Look, the problem is I still haven’t had time to read back on what I have, and I’m afraid of getting mired in hopeless contradictions.  I was supposed to read tomorrow, but we had a household emergency (literally, house related.  Yes, we’re all all right.  It was just one of those “Oh, Lord, call the repairman then wait three hours for him to be done” — unable to leave kitchen, because he might need me — “then deal with aftermath cleaning.

Today I MUST clean (not all the aftermath got clean because it was late (and dark) by the time repairman was done.

It might not seem like it, but this year has been a slow upswing, though it’s also been a “dealing with the problems left over.”

I’ll try to post chapter tomorrow.  I’m not promising, but I’ll try.

I’m sorry — it’s just been argh around here.

Oh, yeah, if you need a minimum daily dose of Hoyt, Older Son is holding forth on Mad Genius Club.  And I have an interview up at Amazing Stories.

I’m so tired – so awfully, comprehensively tired – of people telling me that they would like to do this or that, but they “don’t have the talent.”

You know, I think the fault of this is of the stories we tell ourselves, right?  In movies, in stories, in all sorts of stories we tell, there is some sort of magical gift people have.

I mean, you know, Dumbo can fly, and the hidden prince can king it from the moment that he kills the villain or climbs on the throne or whatever.  And that fricken prince can pull the sword out of the stone, and every movie and book – every single one, plus five – that deals with the creative professions, it all hinges on the myth of talent.

Supposedly you’re born knowing how to do whatever you’re supposed to do, or at least being really, really good at it the first time you try it.  And then all you need is to be discovered.

If only!  Oh, if ONLY!

I’ve gotten to the point that whenever a novelist-actor-dancer-composer is discovered in a movie, and he asks something like “do I have any talent, doc?  Can I make it?”  And the other guy says the equivalent of “you got the goods.  You’re amazing,” I want to reach in, through the screen, grab both their heads and bonk them together until they stop.

The other part contributing to this, of course, is that creative work of any kind is often internal or weird.  I mean, you don’t see us, as you see sports stars – who, now I think about it also suffer from the myth of talent – bat the same ball over and over, slowly correcting our standing and our aim, until we get it.  No, you see us sitting in front of the computer, typing, and you don’t know that before we sat down to finish that story, we spent three days – while scrubbing toilets, ironing, doing the cat boxes and even reading – trying to figure out how to avoid that huge mess we know we made in our last novel, that THING that other people don’t see, but we know kept it merely good and not great.

And then when we manage it, it looks effortless and you go, “Oh, wow.  You’re just doing this stuff effortlessly.”

How I wish.  Some days it feels like I’m typing with what remains of my strength and pulling vivid scenes out of an energy I don’t have.

The other part, other than the stories we tell ourselves, is that I think people look – from outside – like they’re just like.  As Heinlein put it, “Luck is that with which the mediocre explain the work of genius.”  I’m not sure I believe in genius, either, but it’s definitely the way to explain away the often insane work that went into a “lucky” strike.

Back in 2003 when Dan had lost his job (as many did in the tech bust) and I was unemployed following the crash of the Shakespeare fantasies, we went to dinner with an old friend.  Dan used to work for him.  He knows us pretty well, and even back then had known us for more than ten years.

We were talking to him about how worried we were, with a mortgage, two young kids, and no prospects of a job on the horizon, since the entire field was in crisis, and he said “Oh, I don’t worry about you.  I worry about so and so and so and so, and myself even, before I worry about you.  You two are talented and lucky.  You’ll fall on your feet.”

Are we lucky?  I don’t know.  I know over the next year I wrote seventeen proposals and enough short stories to make five thousand dollars in short stories (at an average of three hundred a story.)

Are we talented?  I don’t think so.

Look, I’ll admit I had a certain verbal facility in Portuguese.  I’m told I could talk in sentences before I could walk.  Granted this would be far more impressive if I could walk before two and a half.  (I was really good at crawling.  My theory is that my issue was ear infections.  I still suffer from them as if I were a toddler.) I could read by the time I entered elementary.  I loved those days when the teacher said “Today we’re going to write an essay.” And I was writing my own “novels” (around 15k words) in the infamous pink notebooks, a chapter at a time during class, and passing them around my form for reading at break.  (You’re part of a form, you stay in a classroom, the teachers come to you.)

Part of this, though, might have very little to do with talent, and more to do with the fact that dad read all the time, and my brother read all the time, and my (girl) cousin read all the time.  Reading all the time was expected, so I did it, and then it seemed logical to try to write, right?  And I knew a little about it from having read so much (not a lot.  Those stories sucked.  Think lowest of fanfic, even though it wasn’t.  Well, unless it was Heinlein fanfic.  Um… now I think about it, maybe I haven’t grown all that much.)

The one gift I had was the least useful to the professional story teller.  I had a massive and varied vocabulary – but that might not be so much an inborn thing, as the fact that the entire family talked like that.

But then I came to the states.  You know the instinctive feeling you have for allusion, connotation and denotation?  Gone.  I was good at English, mind.  I spoke grammatical, correct English.  What I couldn’t was “feel” the language.  The first three years I kept telling Dan I was “blind”.   I.e. I didn’t know what words would evoke what feeling.

But I still wanted to be a writer.  So I had to immerse myself in American English, in its permutations and regional variations.  I read a lot, and I read everything, including but not limited to craft magazines, true confessions and tabloids.  I also listened to a lot of television.  Listened?  Well, I’m not visual.  And mostly I had the TV on for company while I cleaned house or whatever.  (I came from a loud and boisterous family.  Our little two-bedroom apartment in a complex that was empty during the day save for me and a couple of moms with kids, might as well have been on the dark side of the moon.  It felt lonely.  So I kept the TV on.  Mostly Disney because it was less likely to have snarls or explosions which would startle me while I was cooking dinner.  My inlaws still think I should write for children because they assumed I was really interested in children programing [rolls eyes.])

During those first five years or so, it wasn’t so much what I wrote (I think a novel and a short story) it was the preparation I made.  First, it was the reading, and the talking – with my husband, with friends – and a lot of listening.

The other part of it was my teaching myself touch typing and improving my speed so that I didn’t have time to think of every word I wrote, as I pursued story.

Talent?

I don’t think.  I still have those first stories somewhere.  Remember I was in my twenties.  They would read okay for a ten year old.

And I got rejections.  And I kept trying.  For years.  For many years, I was the writer of no future.  I topped 100 rejections by March every year.

And then things changed.  I placed second in a regional contest.  Mind you, that piece was grossly flawed, but placing second was an incentive to keep going.

And then came another win and… eventually my first acceptance, in 92, 8 years after I’d started trying to write seriously.  And then three more acceptances for that story before it saw the light of day (it killed magazines and publishers.)  I could sell nothing else, though.  That story was the only one that was a fully functional story and it took me another three years before I wrote another one, and could reproduce the effect at least half the time.

And then I sold a novel.  And another—

And sometimes I feel that I’m only now starting to have a glimpse into making my novels work.  Which is why I fight so much with them.

My husband and kids, who know me and my writing better than anyone else, agree with me.  They say I’m maybe halfway to wherever I’m going – if that far.

Climbing hand over hand.  On raw and bloody fingertips.

I was talking to a friend the other day and I said I must be the world’s least talented writer.  Given my education and the advantages offered me, after 28 years or so of practicing my craft I’m only now starting to get a glimpse of what I can do with it.

I’m either completely untalented or utterly stupid.  And yet – no, I’m not fishing for compliments.  It is what it is – I can write decently.  And I have made a career of it, even with my apprentice pieces.

So, clearly, it’s not talent that’s needed.

And I have to say everyone else I know who has made it in an artistic field might have talent – how in heck do you judge someone else’s natural gift without being them? – but even if they do, it’s not half as important as wanting to succeed and as sheer, raw, blunt stubbornness.

Years ago when hearing Connie Willis speak she said that in the dark of night, in the solitude of our own hearts, we know exactly how good or bad we are.

Maybe.  Right then, in the dark of night, in the solitude of my own heart, I knew I was an untalented hack.  But I determined to learn through raw effort what perhaps came easier to other people.  Because if it could be learned, I could do it.  And craft will substitute for talent any time and twice on Sunday – with the advantage that it’s controllable.  You can call craft to you at will, once you have learned it.

Is there talent?  For anyone?

I don’t know.  There are people that seem obviously, blindingly talented to me right off the gate.  I’ve mentored people who turn in a first book that makes me green with envy at their “talent.”  But is it?  Almost every one of these people have read for most of their lives and are smart and have a feeling for both language and people.

And there are people like my kids.  Inherited talent?  Or growing up in a household where we’d pause movies to discuss plots?  Is it like my “talent” for verbal expression in Portuguese simply the result of being immersed in this house?

I don’t know.  And I don’t care.  Maybe I even have “talent” whatever it is.  Maybe it’s a spark buried deep in you that only comes to life with work, craft and desire to get better.  In which case, how would you know it was there?

What I know is that it doesn’t matter.  If there’s something you want to do, you can do it (We’re assuming you’re not crazy enough to want to be an Olympic runner when you were born with no legs – though even there, there are workarounds these days.)  If you want it hard enough.  If you’re willing to work for it.  If you are too stupid to take no for an answer, and smart enough to know what you don’t know and to correct what you’re doing wrong.

Talent?

Maybe.  But never mind that.  Here, on the cliff face, climbing by the force of my torn fingernails, it’s the effort and the wanting that count for more.

 

I am perhaps not alone at least among people with a depressive tendency, in finding myself in certain situations (not as much now, frankly, but a lot when I was a kid) thinking I am useless and the world would be better off without me.

This was exacerbated, when I got pneumonia, at 33 – I was then a relatively young, unpublished (though working really hard at writing) mother of two, one just five years old, the other just past one – and the doctors told me this over and over in more or less explicit terms.

To make things clear, they wanted to do a biopsy (I had atypical intercellular pneumonia, but it was pneumonia and it reacted well to IV antibiotics the first two days, but then the doctors got fascinated with the fact that it was unusual.  I don’t honestly know if this was made worse by my having an accent) not to euthanize me.  However, as weakened as I was, my sister in law in Portugal (who is a medical doctor and whom my husband was speaking to on the phone sometimes three times a day) thought there was a good chance even a biopsy would kill me.  And the doctors weren’t reinstating the antibiotic, even though I’d reacted well to it the first two days.  Instead, as I refused the biopsy, they tried to convince me by pointing out even if I died it would be better for my family.  After all, what was I doing for them?  I didn’t even make any money, and my husband was missing days of work to be with me in the hospital.

When they convinced me to sign the authorization, while I was groggy from a laparoscopy (I think.  Whatever it is when they put a tube down your throat) which had caused a heart episode (I told them that if I was tachycardic it would be a really stupid idea give me atropine, but they told me not to worry my pretty head about it), my husband came back in time to revoke it and tell them he would sue them if they carried it on under the circumstances.  And then he told me to get up and get dressed, we were going to the other hospital in town, where they might give me the antibiotic and stop the nonsense.

This is where the fact that, by choice, I promised to obey him in my wedding vows comes in. (I did this because we’re both very hard headed and every association needs an ultimate boss.  Since we were moving to his country, where he knew the rules better, he was better suited to be the ultimate boss.  Oh, and you should have heard the hush that fell on the wedding guests when they heard me promise that.)  I thought he was out of his mind, and I was hooked to oxygen and IV feeding, and the last thing I thought I could do was get up.  But I’d promised to obey my husband, and he was giving me a direct order, for the first (and last, he knows better than to abuse it) time.  So I sat up, removed the stuff I was attached to, got up and went towards the locker with my clothes.  At which point the doctor screamed “Stop, we’ll give her antibiotics.”

They did, and I walked out of there under my own power a week later and was fully recovered save for exhaustion about a month later.  (I want to emphasize here that Dan wasn’t making these decisions on his own, but he was faxing my process, page by page to my sister in law who is a respected pathologist and also that because I was being treated by a team of six where no one was in charge, the mix up in doctor’s orders had already got me to stop breathing twice.)

I’m relating this not to illustrate how awful my care was at the time (it was pretty bad) but to illustrate that third parties, from the outside, bring their own biases to what other people are worth.

The bias might be “earning power” which seemed to be big with those doctors, as illustrated by the fact that they kept telling me I was doing nothing for my family.  (I still don’t understand how their families ran, but I presume they had nannies or something?  When I first came in and I told them I’d mostly been lying down for the last week – I was very ill, and we’d got a babysitter/friend to help – they did an ultrasound of my legs, because they were convinced my sedentary lifestyle had led to a blod clot in my lungs.  Again, I had a five and a one year old, with the one year old just starting to walk.  And I had a 2k square foot home that I cleaned myself (I still clean my home myself.)  And I did all the cooking and yard care, and most of the shopping for the family.  How they imagined that I had been lying down long enough and immobile enough to develop a blood clot is beyond me.)  But the other part of it was also “you’ll never be able to do anything for them.  You’re just a housewife.”

This was a value judgment.  And back then, when I was really ill, it was a terrible judgment, that made me feel that I shouldn’t be alive, and that I was a millstone around my family’s necks.

My husband told me it was nonsense, but of course I couldn’t believe it.

This echoes all the times in adolescence when I thought I was useless.

Now, some of this feeling of “born owing something” seems to be a brokenness inherent in everyone who achieves something.  Why, yes, we have something to prove.

Maybe if you could cure us completely of it, we would not ever achieve anything.  It was after that episode in the hospital that I started working hard enough to sell and eventually to make a modest living from it.

But at the same time, there are two caveats, one particularly important right now in the time of Obamacare when doctors and indifferent bureaucrats might decide you’re not worth the trouble of keeping alive: first, you have inherent value, and you should always advocate for yourself and your right to treatment and to stay alive; second, they don’t have a right to think you’re worthless – and you are worth far more than your economic contributions.

Looking back, if I’d died then, my younger son would probably have dropped out of sixth grade and left school – with who knows what future.  My older son would probably be different too.  And Dan would have been much lonelier not to mention harassed with the two boys to raise.  But also, I would never have been published.  Perhaps I flatter myself that my stories have helped or at least amused some of you.  If I’d died then, Athena would never have been written, or Kyrie, or Luce.  I like to believe it’s good I lived to write them.

The same applies to my depressive episodes in adolescence.  If I’d died then – and I often wanted to – I’d never have met Dan or got to have my boys.  I’d never have come to America.  I’d never have known my friends or read all the books I’ve read since.  I’d have missed the pleasurable moments in the last thirty some years – and I’d have missed what I’ve done that other people enjoyed since.

Since Dan and I are quite happily married – thank you – I think his life would have been sadder if I’d died at twelve or fifteen.

But even if I’d done nothing but exist, the very fact of existing makes an impact in the world, and if I don’t go out of my way to be nasty, (I try not to) that impact is mostly positive.

You are worth it.  You deserve to be alive.

Look, I’m not going to talk of lilies in the field who don’t toil – I’m not that good at flowers – but Dan and I have had – so far – ten cats.

I don’t know what use cats are. They are not particularly productive from an economic point of view.  (What they are productive of explains my obsession with litter boxes.)  But they are loveable, and we have loved them.  Just by being themselves, with their clown antics and their purring and the occasional cuddle on a cold night, they were worth more than the price of their food, and the occasional disasters caused by claws and marking.

You are worth at least as much as a cat, and perhaps more.  Even if you feel all you are is a burden on others, that’s unlikely to be true.  It takes a very barren mind and heart to be nothing but a burden.  Even if all you can give is a smile now and then, that might be the smile someone else needs to keep going.  And sometimes, even just the fact that you need help, is enough to give structure and meaning to someone else’s life.  We all know people who were caretakers for other people and who became better for it.

You are not useless.  You are never valueless.

The problem with our ever-more top-down and bureaucracy-controlled world is that people make decisions for/about other people’s lives based on economic value or other external markers.

But no measure can truly capture the value of a life (even a cat life.)  And if you’re alive and thinking and capable of even smiling, you are not valueless.  And you should never believe anyone who tells you that you are.

Tell the bureaucrats to take a hike.  And tell the internal voices telling you that you’re valueless to take a hike too.

And you, keep going with what you’re supposed to do.  You don’t know how wonderful things might be in the future – or what you might accomplish that you can’t even dream of.

(I’m trying to be good and not do new posts every day.  This one is perhaps not very… uh… significant, but it is (I think) funny.)

It started innocently. At the time we were living in the small mountain town of Manitou Springs. There were the two of us, (of course) our two sons and four cats. So the logical thing for my younger son to ask for, for his fourth birthday, was… two hamsters.

In a sign our lunacy was too far gone, we then named them Butterscotch and Fudge. And then – such our folly – we put them in an aquarium on the back porch. An aquarium covered only by fine mesh net.

Oh, yeah, one more thing – these hamsters were both female.

The cats left the hamsters curiously unmolested, but the hamsters clearly felt that they lived under hostile conditions.

In the dark of night, they would screech in their little aquarium like tribbles in heat. And in the summer – such our folly – we left the back-porch windows open. So their call went out to the world at large and – I only surmise this, but it’s almost certain – all over the rodent world little signs sprang up written in whatever it is rodents write in saying “Free the Aquarium Two.” And “No Mercy For the Captors.” Rodent students organized protests and there would have been rodent demonstrations at our door step save for the fact that at least one of our cats was the great calico huntress.

Squashed, ignored, desperate, digested the surviving neighboring rodents resorted to extreme measures.

His name was Jean Pierre and he was born in the yard of a neighborhood French family, from which he learned protest songs, a disdain for the establishment, and a tendency to smoke really stinky cigarettes.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

It started as so many things did with Pete, our oldest cat. You name a cat Petronius the Arbiter, you get what’s coming to you. In this case, it probably wasn’t so much his fault. Pete was getting old. He was fifteen or so, and he caught a cold. As those of you in multiple cat households know, you really can’t have them all together when they are sick. So we locked Pete in the powder room in the attic where we tempted his fading appetite with truly stinky tuna.

Now, to get the action in this story, a little description of the locale must intrude. Manitou Springs looks like a village in an early twentieth century comic, with buildings perched at erratic intervals on the mountain side. Our house was near the top of one of the hills. Our garden was seventeen steps up from the street. The house itself was three floors high and my office was on the third floor. The only doors into the house were on the bottom floor, and we only used the front one, because the back porch one stuck. One of my boys had a door to a second floor porch, but to get to his room you had to walk through his brother’s room AND a bathroom.

The third floor itself, up a narrow staircase, consisted of small powder room, on the left (with a door.) Dan’s office, on the right, without a door (just a railing dividing it from the top of the stairs. And then my office, through the door straight ahead and taking up the entire front of the house. (Not as luxurious as that sounds, since most of it had sloping ceilings. It might explain something about my early writing, that I continuously walked into the side of the ceiling. HARD. To the point of giving myself near-concussion.

On that day, I was running up into my office, to get mail to take out, when I heard the oddest of sounds coming from behind the door of the powder room. It sounded like… an animal choking. I panicked. Pete was getting to be and a little odd, and I thought he was choking. I screamed for my husband, whose cat Pete was, because if Pete was having seizures, he was more likely to be calm with Dan dealing with him.

As Dan came running up the stairs, I threw the door open and…

There was a small, mad-looking squirrel cornered by Pete and making the tcha-tcha-tcha sounds which I believe are French squirrel for “you’ll never take me alive, nom d’un nom.”

So… Dan and I stood stunned in the doorway (not the least of which because a rodent had survived for minutes in a room with Pete.) We stared a moment too long. The squirrel ran between our legs and … into my office, where he holed up behind the printer, singing the Marseillese in squirrel. “Allons squirrels de la patrie” – or, in other words,(Squirrel languages being less differentiated) tcha, tcha, tcha, tcha.

After running in circles a while, we closed the door on Pete, got the phone, leafed madly through the yellow pages (yes, it was that long ago) and called Animal Control.

Most of them just hung up on us. They knew Manitou had a problem with rodents. Though they seemed to think the problem was endemic plague. And then a bright boy told us “Just leave the front door open and a path to the front door, and he’ll go straight out of it.” Now, this would make perfect sense if the path to the front door weren’t: Down the stairs (ignoring Dan’s office, which we couldn’t block) down a zigzagging corridor. Down another set of stairs (with railings we couldn’t block) past the entrance to the library (no door) and THEN out the door. But we were desperate. And Dan had a window in his office. We thought… Block the stairs. Open the window in Dan’s office. Take screen out. Get out of the way.

We didn’t of course realize that this was a special squirrel.

At first it seemed like everything would work. Spying his way clear, the squirrel bolted out of my office and to… Dan’s desk. Where he took advantage of a tiny hole in the back and holed up in a drawer saying tcha tcha tcha * (*translation “I am your worst nightmare, you oppressors of innocent rodents.”)

We called animal control again. One of them took pity on us and told us he wouldn’t handle it, but since the squirrel had probably got in through a hole in the roof, anyway, how about we call his friend who replaces missing roof tiles and has been known to capture the occasional wild animal. At that point, frankly, we’d have called Beelzebub and Sons, Animal Control and Soul Collection. There was something about a possibly rabid squirrel in a house with kids and cats that made our blood run cold. That the squirrel seemed to be singing protest songs from inside our desk file drawer just made it even scarier. For all we knew he was collecting our account numbers to pass to the squirrel resistance.

So we called the roof repairman, who was an almost preternaturally laid back man. We told him that the squirrel was holed up in the file drawer, that he’d been singing protest songs and that we were fairly sure we caught a faint wiff of galoises. He didn’t even look like we should be committed. He didn’t even ask us if the squirrel was wearing a beret. Instead, he said, “We’ll get him out,” in the tone of a man who has encountered the Rodent Liberation Front before.

For his first attempt, he opened the drawer a little, holding a trap at the ready. He said this often worked. But Jean-Pierre wasn’t JUST any squirrel. Instead of falling for the trap of the oppressor, he holed up further in the drawer, a little mad eye (not that squirrels have any other kind of eye) peeking over “accounts receivable” and his defiant tcha tcha tcha echoing throughout the house.

The unflappable rodent-controller sighed and said “Well, this is more risky, but I have some sleeping gas. I’ll just pump it into the drawer. He’ll be out like a light in no time.”

So he started pumping gas into the drawer. But Jean-Pierre had clearly trained for this eventuality by snorting a little bit of sleeping gas every day.

Once the normal dosage. Tcha, tcha, tcha!

Twice the normal dosage. Tcha, Tcha, tcha!

Three times the normal dosage. I laugh in the face of your puny sleeping gas. For years, I trained with lidocaine powder sleeping gas!

At that point the would-be captor opened the drawer just a little. Taking advantage of this, Jean-Pierre ran out through the opening and into the tinier opening of the drawer above it. Where he holed up saying “Never go up against a squirrel when desks are on the line!”

By now the unflappable man was thoroughly flapped. “I’ve never seen a squirrel do this before,” he said. “It’s like he’s a commando squirrel or something.”

To which Jean-Pierre replied Tcha Tcha Tcha (squirrel for “make my day.”)_

“I’m going to try something I’ve never tried before. I’m afraid of hurting him, but if I give him more gas, I’ll kill him.”

We said okay and fine. Without saying a word – because by then he knew Jean-Pierre understood human English – the man made a little lasso. Then he quickly opened the drawer with one hand, while lassoing Jean-Pierre with the other.

To everyone’s surprise – but PARTICULARLY Jean-Pierre’s – it worked. And, faster than Jean Pierre could formulate curses profane enough, the rodent-catcher threw him a little carrier and shut the door on him.

Our kids, of course, being ours and therefore of dubious sanity, wanted to see the squirrel before the man repatriated him in another neighborhood.

I’ll never forget the squirrel standing inside the cage, looking at us in unquenchable fury. I swear he was holding up his little squirrel fist and singing We shall overcome. Za, Rodentia! (Tcha, tcha, tcha.)

The punch line to this is that a couple of years later, we moved to the neighborhood to which Jean-Pierre, or, as the kids call him, Super Squirrel, had been relocated.

The very first night, I hear our less-than-bright cat, Euclid, make the sort of meowing sounds that mean that he’s scared of something. I run downstairs. Euclid is staring out the dining room window. And there – in the dark of night (since when are squirrels nocturnal?) is an elderly and bedraggled squirrel, dancing along the fence, taunting our cat, singing tcha, tcha, tcha.*

*Allons Squirrels de la patrie……

*As part of the Sarah trying to stop the killing of Sarah through overwriting (particularly when it doesn’t begin to be the stuff I get paid for) I invited four friends to blog once a month on Monday.  You’ve met Dave Pascoe (aka Kilteddave) and Cedar Sanderson, and now you should meet Amanda Green.  Amanda periodically lets me haunt her sofa while I finish a book, and I love her mom and her dog (the dog REALLY is neurotic.  Also, adorable.)  The cat I have issues with because she doesn’t like me.  Which is sad, since her name is Athena.  I attest to the haunted table and lamp but I’m okay as long as nothing flies at my head as in the house three houses ago.  And yep, my husband still thinks this “Amanda Green” thing is a complex ruse whose point he doesn’t get.  This despite meeting her. — Oh, btw, if you’re not one of the Raiding party this doesn’t mean you’re not welcome to do a guest blog for me now and then.  I figure 10k of non fiction a week — between here and PJM — is enough!*

When Sarah asked me to do an introductory post, my first thought was “Huh?”. Then it was “Crap.” There are few things I hate doing more than writing about myself. Part of the reason is because I don’t think my life is all that interesting. After all, I don’t skydive – why jump out of a perfectly normal airplane if you don’t have to? – nor do I bungie jump – again, why jump off of something very high held with nothing but a large rubber band to keep me from plunging into the ground? I never wanted to be Wylie Coyote.

So who am I?

If you look at the author bio at the end of my books, here’s what you’ll see:

I’m older than 20 and younger than death and that’s all you’ll get from me about my age. After all, it’s not polite to ask a woman how old she is. I’m a mother, a daughter and was a wife. I’ve spent most of my life in the South and love to travel. The only problem with that is my dog always thinks I’ve abandoned him when I do and it takes weeks to reassure the poor thing and my cat resents the fact I came back before she could figure out a way to kill the dog and hide the body. My house is haunted — it is, really. I swear it. What else explains the table that plays music and the light that comes on by itself? — but it’s mine and I love it. Okay, I’m a little strange. But that makes life interesting.

All of that is true, for any given value of true. I am older than 20 and have not yet reached death (and I hope it is a very long time before I do). The bit about it not being polite to ask a woman her age is something I grew up with. I might have grown up in Texas, but a lot of the “Southern” sayings were a part of my upbringing. Just like we never talked politics or religion at the table. Religion because the immediate family pretty much agreed about it – at least until I was old enough to start asking questions our priest didn’t want to answer. Politics was something else. Until I was old enough to vote, my parents always cancelled each other out on Election Day.

I’ve been lucky enough to travel much of the world, including getting to see Communism at its heyday in Soviet Russia. I’ve seen the resentment my parents’ generation still feels in the country formerly known as Czechoslovakia because Churchill and Roosevelt agreed to let Comrade Josef “liberate” the country instead of the rest of the Allies. I’ve been blessed to be able to talk with survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto, both here in the U.S. and overseas. What I’ve learned is that our country might not be the perfect place to live, but it is damned better than most everywhere else in the world. That’s why I’m willing to fight for what it stands for and why, at times, you’ll see me blogging about what the idiots in Washington have done and why we need to take the Capital and the country back from the politicians.

Beyond all that, I’m a writer. Growing up, I was always telling myself stories. The first time I ever showed anyone anything I’d written was in the 7^th grade. Mrs. Winslow, my English teacher, basically caught me writing what I’d later learn is fanfic. Instead of embarrassing me by making a big deal out of it, she simply kept walking down the aisle of desks and didn’t say anything until after class. Then she asked if she could read what I’d written. Not about to tell a teacher “no”, I handed over my notebook and then went looking for a hole to bury myself in. Imagine my surprise when she came back a few days later and encouraged me to continue writing.

It was around that time I found out that my great-grandfather edited a newspaper in Canon City, CO. My Great-uncle Jack was the youngest linotype operator in the country at one time. He continued in the newspaper business after the family moved to Kansas. His brother, Herb, wrote plays. As for the rest of the family, well, Mom and I have always laughed about how we come from a family of liars and prevaricators.

In other words, a family that loves to tell a good story.

So I wrote.

And put it in desk drawers and under my bed and in the back of my closet. I’d tried at one point to get an agent but without luck. The couple of writers groups I’d been in had been toxic – everything Sarah has ever warned about here and on Mad Genius Club. So, not wanting to expose my “baby” to the evil world, I kept it secret and tried to figure out what I wanted to do when I grew up.

Along the way, I’ve been a teacher, worked at an ad agency and in a dental office, I’ve worked at Baylor Medical Center in various positions and even spent some time in a law enforcement-related field. I’ve also taken and taught martial arts. Plus I’ve raised a son I’m proud of who is currently serving in the military.

Then I met Sarah. I’d been lurking in her forum on Baen’s Bar for some time before finally gathering the courage to speak up, so to speak. Over the course of the next few months, we began exchanging emails and talking on AIM and it was like we’d known each other for years, not for months.

And that’s when I slipped up. In a moment of weakness I admitted I wrote. Before I knew what happened, she’d convinced me to send her something. Then she wanted to know why I kept putting it under the bed instead of trying to polish it for publication. I tried to tell her it was good only for bonfires – I really like bonfires, you see – but she forbade me having any more that used my work for fuel.

Then came the day she told me to write a short story to submit to her husband for an anthology he was editing. No promises, she said. But he’d at least look at it and give me some honest feedback. Well, being me and not being confident in 1) my writing and 2) writing a short story, something I hadn’t done in years, I submitted two stories I pulled together over the course of the next few days. From what Sarah tells me, Dan came in and accused her of making me up as another of her pen names. I say he was insulting her but she says no. Long story a bit shorter, he bought one of the stories and I had my first sale.

Since then, Sarah has been on me to keep writing. Which I have done. I also blog – hopefully on a more regular basis now than in the past. When I blog on my personal blog, Nocturnal Lives, it’s a mix of politics, current events and writing. For Mad Genius Club, it’s about publishing. Here, well, I am a Hoyt’s Hun so that means you’re as likely to get politics – with a libertarian Texan slant – as you are something about publishing.

As for the rest of it, my dog is neurotic. He’s afraid of the refrigerator and the washer/dryer. If Mom or I leave town, he won’t eat for at least two days. When we return, you can see in his eyes that he just knew we’d run off and abandoned him – to the cat. The same cat who is staring at us and letting us know in that way only a cat can that she was this close to killing the dog and hiding his body and why did we come home so soon.

And, yes, I do have a haunted table if not a fully haunted house. At odd times the table will play music – without anything on it or in it that has musical capabilities. At least it’s Ode to Spring and not something from a death metal band.

All the rest, as I say in my bio for my books, is subject to change.

When I was in a writers’ group years ago, my friend Alan had this gag he did when commenting on an obviously short or funny story.  “I found what it said about the human condition profound and illuminating.”  Or “This is obviously about the human condition, but other than that—”

Well, that gag made me hesitate to make this post, but this post IS actually about the human condition.

Yesterday just before going to bed, I read an article linked from Instapundit about poverty in the Appalachia.  Of course, this meant I spent most of an unquiet night (yesterday was one of those days where real life and interruptions intervened to keep me from going for a walk or even using the treadmill – by the time I had time to, I was dead on my feet.  For some reason just walking around most of the day, but not an uninterrupted, full out, fast walk of three miles, doesn’t allow me to sleep well at night.) dreaming of buying land in that region.  It was the line about violent crime being below national average and also the line about how cheap cost-of-living was.  Something in my back brain went “Well, it would be a place we could live in on my writers’ income.”

While this is probably true it would be quite stupid at my age, since I doubt there is any easy way to access emergency medical services.  (Yes, I’m only fifty, but my health has been iffy from early on, and I tend to work myself into sickness.  Also, given my inability to catch on that I’m ill till I’m VERY VERY ill, I have needed medical services in emergencies more than I should, and I don’t expect this trend to taper off.  Also, if we bought we would be buying for the rest of our lives, and I hope (fingers crossed) for another forty years with increased need for medical services as I go.  Which is one of the reasons for considering relocating to a LARGER city.)

Now I’m awake, and not shopping for land amid verdant hills I’ve driven through once or twice in my life, I was thinking about the article.

I have reasons to add some salt to it.  First the characterization as a “White Ghetto” brings with it a whole lot of freight which the journalist should have been wary of and clearly wasn’t.  Because of the title and leaving the correction about how low crime (other than welfare fraud) actually is, I imagined the images that “Ghetto” conjures: shootouts in the glades, women murdered in their houses… that sort of thing.

Turns out no.  While it is inhabited by a bunch of welfare recipients, has almost no stores (this possibly to the lack of population density) and lacks opportunities for local employment, this region is not a hell hole of gang shootings and violent theft.

Which immediately makes it completely different, and far more desirable as an address, than any urban ghetto.

In fact, the author says that for those who have money and who are “well connected” (though this is likely true I think the more important part is “self controlled”) it’s a paradise.

Which brings us to what is wrong with the rest of the local population, and how to help them.

The first is obvious and is going to make me sound horribly heartless.  The second… Ah the second is far more difficult.

The answer to the first is “There is nothing wrong.  They are normal, sane humans.”

And now you’re going to gibber at me about drug use and child neglect.  And – not here, but elsewhere – someone is going to call for more federal money dumped into the place.  They’ll call for more Head Start, more jobs programs.  The left who – with more than a bit of self flattery – will flap gums about how our technological society is leaving people behind, how all these poor people simply aren’t SMART enough to make money and thrive in the new new technological world.

DIGRESSION

This flatters the left insanely because they clearly are “smart” enough to thrive in the new technological world.  Lately in reading their stuff it’s all about power couples and marrying intelligent people and – bah.  They wouldn’t know intelligent people if one bit them in the arse.  They are what in our school system were A students.  These were never – at least when I was going through school – the actual SMART people (unless the smart people made a great deal of effort.)  True geniuses tended to be odd.  They dressed funny, sometimes had er… hygiene issues, and they had the confounded habit of correcting teacher.  As such, they were heartily despised by all right thinking people, and usually managed Bs, unless they were really really smart, in which case they trolled the D/F region.  In adulthood the geniuses I’ve known – those functional enough to hold a job – tend to hold jobs in convenience stores, fertilizer plants, or other menial positions where the fact they don’t dress fashionably and haven’t attended Harvard doesn’t matter.

This is why the beautiful people hold on to CREDENTIALS over accomplishments as signs of their specialness.

Which is why the “economy” the left is thriving on is a combination of glitz, glamour and valueless money printed at speed and of crony capitalism which devours the real substance of prosperity accumulated by our ancestors.

HERE ENDETH DIGRESSION

Part of the reason that even as the welfare model is collapsing all over the world, the left is hysterically seeking to bolster it is that they really think they are in a “With Folded Hands” future, where everything that “the little people” could do has been mechanized and therefore we should give the little people the means to survive and let them get stoned out of their minds, because, what else is there to do?  Kill them?  Oh, please, the left aren’t monsters.  They just hold on to monstrous ideas.  (Note I said “part of the reason” – some of the left is doing this for the power, of course, and to create a neo-feudal society.  But the rank and file of the evil party are not actually evil.  They’re just human and know a lot of things that just ain’t so.)

(Is there a lack of work for uneducated/not particularly intellectual people?  What, in the last 20 years?  Show me where the advances in manufacturing/computing/etc put these people out of work.  What is really happening is that our personal do-gooders have priced the US worker out of competition – and it’s not even the minimum wage, an effort as sane as legislating air humidity, as the crazed and increasingly futile environmental and other regulations – so the jobs have moved overseas.  This will correct itself either when the other lands create a middle class that demands better treatment – though they’re unlikely to demand crazy enviro regulations – or when we hang the komissars with their own guts.  Because as has been pointed out on this blog, there will always be need for the kind of mind that thrives on detailed, repetitive work, and which really really really doesn’t want to speculate about the causes of the Spanish-American war or read about Elizabethan England.  Whether these minds are less able, I refuse to even consider, because look… I couldn’t do what my plumber – or my hairdresser! – does.  I certainly couldn’t do what factory workers do.  It would drive me as batty as for them to do what I do.  Yeah, they test lower on IQ, a test designed to measure achievements of a certain kind.  We’ll just say they have different types of mind and that, without interference, there would be work they could do.)

So, what is wrong with these people is that they’re human.  When war on poverty was declared, it’s obvious what they were thinking of as an explanation for poverty was what is now called “The beesting theory of poverty.”  That is people are poor not because of any one big problem/injustice, but because of an accumulation of little things.  Car broke down, children got sick, got laid off, and is so held down that nothing – nothing – can lift you up again.

Does this happen?  Yeah, sure.  I’ve known cases of its happening to my friends and relatives.  I’d call it “crisis poverty.”  But I’d dispute the theory that this explains long-term poverty.

The facts seem to dispute it too.

I’m not just going on my own anedoctal experience – though I have that – having been in that situation at least twice in my life, and having clawed back out of it, or even in the experience of my friends and relatives, ditto, but on the fact that very few middle class people “fall” that way and never get up again.  In fact statistics seem to show the middle class moves up far more frequently than down.  I can’t find it, of course, but someone did an analysis of middle income in constant dollars, and the middle class has shrunk, as has the poor class, but the upper income has grown.

No, the sort of ground in, long lasting poverty is, as instapundit noted in linking this “the condition of the human race.”

Heinlein has a quote about it, and I’ve mentioned it here before:

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

This is known as “bad luck.”RAH

Insty mentions this, but Heinlein doesn’t go deeper into the mechanism, and neither goes insty.

Look, I’ll admit I don’t have any study on this, except what everyone has: that minimum income guarantees don’t make regions markedly richer (I understand that there was a program in Denver that spectacularly had the opposite effect.  I don’t remember when – the seventies?), that people on welfare that covers their bare minimum needs have trouble escaping it, and their kids have trouble escaping it, that socialist countries tend to go the route where no one quite starves but no one thrives, and everyone sort of simmers on at “poverty” level, more so as the years go by.  (Sweden? Norway?  Well, not enough years.  Despite the oddities of culture there – and yes, culture does count – they seem to be heading down, just not as dramatically and as fast as bigger and more diverse countries.)

Part of the issue with the war on poverty is that it seemed completely reasonable “Give people just enough to lift themselves up out of dire need and they’ll do the rest.”

Only people don’t work like that.  No?

Okay, do an experiment with your toddler: offer them a food they like well enough but aren’t crazy about – say eggs – and tell them they can have chocolate cake instead if they clean their room to your satisfaction.

Sure they’ll take the bait SOMETIMES, but most of the time they’ll shrug and have the egg.

I don’t know about other human beings, but I know one of the most prolific writers I know says he’s the world’s laziest writer.  He just FORCES himself to work.  And I can attest that I too often think I’m two people: one that wants to go bum out on the bed with a book, and the other who chases her around and makes her write.  (The chasing around time usually involves my bummish self trying to justify her leisure with increasingly crazy stuff like “I’m cleaning the litter boxes.  Scrubbing the toilet!  Ironing!)

I also know my older, extremely driven son, often tells me he is incredibly lazy and doesn’t force himself to do a quarter what he should.

I think all humans are lazy and all humans given a “minimum to live comfortably” don’t do anything else.  It’s not a bug.  It’s a feature.  A Neolithic hunter who continued hunting after he’d eaten enough for the day would deplete the food supply and the meet would rot.  This idiot left no descendants.  We’re descended from the sensibly lazy ones.

So, what about that “despised minority” – well, the despised minority that does more than strictly needed and thereby makes themselves “rich” and advances the wealth of all human race are usually, in social terms, deeply flawed.

It either has a tribal identity which needs security in mobile goods for the next time its crazy neighbors try to kill them, or it – one on one and individual on individual – is deeply broken.  Often they are Odds, and no, don’t get recognition just for “being smart” or whatever their oddity is, so they keep trying to get some recognition for SOMETHING.  And often they have other issues.  It is not coincidental that the lives of almost all great men often resemble horror tales, particularly the childhood parts.

There is another driver and that is a cultural identity that prizes work above all else.  The famed “Protestant work ethic” though I always thought that was funny as obviously there is the same thing on the Catholic side (but maybe there wasn’t at one time) was a powerful driver.  People would judge you for being lazy and not trying as hard as you should, and that in turn made people try very hard indeed.  Most people.  Because as Heinlein also pointed out the strongest motivating force for any simian, member of a highly social species, is the approval of its peers.

So you can see how when the “war on poverty” started and there were still fumes of this social judgment going on, the beesting theory would apply.  Oh, sure, there were still ne’er do wells who weren’t even pretending to try, but they were few and far between.  Most people would at the very least PRETEND they were trying to climb out.

So people looking from the outside would think “let’s make it easier”.

But the very fact of giving people unearned income makes two implicit assumptions: that poverty is not their fault and that it can and should be treated from outside.  (I.e. that there’s nothing they could do.)

That in turn changed the culture so people don’t at all feel guilty for not trying to climb out.  In fact the poorer they are, the more “deserving” and the more obviously burdened, and they should be given more stuff to bring them to parity with “luckier” people.

And then you have vast regions of poverty.

I resent very much the implication that the people of that region are good for nothing but being “peasants” – although in a right wing publication, the writer clearly buys into the left’s nonsense about “too dumb to thrive.”

Medieval peasants were in their unenviable condition because they needed the Lords to defend them in case of attack and this meant giving the lord rights to micro-manage their lives.  Which meant they could never climb out, because this was their “condition” – and yes, the lord looked after them in terms of keeping them alive.  And could kill them as well.

It might seem primitive to us, but it’s a highly sophisticated structure and far from natural.

As soon as the Black Death burst the bounds of the middle ages structure, the peasants took off into the wilderness, where they could take risks for their own survival AND they could innovate and be richer than ever before.

So, am I suggesting we abandon the people of Appalachia to their fate? Isn’t that cruel?

How much crueler can it be than what we’re doing to kids raised by drugged-out parents?  And what business is it of ours anyway?  Keep the payments for the elderly and the too young, and cut everyone else off.  Let them make their way to where they can make a living, or learn to wrest a living from the land again.

Horrible, right?  Well, it sounds horrible, even to me.  Because I grew up in a time when it was assumed it was the state’s right and duty to improve human lives – even in contravention of human condition.

Right.

The chances of it happening?  Not high.  So these people will go on living in pill-happy serf-like poverty (but producing nothing useful, unlike the serfs.)  Until and unless the gods of the copybook headings in terror return.  Or until the culture takes a turn where work is again enforced as a virtue.

And then we’ll find the vast majority of those “too stupid to thrive” people do indeed thrive and that most of them aren’t stupid at all.  They’re just human.

And here’s the truly stupid thing about humans: as much as we hate work, work is good for us.  When we work, we create something of value to others, and that raises our simian status among our peers, and in turn that’s good for our mental health and even our physical one.  (Work here being defined as doing something useful, not filling federal forms or polishing dog poo.)

And the more we work and the more confidence we gain, the more we find we can do, and the more interesting it becomes.

But none of us would start without some incentive that makes it more painful not to work.  For a lot of us that’s being not quite right in the head (what, you think a person who sits around writing lies for a living is sane?); for others it’s having something to prove; but for the vast majority of sane humans it is to need to eat and have a roof over their heads.

And this is why in the war on poverty we lost.  We met poverty and found that the seeds of it resided in each of our very sane normal brethren.

Poverty is normal.  Sloth is normal.  It’s we who work who are crazy. Absent that madness we’d all be living in caves and feasting-starving on hunted mammoth.

 

 

*This is Sarah — There will be another post later today.  For now, consider these*

Happy Saturday  Sunday, Huns and Hoydens! We have for your delectation a variety of fine books by members of our own commentariat and various other readers. So go, commit commerce, and enjoy a good book this weekend! Future entries in the reader promo posts can be sent to me at my business email, editor@dyck.us. Enjoy!
Jason Dyck, AKA the Free Range Oyster

Peter Grant

Ride The Rising Tide (The Maxwell Saga)

Trapped in the Dragon Tong’s search for a lost legend, Steve Maxwell finds a way out by enlisting in the Lancastrian Commonwealth Fleet.

If he survives long enough to earn a commission, he’ll be able to hunt down the pirates who killed his mentor. To get there, he’ll have to slog through rain-swollen swamps, dodge incoming fire on a ‘peacekeeping’ mission, and face down a gang of angry smugglers. Even far away from enemies, a mistake can turn a spaceship into a deathtrap.

It’ll take resourcefulness and courage to succeed… but Steve hasn’t come this far in order to fail.

Alma Boykin AKA TXRed

Elizabeth of Starland (The Colplatschki Chronicles)

Stubborn as a mule? No, stubborn AND her mule.

Colonial Plantation LTD. abandoned ColPlat XI, writing the planet off as a tax loss after a series of severe Carrington-type events. Now, four hundred years later, Laurence V of Frankonia wants to write Elizabeth von Sarmas out of his kingdom, but like her Lander ancestors, Elizabeth refuses to roll over and die.

To survive, she needs to cross the continent, thread her way through a holy war, and find friends in the Eastern Empire—an impossible task for a sheltered gentlewoman. Or is it? Never underestimate a woman with a mission and a mule.

Walt Pimbley

Forgiving Michael: A Judeo-Christian Thriller

“Mikey, what trouble he’s been!” thought Grandma Liu. “Why do we wish for smart children? Mikey’s so smart, he melted the basement and made us all run. Not on purpose, he’s a kindhearted boy. Except when he’s sending dirty pictures to his friends on the Internet and getting my children killed!” A school project gone wrong. The secret to a doomsday weapon in a teen’s head. Michael’s wanted alive in Moscow, Peking, Tehran. Wanted dead by Tel Aviv! Even Washington’s grown a little peevish with this All-American boy. With sinister spies and comely assassins on the prowl, can Mike’s Christian family find a way to safety?

Cedar Sanderson

Pixie Noir

You can’t keep a tough Pixie down…

Lom is a bounty hunter, paid to bring magical creatures of all descriptions back Underhill, to prevent war with humans should they discover the strangers amongst them. Bella is about to find out she’s a real life fairy princess, but all she wants to do is live peacefully in Alaska, where the biggest problems are hungry grizzly bears. He has to bring her in. It’s nothing personal, it’s his job…

“They had almost had me, that once. I’d been young and foolish, trying to do something heroic, of course. I wouldn’t do that again anytime soon. Now, I work for duty, but nothing more than is necessary to fulfill the family debt. I get paid, which makes me a bounty hunter, but she’s about to teach me about honor. Like all lessons, this one was going to hurt. Fortunately, I have a good gun to fill my hand, and if I have to go, she has been good to look at.”

Vulcan’s Kittens

12-year-old Linnea Vulkane is looking forward to a long, lazy summer on Grandpa Heph’s farm, watching newborn kittens grow up and helping out with chores. That all goes out the window the night Mars, god of war, demands her grandfather abandon her and return to Olympus for the brewing war.

Now Old Vulcan is racing around the world and across higher planes with Sehkmet to gather allies, leaving Linn and an old immortal friend to protect the farm and the very special litter. But even the best wards won’t last forever, and when the farm goes up in flames, she is on the run with a daypack, a strange horse, a sword, and an armful of kittens. Linn needs to grow up fast and master her powers, before the war finds the unlikely refugees…

Elizabeth Bruner AKA kortneearies

Flash of Copper

Step into a world of automatons and airships, jungle explorers and demons.

Flash of Copper is a collection of super short steampunk stories, some previously released as part of a weekly flash fiction challenge and others exclusive to this volume.

James Young

An Unproven Concept (The Vergassy Chronicles)

The Confederation of Man has overseen the prosperous expansion of humanity for centuries, with the Confederation Fleet its bulwark against all that would harm it. This shield is flawed, however, with a schism between the Line and Carrier factions threatening its ability to protect mankind against internal dissent and the possibility of external threats. In the year 3050, Fleet Admiral Malinverni has designed the battlecruiser Constitution to merge the best of both factions in the hope of forging a better future. Considered a flawed concept by all but those who serve aboard her, the Constitution is unexpectedly called upon to save the passenger liner Titanic from a new and pressing threat.

Anita Young

Eyes of Osiris (Architects of Lore Series)

Just when Dr. Kayara Ingham thinks she has finally escaped her dark past, a mysterious figure who calls himself an Architect of Lore enters her life. The renowned immunologist’s ordered world is thrown into chaos as she finds out not only are the things that go bump in the night real, but they want her. Kayara must learn to cope with this new reality while hoping her darkest secret does not come to light: she dreams of the future.

CJ CArella

Armageddon Girl

College student Christine Dark wasn’t happy. Her social life sucked, she spent too much of her time playing computer games or reading sci-fi novels (and the occasional paranormal romance) and she felt like she was missing out on everything.

Fate had something special in store for her, though.

Without warning, an unknown force drags Christine out of her world and takes her to a whole new universe, an alternate Earth where superhuman beings have existed since the end of World War One, a world filled with strange and dangerous characters.

Christine soon learns she too is more than human, and that her choices may save her new home… or bring about its destruction.

I grew up in a country that was decaying from an imagined great height where it got to divide the world in two with its hated next door neighbor.

The height was largely imagined for various reasons, but the quickest one to explain would be that Portugal never had a mercantile empire, a manufacturing base to back their “rule of the world.”  There was no middle-class culture.  So all the raw materials from the colonies, all the gold from South America, made a  short stop in Portugal and then went on to enrich countries that did have a middle class culture, such as Britain and Holand.

In terms of a superpower Portugal was closer to Saudi Arabia with an army (or at least a navy) than to the United States.  If people came to Portugal, unless they came to study navigation, they came to work for the foolish money and then to scuttle back home.

In other words, there is more resemblance between that mythical Portugal that “ruled the world” and the Portugal of sinecures, scrounging and status seeking in which I grew up than might be immediately apparent.

That is one of the amazing things about countries, even when they change a lot in ethnicity and way of living – there is an underlying personality and in the end it tends to be more or less the same.  Perhaps the crazy ideas of language shaping the brain are true, or perhaps more is transmitted not just in genetic propensities, but in the assumptions of slang, the lore that gets embedded in proverbs and expressions.  (Also the genetic replacement/flooding is always less than we tend to think, even in terms of say ancient Rome and how it changed.  To utterly overwhelm a genetic heritage you need something on the order of what happened to the Native Americans when Europeans arrive.  Massive numbers of incoming people, all at the same time, and at least some die off from new diseases.)

But the other thing that is absolutely true about a nation is that every man jack is convinced that his ancestors were so much better, and possessed of whatever virtues the country prizes.  I about shot tea out of my nose when Robert Graves made fun of this in ancient Romans, how they talked about their ancestors who lived in caves and ate bread made of acorns.  Even by the time I read The Decline and Fall – at 12? – I knew this type of talk from Portuguese and French and had read it from Englishmen.

To hear it in America is just the icing on the cake in so many ways.  For one we can’t claim to be genetically overwhelmed.  (Yes, the people-from-above are trying to CULTURALLY overwhelm us.  But what they don’t get is that by preventing assimilation, they are also preventing their charges from becoming useful members of society.  And yet, my bet would be as things get pinched and benes for being “diverse” dry up, their charges will either go home or become American.)

We are not a nation of genetics.  We’re a nation of ideas.  And we’re a nation of ideas so contagious that not only have they spread across the world (in mutant forms, I grant you, but the thing is what the ideas had to work with.  In France they became a sort of enforced egalitarianism except for the aristocracy of the bien pensant, because France is always a republic looking for an Ancien-Regime, and in the rest of Europe they became various forms of paternalism/classism, because that is those nations’ original idea.  BUT even then they don’t dare call them absolute monarchy or empire, or whatever, because we made that impossible) but infected the mother country.  I was chortling over a book on Henry VIII that said that the ultimate revenge of Catherine of Aragon was that Prince Charles’ kids are descended from her maid of honor, Maria de Salinas.  So her maid’s descendants will sit on the throne, but not Henry’s Descendants.  I thought “Yeah, but the throne compared to what Henry held is nothing, and he would be shocked at how low its power has fallen.”  And all because of us.

So imagine my shock when I found myself at Ace of Spades reading this thing about a Republican consultant (and if he worked on the last two campaigns, will you please get a grip on reality?  I can tell you right now those were infiltrated from inside.  No, stupidity cannot explain how badly they worked. Or the fact that my yelling my head off at people in Boston got the computer system working – but only for me.)

A lot of it threads the light pathetic, with him talking about how upset he was after the elections.  Tell you what, he wasn’t alone.  But if he’s such a big heap consultant, why was he so surprised?  I was JUST a poll watcher, and halfway through the day I KNEW we were going to lose.  I knew it because the number of people who apparently suffered amnesia and had forgotten they’d voted by mail – (about 1/3, though I heard that in Denver the percentages were reversed) – told me that the fix was in.

So explain to me how:

America’s best-known public-opinion guru hasn’t suddenly gone vegan. Luntz—the tubby, rumpled guy who runs the focus groups on Fox News after presidential debates, the political consultant and TV fixture whose word has been law in Republican circles since he helped write the 1994 Contract With America—has always been a hard man to please. But something is different now, he tells me. Something is wrong. Something in his psyche has broken, and he does not know if he can recover.

This is a man who makes his bread and butter – supposedly – from politics and elections, but he missed the vast, vast elephant of voter fraud in the room?  Bah.

And then he talks about how he goes all over the country and talks to people and America has changed, and America no longer wants to be free, but wants free stuff.  BAH.

Look, guys, the proof that he’s not all there, or at least is talking out both sides of his mouth is that he refers to Peggy the Moocher as representative of America now.

The entitlement he now hears from the focus groups he convenes amounts, in his view, to a permanent poisoning of the electorate—one that cannot be undone. “We have now created a sense of dependency and a sense of entitlement that is so great that you had, on the day that he was elected, women thinking that Obama was going to pay their mortgage payment, and that’s why they voted for him,” he says. “And that, to me, is the end of what made this country so great.”

If he really believes this, what he needs is a lengthy session of psychotherapy.  What made Peggy The Moocher famous was NOT that she was representative of America, but that she was out there on her lone limb as much as the chick who thinks sex is against nature.

And why is Ace of Spades – one of my go to blogs – giving any credence to the ravings of this “consultant”?  Because he says he’s run focus groups?  Oh, please.  Part of what makes the stupid party stupid is that they believe these outfits, which are mostly owned (like most of the chattering class) by the other side.  Mr. Lunz might run the focus groups, but I bet he doesn’t pick the participants one on one.

And why is everyone in the comments falling in line with “it’s over”?  Have all of you lost your minds?

I remember, yes, on election night, I lost heart for about ten minutes.  But that is not permanent, and my reasoning reasserted itself.  (I was talking two friends down from the ledge at the time, and that must be my excuse.)

Yea, yeah, yeah, we’re soft compared to our pioneer ancestors who lived in caves and ate acorns.  PFUI.  Would you please grow up?

Humans are humans are humans.  The part of humanity that wants to have liberty and is willing to pay for it has always been a minority. The only reason this here country exists, in the thin ledge between liberty and tyranny is that that minority is much more industrious and much more willing to work towards it than the vast majority who want to be taken care of.

Listen, dunderheads, the people who fought for independence from the British were a TINY minority, much fewer than the probably 50% now who just want to be left alone to live and work.  That is because this idea of being left alone and not taken care of was utterly revolutionary back then.  It has since infected the world.

Our founders lit a great light upon a hill, and like any great light, it has attracted both imitators and moths.

The moths just want to be warmed (and a lot of them get burned and start hating everything America stands for.)

Even in winning, the compact that is the Constitution started being violated and piecemealed almost immediately after.

And yet, the other side can’t QUITE put it out, which is why they hate it.  It infected their paternalistic monarchies, which they ultimately long for.  And they can’t get us to forget this idea of being free and of an armed citizenry ensuring its own liberty.

This whole “is over” thing is just their way of trying to get you to put down arms and to accept that their stolen victories are true.  (How can I talk of stolen victories?  Well, for one we know of several where the votes just kept showing up in car trunks till the count was what they wanted.  Do we believe that this wouldn’t happen in a presidential election too?  WHY? For another, guys, sweeties, why do they fight voter ID so hard?  No, it doesn’t make ANY sense.  The infinitesimal danger of “voter suppression” is lost in the danger of your vote not counting because ten million illegal immigrants diluted it.)  They want us to lie down and go to sleep and be like the Europeans.

And the doom sayers and ancestor-worshippers are ONLY helping this.

Not that it will work.

Look, I grew up in Europe.  Forget Peggy the Moocher, okay?  Peggy the Moocher in Europe would be considered a sane, if somewhat fringy member of the polity.  This is because in Europe you BELONG to the country and the government exists to take care of you.

In America the very idea is repulsive.  Yes, yes, some of the crazier democrats think we all belong to the government, but note even the wholly owned news services didn’t give this any play, because the average Joe would point and laugh as we do at Peggy the Moocher.

The European attitude is as incomprehensible to Americans as theirs is to us, and thank heavens.

Yes, pioneers could hunt, grow, be self sufficient.  This might have encouraged a certain mentality.  Weirdly, it’s not all that different from the mentality of the self-sufficient cyber entrepreneur who is getting tired of the government’s yoke.  The challenges they faced were different, and yes, they lived much closer to the bone.  Part of that “great light” is making us all more comfortable.  But a lot of us in this prosperous future find ourselves driven close enough to the bone, partly through stupid tax policies that penalize entrepreneurs.  And a lot of us are getting right tired of it.

Yes, us hard coreliberty lovers are a minority, but we are a minority that is armed, and dangerous, and by this I don’t mean physically.  We are people who read, who talk, who work for what we want.  And because liberty is as essential to us as the air we breathe, we fight with the despair of cornered beasts.

Is it enough?  Are we enough?

I don’t know.  Less than us was enough before.  It did for the British, and it lit a great light of freedom.

Cry no more.  Stop lamenting and put your shoulder to the wheel.

Our ancestors might have lived in caves and eaten acorns.  We, thank the Lord, hope to be spared having to do that.  The culture is what you make it.  You’re part of it, not a passive observer.

Now stop lamenting and work.

(Those of you who are writers, if you wish to post your links in the comments OR to send them to Free Range Oyster [his screen name without spaces – at – gmail dot com], he’ll be compiling them for a promo post on Saturday.  It might take a couple of weeks as he’s dealing with life stuff.)

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

For previous chapters, read here Though you might have to hunt for the last two as I haven’t added them.

Wolfe Merrit, manager of the manufacturies for the Earl of Savage:

 

I pulled the lady all the way into the undergrowth and hid there, scarce daring to breathe.  I threw my magical veiling ability over both of us.

The thing is that such as it was, my magic was smaller than hers, but I’d been in this situation before, and I knew exactly the kind of veiling that was required to keep creatures made mostly of magic to see us.  Of course, gods weren’t elves, and I hadn’t been even in fairyland, let alone in this place.

I wondered how a place could combine all the disparate myths of mankind and not implode, and I wished – I heartily wished – that I could be reading about someone else having this adventure, far away.  It would seem grand and interesting then, instead of stomach-churning terror.

I wondered how one got out of the mythworld, let alone get out with our skins intact.  There was the descriptions of escaping hades, which perforce must be in the mythworld.  If those were right, there must be a path out, a way to recross the river, or perhaps some large rock we could roll.

I pulled the Lady Helen close to me without even realizing what I was doing.  That she let me, and crouched unresisting next to me, so that I could feel the heat of her body and her form against my chest and thigh seemed a little odd, but not strange.  Force, she must be scared out of her mind.

At least she was not complaining or trying to push me away, which I’d been afraid she would do.

Around us there were sounds of monkeys in the overhead trees, and other sounds that I couldn’t quite identify all around.  There is one thing to say for the mythworld.  Normally, in my own world, I can at least guess “there is a hare” and “that is a carriage passing by” but the sounds of the myth world were all their own.

Oh, there were guesses I could make, like about the sound of the horn and the barking of dogs.  Diana was not about to be beat that easily.  I wondered if she had really been on Earth, pretending to be Betsy the maid, or if Betsy the Maid had been possessed by Diana.  If the later, the Lady Helen and I were bound to rescue the poor thing.  If the first… Wouldn’t the world of men break such a thing of gossamer thought and imagination as Diana the Huntress?  And how could she manage to keep her magical aura invisible, in a household of magic users?

But above all those thoughts and worries there was the memory of what Diana’s hounds had done to Acteon the Hunter.  All right, supposedly his own hounds, but I wasn’t buying that for a moment.

“Her dogs,” the lady Helen whispered, then, limp and warm in my arms.  I tried not to think of her as a woman or as being in my arms.  She was my charge.  Even were she not, there could be nothing between the two of us.

So I said, “Shhh” and thickened the veil of protection over us.  I could feel her questing that, delicately, with her own magic senses, but she said nothing and neither tried to supersede it nor to remove it.

I was afraid my shield would be inadequate, but little by little I heard the pursuit move off.  Not that I trusted it.  Not for a moment.  I clutched the lady to me, and remained very quiet, while her heart beat next to mine.

We might have fallen asleep.  I don’t know.  I kept my eyes closed because anything we were likely to see was an illusion designed to scare us from cover, and she must have too, because she was sensible enough when she wanted to be, but we stayed like that a long long time.

I woke, or at least became aware of myself with a feeling of being cramped in my half-crouch in the undergrowth.  The lady stirred at my stirring, and I opened my eyes half expecting to see Diana’s hounds crouched in a circle surrounding us.

The Lady Helen was opening her eyes at the same time, and all was calm around us, in the deep green undergrowth.  We were under a plant I could not recognize, and there were others of like size all around us.  They looked like onto a palm tree, with the leaves growing right out of the ground.  I frowned at it.  We could probably make our way through the undergrowth, crawling, under these leaves.  The problem, of course, is that we would have no idea where we were going, nor could we see our way until we hit upon something.

The lady moved her lips, asking soundlessly “Are we safe?”

I gave her a little non-commital shrug.  “Perhaps,” I mouthed back.  “or they could be waiting.”

She looked scared then, and darted a look upward at the canopy of trees.

“What do we do?”

“I think,” I said.  “We must crawl” I dared put a little sound into the words, but not much.  “We must crawl under these fronds and hope we come somewhere we understand, and from where we can decide how to leave this perilous land.  I think it must be like the legends of escaping Hades?”

Her eyebrows went up and she opened her lips, then closed them, then opened them again.  “I see,” she said.  “I’ve for some time now been suspecting we were dead.”

“What?” I so forgot myself I spoke in an almost normal voice.

“Think on it,” she said.  “When do mortals enter the realm of myth?  Only when they’re raised to Olympus or sent to Hades, both the realm of the dead, in different ways.”

The idea so stunned me, I didn’t say anything, sitting there like a gabby with my mouth half open, until she said, “Of course, if that were to be my eternal faith, to transact with the old myths, I wish I could at least have been a constellation.”

The idea was so absurd I heard the chuckle in my throat before I felt it.  “You’d have made an interesting constellation.  The pirate queen?” I said.

She looked surprised then smiled.  “I was hoping for the maiden.”

And then someone cleared his throat near us.  We both almost jumped out of our skins and turned, expecting – or at least I was expecting – to see Hanuman.

But instead the man who stood near us looked little past adolescence.  A very young man indeed, and from the portions of skin exposed between toga and winged sandals, a Levantine or someone of similar complexion.

Of course, I thought.  Winged sandals.  Mercury.

Sweeping my gaze upward, I met with the expected golden mask.  But the eyes that peered from the eye-holes were oddly familiar.  And when he carelessly reached up and pulled his mask upwards, his face was eerily familiar too.  Not, mind you known, just echoing with familiarity.

I felt both horrified and defeated.  We’d hid so long, and now…  I couldn’t find something to say, but the Lady Helen spoke, “And what do you want?” she said.  “Are you going to offer to marry me?”

He laughed.  The laughter too was familiar. “That would be rather odd,” he said.  “At least for you.  Our rules are rather more…  But no.  I am here to ask you what you want?  If you wish to leave this place, I am the person to guide you.  I am Hermes who walks between the worlds.”

I realized that he reminded me of Jonathan Blythe, but then my mind rejected this.  Yes, somewhat.  There was a faint resemblance.  But the real similarity…

I imagined the preternaturally beautiful face aged, the hair turned white, and I almost jumped out of my skin.  There was no doubt about it.  The golden Hermes looked like none other than the Old Lord, Jonathan Blythe’s grandfather, about whom the most polite thing said was that he was the devil himself.

I wondered.

*It is clear I’m not doing a second post today.  So I hope this is enough.  Feel free to get goofy (oh, I know, like I need to encourage you) in the comments.  I’m going to have more tea and write teh paying stuffs.*

Last night I received the following message:

We need to test the new Baen mobile site ordering system thoroughly. Y’all are folks with big web presences. I was wondering if you could give away some ebook vouchers on your blog, site, or Facebook page. The condition would be that the recipient must go to the Baen mobile site forthwith and use the voucher to purchase an ebook there.

You might give away, say, five vouchers for $9.99 ebooks and 5 for $6.99 ebooks.

So this is how we’re going to do it: the first ten commenters who post an answer to this, and who give me a way I can contact them will get the place to email for a voucher.

Tony Daniel would also like to remind you: Also feel free to share the link.  Though we’re in beta, the mobile site is open for business to everybody. One can purchase lots of Hoyt ebooks there…  [This is Sarah — Most of you already have most of the Hoyt books, right?]

The link is this: https://www.baenebooks.com/mobile/

So, I’m going to post this and I’m going downstairs for some caffeine.   The first ten who comment and leave me a means of contacting them get the email.

And then I’ll do a real post, after I’m caffeinated.

UPDATE: Claimed, of course, but for the rest of you who leave me/left me the email there will be a consolation prize in a little bit — at least if you have a smashwords account.

UPDATE: As you guys know I’m playing with Createspace, and I’ve found I’m not a very exact person.  Meaning no matter how many times I look at page proofs, when I order the printed proof, I find out I did something like set the date of first publication of Death of A Musketeer in 3007.  (No, really.)  So I have a bunch of these dud books I can’t sell, but they are one of a kind and collectible.  If anyone wants them, I can sign them and mail them.  Right now I have Death of A Musketeer, The Musketeer’s Seamstress and No Will but His, but I’m sure when I typeset the Shakespeare books there will at least one each….

UPDATE TO THE UPDATE TO THE WHATEVS: If you want the Smashwords consolation prize, I’ll email those out this evening, to give you time to post you want it.