So, weirdly I managed not to get sick — or not for more than about one night of weird fever-like dreams.  Why is this weird, Sarah?  Well because my entire family has spent the week being several shades of sick.  I never quite got sick, but the week might as well have been flushed anyway.

To make things better Havey-cat has got into something that gave him diarrhea, so the evening was spent trimming er… pasted cat tail.  He’s hiding from me now of course.

I sat here and thought “I can write the next chapter.  It’s Jonathan’s perspective, anyway and he’s always drunk.”  But I can’t, so I’ll have to write it tomorrow morning… So, check back in three  hours or so.

To speak or not to speak?

Imagine that you are in a situation where everything you hear around you, all the points of accepted truth are carefully manufactured from above.  From your own experience, from the things you’ve seen yourself, you know that they’re not true.

Can you say anything?

Of course you can’t.  People will think you’re crazy.  In fact, you might start thinking you’re crazy yourself.

For years I seesawed on this point.  I knew that there were things I’d seen, things I’d lived through that no one in the US would believe if told (I imagine it’s much like someone who is for a democratic government in the Arab world now trying to tell the truth in the US about the Arab Spring.  Even with blogs, unless he’s very lucky, people will think he’s crazy or a supporter of a repressive regime.  Because everyone they hear about the Arab Spring tells them how chocolatesprinklesawesome it was.  And how it was populist and pro-democracy.) Heck, most people in Portugal, save the few who’d been there with me would believe it. And even SOME of those had gone into believing in the official version.  Because it’s easier.  Because then you don’t feel crazy.  And even if you can’t bring yourself to believe in it, you talk as if you do, in public, because you don’t want anyone to think you’re crazy.

This subtle disconnect followed me to the US, where I found that to get ahead in life you needed to be as far left as you could be, or at least make noises like you were, and yet where every single TV show and TV report and book and magazine shouted that the left was downtrodden and the right firmly in control of government and everything else.  Oh, and the rich were all right wing.  (Guys, for those people who are my age, this was never the truth.  Not even in Europe.  The rich are more likely to be extreme left.  And it’s not guilt.  It’s that they know what is the end result of communism:  a sort of techno feudalism. They want that.  In its end stage, communism is a complete reversal of the anti-nobility revolutions of the eighteenth century.  And that’s why the upper classes support it.  By their fruits, etc, as a wise man once said.)

And then at some point I reached the Kit Marlowe point: To speak the truth, just once, would be worth it, even if one had to die for it.

I won’t claim any great bravery.  I came out of the political closet when indie became available.  That’s because I have obligations.  To my family, to my kids.

I keep hearing that writers should still keep their politics quiet, because we’ll alienate readers.  Is this true?  I don’t know.

At this point, the way the left is, if you don’t vocally endorse their pet causes, they’re not going to read you anyway.

I know my coming out of the political closet has cost me maybe ten readers that I knew and that I liked as people (despite their vile prog politics) but I don’t know how much that propagated to the “real world” readers.

Does it matter?

Sigh.  I don’t know.  I have obligations to my kids.  I have obligations to my husband.  Maybe coming out as libertarian/conservative means I’ll NEVER achieve more than the audience I have just about.  Who knows?

Even if I knew that – even if I IRREVOCABLY knew that, would I have stayed in the closet?  No.  No, I wouldn’t.  Even if I knew it meant the end of my career (and, hell, it might.  What do I know?  I’ve seen the job of demonization they did on Heinlein.)

Partly because I couldn’t stay in the closet any longer.  Partly because… every time you stay quiet, particularly as the lies grow more deranged (I swear I saw someone defending the loss of full time jobs as “people worked less hours before the industrial revolution.  We don’t need to work that much.”  What work might mean in self-respect and in habits passed on to the next generation means nothing.  And what work might mean in terms of society subsisting means still less.  Do they really think that if no one works and everyone gets money from Uncle Sugar the country will stay prosperous?  No, don’t answer that.  I want to sleep nights) you’re forcing other people into that thought closet where I lived so long – the place where you double think, and guess yourself and wonder if you’ve gone nuts.

And the time came I couldn’t stay quiet any longer.

I imagine at some point people around 1773 made the same choice.  They didn’t want to.  They wanted to go on being loyal British subjects and bless the king in public and drink to him in taverns.  But after a while you have to choose.  Your silence contributes to the destruction of everything you hold dear.  Can you stay quiet?

I’ll add I still stay quiet sometimes.  If you erupt in every social occasion, at every minute, people will discount you.  It becomes a form of Tourette’s.  So I choose my times, but I do talk.  I do provide something people can read and say “I’m not alone.”  (And sometimes I do talk at the grocery store, and the park, when I hear something egregious. The first time I had an attack of this was in a bookstore in Portugal in the seventies, where employees were talking about… well, their summer of recovery.  And I came back at them with not only figures carefully gleaned but with how those same figures were viewed  by the same paper when the other guys were in power.  And I asked them “Do you have short term memory loss or are you a party parrot, willing to repeat whatever the socialists say, no matter how egregious?”  Then I walked out, shaking.  None of them detained me to explain.)

But in the end, you have to pick your place to stand and this is mine.  Does it cost me readers?  Who the frack knows?

If someone takes offense to my views – which aren’t standard conservative, or even (and this takes effort) Libertarian enough for the party, mostly because I arrived at each of them individually and painfuly and on my own – then they probably have a much greater choice of glittery hoo has to read.  But it is possible a demonization campaign means I never grow beyond the Huns, which are not QUITE enough to make a living from.

If that is it, well… I can cut back.  Or write monster porn under a deep secret pen name.  (I swear I’m not.  Because ew…  But I’d rather do that than stay quiet.)

Perhaps I’m expressing it all very badly.  I read Live Not By Lies in the journal of Law and Liberty.

And I thought “Yes, that’s it.  That’s why I came out of the political closet.  That’s why I must remain out.  That’s why I must continue talking even when the other side claims I offend them deeply.”

Because they need to hear this. They need to know that opinion isn’t uniform nor uniformly in accord to them.  It might not change their minds, but at some point, they’ll have to start explaining their philosophy to us and to themselves, and maybe that will clear away some of the oddest contradictions.  And maybe they’ll have to learn more about the history of their beliefs.

Because people who believe like me need to hear this.  Sometimes I feel I’m preaching to the choir, but by all that’s holy, you need that too.  There is a reason for weekly church services in a world hostile to religion (as it was at the beginning and in many places again.)

Because men (and women) are social.  We want to fit in.  We need a group.  And we’ll sell our souls to belong to the consensus, if that’s all we see.  (And if you want to know how close I came to it, read Magical British Empire.)

And because, even if my voice is small and weak, it shatters the consensus.  There’s only one of me, but there are a hundred other small and weak voices.

They might, maybe, dismiss us as crackpots (someone called Larry that.  Never mind.)  But in the process of doing that, they mention us.  And one or two of their sheep come over, and remember that they once thought the same.  And one by one, we pick at the unthinking flock.

Is it enough?  Is it possible to save our country and our world, one by one?

How else would you do it?  This is the only way it’s ever been done.  Speak out.  Live or die free.  Live or die on two, like a human being.

Don’t let them get in your head and change your thoughts from what you know is true, just because you want to fit in, to be feted, to be accepted, to be loved.  Don’t let them enslave you.

I speak out because: “You can’t enslave a free man. The only person who can do that is himself. The most you can do to a free man is to kill him.”Robert A Heinlein

[What follows below is a blast from the Past Post, He Beats Me But He’s My Publisher from 8-31-2011.  Posting it again was precipitated by this: The New Role of Gatekeepers by Joe Konrath.  My friend Amanda bloged on it yesterday at MGC.

I’ve made comments on the original article in square brackets.  However, it was impossible to say everything I want to say about it.

Overall, it’s frigging amazing how it held up.  Most of what is said below is still true.  At least for those entering traditional publishing.  However, I’m going to list some of the trends I’ve seen in the last two and a half years, both indie and traditional and indie changing traditional and traditional running around in circles like a chicken with its head cut off… er… I mean doing stupid things.

First, like when I quit my first agent, when I quit my last agent, and walked off on my own, I didn’t starve to death.  The last two years are the first time I’ve made a middle-class income.  (Even if the last year was terrible due to my health and I’ll probably pay for that in income this year, unless I make with the writing VERY FAST — hey, I’m trying.)  Is there a use for agents?  Perhaps.  But not as currently constituted.  I wouldn’t mind an agent for translations, but I don’t have that, and heck in my whole time with agents I sold ONE translation to Japan (which has gone to reprint, but I’ve no heard about buying anything else.)  About 20% of my income came from Indie and “Found money.”  However, in the last two months, my income on Amazon has increased exponentially, as I put more backlist novels out.  So, I’m not where I can live from it, but I can see it from here.

Which means, G-d forbid, should something happen to my publisher — like, should they get crushed by a giant alien ship or something and leave nothing standing and no one alive — I would have a bad half year, but my income would probably recover.  More importantly, people would STILL read my books.

Needless to say — or is it needed? — I will continue working for Baen as long as they want me.  This is because they treat me like a human being and when they make mistakes THEY ADMIT THEM.  (If you’ve never worked for anyone but Baen, you don’t know this is sort of like saying that the sky is poka dots with pink background.  And yet it’s true.)  Also they picked me up when no one else would and when traditional was the only game in town.  Picking up a newby author is one thing, picking up one someone else had burned was a gutsy and more importantly, humane act.  I owe them one of those debts you never pay back.  Never.  If they’d never picked me up chances are I wouldn’t have written for 11 years now.

I wish I could convince them to let me work outside contract, because I totally would be faster.  It’s a psychological kink. (And I finally understand the mechanism and could explain it, only it would take a whole post.) OTOH I understand their need for security.  I’ve decided I’m circumventing this, as soon as I finish the two books under contract (which are of course late — psychological kink) I’ll send them two books on spec, and that should stave off the contract a while longer, right?  (I’m thinking the fourth shifters and World War Dragon, which might be a one off, then the third of the Earth revolution, and then another Darkships at the beginning of next year if my health doesn’t crash and burn.) But humans are mortal, and in a time of rapid technological change, things could happen to Baen.  I prefer not to have my entire income rest on them.  You guys know my history.  I don’t like that my fate is out of my control. Also, I write in a million genres (that like the no-contract thing is a psychological kink.  THE SAME psychological kink, in fact.  Can’t explain without a whole new post, but trust me when I say without the occasional mystery or historical fantasy, the sf/f would stop cold. — it occurs to me to wonder if I should have offered Baen Witchfinder.  Since it’s in the world of the magical British Empire — well, the universe — and since I wrote it in public, I didn’t.  Um…) and some of them, like mysteries, or historical novel, or who knows, in the future, Romance, Baen won’t publish.

The other thing that has changed in two and a half years (has it really been that short) since I let go of the other publishers and said “I’ll keep the one that doesn’t drive me crazy” is that my hair isn’t falling down by the handful and I sleep nights.  I LIKE that.

The things that has changed the most  about traditional with indie publishing is that the push model isn’t dead but it’s ailing.  Right now, pre-orders on Amazon count for more than whether you are young and perky and went to college with the publisher.  This is a good thing! Some of us are making a spirited dig out of midlist hell, with mypublisher’s help.

The next thing that has changed markedly and not at my publisher is that those publishers who have become desperate now seem to be buying what I call “too stupid to know better.”  Also, they’re paying less, the contracts suck and often the publication is “digital only” — who wouldn’t want to sign up for that?

This is what I’ve learned to expect in the way of winning friends and influencing people, back in the days when:]

He Beats Me But He’s My Publisher — a blast from the past post from August 31 2011

First let me point out no one beats me. Not literally. For those of you who’ve read Athena (Darkship Thieves) this should not be an incredible surprise.

The title is denoting of the relationship existing in traditional publishing between the writer and the publishing house. It is also the sort of thing I heard many women say about their husbands in the village where I grew up. Portugal, like most countries whose cultures were strongly influenced by Islam, had a streak of wife-abuse running through the poorer or more culturally backward classes. Since in the village where I lived my dad was one of the very few white collar workers, this meant my mother and my grandmother were forever saving women who ran away from home when they were two steps from landing in the emergency room… Only to see them go back to their husbands because “He beats me but he’s my man.” Or “He beats me because I’m not good enough.” Or “He beats me because he loves me so much.” Or even “Whom should he beat but his own?”

Needless to say, the one thing my family told me, from – I think – before I could toddle (I could talk before I could walk. No. Don’t ask.) was “If your husband ever so much as slaps you, you leave. That day. And you don’t go back.”

Unfortunately my family never knew about publishers and the status of the mid-list author. So they couldn’t warn me.

I wasn’t going to talk about any of this. I wasn’t. I like at least one of my publishers immensely, and I do understand how their hands are tied. On the other hand the last few days have been very trying. First, is it my impression or are all the establishment’s blue eyed boys going out of their way to tell us how we’ll starve in the gutter without traditional publishing? They remind me of my first agent, who btw, ONLY made official the sale I had already made to the publisher, and who then told me I’d die in the gutter without her, when I fired her. (Yeah. That… didn’t work as she thought, curiously enough.)

But then yesterday, in the Baen bar, someone posted that he sent letters to WRITERS complaining about their publishers’ DRM policies and pricing for ebooks because, I don’t know, the Kool-Aid man is red? Oh, wait, no, it’s more nonsensical than that. Because and – clears throat – I am quoting: writers choose their publishers. I want them to choose publishers who don’t do these things.

And that pushed me over the top. Call it hormonal, all right? I’m getting to be the same age when my mom was more likely to take off with the cast iron frying pan to talk to one of the abusive husbands than she was to simply bandage the woman’s wounds.

So, to begin with, let me tell you right now that the chances of a mid-list author dictating terms to his/her publisher are about the same as those of a village working class woman finding a man who doesn’t beat her. She might get lucky. She MIGHT. But she can’t count on it. In fact, a village woman once told me “If you think you’ll find a man who doesn’t beat you–” (And let me say, yes I have.)

Heck, as some of you know I have a lot of friends who are bestsellers. The way the market is right now, the chance of a bestseller dictating terms to his publisher are close to nill as well – unless he’s one of those blockbuster bestsellers that defy all classification. In our field you can probably count those in the fingers of both hands and have some fingers left over. And unfortunately none of them are close enough friends for me to ask if they, too, are worried.

Now, let me describe to you how much power the typical author has. Let me tell you how traditional publishing works for the unconnected, the non-fashionable and the doomed.

First of all, it’s a buyer’s market. Since the mega mergers of the eighties, there are five overarching houses. There might be more imprints, but, at least when submitting through an agent, you can’t submit twice to the same house. (Well, at least not using any agent I’ve had.)

Second, for each slot available on the publishing schedule there are thousands upon thousands of submissions. Even assuming the vast majority of those are either horrible or “don’t fit” the publisher’s “needs” there have to be at least ten books that would fit the slot at any given time. [I’ve heard this is no longer true.  It’s all leaked through friends of friends and very hush hush, but it feels intuitively right and if it is how much those numbers have fallen shocked even me.  The one not following this trend is Baen, and as someone who works for them — DUH — In fact, their submissions might have gone up. — SAH 2014]

So, let’s say YOUR book takes the editor’s fancy. Or maybe they owed your agent a favor. Or maybe they liked the title better than the other ten. Who knows?

You’re a brand new author, and they pick you out of slush. Oooh. Oooh. You’re in the money now, right?

Um… maybe. But first let’s talk about the important considerations: how powerful is your agent? How much does he/she believe in you? And do you know anyone in a publishing house? If all those are negative, you have one more chance at the big money – are you a “sexy package”? Part of this is literal. Are you cute and young? Can they count on displaying you and having people tumble over themselves? Part is metaphorical – do you have a hard luck story? Do you have something interesting about you? Do you perhaps have a well-followed blog? Or are you a politically correct refugee? (When my first series tanked the publisher told me she would buy me again and “make me a bestseller” if I wrote an autobiography. I was thirty eight. I’d done nothing but get married, have kids and write three failed books. So… she wanted me to write about my childhood in Portugal and make it “sexy.” No, I didn’t. What, am I stupid? No. I respect my family and friends there too much. I want to sell my books, not my unremarkable self. Also there are other reasons which are none of their business. Or anyone else’s.)

Let’s suppose you’re either white-bread American and unconnected to the publishing industry in any way. (Or you’re not white American but are stupid or honorable enough not to let them make a big deal of your life or treat you as an oppressed minority.) Let’s also suppose you wasted your twenties trying to break in, and in your thirties you’re blousy, somewhat overweight, with two small children.

Ah, my dear, welcome to hell. Here’s your accordion.

Having looked at this, your editor “forecasts” your numbers. I have it on good authority this doesn’t involve the bones of sacrificed animals. What they do is go “White, American, unremarkable and not sexy.” And you get the standard beginner’s advance. It used to be the princely sum of five thousand dollars (what, you can’t live on that for a year? Foolish you. Appliance boxes are free, and there are some nice underpasses. You can write at the library.) It is now three thousand. [I have a friend — oh, heck, you can know Amanda Green, writing as Ellie Ferguson.  Wedding Bell Blues made 3 times that within a year of being out.  It’s still selling. — SAH 2014.]

Now the book and its advance pass on to the marketing department. Who… barely glance at it. To get back the money they invested in you, they don’t really need to do anything. No, look, I know what you’ve heard. They say that printing the average book costs 100k or some fantastical sum. But that’s because they’re charging to every book the same percentage of editor/publicist/secretary/etc salaries. (Many books at this level, if bought on proposal, never get READ in full. Except presumably by the copyeditor. That’s how much time you take of those salaries.)

Next, you get assigned to someone – probably someone’s secretary – who procures a cover for you. Usually you get a beginner artist (and some are darn good) but they might also use some form of out of copyright art – like my first three books. And then… and then you go to copyedit. And thence to the marketing department again.

I’ve been privileged to listen to a book reps spiel back before I was published, at my favorite independent bookstore, while I was waiting to ask the manager a question. Back then this was done with a huge catalog with covers, and one or two books in actual advance printing. First these came up. They were either bestsellers or those the publisher had slated as bestsellers. They got handed to the bookstore manager and the manager was told “Well, we have strong confidence in these books. You’ll want to take…” twenty of each, I think, at a minimum. Might have been fifty. It’s been a long time. Then came the books in “second slot” for that quarter. For these the rep had the covers. He’d hand them over, do a little song and dance, and say “you want to take” – five or ten of these. He’d tell you how the publisher was promoting these books this way or that, or how interesting the life story of the author was, or what have you.

AND THEN, at the end, he’d say “You also can take these.” THAT, Mr. or Ms. Whitebread, is where you are. And if your cover is exceptionally pretty or the manager recently watched a movie that sounds somewhat like your book, they might take one or two.

At that point, you’re in the midlist zone. You’re also more than likely in the sales death spiral (no, I’m not going to explain that. This would run to ten pages. Google “Books and Death Spiral.”) After that, any book you sell, those numbers will be brought up. Can you escape the midlist, once you’ve been cast into it? I don’t know. One hears stories, but those are usually from before the computer number system. Perhaps, as with hell, you can swim out of it but I doubt it’s on a sea of tears of true repentance. More likely you’d have to marry a movie star, or perhaps run for president.

Note that SO FAR the writer has had exactly zero choice. Oh, he can chose NOT to sell his book and remain obscure forever. Does how good his book is influence anything? Well… it could. Supposing that word of mouth got going among readers. Except that, for all but one of my publishers (yes, you know which one) until very recently, it was one print run, one time, it sells out and the book is no longer available in any format. Too bad so sad. One of my publishers until the last two books made it a point of taking the books out of print at the year mark or when the book started earning royalties.

This meant the chances of your being discovered in back inventory were… you’re right. Zero. (I know through my fanmail a lot of people are NOW discovering my Shakespeare series which came out eleven years ago. I get no money for those, because they’re out of print and either used or remaindered. I don’t even get statements for them anymore. And there weren’t enough of them printed, so even if they all sold twenty times, my name recognition would be limited.)

In fact, if your book had been completely blank, or a compilation of nursery rhymes, it would have got exactly the same distribution and sales as it got with your words in it. You didn’t choose the cover. You didn’t choose the price. You didn’t choose the push. You didn’t choose the distribution.

More importantly and more than likely, the person who chose these things chose them NOT based on the book – which they might or might not have read – but on YOU and their perceived marketability of YOU. (And let me tell you, as a reader, that’s many shades of wrong.)

Most people don’t know your book even exists, and therefore they can’t ask for it. And if they do, they might get told it can’t be ordered.

And then… and then the fun starts. When the numbers are in, you’re told your numbers are only “midlist” and barely good enough (if you’re lucky) for them to buy the next one. And the next. They all get the exact same treatment. You might grow your fans, but it will be very slow. And even if you sign with a publisher who wishes they could do more for you, at that point the publisher is hamstrung by the numbers in the computer about your previous distribution.

You might (or might not) be asked to change your name again and again and again (one of my publishers has a fetish for this.)

And all along you’ll be told the fault for your lackluster sales is … yours. Yep. You wrote the book, and if it doesn’t sell, it’s ALWAYS your fault. No matter how demonstrably it ISN’T.

And under the old model, you swallowed and took it. You did what the village women did when I was a kid. You bandaged your worst wounds, and you made up stories. “I fell down the stairs.” “I bumped into bad sales figures in the night.” “I am so clumsy.” “It’s all my fault.” “They beat me because they love me.” And you crawled back. Because the alternative was unthinkable. The alternative was to never publish again.

And if you complained – if you so much as opened your mouth and said something along the lines as perhaps the crash of the books wasn’t ENTIRELY your fault (I’m not a conspiracy theorist, for instance, but I’m 100 % sure that the crash of my first book was exacerbated by coming out exactly one month after 9/11 and while I’ve done many weird things in my life I’m SURE I never committed any terrorist attacks. But those numbers were SOLELY my fault, as far as the industry was concerned) you got told how grateful you should be to the house for continuing to publish your worthless self, how each of your no-good books cost them 100k to get to the printing stage, and how they only did it out of the goodness of their hearts. And you had to swallow it, no matter how nonsensical it was.

THIS model. THIS MODEL is what the bright eyed harbingers of the establishment, the blue eyed boys of privilege want me to get maudlin about. Both as a reader and as a writer, let me say RIGHT NOW that I’m not going to.

No, I don’t know where the buck will stop in digital publishing. No, I don’t know what will emerge or what shape it will take. I do know just being able to say “It wasn’t my fault. I’m not the world’s best writer, but there’s something mighty weird with the system.” Or “I will not be grateful for hind teat” is good enough for me.

A biography of Marlowe claims that among his last words were “Just to tell the truth once, would be worth dying for.” This, it turns out, is also true when the result is the metaphorical death of a career. Particularly when there are alternatives.

No, I will not eat what’s put before me. No, I’m not the world’s most wonderful writer – every year I look at what I wrote the year before and cringe, so I know there’s room for improvement – but I KNOW I’m not a million times worse than J. K. Rowling. Sorry, that’s not just impossible. That’s obscene. I also know that until Pratchett got a new agent and editor, he was lost in mid-list hell in the US while a bestseller in the UK. His writing did not change. His marketing did.

Will I continue selling to big houses? Only if I like them. I write for a house I like, and there’s one other house I wouldn’t mind writing for.

As for the rest of them, they can go to hell. I’m going Indie.

As you guys know, this last weekend I was attending a seminar here in town.  One of the presentations (which I’d got to audit last year and already knew was great) was James Owen’s Drawing Out the Dragons – go look look, for the book and/or CD which I understand is a close approximation to being there in person.

I think it’s great and inspirational and I wish I’d got it thirty years ago, when we didn’t have dependents (other than the cats) and when – frankly – we were afraid of our own breath which is why I’d write novels and spend years not sending them out.  (Okay, we also didn’t have money for postage, but we could have sold something.  (Not one of the cats, though.  No one would buy them.))  If you’re relatively young (younger than I) you definitely want to buy the book/CD and go through it.  It might be the kick in the pants you need.

Keep in mind, though, that you’re not him.  Take a sane and rational assessment of your drive, your qualifications and your need to do whatever you really want to do (writing, cooking, painting or playing piano) instead of what you’re doing.

I am aware of my own limitations and my own internal issues.  Just listening to this doesn’t turn me into J. K. Rowling – by which I don’t mean the writing itself (yes, she is a good writer, but she also hit at the right time, in the right place, and I might be as good as she was and as lucky as she was at some point.)  I mean that if I were a single mother, on public assistance, even if I weren’t so poor that I couldn’t afford heating, the paranoid side of my brain would lock the writing down absolutely tight, and I’d be getting a minimum wage job, just to bring in some money and set my foot on a ladder.  I know I have the crazy paranoid person inside my head who spends most of her time locking my writing down tight (which is why I hate being on contract.  As deadline approaches, and then after the deadline passes which is worse, I spend more time being paranoid than writing. – After I deliver these two contracts, I’m going to try to send Baen a book every six months, on spec, so I don’t have to be under contract, which is a serious psychological problem.)

Okay – let me backtrack – James Owen’s presentation is about having the courage to let go of your stupid, go-nowhere “safe career” to do what you really want to do.  He says, right at the beginning “If you want to do something, no one can stop you from it.  If you don’t want to do it, no one can help you.”

You should listen to it, and consider his point, but you should also consider who you are.  For instance, I wish I’d listened to this 20 years ago, so I’d have had the focus to work without the near death experience, and even more importantly, to have more focus for the last twenty or thirty years.

Near death experience?

We were talking about this session – my husband and I – and we went back to the fact that part of the effect of the presentation was achieved for me when I was 33 and I found myself on my back, in an hospital bed, with pneumonia, and thinking I was going to die.  Or rather the doctors thought so.

I had a kid who was 5 and one who was a year and a half, and I thought I was going to die.  There was the usual issue when you have children that age.  I worried about my husband and my children, of course; I worried about who would look after my kids when Dan was working.

But what surprised me – shocked me to the core – is that I was guilty and worried about the books I’d never written.

Now, yes, I’ll probably die with books unwritten, but all of my worlds were dying with me.  One of the worlds was one I had had since I was fourteen – and when I died all of those characters would also die. (Part of the conversation this morning is that this world will have to be written.  And those of you who know exactly what I’m talking about, yes, what I mean is that world, and yes, it will be a pen name.  Closed.  But wouldn’t it be hilarious if that is the series that takes off.  It will be written, as time permits.  It will have to be published indie.  This is for my own conscience.  The rest is not important.)

When I actually recovered (and that’s a story in itself and not here) and went home, even before the year of recovery passed and I was fully recovered, changes were made.  That illness is part of the reason my children went to kindergarten and later to public school – so mommy had writing time.  They were still getting taught at home after school.  And yes, if I had the time again, I’d homeschool and write while the kids were working.  When forced I found out later on that I could do that.  But that’s besides the point.

I’d been writing before I almost died.  In fact, I had been part of a writing group, and I thought I was serious about my writing.  But in fact, I only sent a short story out a year or so, and though I was working on my writing everything else took priority.

After I came out of the hospital, even in my lowest-fiction-writing year (aka 2013), I’ve never written fewer than two novels and several short stories a year, and I sent them out, and I started seriously applying my time and effort to getting things published.

Because if I went back to the hospital, I didn’t want to be lying there and knowing there were worlds that lived only in my head and were dying with me.  I didn’t want that guilt.

That alone was enough to seriously focus me, though I had distractions – still do – and last year I got sucked into a whirlpool called non-fiction writing and consecutive illnesses, and finally had to step back, take a hard look and realize I couldn’t go on with that and is it what I really wanted to do?  (Yes, I’ll still be writing for PJM, but we’ve arranged things differently, and I’ll be writing less and have only one deadline for four posts a month.)

That is what a near fatal illness will cause you to do.  And I think it’s possible that Drawing Out Dragons will perhaps give you the same drive, the same focus (or close enough) without a near fatal illness.  (I get no portion of these sales, so if you can sit down and do this calculation yourself, do it.)

But think about it.  If you find yourself in bed, dying tomorrow, what would weigh on your conscience?

If you find yourself regretting that you spent so much time writing and so little playing with your kids or holding hands with your spouse, for the love of G-d, stop writing now and go do that stuff.

No.  Wait let me explain.  You’ll always feel a certain regret on those things.  When I get to take a walk with my husband, and spend the whole afternoon just the two of us, I treasure those days – or weekends.  Yes, the canoodling ones – and would like to do a lot more it.  And the other day I found myself crying into a box of pictures of the kids when they were little, because you can never hug them or play with them enough.  (They’re wonderful kids now, but they’re really not kids anymore, since both are legal adults and the older is the age I got married at. I miss my littles.  And no, I didn’t hug them enough.)  But this is the stuff you never do “enough.”

The question is do you regret that MORE than you regret not having published those worlds that have haunted you since the age of six?  If so, just go and play with your kids now, and devote ten years being a mom/dad or wife/husband.  Later, when the kids move out, revisit this question.

On the other hand, if, as with me, you feel bad about the times not taken to cuddle the kids, but what you REALLY mind is all those worlds – find a way to be serious about writing.

No, seriously.  Find a way.  Remember who you are.  Quitting your job might only make you neurotic and lock down your writing.  So you might want to keep a job, keep a safety net, whatever.  And yeah, you might still want to take time to spend with the kids and the husband – but put in two hours a day (say) hard and fast so you can write.  Or whatever it is you really want to do.

Because few of us (ah!) come back from their death beds.  And you might not have a second chance.  And waiting for the miracle when everything is perfect for your great work, just means it will never get done.

*Cedar Sanderson is a “raiding party member” that is my four friends who guest blog on rotating Mondays so I can have more time to write (yay.)*

Eating the Apocalypse — by Cedar Sanderson

The prequel to this — Witchfinder — has been removed.  I do promise to go through the copyedits as soon as humanly possible and send the advance copies to those who pre-ordered.  You’ll know when that’s eminent because I’ll remove scattered chapters from this blog.  I do hope to manage it next week, but I’m not promising as I’m still finishing a novel under contract to Baen. Meanwhile, if you donate $6 and note it in the field, you’ll get advance-subscribed to this novel.  I do, however, understand it can be a long time to wait, and if you want to, do so.  I will continue to post chapters here, roughly one a week.

NOTICE: For those unsure about copyright law and because there was a particularly weird case, just because I’m making the pre-first draft of my novel available to blog readers, it doesn’t mean that this isn’t copyrighted to me.  Rogue Magic as all the contents of this blog is © Sarah A. Hoyt 2013.  Do not copy, alter, distribute or resell without permission.  Exceptions made for ATTRIBUTED quotes as critique or linking to this blog. Credit for the cover image is © Ateliersommerland | Dreamstime.com

Lady Helen Blythe, Sister of the Earl of Savage

I’m not as innocent as I look.  No, wait.  In many ways I’m far more innocent than I look, since I have it on good authority that I look like my brother Jon.  But I’m not so innocent that I didn’t know our oh, so helpful friend was the god Hermes, and that I didn’t know the reputation of that particular divinity.

Trickster, god of thieves, and other things that mostly were expressed by Jon wagging his eyebrows up and down when they were anywhere near his thoughts, but I was close enough to hear it.

It was a little surprising that he seemed to look like my brother, but I assumed that was because he was trying to lull me into complacency.  I still had no intention of marrying him, or, for that matter of revealing that long strand of pearls wound under my clothes.  I needed that strand of pearls to secure a comfortable living, so I wouldn’t have to marry whoever offered for me.  Because even if I couldn’t be a pirate queen, I was tired of living my life by someone else’s rules.

“You have to tell me where you want to go,” Hermes said.  “Else I can’t help you.”

I thought that if what I remembered from the stories was true, then whatever we told him would come true upside down and sideways, but then again, how would that be different from that very strange journey I’d embarked on when Betsy and I had transported to what we thought was Plymouth?

But before I could talk, Mr. Merrit spoke.  “We want to get out of here and back to the Earth of men, and I want the Lady Helen safe.”

I spoke over the end of it, and my voice came out in a sullen tone, “I want to be a pirate queen.”

Hermes had been nodding at Mr. Merrit but now turned to me, a sort of cackle escaping from his throat and, seemingly unwillingly, between his lips.  “You do, do you?” he said, and to my chock did exactly what Jonathan does when he thinks I’m being silly.  He patted my head, as though I were a cute child aged about six.  “Well, my dear, maybe someday you will be, but now is not a good time.”  Then he turned to Mr. Merrit, which did annoy me, because, after all, surely, I mattered too.  “I see that,” he said.  “Whether it is possible is something completely different.  I can surely get you to the world of men, and even to the vicinity of your place of residence, but whether that means you can be safe is something wholly different.  Three worlds are involved in this collision.  There will be none safe and possibly none alive, unless we find a way to stabilize and insulate each world from the others.”

“But I thought,” I said, “That the mythworld wanted the collision.”

“Zeus,” Hermes said, and it might have been a swearword.  “Wants many things, but when you’re that old, that powerful, and so many conflicting expectations have been laid on you, it is all a matter of conjecture whether what you want would be good for anyone, least of all you.  Never mind.  Some of us – myself and Loki and others have been wondering what to do if this disaster is going to let some of us escape alive.  Already, the old myths are bursting out.  The kingdom of Neptune is threatened by an ancient, nameless one, which is why the king wanted to marry you, hoping some of my magic—” He stopped abruptly.  “Never mind that.”

“But I do mind,” I said, primly.  “After all, you’re asking us to trust ourselves to you, and Loki, and I assume other rogues.  Why should we, when the powers of good are aligned against you.”

He grinned, and his grin was exactly like Jonathans before one of those words he wasn’t supposed to say in front of me escaped his lips – words like “round heels” and “tup.”

“Why should you indeed.  But lady, one thing you learn fast in this world is that ‘good’ is entirely relative.  For instance, Neptune is a good … creature, supposedly, but you refused to marry him.  And well done that, since he’s already married.  And The All Father… Zeus, Odin, whatever you wish to call him, has his own ideas about what is good, that don’t involve the convenience or even the life of anyone else.  In this case, he wants more power, and he wants our world to merge with yours again, at least to an extent, so we can again milk it of belief and energy.  The only way to do that – which will kill magic among humans – is to use Fairyland as fuel for the merge, which I understand will wholly consume Fairyland and in turn destroy all of the worlds.  We tried to explain this to him.  Hephestus himself… Never mind.  He would not listen, and he is sole ruler of mythworld.

“Sometimes, when the good people are disastrously wrong a confederacy of rogues is needed, and just such we’ve created.  And now, discounting that the lady can’t be a pirate just now – maybe later – I’ll conduct you to a portal that will take you to your home world.  This will greatly disappoint Neptune and Diana and most of all The All Father, but it must be done.  Follow me.  And don’t be afraid to walk normally.  I’ve cast a veil upon us.”

When I was kid, we got visitors in the village every spring and summer.  These were usually relatives who’d moved away long ago, but there were also friends and friends of friends.  I have a vague memory that, before I was six, my grandfather’s boss from his time in South Africa spent a summer with us.  I know other people – from the bigger cities or from abroad would come and spend summers in the village, living the simple life.

The verdict was always the same, and best summed up by the friend of a friend my mom had house-sit for her some years ago “It’s like going back to a simpler time.  It’s like a little slice of paradise?”

Was it a slice of paradise?

I confess that in my mind the time I go back to those long summer days.  In the nostalgic mind it’s always ninety degrees out, and the air is full of the scent of roses and ripening grapes.  There is no sound save from, very far away, a song – so distant that you can’t tell anything beyond its being music.  And I’m lying in bed, on crisp sun-dried sheets, reading.

But if I stop squinting quite so much, I’ll hear the mosquitos buzzing, and your choice is between turning out the light and not being able to read, or keeping the window closed and sweltering.  And the summer nights is when the garbage disposal plant near us – well over capacity – chose to burn the garbage outside (instead of inside the plant with filters.)  Since that plant processed all the waste from the city of Porto, you’d wake in the morning to the village blanketed in impenetrable smoke that stung your eyes and made it impossible to breathe.

If you go back before that, to the early seventies or late sixties, the village was even more… picturesque.  For instance, there was often an animated soccer game in the street in front of grandma’s house.  This is because there was maybe a car every three hours, and you could hear it coming a mile away.  This was before the garbage disposal plant got placed about a mile from the village, and when things were still so safe my brother used to take his books and transistor radio and go study in the middle of the woods and even I and my little friends could go on long unsupervised hikes.

There were village festivals.  On summer nights – it seemed like every night to me, but hey – there were often celebrations and parades up the street.  People gathered on their stoops to talk.

A slice of paradise!

Except that we were one of the very few families in the village which had a bathroom with running water.  But even there, given the difficulties of installing such things in a 100 year old house with rock-slab walls, the bathroom was outside the kitchen door.  This meant in winter (or even fall) at night, we used the guzunder which is what my friend Kate calls those useful porcelain (usually) containers that go under the bed for an emergency.  Not your more pleasant setup, even if part of human life for many centuries.

And because the only way to wash clothes was by hand, in the wash tank (in grandma’s house a square stone thing big enough to drown several grown men, at mom’s house only big enough to drown a small child.  Weirdly, my brother did almost drown in grandma’s, only they caught him in time and revived him.  Dying by drowning in the wash tank was fairly normal for kids my generation and older.  Every few years it would happen.) and could only dry them on the line, most people only washed/changed clothes once a week.  (We changed at least underclothes every day because mom is like that.  She dried the clothes in the kitchen, too, if it was too cold outside.  I remember lines strung back and forth everywhere except over the stove and the kitchen table.  Since that house, back when I was very little, was a shotgun apartment – kitchen, hall (where my brother slept) bedroom (where my parents slept.  I slept next door at my grandma’s, with my cousin Natalia) and front room/mom’s workshop, this meant that the kitchen was 1/3 our living space and the gathering place.  Right under the dripping clothes.

Grandma’s kitchen next door had a Franklyn stove, but that was the only heating around.  Sometimes, in winter, if you left a glass of water on the bedside table, there would be a thin crust of ice on it in the morning.

Even in my mom’s house – bathrooms inside, electricity in every room, and more than just the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling or, in other words, the height of luxury for the village – there was no heat.  (Part of this is that despite being a climate not un-akin to London, the North of Portugal thinks of itself as temperate or warmish, so they don’t think anyone needs heating.  This is a recent illusion.  My friend across the street lived in a Victorian that had radiant water heat – must have been the only heated house in the village.  I used to go over to sit on the radiator in her room.)  I spent a great part of my adolescence reading in bed, not because I was tired, but because I’m very cold-intolerant.

None of this is to complain understand.  If you squint at the village a certain way, it was a paradise.  It was certainly much better than most of humanity has had for most of human existence.

Squinted at another way… well… when the community organization started running the neighborhood (yea, exactly what you’re thinking) one of the few things they did that I could find no fault with was arrange to have showers installed in the nearby school, and to have them open to the public every Sunday with hours for men and hours for women.  This alone must have improved the health and longevity in the village exponentially (I moved here shortly after, so I haven’t tracked.)  Before that, there were people who simply didn’t have the facilities to bathe (not even the hip bath in front of the fire we had at Grandma’s.  There was a shower too, but it wasn’t heated and the only one who used it in Winter was dad who believed in the old Roman method of forestalling colds.  In my parents’ “new house’ built 1971, we had running hot water.  And inside, too.  The height of luxury.)  Most of the village didn’t use to bathe in winter at all, and the smell in any enclosed public gathering had to be smelled to be believed, particularly when you consider most people heated their houses with wood or coal.

We had cholera every summer and some sort of flu bug that killed all the elderly people in winter.

But the landscape was beautiful, the area pristine, and generally (except largely for me) the people who survived all this were fine specimens, because they had to be or they’d be dead.

Why am I going into all this?

Years ago, in the bar, I got in an argument with a fellow writer who said longevity hasn’t improved at all.  Humans have always lived about this long, if they survived infancy.

This is, pardon me, horse pokey. Which of course doesn’t prevent its being the currently prevailing archeological theory.

She “knew” this because she had studied an affluent village in Bavaria in the eighteenth century.  Head>hits>desk.  Guys, even then and there, there were differences.  You can say longevity was sort of the same if you eliminate all deaths by misadventure.  Because if you don’t eliminate those, there’s a hundred ways you can die, from a hangnail or an infected tooth.  (Which is why you shouldn’t eliminate those.  Antibiotics dramatically changed human life.  Yours truly would not have survived childhood had she been born 20 years earlier.)  And even then, it’s close to our life now, only if you think that most people die in their sixties.  (No, they don’t.)

I can’t even begin to imagine how people can believe this, unless people my age in the States lived at a much, much, much higher level.  I met exactly one person over eighty when I was a kid, and let me tell you, he was not like my parents who are still largely active and self-sustaining, nor even like my grandmother who lived independently and self-sufficient until 87.  Go back just twenty years from that – when I was little, and sixty was “very old.”

Maybe people in the little village were unusually sturdy.  Maybe – and my mom and dad maintain this happened in their childhood – childhood conditions were so horrific that only the strong survived, and so those lived maybe to their seventies.

Maybe.  Or maybe there was the usual slapdash way of recording births and deaths, and people were assumed to be a lot older than they were.  (It was said that Shakespeare was “very old” when he died, but worked out, he was about 58, that is seven more years than I am now.  For that matter we’re not sure EXACTLY how old my dad is.  The only thing we know is that he couldn’t have been born on his official date of birth.  And this in a fairly bureaucratic society.)

My son volunteers at the hospital.  The only people coming in dying of old age, and in conditions when they usually can’t cope are in their hundreds.

When I was a kid there was doubt people could live till their hundreds.  The few cases, usually featured on TV, “Auntie Isolda lived to be 100 by eating a pound of dried carp a week” my dad would scoff at and say that they’d got her birth registration wrong.  Now, it’s not even unusual.

Now, does everyone live to that age?  Well, no.  The picking off starts at round my age, and continues at a merry pace, but there is enough of a percentage hitting 100 that it’s not that big a deal.  (The hard and fast unbreakable line seems to be 114 right now.)  It is, to my “feel” of it, the equivalent of hitting 74 in the village in the old days.

I was talking to Charlie Martin about this the other day and he said that we seem to have roughly doubled the expected human lifespan but no one has noticed.

No one has noticed because the theory, of course, is that “people lived about the same time.”

They didn’t.  I didn’t grow up in the eighteenth century.  I didn’t grow up in a real third world country.  But I remember when people died and of what.  I also remember, for that matter their finding the skull of the Tsar of Russia and finding he had had a permanent abscess in his mouth.  Guys, this was one of the wealthiest persons in the world.

Abcesses, uncured infections that left weak points, people who did die of little trifling colds…

No matter how much you tell me life expectancy past childhood was about the same I’m going to say you’re full of it.

It’s like telling me the village was a slice of paradise.  Oh, sure.  It was pretty.  And we loved some parts of living there – but it was not comfortable, hygienic or very healthy.

You see, there are different ways of looking at data.  For instance, I was reading about the thirties in England (yes, THAT backburnered project.)  It was a scholarly booklet put out by Oxford (I think) and there it was how after WWI people came back, and they were displaced from their traditional occupations in the countryside, and they were living in urban slums and oh, the horror.  But in the chapter on appliances they forgot this and talked about people – even lower middle class people – buying domestic electrical appliances.  Oh, also, rural estates were overrun with suburban houses built for the working class.

At which point I wondered if they read themselves and how they squared the contradiction.

But they weren’t interested in that.  They were interested in running down modernity and capitalism.  Hence, older times were better.

This is partly noble-savagism (totally a word) partly eco-savagism (totally a concept.  It’s the desire to believe that if we all went to a “sustainable” society where the most advanced concept is the grass skirt there wouldn’t be massive deaths or famines) and partly Marxist-savagism (which is the belief you need wise top-down leaders to prevent you from being rooked out of paradise as your ancestors were.)

It’s also a strong dose of “I want to believe.”  I don’t know what the heck it is in the human mind that makes us wish to believe in a lost paradise.  But something there is, and you can’t beat it down with a stick.  (Give me a stick large enough and I shall move the world.  Ahem.)

This is the same thing that has led people to SERIOUSLY claim that hunter-gatherers were healthier.  They base this on a few skeletons found.  Brother!  Of course they were healthy.  Given how hard the life of modern primitives is, you had to be healthy to survive to be of advanced enough age to merit a burial.  (Let alone the fact that most of the tombs we found are, of necessity, royalty.  That corrupts every such study up to the very recent time because (if what I read in that book about burials in London was true) paupers were often buried in ways that either left no trace or would be er… interesting to excavate.)

Me?  I accord my ancestors the same respect I accord members of other races. I don’t think they were idiots.  No, they weren’t always in control of their own fates.  (Dad’s ancestors have a fatal – or often near fatal – attraction to lost causes.)  They lacked that control the same way we lack it.  I might believe I know exactly what’s wrong with the economy (too much regulation, too much money printing, too much wrong-headed fiscal theory) but the truth is that I can’t just tell the idiots in charge to move over and let me drive for a while.

But to the extent they could make choices – agriculture over hunting gathering, indoor plumbing over lack thereof, motors over oxcarts – I trust them to have made choices rational beings would make.

And I don’t believe they needed wise leaders, any more than I need a wise leader.  I believe most of them could match wits with most leaders throughout history (most of whom, after all could figure out which end of a queen to set the crown on one try out of three.)

You can tell me it’s been a long slow way down for humanity from some imagined paradise. And I can tell you that unless you believe in noble savages, you can rinse your assumptions and start again.

In some regions, for some brief time, you might have had near-paradise.  But compared to us?  We are healthier and wealthier than Pharaoh in all his glory.  Caesar’s legions couldn’t secure for him the comforts of someone who lives on welfare in most regions in the US.  And I believe PJ O’Rourke about the ad in Pravda in the final days of the Soviet Union, “Will trade state assigned apartment in Moscow for sleeping bag over grate on the streets of New York City.”

And it would be a poor trade for the person getting the apartment in Moscow.  Even if you throw in all the comforts Charlemagne enjoyed.

I’ll take antibiotics, running water and the lack of need for a guzunder, thank you so much. And I’ll take the possibility of living to 100 or near there.

You can keep your splendid primitives.  Me and mine will do what we can to stop you subverting civilization.

Like the village when I was a child, the past is very scenic.  Provided you don’t have to live there.

Tomorrow there will be a post by James Cambias about the wonder of Human Wave SF!

Oh — the reason is that this weekend I’m taking the Superstars Writing Seminar.  (In the coldest days of the year!)

Would you ask the homeless person down the street how to conduct your sex life?

Would you approach the guy mumbling incoherent stuff and peeing on himself whether you should have a boyfriend or three?  Have casual sex?  Would you ask him if he has done that, and if it made him happy?

Okay, let’s go with a slightly less outrageous example – instead of the homeless guy down the street, you knock on your neighbor’s door and ask.  He doesn’t speak English very well, but he looks like a happy enough guy, and his kids always smile at you.  So, would you ask him how early your kids should have sex and with whom?  And whether you should experiment with group sex?  And take his answer when he tells you what he’s done and how happy it’s made him?  And change your entire life around to be JUST like his – or at least just like he tells you it is?

No?  Why not?  Western civilization did that.  Western civilization still is doing that.

Yesterday for some reason I got suckered into reading about Margaret Meade and the whole Samoan “Was it an hoax or not?”

Of course in anthropological circles, it is considered heretical to say she was hoaxed, or to say that Derek Freeman proved she was hoaxed.  In fact, most of the anthropologists seem to ostracize anyone who suggests she was hoaxed.

For those following this at home, without a score card, who have no idea who Margaret Meade is or why they should give a hang: Margaret Meade went to Samoa in the twenties, to study whether in a more sexually free society (note the assumption) adolescence was easier and less neurotic.  The book she published, upon return, was the seminal work of cultural anthropology.  It also – because she claimed that Samoans lived in a free-love paradise, where neither incest nor adultery, nor ANYTHING was considered taboo and that they were far less neurotic than us – launched most of the totally insane theories about sex of the sixties and seventies.  Including the strange idea that if humans just slept with everyone who asked, they’d be happier, less aggressive and less neurotic.

Years later, Derek Freeman went to Samoa hoping to corroborate Margaret Mead’s study.  Instead, he found one of the most sexually regulated (repressed, if you will, but that word smacks of Freudianism) societies on Earth and convincing evidence that Margaret Mead was hoaxed.

When he presented that evidence, he found himself outcast, because Margaret Mead was a grand damme of the left, the mother of feminist sexual liberation and of the free love movement.  (No, really.  There’s no other reason for the way people reacted to him.)

To be fair I don’t think it what happened with mead was an hoax, as such.  Oh, sure, I’m fairly sure those girls, her informants, lied to her.  At least a bit.  And exaggerated.  And probably tried to figure out how to gross her out.  The reason I assume this is that my friends and I – far more sophisticated (at least in theory) than the Samoan girls, and far more aware than they of what our studies would be used for – told the most outrageous lies to anthropologists who interviewed us in middle and high school.  In middle school, in particular, when sex was both icky and funny.  And in high school, at one point a study from my class in a strict all-girls’ school revealed that 90% of the girls were not virgins and had lost their virginity to a bottle.  Guys, this was an academic magnet school.  These were my friends.  I was one of them.  We were, I’d guess 90% virginal with maybe 5% involved in various kinds of lesbianism (Some of it, at least, deprivation lesbianism–  periodically they busted a couple.  The most inventive ones had a love nest under some bushes in the garden.  One of them was the first of us to get married – yes, to a guy – because she was knocked up.  She had twins.  Never mind.)  The others fell into various situations, including the ones who actually had boyfriends/were engaged and might be physically involved with these guys.

So, I’m sure these girls – who were, after all, adolescent girls told this strange woman asking about embarrassing subjects the most outrageous lies, part to see how far she’d swallow them and part to see if she’d go away.

But there is no way – none – they could have hoaxed her so far as for her to believe she’d found the perfect free love (where even incest wasn’t taboo!) society, if she didn’t want to believe it.  In fact the “I wanna believe” was the main component of it.

I know, I know, people get very weird and the anthropologists assure us that in the years between her study and Derek Freeman’s, which debunked her study, the island had changed that much, and become “that much more repressive.”

I’m sorry, that dog won’t hunt.

Some of the things Derek Freeman found out were that the rape statistics from that time were not what Margaret Meade claimed.  That’s not a matter of “the culture changed.”

The article I found that tries to balance it all, claims that what changed was not the observed – Samoan culture – but the observers.  When Margaret Meade went out, supposedly (I’d roll my eyes, but I think they rolled under the desk) America was repressed and puritanical, while when Derek Freeman studied them western culture had been changed by free love to such an extent that he thought them repressed compared to us.

I’m sorry.  That dog really won’t hunt.  I think he’s dead.

What THAT article claims is that, despite the supposed worshiping of “virginity” girls used sex to lure men to marriage; despite the ideal of a big church wedding, most marriages happened by elopement, after sleeping together.  What he’s saying, in fact, is that these rules were honored more in the breach than in fact.

In other words, they were, in fact, exactly like every other human society in the world, where real humans always fall short of the ideal morals and precepts.

None of which explains the “they don’t have any rules and do everything that moves and that’s why no one is neurotic” that Margaret Mead came home with.

I don’t think it was so much of an hoax as the eye of the beholder.

Which would have been okay, if not for the fact that for whatever reason (WWI, WWII, loss of cultural confidence, cultural betrayal, and the ever pervasive myth of the noble savage) the western world decided to take this truly shaky study and make it into a model for how to run the western world’s sex life.  (Would someone find my eyes?  I think they rolled under the desk.)

This myth of the happy go lucky Samoans who sleep with everything tied in with the ideas of the noble savage, the Marxist idea that wanting to own things was somehow wrong and a sign of neurosis, the confusion between marriage and ownership, the Freudian idea that not being repressed at all – no frustrations! – would make everyone an angel and the American can do idea (“We can change everything.  We can make it better.”)

The end result was the free love movement of the sixties, the “if it feels good do it” still being pushed at us, and the idea that to abstain somehow makes you “sick.”

Yes, before you ask, a lot of this ethos permeated Heinlein’s work, because – here we go again – Heinlein was a man of his time, and read the scientific papers, and this was science with a capital S.

So… women were empowered/encouraged to have sex with no commitment.  So were men.  Women are still being pushed into this.  Now, with men everything is aggression and the can’t look wrong at a woman without being accused of assault.

How did it work out?  Are we in a wonderful, liberated future with no repression and no neurosis?

Brother.  It worked out exactly as it would have worked out for the Samoans if they’d really lived that way.

Human beings crave connection and structure.  Yes, if the structure is too demanding/unattainable, they will betray it in fact, but serve it in word.

As for neurosis…  We now have feminists so exquisitely “liberated” they think it’s unnatural to have sex with men, period.  And women on college campuses are threatened by a realistic statue of a man in his underwear.

No neurosis at all, right?

The really funny thing is that Heinlein based the sexual aspects of his later novels on that research and based his societies on those ideas, but the same feminists who will defend Mead to the death will scream that he has “too much sex” in his novels and that he was “a dirty old man.”

(Ah, there are my eyes.  Does anyone have a cup I can use to conveniently roll them?)  You’d think it’s almost like all they have against Heinlein is that he never catered to their other political delusions, still believed in women having kids, and, oh, yeah, that he had a penis.  Particularly that.

The other funny thing is that they’re still defending Mead, even though we’ve seen through the last… seventy? Years of experimentation with an approximation to Meade’s “no inibitions” ideal that it just doesn’t work as advertised – what it produces is women who feel used, (Credit Heinlein with that insight “When women insist on absolute equality, they end up with the dirty end of the stick.”) men who never engage in the “father/husband” mode, and kids who are left to grow up alone and abandoned, or as wards of the state.  What we’ve found is that more and more women are asking the state to hurt men for them and treating the state as a sugar daddy.  What we’ve found is that there ain’t no pot of gold at the end of that there rainbow.

And yet, they still defend her “conclusions.”  You see, the reason paradise failed to happen is capitalism.  Oh, yeah, and patriarchy.  And patriarchal capitalism.  And capitalist patriarchy.  Never mind the fact that we’re fairly well informed of our history some 3000 years, with decent extrapolation for the rest; that capitalism has existed in any form for maybe 400 years, and that the world has not gotten worse or less tolerant, and certainly not poorer in that time.

Worse – and this is mind boggling – we’re still going to primitive tribes/isolated populations, in out of the way places, in search of our “natural” way of being.

Guys, the natural way for our ancestors to be was starved, disease infested and short-lived.  Also, if they like other simians lived in bands, oppressed by unbelievable tyranny of those in charge of the band.  No, seriously.  Your ancestors have spent the last however many millennia getting away from the “natural way to be” – why would you want to go back?

The studies aren’t always pushing a leftist point of view.  This doesn’t make them ANY MORE SANE or safe to take at face value.

I looked for and couldn’t find the article on this study that went to some primitive tribe and came back claiming they had no homosexuals.  None at all.  They didn’t even know they existed.  And every married couple in the tribe had sex like ten times a night, and yep, there is no neurosis and no one—

Guys!  Seriously.  There are also no homosexuals in Iran, according to Themadjihad.  And if you didn’t have evidence otherwise, through the people who manage to sneak out articles and pictures, some anthropologist would probably believe him.

There is homosexuality in every higher mammal, most of it dominance behavior, but a lot of it… uh… not.

Throughout history, homosexuals have been condemned to various forms of unpleasant death, when discovered, and yet, there were still homosexuals, as there are still homosexuals in Russia and Islamic countries, where it is very dangerous to be gay.

Whether you think it should/could be eliminated or not, it’s fairly clear that simply “we have sex with our wives multiple times a night” is NOT a cure for it.  (It is also obvious that in any civilized nation there isn’t enough energy to have sex multiple times a night EVERY night.  Hey, look, I’d love to.  I’m sure you’d love to also but there are jobs to go to in the morning, and kids who won’t go to sleep till midnight, and…)

There are two levels of craziness here.

A)    Assuming that someone in another culture, particularly a tribal culture, suspicious of outsiders, is going to tell you the truth about a function that in every human society – particularly tribal and isolated ones – is edged around with taboos and prohibitions.

B)    Taking whatever you manage to find out and viewing it as a manual to improve life in the most successful society that humans have ever formed on this planet.

This is exactly like the successful CEO going out and asking the guy on the corner how to be happy.  There have been several stories and movies on this theme, and most of them induce eye rolling to the extreme.  Because in real life we all know how this would go.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t practice cultural anthropology.  Of course, there is something to be said for knowing how other humans live.  But clearly not only must we make the thing more like a science – making sure we remove as much as possible the wishful thinking of the researcher – we also must not go about “applying” this knowledge before it has been confirmed several times, by several studies.

To me these announcements of the complete breakthrough difference of the sexual mores of “isolated” or “tribal” human populations strike me as incredibly racist. To believe there is a human population on Earth that practices PERFECT free love, with no jealousy and no consequences, you have to believe they’re a different species, free of all normal human impulses.  The same thing btw is necessary to believe there is a human population on Earth completely free of homosexuality.  (Homosexual behavior rises with the decrease of a species dimorphic difference.  I.e. the more the sexes look like each other, the more homosexual sex.  And in animal term, we humans are almost as alike as penguins.  Maybe more.)

Yes, humans have tried various forms of mating, with more or less success: from patriarchies to matriarchies, from one-on-one pairing to harems.  (To celibacy, but those didn’t last.)  I understand there are successful group and line marriages among science fiction fans (an odd group to begin with.)  Some of these even work pretty well for that population, at that time.

Would they work for the rest of the world, all the time?  What? Have humans stopped being humans?  Will conditions and ways of living never change? Will the best strategy today be the best strategy forever?

There is no recorded case – ever – of a human group exactly following the rules no matter how strict or how lax.

There is no recorded case — ever — in human history where humans didn’t lie about how much/little sex they’re having, or what kind, for that matter.

And there is no recorded society in history that was perfectly happy and free of neurosis.

To pursue this sort of state by imitating small, tribal societies – or worse, by imitating what we believe they are – is not just insane.  It’s completely insane.

How about we accept we’re humans?  Sex is a great thing, but it is both more and less than what we have tried to make it in the last sixty/seventy years.  It is far more than the appetites we share with dogs – sex in most cases (at least the best sex) comes with emotional attachment and – for permanence – with mutual obligations.  It is also no universal panacea, no cure-all and CERTAINLY no bridge to an earthly paradise.

Freud is dead.  So is Margaret Mead.  The Samoans were never completely happy.  Neither are we.

Perhaps we can accept that we’re humans and that one solution fits all only works in the cemetery, and event here only with adjustments.

Perhaps we are now grown up enough to put our pants back on, or at least to not ask the homeless guy if we should put them on or pull them off?

Or we could send another emissary to modern-day primitives and ask THEM the secret of happiness.

Unfortunately, I know what we’re likely to do.