the flight as such, but because I can’t drive, nor can I make sure that the pilot is someone I trust. I have… issues leaving myself in the hands of strangers.

Anyway, for obvious reasons, no chapter tomorrow unless a miracle occurs and I have access from the hotel – I wouldn’t bank on it, though.

No chapter at MGC on Sunday either, and I hope someone will cover for me. Not Kate, though, because Kate will be with me this weekend, planning world domination at Ravencon, in Richmond, Virginia.  BUT there will be guest posts here, and they’re good ones.

Unless my Kindle Fire fails, I’ll be answering comments, but the auto-correct shall be with us.  OTOH maybe I’ll have connectivity.  I will have my laptop.

Right now you guys probably know more of my schedule there than I do, mostly because I’m having trouble holding anything not directly novel related in my head for more than ten seconds at a time.

PARTICULARLY since now, more than halfway through final pass on Through Fire, Zen finally condescended to tell me why she’d decided to run away to Earth. And, you know, it makes perfect sense and it solves one of the things about her that drove me nuts, because what kind of lunatic just ups and runs away from home to another world. To escape what? Notoriety? Turns out, no. And she does have a perfectly sane reason, but for the love of little fishes, couldn’t she have told me earlier? What do you mean figment of my imagination? Pfui. If she’s a figment she’s a badly behaved one. And I can’t hit her with fish. She’s inside my head.

What else?

The last week was truly appalling for my indie sales – not just Witchfinder but everything else – and if it weren’t for the fact everyone’s reports are universally the same and also that my selling of the excess books has come to a complete crawl, I’d think I was cursed or someone had managed to put a warning on my page “Warning, do not buy.”

I did not forget, BTW, I owe the rest of you an edited copy of Wtichfinder – and it will come. This week was just one of those where I had appointments, and repairmen coming over and… eh… just everytime I sat down something happened. I used to have a joke with my friend Rebecca Lickiss that she must have an alarm in her house that told her the minute I went into the bathroom, because that’s when she’d call. She was also particularly good at targeting mid-shower.

Now apparently there’s an ap for that and everyone in town has it.

But I made progress both on the book (not enough, d*mn it) and on the sorting/packing (also not enough, but better than nothing.) The hard part is for the neat freak to convince herself (myself) to live with the mess for two months or so.

As for the rest, everything is in the air, everything suspended. We’re not sure,, yet, what #1 son will be doing next year (it’s complicated) and that in turn affects our plans for staging the house, and what we’ll be doing till it sells. I hate this type of time, because I figure my life is complicated enough, thank you so much, and what’s going on inside my head unsettled enough without adding instability in Real Life. However, no one gave me a choice in this.

And under the counting of blessings, the girl cat is still with us, we all seem to be in decent health (which compared to last year is great) and I am making progress towards the goals. I just wish it were a little faster.

Okay – so I’ll stop whining here. If you come see me, I’ll whine at you in person! Okay, not really – but I WILL find a comfortable place and talk and/or read whether it’s my reading time or not. I shall have laptop with me.

Come on out. If you’re lucky, I’ll introduce you to Kate Paulk. (No word on whether Jim will be attending.)

And now I’m going to stop typing and go to bed.

Sorry this is late. Last night by the time I was ready to write a post I was so slap-happy that I started auctioning the destruction/sparing of countries in the Diner on Facebook. (Which isn’t entirely a bad idea, since with money for moving repairs, money for renting somewhere while this house is for sale – you can’t show a house with cats in it, one of them a geriatric cats who keeps getting close to the box but not in it. You also can’t show a house with my sons in it. The problems there hinge more on “What book did you leave in the bathroom again? Honey, you’ll scare people” and “Honey, dirty clothes belong in the hamper, not in a trail leading from your room to the bathroom.” – and I’m still late with the books, probably the latest I’ve been, and yeah part is recovering from being sick, and part is just having time in the middle of the madhouse, but anyway, with one thing and another, Number One son is graduating in May and I’d like to take him somewhere nice without feeling guilty about it – if I thought you were stupid/crazy enough to do it, I’d auction the destruction/sparing of cities and countries for $6 a pop, and the one (destruction or sparing) with the most votes would win. Would sign you for Rogue Magic, too, which only has about ten subscribers, I swear. BUT I don’t think you guys are that stupid/crazy, and you all know in DST there is very little trace of our current world, so I’d have to get creative and describe how they were destroyed long ago. So, ah well. As I said, I was slap-happy.)

Anyway, tomorrow I’m flying out to Ravencon, so if any of the Huns are in Virginia and within reach come out and say hi, would you? Kate Paulk will be there and Speaker To Lab Animals, and a bunch of other people, including number three son by adoption David Pascoe, and his lovely wife (Number one Daughter In Law by adoption). Speaker and Dave and I promise to protect you from Kate Paulk. Really.

I’m looking forward to the con, among other things because it’s a new one I’ve never been to, but I find myself wishing it was a week from now, because I never know if going to a con is going to stop my flow on a book as I’m nearing (I swear to heavens I really am) the end. And because we’re trying to be out of here and have the house ready for sale by late June, and it’s sort of weird as we don’t know where we’ll end up, because it depends on what number one son is doing next year, and I’m trying to finish the book, and I’m trying to figure out what furniture to sell/donate (and books. You don’t want to know about the books. I think our attic is mostly books. And not INTERESTING books – not to us – but stuff we bought long before we had kids because “our children will like this” and which now makes me wonder about exactly how stupid we were. No seriously.)

There’s also stuff like processing the backlog of clothes. In case ya’ll haven’t noticed, my guys all wear button downs. In the younger son’s case that’s because of sensory stuff. For whatever reason, knits next to the skin disturb him. In older son’s case it’s because he was born starched up and stuck at age 53 or so. One of these days a young lady– Never mind. Anyway, so, they all wear button downs, and I iron them. No, it’s not a war on women thing (rolls eyes.) They would quite gladly go off having spun the shirts in the dryer to minimize the wrinkles. But I was trained by my mother, okay? These men are yours, they belong to you, and how they present to the world reflects on you. Yeah, I know it’s stupid. But then take into account that ironing is the ONLY time I watch any television/movies (mostly through prime. We don’t have cable.) Without ironing I’d never have watched Buffy or Stargate. So, there it is.

Only with being sick/trying to catch up, there’s a massive backlog of ironables. Five baskets full (consider a basket an hour, just about.) Some of it is table cloths from the holidays (all of them) last year, and some are short sleeve shirts, which the kids haven’t needed till now. So, normally I’d catch up whenever, but not knowing where #1 son is going to be as little away as a month or two makes a difference, and also the fact we need to start boxing things (like rarely used elaborate table cloths) to put in storage until we have a place of our own again – hopefully after this sells. So I’m trying to do at least half a basket when I wake up, then do some book/furniture processing and/or fix something in the house before I sit down to write. And then I’m trying to write like a demon, something not facilitated by one of the hardest-to-write characters I’ve ever done.

Last night when I went to bed – after the slap happy had worn off – it occurred to me it was a wonderful time to feel sorry for myself.   Here I am so busy, and I’m fifty, and it’s too late for me to have to deal with all this stuff, and and and boo hoo.

I assure you this is not my normal mode, and that about ten seconds after that thought, I started pointing and laughing at myself.

Given the rest of the world, or even America right now – I read this week my age group is the one moving in with their parents fastest and NOT because parents need looking after, but because with job instability, utilities, insurance, we’re mostly broke and losing houses at a record pace. – even if the absolutely worst happened (and trust me, it’s not LIKELY. It would take something like a fire running through town) and we lost everything, we still have training and jobs, we’re still making money, and we’d find a place with a roof for over our heads, and we have a nice family and four … four cats (nice might be too much), at any rate (plus Greebo who is not our cat.) And we would have our jobs and our minds, and books and music, and—

Yeah. Ain’t nobody going to be pitying me – or at least nobody should – just because I had a lousy health year last year and I’m slowly crawling out of the hole which involves working my behind off. Some people – most people, probably – in the world work like this all the time, and never get the rewards, like days at the zoo and dinner at Pete’s.

And heck, my very super busy days don’t compare say to the day of a cleaning lady when I was a kid, let alone in the Victorian age. They just don’t. Or even to my grandma’s days, up to the last year of her life, cleaning the house, looking after “the creation” – chickens and rabbits, mostly – and whatever strays she’d adopted, and the little backyard mini-farm.

I was thinking about this and thought about someone who claimed you know, being a white male is going through life in the easy setting. In a way he was right, because being a white male of the US middle class is easy compared to just about anyone in the world ever. Being an American of any gender and color who is born to two parents, in a place where people don’t shoot at each other in the night streets is easier than just about anything. Hell, even being an American in the worst parts of Chicago (I’ll destroy Chicago. Cheeep. Six dollars!  And you get Rogue Magic.  Kidding, kidding.) is easier than life in most of the world. This reminds me of the PJ O’Rourke joke about people being willing to trade a state apartment in Moscow in the eighties for a sleeping bag on the streets of NY city.

More than that, it shows a becoming awareness on that writer’s part that no matter what struggles he’s had are minimal compared to most people.

This is at least much better than the critter who was running around Facebook this week attacking people then accusing them of lack of compassion for swiping back, because she had broken her arm, and had we no decency. Colonel Kratman, who, like all men, has way too much Ruth (I didn’t even know it was that popular a name) said the silly git must be high on pain pills and we should cut her some slack. I don’t think so. First her page showed that this is fairly standard behavior. Second, I’ve been on pain pills – and fever – and it never occurred to me to use it as a magical shield. I’m more likely to post about seeing pink lizards and leave the politics and politicking over awards for when I’m sober. (Though I confess to having done the gifferic post while high as a kite on fever.)

It occurred to me the true tragedy of the human race, as individuals, is that we can’t SEE into each other people’s lives. We see some things, and interpret them, but there’s no guarantee what I see matches what it is like for YOU. So according to my temperament, I either decide I’m veeeeery unfortunate, or the most blessed person in the world, compared to others, and it has nothing to do with reality.

Take every time someone posts here or sends me an email saying “I don’t know how you do so much” and I’m thinking “Me? I’m a slacker. Just yesterday I took a two hour walk for the heck of it” or something. And then I look at #1 son who ALSO claims to be a slacker and who for years has run double the credits recommended, written Ninja Nun, written stories, contributed substantially to house upkeep, and taught himself things like game programing, and I think “Uh.”

This is why making statements about entire (Marxist) classifications of people is silly. You really don’t know what other people’s lives are like. And also – having gone through times of being very ill, where I couldn’t do half what needed to do – you don’t know what they can do. What might look easy to you could break other people. On the other hand, what you think is very hard, I guarantee some people are shouldering, every day, without a complaint and probably thinking they’re doing nothing.

Note that the wise man said “Pick up your cross and carry it” not “expound on what weight the crosses should be, and make regulations as to who should carry how much to make sure it’s evenly distributed.”

It will never be evenly distributed. And this is not even a matter of temperament but biology. I’ve known since I was very young, for instance, I’m on the high end of capacity for lifting weights for a female, and was even when I was a little slip of a thing who weighed 100lbs soaking wet. This doesn’t mean that should we be on a forced march with weights the woman next to me should have to carry exactly what I do. As an ex-marathoner and rather muscular woman, I guarantee it would break most of them (heck, what I could carry as a kid would break me now.)

And this is why an entire society based on redistribution of the ah… burdens of civilization is crazy. No one can know what others can carry. No one can know when others are being crushed. We can guess, but we can’t know. And we certainly can’t do it by numbers. Humans are not widgets.

What we need is a decent understanding that all of us are supposed to do our parts to the limit of our abilities – pick up your cross and carry it, if you will – and that reliance on others (when not mutual) is vaguely indecent; coupled with the understanding that when we need help we SHOULD be given it, because if someone is that broken as to be asking, then it’s a desperate situation.

Will there be abuses? Oh, of course. As I said, some people think “I broke my arm, your argument is invalid” is a proper trump card.

Some people will think being made to earn a living is a terrible imposition. Which is why we can’t do it by the numbers and charity – all charity, even government charity if that’s to continue (and we all know my opinion on that, right?*) — should be as local and as granular as possible, because we might not be able to see inside each other’s lives, but to the extent we have limited visibility, it helps to be close enough to see it day to day.

Will the system be gamed? What, because it isn’t now? Sure it will. But at least we won’t be treating people as widgets, and we stand a better chance of helping those who really need it.

And yeah, I know this entire idea and $2 (I’ll destroy Chicago for $2!  Sale) will get me a cup of coffee.

And now I’ll shut up and go iron clothes.

 

*I’m against government-run charity not because I think we should let the poor starve in the gutter, but because government is a blunt instrument for such a fine tuned purpose. Or to put it another way, government is force, but charity should never happen at the point of a gun. Yes I know “Government is the word for what we choose to do together” but how much choice do you have, when a majority vote is treated as a reason to disregard almost half of the population and you’ll be thrown in jail for disobeying? “Choose” is rather a loose term. If a mugger holds a gun to my head I choose to give him money for instance – and government is more intrusive and less subtle than a mugger.

 

 

(I was about to write a post that was pretty much this.  And then I thought “I already wrote it.”  And I had, and I found it.

I’m still broken.  Sometimes scarily so — take my obsessing over my sales on Amazon when the sales dip — but I’m also still me.  Would I be me if I weren’t broken?  Doubtful.  And sometimes, my best “luck” comes from how broken I am.)

If I had a dime for every time I’ve read that “every baby should be planned” and that “every puppy should be wanted” and that “everyone should have a fulfilling occupation” I’d have too many dimes to be contained in the universe.  But the question is: would every dime be shiny?

What are you getting at Sarah?

What I am getting at is that many people seem to have completely lost track of the distinction between ideal and actual.  Let me spell it out for you: ideal exists only as a perfect thing in your mind.  Like the battle plan not surviving contact with the enemy, it will never survive contact with reality.

That perfectly planned child will suddenly become unplanned when it turns out to be a girl, rather than a boy, or a boy rather than a girl.  Or when he/she turns out to have a personality completely different from what his parents’ expected.  While IQ might be broadly inheritable, at least in components (mostly from the mother, interestingly enough) the way it’s expressed isn’t necessarily.  So you’ll have the bookish parents with the mechanically gifted child, or vice-versa.  Planned?  Who told you you could plan a chaotic system?  It’s sort of like planning your day tomorrow – you’d best have three layers of plans in case it rains, in case a wildfire comes through, in case it’s fine and beautiful.  And even then, it will find a way to surprise you.

And the puppy who was so wanted?  The family that adopted him will get sick and have to give him away.  They’ll unexpectedly lose their jobs.  The puppy will turn out to have a condition that’s not fatal but is a life-long drain and expense.  Or something else will happen you can’t predict.

But, Sarah, you say, shouldn’t we PLAN for the ideal?  Then we just adapt to less than ideal.

It depends on the plan.  There is a type of positive planning, in which you leave the route open to the wonder of the broken (yes, I’ll explain) and the negative planning, where you won’t take anything less than absolute perfection.  The negative planning is usually what you get when government bureucrats or do-gooding busybodies get involved.

It concentrates on NOT LETTING the less than ideal happen.  These are the people who think you should be licensed to have children, after you pass classes that say you’re an ideal parent in THEIR WAY.  The people who think every unplanned baby should be aborted or killed up to three months after birth (you only think I’m joking.)  These are the people who post on craigslist screaming at people giving away puppies and kittens that they are terrible people and should have had their animal spayed.

Let’s leave aside for a moment the fact that I think overpopulation is lies, damn lies and statistics and that in fact the current worldwide crisis is caused by population ALREADY falling.  (I confess the evidence is circumstantial and thin, but there is some and – more importantly – the evidence on the other side is dubious and suffers from wrong-process.)  That’s the subject for a whole post and one I don’t have the energy to write right now.  Let’s leave aside the fact that I think our obsession with spaying and neutering in fact can act (is acting?) as a sort of reverse selective breeding, pushing cats and dogs back to non-domesticated (no?  We keep the cutest/friendliest from reproducing.)  And also that in some areas of the country – here – you either buy a breed dog, adopt a dog who turned out less than ideal for someone else, or … adopt a puppy imported from elsewhere.  In Colorado puppies seem to come from Texas.  But in some places they come from abroad.  Cats are more abundant because… they’re cats and harder to catch and confine.

Let’s instead look at the other side of the coin, and why negative planning for the ideal and temper tantrums at people who don’t follow your version of ideal, are stupid: because broken plans and broken ideals often come as a blessing.

Sorry to use the religious term, but I don’t know how else to express it.  Sometimes the crisis-unplanned turns out to be the best thing you ever got.

Right after our cat Pete died, we found ourselves adopting Euclid because otherwise he was going to be euthanized because he had an uti and our humane society euthanizes those, so it doesn’t spread throughout the pens.  We had about twenty minutes in which to decide.  We had – G-d knows – enough cats.  But he would have died otherwise.  We adopted him.

Yes, Euclid is broken in interesting ways.  My son calls him a feline Woody Allen.  Only Woody Allen isn’t into extreme body modification, while Euclid chews off his leg hair and gives himself a poodle cut.  Also, some right b*stard trained Euclid to fabric before we got him, which is why we can’t have rugs on our floors, not till Euclid departs this vale of tears. (On the good side, Euclid doesn’t show any propensity to love on adopted daughters.  Of course, he doesn’t have any.  Um…)

But in the days after 9/11, when it seemed I could not stop crying, he was the cat who came and loved on me.  He’s the one who sits on you when you’re sick or worried, and purrs and reassures you all is well in the world.  And sometimes that purr is your only connection to happiness.

Or let’s look at how many not only unplanned but disastrously unplanned children go on and make the world a better place.  Right now it’s early morning and only Leonardo DaVinci – unplanned, illegitimate, broken in interesting ways – comes to mind, but I know there are scores of others.  (Yes, there’s also people like Hitler – but there is no indication that it was the fact they were unplanned that sent them spinning towards evil.)

A friend who had a terrible childhood once told me that she supported abortion unconditionally, because it would have been much better to be aborted than to be abused.  What she was missing was that her parents would never have aborted her.  She WAS planned and needed in the family: as a scape goat.  The kids that get aborted in that type of calculus are the ones whose parents are afraid they can’t give them the very best – just like the animals who get spayed are those whose owners fear that they can’t find good enough homes for the litters – not those that are born to be mistreated.

Part of this, I think, is that our life has become so good compared to that of our ancestors that we think we can push it just a little further and make it ideal.

Every baby will be wanted!  Every pet will be loved!  And there shall be no more tears and suffering!

Never works.  Ever.  There will always be people who need a kid as a scape goat.  And even if you certified parents there will be parents who are fine young, and then get some illness or some other problem and – there you have it.  Less than ideal.  And before you say “but then the kids can be taken away” think of strangers evaluating and deciding family life from the outside.

I was a disastrously unplanned child, born premature with all the problems that implies.  I had the world’s sickliest childhood.  Mom has health problems that make her less than an ideal parent.  (She knows this.  She never wanted children.  She ended up with two of us by accident.)  Were there rough patches?  Oh, sure.  Aren’t there in everyone’s life?  But my family has a shared sense of humor, which helped.  And I got to live and write, and marry and have kids of my own.  Would it be better if I never existed because I wasn’t wanted?  Or even because I would, of necessity, always be at least partly broken?

Some of the best pets I’ve had have been mutts or even feral babies whom I tamed.  Right now we have Havey-cat whom we found on a mini-golf course, starved and covered in grease, and with a broken tail.  He now presents and behaves as a Turkish van.  Is he?  At least partially, probably.  But he’s not less loved because he came to us when we were maxed out on cats and definitely not in the market for one who is a fuzz machine (we’re all mildly allergic to cats.)  And he is, again, one of those animals who can lift your mood, because he’s a born clown and still kitten-like after three years.

Oh, yeah, and through no fault of anyone, I never fit in Portugal.  But my askew childhood and youth – difficult as they were in living them – resulted in my falling in love with a stranger from a strange land, and finding home that way.

Will some percentage of children you give up for adoption be abused?  Inevitable.  A controlling system can’t prevent that.  No system can.  What it can do is keep children trapped in foster care or convince people to abort rather than put the kids up for adoption.  Will some percentage of kittens given away end up as snake food?  Inevitable.  No system can prevent that.  I doubt it’s as many as we’ve been led to believe, though.  Most cats throughout history have been pets and not snake food.  Most humans are predisposed to at least not mistreat pets.  Call it co-evolution.

Look at your lives: really look.  Could you have planned everything that happened?  Would your ideal life have been REALLY better?

Take my career: did I intend to have my first trilogy tank, trapping me in ten years of midlist hell?  Well, no.  But let’s imagine it had succeeded.  I’d now be stuck in the “literary fantasy” niche, which btw pays lousily and where they expect only one book every two years.  Worse, I found by my third book that while I can do it and even enjoy it to an extent, if I do nothing but that I become horribly depressed.

But the trilogy failed, and I was broke, and we were paying on two houses and I was fixing the “old” house for sale, and I couldn’t find a day job.  Then Jim Baen offered me money.  Then Berkley paid me to write Plain Jane.  My heart was broken, I didn’t want to write anymore.  The dream was gone.

But I needed money, and so I wrote, and even through the hell of six-books-a-year the dream came back.  And now I’m facing the chance for a better career than I hoped for AND I have the skills of incredible amounts of practice under pressure.

Would I have chosen this route?  No.  Was it rough as heck at times?  Yep.  Would I wish it undone?  No.  I wouldn’t wish any of the books unwritten.  I wouldn’t wish what I learned unlearned.

There is no perfect upbringing – for man or beast.  There is no ideal situation that can’t be reversed.  There isn’t any reason to believe that wanted – animals or humans – are better.  There isn’t any reason to believe the most peaceful places or eras are better.  Yes, the fourteenth century was a terrible time, but it gave us the renaissance and, eventually, the enlightenment.

Taking the broken and doing the best we can with it is all we can do.

And sometimes it’s much better than the ideal could have been.