Okay, so I’ve rolled my eyes at the ever increasing amount of erotica in my non-erotica reading.  This isn’t a simple matter of “you got chocolate in my peanut butter, yum!”  When you get erotica in my romance, it might be sort of kind of excusable, at least when the erotica is relevant to the plot — it rarely is — well written — it VERY rarely is — and interesting — it never is, not in romances — but when you get erotica in my mystery, I start to go all frowny face.

Look, bub, unless she’s hiding a blade in her vagina and is going to slice the detective’s throat any minute now, I don’t want to hear, see, or be told about what went into her vagina and how many times.  No, Mr. Bond, I don’t want to know what you did with Gold Finger.  Or … never mind.

And when it comes to getting erotica into my historical non-fiction… Well!  Yeah, some people really were history’s greatest sluts, but when you go out of your way to mention that the common people were doing it on the streets, and then to introduce the chapter with a hot-and-heavy blow by blow (sorry, it had to be said) of people doing it on the streets — and the heartrug, and in the garden, and behind the carriage! — I get truly upset.  I read these things for research.  Research, dang it, and unless you are disclosing some new anatomical arrangement or some novel position that existed only in this time and place, I don’t want to hear it.  (“Do the Robespierre.  It will make you lose your head!”)

I’ve classified this as a disease of traditional publishing.  In a panic, unable to realize that it’s political correctness that has killed reading-for-fun, they stampede ahead towards more political correctness, more by-the-numbers inclusiveness (Now  more inclusive!), see the numbers fall, can’t figure out why (people with excellent liberal arts education aren’t made of stupid, but they’ve been trained to appear to be) and then discover that — wow — sex sells.  Even vapid, improbable implied sex with sparkly vampires or explicit even more improbable S & M with cardboard cutouts.

And then they scream like cartoon characters (people with excellent liberal arts educations aren’t cartoon characters, but they often act like them) “More.  More Twilight.  More fifty shades.”  All without realizing that when it comes to badly written romance or erotica a little constitutes a surfeit and like the jokes in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress that are “funny only once” these are “salable only once” or a very few times.

Instead, they take from this that “Sex sells” and then I get erotica in my peanut butt–  wait, no.  In my mystery and while mystery in my erotica (what is this?  A Hemipene?) might be acceptable, the opposite is not.  Or not in massive doses.  (“No, Mrs. Higgins, your removal of your clothes doesn’t distract me from my acquiring of clues to…. Oooh.  Is that a grappling hook?  What an unusual location for it!”)

But this at least is traditional publishing doing what traditional publishing does.  “More, more sparkling vampires.  Bring out the glitter!”

However, this weekend I found a new one and it’s indie.

No, seriously kids.  SERIOUSLY.  These are at most 5k words, are selling for 2.99 — okay, so I sell my shorts for 2.99.  Uh, my short STORIES.  But they’re not improbable copulation with the ancestors of birds!

What’s more interesting these women are MAKING A LIVING from this.

I take back everything I said about traditional publishing.  Perhaps their problem is that they haven’t gone far enough.  Perhaps…

Well, no, let’s recap.  What you can take from this is that NO, that story you have in the drawer is not too stupid to live.  Yeah, I mean that one where the knight gets it on with the ostrich.  Bring it out.  Put it up on Amazon.  Okay, your mom might die of shame, but hey, you’ll be able to pay for a real snazzy funeral.

Am I raging against this?  Well, no.  Seriously, I don’t often get surprised these days, but the fact these area selling just about made my jaw drop on the floor.  On the other hand, it is proof of my belief that no matter how strange your fixation, if you write it and publish it, and keep trying, eventually you’ll connect with people just as crazy as interested in it as you are.

All that agonizing you do over “is this the right thing to write?”  “Will anyone buy it?”  That’s old thinking.  Put it out.  Put it all out.

Why not?  T-Rex does!

*As a way of explanation — do I need to explain? — I have my internet turned off this weekend.  This is a means of trying to finish Through Fire and getting it to Baen this week, so I can write Darkship Revenge, and then bowl of red.  I hear that in the old days, in soccer teams trainers would separate the players from their wives, to make them more keen to play.  I’m not sure how that worked, unless, of course the wives were shipped to a small deserted island and forever out of reach if they lost the match, which I don’t think is likely, but who knows?  I will be responding to comments on the Fire (tablet) which is the only permitted internet access this weekend.  This means of course there will be specactulabulous auto correct errors, like Mucous for Lucius, but never mind.  I shall report on Tuesday on whether this worked, and by then we can decide whether to send soccer players’ wives to little deserted islands or not.  Meanwhile, Ms. Sabrina Chase, she who forges ahead where no indie has gone before — okay, where no hun has gone before — is here to tell us about the joys and wonders of producing your own indie audiobooks! I’d tell you to be gentle with her, but she’s one of you and can dish it out better than you can, so never mind.*

 

*I first met Pam years ago in Baen’s bar where she was a ware slush-reader.  That is, she was a slush reader for Baen and she sometimes came into my conference — the diner, natch — in her human form, to… I guess to realize some of us were worse off than her.  I have also been reading Pam for… a long time.  I don’t remember the first time she handed me one of her stories to read, and I don’t remember what the story was — chiluns, while prepping the Musketeers for going up, I realized I don’t remember a lick of what’s in those books — but I do remember I thought it as promising BUT suffering from contamination from her day job.  The last story of hers I read is much better, and I’m glad to see her making great strides and starting to sell her work on line.  Give her stories a try!  And give a warm ATH welcome — that means NO bad puns.  I know better than to ban ALL puns — to Pam Uphoff, now in her human form!*

Some Assembly Required

Pam Uphoff

 

I write both science fiction and fantasy, so I get to do a lot of world building.

It’s the most fun part of writing.

I like to start small. A single building. A house with a teenager playing a video game while his mom fixes dinner. A tavern, my characters chitchatting over desert. The kitchen of an abbey, with a young man chopping up vegetables. An office, the occupant sitting down with his first cup of coffee for the day.

Then I build the world outward, from there.

The city—or village, or countryside, or underground in Cheyenne Mountain—whatever I need for the story my subconscious is feeding me hints of. Counties, states, shires? Countries, kingdoms, planets?

And government.

Who has power over my characters?

A local government? Regional? National?

How does the President, King, or Conte collect taxes? Very important thing, those taxes, no world is complete without them.

Maybe we should analyze the real world as if it were fictional.

Because I think we all need to start small, and then build our understanding of the world outward.

Oh sure, I read about Syria, and Egypt and all the other trouble spots. I flinch from the pictures of the Boston Marathon, grind my teeth over Benghazi, hang my head in shame at the leadership of my nation. But the main impact of the Federal Government on my world is those checks I make out to the US Treasury.

In the real world, the next biggest tax bites are property and probably sales. My property taxes are collected as one, then split among school, sheriff, drainage district and the precinct. Oh, yes. My imaginary world needs schools, some sort of organized anti-crime organization, water, sewer, and street maintenance and repair. And if the population is growing, all new facilities, roads, and schools.

Creating an imaginary world can give one appreciation for the sheer amount of underpinnings our society has built as it grew and developed. And studying the real workings can enrich and complicate your imaginary worlds. It can make them seem very real. This is how the water system works. Here’s the city workers digging down to the broken sewer pipe and finding the skeleton of a man murdered twenty years ago! Oops. Ahem. Sorry. I’m a writer. These ideas just invade my mind.

When you get your nose out of the newspaper and put aside the considerations of foreign affairs and never ending economic stimulus, the local scene is astonishing.

And if Armageddon ever comes, keeping those local foundations up and running will prevent a lot of the collapse of society.

But in a crisis, everyone pulls together.

This slow sucking decline we’re in, the stress everyone is feeling . . .  That when tempers flare. When houses are lost and people move away. When the widow is reduced to penury, and the youngsters can’t find jobs, people get ugly.

As a writer, I have to show that in my imaginary world. As a member of this real life community, I have to jump in and help, here and there. Defuse a situation, hire a young man to do a job I could do myself, drop off a bag of groceries where it’s needed.

And _then_ go back and read the newspapers. Understand that Syria means that the neighbor’s son is going to be back in danger. That the nephew who’s out of the Army could be recalled. To understand that MegaCorp buying OtherCorp probably means several hundred people right here suddenly without a job. That this or that county or state government funding this program means that program will face cuts. That the Federal Government mandating something means more paperwork for teachers. That the Federal Government sternly promising more oversight so who-know-what won’t happen again means it’ll take two extra hours to get a permit, and no doubt it’ll cost more.

The larger scale governments have started to seriously impact the smaller. Or maybe I’m just finally aware of that. I’m beginning to see that to save the underpinnings of society, we need to protect not just ourselves from the federal government. We need to protect our local government from the federal government.

Each layer has a proper field of endeavor, a proper scope to their oversight and control. The drainage district doesn’t have input into the school curricula. The Federal government ought not be able to tell someone they can’t fill in a low spot in their yard that’s breeding mosquitoes because it looks like wetlands to them. Their business ought to be looking outward at the rest of the world, and inward only to things that cannot be handled at the state level. Like maintaining a monetary system. The military. Protecting civil rights, the rule of law. The interstate highway system. And yes, some environmental issues as well, as little air and water pollution will stay put in the state where it is generated. Patent and copyright issues are important to encourage creativity in both the arts and the sciences. There’s a ton of stuff that could easily be argued as being properly under Federal control.

It’s much more comfortable in my imaginary worlds. I can make the local, regional and national and planetary governments stick to their own stuff. Or whip up popular pressure or an actual rebellion, according to my stories’ needs.

How do we do it in the real world?

We talk. We vote. We see the alternate news on the ‘net, and we don’t blindly accept the mainstream media. And it changes very little, very slowly, if at all.

So we’d better all learn the local system, and figure out how to best maintain it. How to make it ours. Because at the Federal level, everything is looking grim. They seem determined to destroy jobs, the medical system we’ve got, however flawed, the currency and the economy.

I think we need to save America by each saving our own town, city or county. Maybe we can save whole states, once the Feds collapse.

And maybe we can then rebuild a small, limited, federal government that will stick to its own job. My only suggestion is, keep the Constitution. And make the Feds keep to it.

Why do I think the Federal Government is headed for a crash and make over?

It’s because, in my fictional world actions have consequences.

The real world is complex enough that consequences often aren’t obvious. Many times they take a long time to arrive. But they are there. And they’re on the way.

This is the real world, and we can’t write it off.

*This is the new free novel I’m posting here a chapter at a time.  This is pre-first-draft, as it comes out.  It is a sequel to Witchfinder which will soon be taken down (once edited) and put for sale on Amazon (It’s now done and with editor and we’re getting the cover done.  My wretched health this year delayed everything.  (Meanwhile, if you donate $6 or more, I’ll get you a copy of Rogue Magic, once finished and edited, in your favored ebook format when it’s done.  Of course, if you’re already subscribing to the blog at a level at which you get whichever books come out that year, you don’t need to worry. )*

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

 

The Gamble.

Wolfe Merritt, Manufactories and Properties Manager for the Right Honorable Earl of Savage.

 

After a while it became clear how to outwit the beast.  We couldn’t use magic alone, not while fully enveloped in the creature – or at least not unless we laid the spell in an unusual way.

Which is how we found ourselves, with ropes around our waists walking single file along one of those narrow ridges that I believed were the very flesh of the creature in whose gut we were trapped.

We consisted of the king Hanuman and his monkeys, most of them in Monkey form —  though Hanuman himself had a disturbing tendency to shift in and out of his ape form – and myself, and Miss Blythe, and Betsy.  We brought up the rear, or rather I did, with Betsy walking ahead of Miss Blythe, and Miss Blythe ahead of me.  This formation was necessary in case one or the other of the girls should lose their footing on the slippery pink ledge.

When Betsy slipped, miss Blythe would hold her, and likewise if she slipped, I’d hold her.  As for me, I took great care not to slip, as we’d been told that the foamy liquid foaming a foot or so beneath us, and filling a cavity the size of a natural lake was – in this part of the beast – pure acid.  Hanuman had said one of his monkeys had fallen in it, and they’d not even retrieved the skeleton.

This was born out by the smell which was much like what I’d smelled once at an engraving plant – acrid and acid, seemingly burning the nose as we breathed.

Which was a concern, since, if this didn’t work out, then we would be in the liquid, anyway.  Or at least I would be, having made up my mind to that I would be first to try this.  My magic, my responsibility, my fate.

“Are you sure this will work?” Miss Helen Blythe asked, leaning back so that I could hear her, and, in the process, almost slipping.  I put an arm around her waist and tried to tell myself it was all to keep her from tripping and dissolving.  The thought of Miss Blythe dissolving, or indeed suffering any untoward fate was unbearable.  I’d come on this adventure to protect her, and I was a full grown man, with full knowledge of the vagaries of the world and its traps.  If anyone deserved to pay for any mistakes made it was me.  She was little more than a girl out of the schoolroom, and she couldn’t have known how unadvisable this adventure was.  She certainly couldn’t have known about the rogue magic plaguing the world and what effect it would have upon her.

I debated whether I should lie to her, but I had a feeling this young woman had already had too many lies in her short life and would be bound to know if I prevaricated.  “No,” I said.  “I’m not even more than half confident.  But there doesn’t seem to be any other choice.  So I’ll do it, I’ll be the first to go.  And then, if I fail—”

“We’ll be trapped in the beast’s gut forever?” she asked.

“Well, no,” I said.  “At least you get to live.  And if you or Hanuman don’t come up with another scheme in no time, I’m much mistaken.”

“But then why try it at all?” she asked.  “Surely one of us three will come up with another scheme soon.”

“Not that I can think of,” I said.  “And Hanuman is impatient.  Besides, this scheme has some hope of working.  Perhaps not high, but some hope.”

She shivered against me, and I realized I still had an arm around her waist.  I let go, but took hold of her upper arm, because she must be guarded against chance slips.

“How horrid,” she said.  “Well try one thing after another and each of us will fall into this terrible liquid and be destroyed.  Or die some other way, till in the end there is only Hanuman and his monkeys.  Perhaps we’re not the first humans he’s recruited?”

I bit my lip.  “We shouldn’t think such gloomy thoughts,” I said.

“Why not?  If they are true?  What are the chances of your succeeding?”

I sighed.  “Three in ten, maybe.  Not that one can calculate magic chances precisely in these circumstances and under these situations.  I don’t have my magical charts.”

She looked back, her little face pale amid the dark curls.  “Doesn’t God disapprove of self murder?  Don’t you have anything–  anyone you’d live for?”

“My son—” I said, before I could stop myself, and thoughts of my child put a heavy weight in my heart.  Mom would do the best she could for him, but it might not be much.  Truth be told, I wasn’t sure I could do much more.  Magic children weren’t meant to live in the normal world.

“You have a son?  Then you have a wife too?”

“No, his mother—”

We stopped, because Hanuman had stopped suddenly, and there was much shuffling and holding as we grabbed each other to keep from slipping.

Hanuman was in a larger, projecting promontory, if such terms can be used when inside an animal.

We all filed after him into this little projecting platform, standing cheek to jowl in such a way that it barely contained all of us.

“Well, Mr. Wolfe,” he said.  “The time has come to try your magic.”

As he spoke, one of his monkeys was clambering up into the dim depths of what looked like a cavern ceiling above us, but must be the upper walls of the creature’s stomach.  He affixed a hook to something there, and from the hook there dangled a rope.

The rope was brought to me.

“Climb up, Mr. Merrit, and show us how it’s done.”

“No!” Miss Blythe said.  “Let me try it.  He’s the greater magician and he—”

“No, indeed, Miss Blythe,” Hanuman said.  “His magic it is and he must bank on it.”

I hadn’t climbed a rope since my days in school, but this one had been knotted so I had somewhere to edge my feet.  That said it was still hard at my age, to engage in such athletics.  Particularly hard when the monkeys stopped holding the rope and it swung vertically, like a pendulum on a clock, with me doing the turn of the weight at the bottom.

The base of the rope disappeared into the liquid and gave off a most strange smell.

You see, the thought was that this was the largest chamber within the creature.  And that I must be in it, as far away from the flesh as possible, and then let go even of the rope because that was still attached to the creature, while the spell took effect.  If it worked, I’d be transported back to Earth.  If it failed…

I’d made little pre-packaged spells for everyone, contained in the powder inside tiny transparent envelopes whose provenance I’d rather not know.

As I climbed the rope, it was hard to avoid the thought of that lake of acid below.  But I must climb as high as possible, so I had more room to fall – and perhaps transport – before I hit.  The question was, of course, had the magic gone rotten here too?

No use asking.

I was sweating by the time I made it to the top.

Tearing the little envelope – I really didn’t want to know its provenance.  It was rather like sausage casings – with my teeth, I released the powder and said the one activating word, “Abras.”

And then I let go of the rope, and fell, tumbling head over heels towards the lake of acid and certain death.

 

Not only our current national follies – really, the shutdown involves roping off access to the old North Bridge in Massachussets and a monument to the original tea party?  Something that like the WWII monument and the self sustaining farm, and the service academy football game requires NO federal money but requires federal money to shut down and keep shut like, oh, the trail heads of suddenly “closed” trails?  Really?  You really think we are that stupid? – but the follies of SFWA including the hilariously bizarre survey that Kate fisked today have brought to my mind again the oddly persistent myth that if only the right people were in charge, then we could have a paradise right here.

I have no idea why this myth persists, except, of course “How full of brambles is this workaday world.”  That is, almost all of us know someone who really deserved much better from life, and who got handed the short (and often dirty) end of the stick.  And we know right bastages, with nothing to recommend them, not even a good amount of the brains given a common goose, who flourish like the green bay tree.

To our monkey brains this seems wrong and like there should be a better way to organize things.  Then comes the temptation.  “If only the right people were in charge.”  You know, smart people, and well brought up, who really want what is best for everyone.

Somehow this keeps failing and the monkey brain keeps insisting it shouldn’t.  And we keep being baffled by it.  “Perhaps we need the right people and the right ideology to train them in, an ideology that foreswears private property and makes the world sing in perfect harmony – oh wait, that’s coca cola – and makes everyone share everything and be nice to each other.

And yet, communism, has not only filled the graves with hundreds of millions of innocent lives, who did nothing to deserve it, it has also brought about the world’s worst living misery AND succeed in establishing the old dynastic monarchies in the shape of Kim’s and the Castros and others.

So – to quote an old communist – what is to be done?

Why does this keep happening?

Most of us have never got to be rulers of the world.  But we have all got to work in groups. And ultimately, even a totalitarian government is a group.  Any group of humans from the smallest work group in your local high school falls prey to the fact that we’re monkeys, and monkeys wish to establish dominance structures.

I remember my shock in high school when I found that the people in my work group were not in the least interested in turning in a good project.  Oh, no.  They were interested, instead, in showing each other who was boss.  And every female in the fargin group would decide I was the person to beat.  Say it was an English Translation group, tasked with translating a story from Portuguese to English.  I’d calmly point out to the female tossing her hair and blowing out air from both nostrils that no, I wasn’t going to write in French Friends for French Fries.  The answer would not be to look it up in the idioms list and confirm I was right, it would be “You’re not the owner of this group.  I want that there.  Am I not a part of this group?  And why are they called French anyway?  That’s just stupid.  Potatoes aren’t French.  You’re always putting crap like that in, because you think you’re so smart.”

And heaven have mercy on our souls if this chick was actually pretty and there was a male in the group, because he’d immediately take up his lance for the lady fair.

Think of any government as the same thing.  You might go in as the most ethical person who ever lived, but after sustaining ten or twenty or a hundred of this type of assaults, you’re going to go “Screw that.  I’ll keep power, because you guys are all crazy.”

The problem with this is that by then you’re likely also crazy.

And then there’s of course the inherent problem of communism, which is supposed to equalize things by identifying the deserving who aren’t getting enough.  Note the subjective things.  Who are the deserving?  And what is enough?

The Kulaks were after all small farmers, and pretty damn poor by OUR standards, but they were deemed to have too much and to stand in the way of fair distribution and into the grave they must go.

SOMEONE must decide.  The person who climbs to the top in this type of system is the sort of person who by nature thinks they know better than everyone else, even when this is demonstrably true.  And the top in this case is not just the dictator spot but every node in the bureaucracy.

Then there’s the fact that these people arrogate to themselves the right to decide what’s best for people they don’t know and whom they’ve never seen.  Given the plain weirdness of my body and how it reacts to things – no, really? Carbs make me break out in eczema? – and that’s before you throw in far worse weirdness like my husband who gets put to sleep by caffeine and gets wired by codeine…  who ARE these people to think they know what I should do and eat, and when I should be treated or not?

I have bad news for the panel of doctors who, 17 years ago declared my case to be both baffling and beyond hope (I had atypical intra-cellular pneumonia.)  They said I’d be in again within days, when I insisted on leaving the hospital, and also that I wouldn’t survive another year.  Well, I’m still here, and the body though not working well… is working.  Because I left, and because I took enough anti-biotics to clear the thing away, even though they said it wouldn’t work, because it hadn’t worked, because….

These were doctors who were working directly with me.  They were grievously wrong.

Do I want a panel of bureaucrats who’ve never seen me deciding I shouldn’t have whatever it is I need to survive?

PFUI.

The more government grabs, the more it becomes like group work, and we should all be French Friends, only not French because that’s stupid and potatoes are not French.

And this is all ignoring the fact that no, life isn’t perfect and we all have differing amounts of drive and talent.  However, if you let people work for what they conceive to constitute their happiness, they will work hard enough to enrich even those who don’t work.  No, not to the same level.  Humans aren’t eggs, all alike and perfectly unmarked.  No, the ones who are poorer don’t “deserve” better.  Oh, they might, some of them, on a case by case basis.  BUT they don’t deserve it JUST because they’re poor.  That just creates an incentive to be poor.  But in a society where people can keep the fruits of their labors (Ah!) then those who are able and willing work hard enough that even the poorest in the society are better off.  No?  Compare your local working poor to middle age peasants (living in a system that confiscated earnings based on birth, if not on equality.)  Oh, heck, I’ll spot you one.  Compare your working poor to the kings of the Middle Ages.  Rich beyond the dreams of avarice.  And that’s our poor.  By historical standards.  (And I know whence I speak.  Reading history when I was little, I considered myself immensely wealthy, living in an unheated stone house, with the bathroom outside the back door and eating mostly the local produce and meat on Sundays. Oh, heck, I had FIVE outfits.)

Yes, there will be injustices: the mother left with a brood of children, working till she drops to keep them decently; the man who for some reason never gets ahead, and works in obscurity until he dies when his worth is realized; the artists who are never discovered; the person who is cheated out of all he owns.

Except that a top down system doesn’t cure any of that.  It just makes them endemic.  How could it be else, when it’s administered by bureaucrats working at cross purposes with each other and often with no view at all to the people they affect?

No?  Then what possessed a government HERE to close monuments that don’t need government employees to run?  What except to keep their power?

This, this, if nothing else is sufficient demonstration that they certainly don’t need more power.

A small government that lets individuals make choices on what constitutes their happiness is the only answer.

As much as it might offend bureaucrats and feminists, it might constitute that poor single mother’s happiness to work herself to a bone in order to bring her kids up right?  No?  How do you know?  I know many in her position who felt just that way.  Would a self-actualizing lifestyle be better?  For whom?  You perhaps, but then don’t come whining to me about the anomie and lack of purpose of modern life.  Some of us find our purpose and happiness in others.  Not your cup of tea?  Then don’t drink.

In cases like that government subsidies just rob the person of purpose and happiness.

An, but we get French Friends because “it’s my work too, and I want to have my hand in it.” (Stompy foot.)

If that’s the kind of system you like, then you definitely want the right people in charge, and you also think you’re the right people.  Full speed ahead and damn the mass graves.

If you’re not…

If you’re not you might start suspecting that though a lot of nonsense has been spoken about the occasion of sin (possibly because the poor serpent is inherently phallic) what that ancient serpent whispered in the woman’s ear in the fabled garden was “This Earth could be a paradise.  If only we had the right people in charge.”

 

 

So sorry to be so late with this, but I came home to a pile of stuff that needed to be done.  Yes, there were other reasons for my cutting short the Texas trip, reasons having to do with family stuff (no, nothing horrible) but here’s the thing – even without that staying away for two weeks would be inadvisable. Because I’d come home to two weeks of stuff that needed done, and not just house stuff (where the guys do pitch in, if often not well) but business correspondence, cover art to evaluate, contacts with editor doing Witchfinder, stuff that needs to be put up — that sort of thing.  Oh, yeah, and working on novel for delivery.

Which brings the question again, when did we all get so busy?

I was talking to my sons yesterday, and all of their friends (and they too, if in odd freelance areas) are doing thirty things at once.  Two part time jobs, more than full time studying, and a couple of volunteer gigs on the side because it’s something they want to do.

Okay, I’m a terrible example of this, because I took a full load in college, took private language classes on the side on stuff the college didn’t offer and taught part time.  But that’s not how the movies show my generation.  It certainly isn’t how movies show their generation.

There’s a bit of selection bias there, granted, and granted, they know people doing half time in college, and then spending the rest of the day getting baked or playing computer games.  But these aren’t their friends.

Among my friends, too, I can only come up with one, off the top of my head, who has only one “regular” job and nothing else.  I will grant you selection bias.  Being a writer is sort of like being an actress in Los Angeles.  Half the waiters you know are really “actors” too, and then there’s the girl down at the copyshop, who’s hoping to be discovered.

Of course a lot of the people I know are… whatever they are and indie writers or aspiring writers on the side.  But even taking away that component, most of them have third jobs too, something that brings in “a little cash” – whether it’s doing the accounting for a company, the research for another, or more homely stuff like office work for a friend on the off hours, or crafts you sell on the side, or… both for cash of which we are all short, even those of us working like crazy, what with the price of everything always going up, and for well… when we’re working we’re not reading the news. Right?  It serves a purpose.  It could be argued my younger self took those extra courses because the labor market in the late seventies in Portugal was tighter than a miser’s purse and also because being so stupidly busy kept me from worrying.

But all the same, when did we all get so busy?  And where are the people who must – perforce – be doing nothing?

To an extent this is the evolution of the “job”.  I remember in my parents’ day a job was something you got and you stayed on until you got your retirement party and your retirement.  There were signs of anxiety about that model before I left elementary.  My brother’s generation, ten years older than I, all seemed to be getting “gigs” to “make do.”  Six months here, and they let you go before they were stuck with you for life (European labor regs are fun.)  People would do six months as teachers, six months as mechanics, and then rotate to working in an office for six months.  The jobs that remained sinecures were either government or “someone got me this job because my uncle owns the company.”

Coming to the states after college didn’t seem to make much difference for those prospects.  All of our friends were getting temporary jobs.  And honestly, throughout our working lives, except mine, which is of course weirder than that being a freelancer, all our jobs have been “a few years.”

Part of this is how industry changes.  Dan has worked all over the place.  So have I, when forced to get honest jobs.  In my case, I’ve ranged from retail to a chemical plant, to colleges.  Nothing is permanent, and you really don’t expect your employer to have any loyalty to you, so you don’t really consider yourself bound to stay with them for life.

In fact, most of my generation has suffered more or less prolonged bouts of unemployment.  We’ve been lucky and ours have been minimal, though we have this thing that if I’m having trouble selling (so far only ONE dead year, back in 02/03) it will be at the same time Dan is laid off.  Because misery loves company, I guess.  We’re speshul that way.  Never mind.  I’d rather get my misery over intense and quick than light and prolonged.

But now, and yes, partly through the completely stupid law that shall not be mentioned, we seem to be parting ways with the full time job, even the temporary one.  Or the full time job just doesn’t pay enough.  Or it’s shakier than a guy who guzzles whiskey for breakfast.  Or whatever… and then people have these “I also do this—”

Is it a great strategy?  Oh, heck yes.  One of my friends who was laid off stands a good chance of replacing his traditional income with income from his other sources, just amped up a little.  And of course, he now has more time to pursue them.

But time is the thing.  I mean, I’ve not got to the place I was in college, where I slept only on Saturday (– and slept like sixteen hours.  The rest of the week I made do with two hour catnaps per night.  Good thing I haven’t got to that point.  I don’t think I could survive a month of that, much less four years, at my age.) but I dream – DREAM – of taking two days off and just sleeping and reading.

It’s a pipe dream.

Heck, take the Texas trip: when I started going there, five? Years ago to teach the workshop at Bedford Library, we thought “Why not cut it so it’s two weeks, and I can attend Fencon.”  And it worked fine.  Oh, I didn’t work on schedule while there, but that was okay.  I could take the weeks to read and research and work around the edges.

Objectively, I was doing a maximum of three novels a year, blogging once a week (if that) and maybe doing five short stories a year.

This year, for good or ill, I seem to be on the short-a-month treadmill, and of course I blog for PJM, and blog here every day, and I’m trying for at least four novels trad and a couple indie a year (not that I’ve done great at that) plus I’m working with Goldport at bringing out my backlist, and I’m doing cover design for Naked Reader (and man, is that a steep slope) and because of all my new duties, I’m taking classes and…

And if I take a day or two off, I end up having to make it up, so taking time off NOT worth it.

Of course, this is also the fault of technology.  Not that way.  It’s obvious that when technology makes it easier to work from home and to learn new trades part time, the ones who will do it are not the ones who are doing nothing, but the strivers, the already over busy, the chronically curious and insatiably interested – us, in fact.

And all my friends – except those who are ill — are the same – when they’re not worse.

So, when did we all get so busy?

This is a question a friend asked.  She said “So, traditional publishing is dying and we all thought we’d be vegging in front of the TV and instead we’re all going crazy.  When did we all get so busy?”

When indeed?  And how?

Atlas isn’t shrugging.  Atlas has taken a part time job lifting Jupiter and Mercury, and he’s juggling all the asteroids on the weekend.

Is it useful?  Well, it gives us more skills.  And it can cushion you when the main job falls.  But this resting from a job by doing another, only works for a while, right?  Maybe the completely insane drivers (No, worse than normal.  FAR worse) on Colorado roads these last few months aren’t just because of pot legalization and driving drunk and/or importing Californians.  Maybe they’re all sleeping behind the wheel.

Take me right now.  I have to finish this blog post – late, because I actually crashed and slept 12 hours, last night, perhaps logical after illness/trip/cleaning house and catching up on business stuff yesterday – and then do the post for MGC.  And then I need to do three covers for Naked Reader.  And then I need to get the first two musketeer books in shape to reissue.  And then I have a story that MUST be delivered by Friday.  And somehow there in the middle, I MUST do my posts for lifestyle, since they very kindly put up with my going AWL while sick.

And there’s laundry and dinner and the chores of daily life.

The question I have is – where are those people who aren’t doing this?  Do they exist?  And what do they do all day?  Surely you get tired of watching soaps after a week?  No?

When did we all get so busy?  And where are all those zombies?

UPDATE: a different post is up at Mad Genius Club: A Self-Doubt Called George.

I am home. Today I feel curiously non-verbal, so I apologize for the disjointed nature of this post.

So, I have proof the airlines are out to get me – all of them.

Okay, it’s not so much proof as the fact that I can’t get anywhere without a cancellation/delay/baggage loss, but on the other hands this seems to happen to everyone who travels to the point a trip without any of those is startling.

Of course this is because our government bails out the airlines when they insult so many customers that people will drive across country rather than fly.  So, what do they learn?  Be inefficient, get more money.

Actually that also relates to our government.

Which reminds me, doom, gloom, horrible things loom: you realize the NSA didn’t read this blog post before I put it up?  How can any country survive such lax ways of handling information?  How can I get used to privacy again?

We must un-shut the government even at the cost of paralyzing all of the economy with the worst law ever written implemented in the worst way possible.  Otherwise, who will make us use toxic-metal shedding lightbulbs?

If you wrote this as a plot, you could never sell it.  The law is demonstrably destroying the economy, yet the party trying to stop it is the one that can’t be blamed for it.  Meanwhile the Frankensteins who cobbled it together are saying “full speed ahead”.

Is it because they think that they’ve got vote fraud SO sewn up they don’t think they have to worry?  Is it because they think the votes of the people hired to administer this three ring circus will out-leverage the rest of the country?  Or is it that they hate us and wish us to collapse?  Or “yes”?

Or is it that they’re stupid.  I mean, really, really stupid.  Lethal levels of stupid?  After all more than one of them has seemed to intimate that in the ideal society everyone works at government make-work jobs.  And yet… there would be food and electricity and everything.  Think on this a while.

Meanwhile?  What if they gave a government shut down and no one noticed?  Other than the contrived instances they want us to notice?

Wall Street didn’t react at all to the shut down.  What does this mean?

We’re too great a nation to have this sclerotic, bizarre and STUPID government.  Let’s continue with our business as if they didn’t exist.

There are two types of people in the world.  Those who want to tell everyone what to do and how to do it, and those who have fond fantasies of holding them under water until bubbles stop coming up.

Okay, I’m probably wrong on this.  That last is just me.  In my camp I count people like Charlie Martin who, despite not being a Christian, has a bit St. Francis serenity to him.  They just want to be left alone, and they will evade anyone trying to force them to do things and do them exactly THEIR way.

The types who want to tell people exactly what to do and how to do it are everywhere.  I grew up in a culture where total strangers would approach you in public, on the street, to tell you that you were wearing your shirt wrong – because it was not the way everyone else would do it.

Being me, I rebelled against everything that people told me I should do, including basic manners which was stupid, because basic manners are simply the way we avoid making everyday situations into horrible confrontation.  Manners are how we avoid beating each other over the last roll at dinner and running into the door all in a bunch and getting all stuck.

Manners unfortunately also stop me waving the middle finger of doom at most idiot pontificators telling you “This is exactly what you should do and how you should do it.”  However the issue needs to be addressed, because if we don’t then these kind of idiots end up getting political power and making it a law that you have to do things their way.

There are things of course that you can only do one way.  Say you suffer from craneo-rectal inversion and want to see the world.  The only way to do it is to pull your head out of its dark, smelly place.

There are other things like that too.  I mean you shouldn’t eat sand or metal.  And at a formal dinner, you shouldn’t eat with your hands.  In general it’s more efficient to eat with your fingers than with your toes.  Though I’ll point out our class president wrote with his toes, because he was a Thalidomide baby.  So even in these basics, there are no hard and fast “How to do it.”

However for most basics, and lacking other impairments, the “how to do it” is agreed on at least by the time you leave high school.

For everything else, can we have people leave us alone already.  Note that the first lady has now found it necessary to tell us to drink more water.  This is relatively innocuous, until some idiot decides to make it into a law, but still – drink more water, really?  You need to put this message out there?  Listen, lady, most of us figured out that drinking gasoline killed you by the time we were two, or at least we took it on faith, plus the smell nauseated us.  As for “but… water… drink more.”  Yeah.  Well, most of us have been hearing that since we were out of knee breeches.  And since I never wore knee breeches and I’m almost the First Nagger’s age, that’s a veeeeeeery long time.

Does she think because it’s her wagging her finger we’ll pay more attention?  Listen, Lady, I’m more likely to listen to my doctor, and I still don’t.  Why not?  Because I hate drinking plain water.  I do it only if I’m really thirsty and there’s nothing else.  (I will drink carbonated water above that, but above those I will drink tea or coffee.  And no, those aren’t the opposite of hydrating.  That’s been disposed of.)  In fact, I only stopped being severely dehydrated when I gave in and started guzzling iced tea.  And yes I knew that I should drink mo’ water, but I couldn’t force myself to.  Because I don’t care who tells me, my back brain doesn’t like it.  (And btw, through most of humans’ history – not pre-history because I can’t be sure – people didn’t drink water, they drank beer or other alcoholic beverages.)

But nowhere is this more annoying than in the arts.  No, seriously.

I’m sick and tired of being told there is only one way to write.  This is only because I’m not a painter or a musician anyway, but yes, I’m tired of it.

You’re going to quote the tribal lays thing, and of course, there’s many ways to construct them, but truly, this doesn’t seem to percolate to people’s heads.

It’s fine by me if you say “Hey, Sarah, you teach writing.  So, clearly you think there is a way.”

I think there is a way to make a story more attractive and popular, yes, and that’s what I teach, though those who’ve taken workshops with me know that I “beg” a lot.  I’ll say things like “don’t start with your character crying, unless you can make it fly.” Etc.  Because though there are certain guidelines to make your way easy everyone can quote three or four major instances of rule breaking that went big.

That one is already bad enough when people come in all big and bad and say “you can’t have first person narration that doesn’t sound amateurish,” which causes me to clear my throat and go “ahem, Heinlein, and smile when you say that.”

But what really gets my goat, gores it and then barbecues it over a pit with hot sauce is the people who tell you HOW to write.  And by that I mean the process of writing.  No, really “You must write on paper, or you’re writing trash” or “you must type everything on an old Remington Selectric” or and this will make some of you grimace “you must revise everything five times – preferably to the tastes of the editor who is the voice from on high and who is NOT paying you until/unless you hit his/her hot spot, before your story is “good”.”

This gets on my nerves for various reasons.  The first is that the little clueless writer I used to be took all this to be gospel truth.  This included using 30 to end my short stories for years because some book told me to.  It included writing short stories, in the first place, because three or four books assured me this is how you broke in.  It included sending to pays in copies first, because I heard you needed those in your resume before the bigs looked at you (not true, and if you had too many of them, no bigger mag would trust you.)

It included my trying to follow all the “rules” of writing, including “don’t use the verb to be” which for a while made my writing very stilted and odd.  Also, I bought all the “you must revise five, seven, ten times” for each story. What happens when I do that – I once took a year to write a SHORT story – is that my stories become absolutely blah.

Until I went to Oregon and people took a look at my unedited stories and didn’t run screaming, I thought I needed this.

Now, am I going to tell you no one needs this?  No, I’m not.  I have friends who revise and polish multiple times and you don’t want to see their first drafts.

Is my process better than theirs?  Oh, hell no.  It’s faster.  That’s a good thing in the current model.  But what it REALLY means is that I’m a LOUSY reviser.  I either hit it off the bat, or not.  But it also means I need to improve by what I call “months of silence” where I study and experiment on pieces no one will ever see, before I am able to start a story “hot” and carry it through to the end readable, without having to revise.

However, for me the “one true way of writing” was a sand trap, which cost me years of livelihood, and years of work.

In the same way everyone saying that to be “really” published you must go through a traditional publisher is going to cost writers years of life, and is also implicitly endorsing a system that had become so dysfunctional it was selecting for “tone” and look of the writer, rather than any quality of the writing.

I love my traditional publisher, but truth be told, they’re not very traditional, and in fact all the other houses rage against how they do business and whom they buy.  And yet, they’re the ones with the most fans on the ground.

I’ve been known to get a discount at my local Home Despot, in CO, because I wrote for Baen, and everyone in the store READ Baen.  This doesn’t happen with any other brand.  But if you hear the other editors, Baen is doing it ALL wrong, because they’re doing it differently.

And ultimately, that’s what matters – nothing succeeds like success.

Should you rewrite multiple times or publish your first drafts?  I don’t know.  I’m not you.  Chances are your head doesn’t work like mine.  I can tell you how I do it, but not how you need to do it.

Should you go indie or try traditional?  You do it how it works for you, and if it doesn’t work you try another one.

But most importantly, you stop trying to impress the newbs with your wisdom and power.  No one gave you the right to tell people how they should do their thing.  If they fail, they’ll soon figure out the other methods.  You can tell them “this is how I do it” because guidance is helpful.

But you don’t get to tell them how to do things and what things they should do, because you don’t know how other people’s mind works, you don’t know your taste is universal, and besides, you’re not the boss of anyone.

You didn’t just come down from the mountain, and I don’t see no stone tablets in your hands.

Let people find their own path.  Advise them if they ask.  Tell them “to publish here and there, I’ve found you have to do this” but stop already with “the only true way.”

Because this is my middle finger.

Oh, yeah, and drink more vodka!

 

There was a discussion at a forum to which I do not have access right now, on whether indie publishing means you didn’t “make the cut” for traditional.

Sigh.

Do I have to revisit this?  Apparently I do.

If I had the keys to the forum on me – I don’t.  I’m away from home and don’t have access to a lot of stuff from this computer – I’d go in and point out it totally depends on what you’re talking about and what you want to do.

Note right at the onset that I publish both Indie and Baen.  And that a lot of the stuff I intend to do Indie is stuff Baen wouldn’t touch (for its main publishing house, though I’ll try to sell it to webscriptions for those who read that way.)

What is the reason for this divided strategy?

Would I stop publishing with Baen so I can go fully Indie?  Not only no, but h*ll no.  And it’s not just because Baen gives me upfront money, though for a woman with two sons in college this is not sneezable-at (totally a word, shuddup.)

Baen has name recognition, and when you’re a wise, (trust me, on this) Latina, with a degree in literature and various odd opinions, you need that little rocket ship on the spine to convince sane people you’re not another feminist glittery hoo-ha of profound boredom.

Baen, to put it bluntly, takes me where I want to go with far less effort than I would have to employ to get there on my own.

This is because Baen – all praise to Jim Baen and Toni Weisskopf as his successor – has taken great care to build a cohesive brand.  If you like a Baen book, chances are you’ll like the others.  This makes it easy for readers to go “ooh, it has the rocket, I’ll read it.”

Do other brands in science fiction or elsewhere enjoy the same name recognition?  Well, for a while bantam had a reputation as being more high brow than the rest but – nota bene – this was a reputation MOSTLY among writers, not the reading public.  If you ask the reading public if a book is random penguin or Tor or… they’ll look at you blankly, with good reason.

For several years now, the other houses have made it a point of buying and disposing of in two books writers who didn’t miraculously become bestsellers with no publicity and no support, while cultivating and making artificial bestsellers out of a bunch of things with little natural audience.

What this means is that their print runs have shrunk and their trademark does not encourage anyone to buy.

So, let’s suppose you’re not writing something that fits the Baen trademark.  And please, don’t tell me that the Baen trademark is “quality” – yes, it is that, but there’s more to it.  Baen is plot driven fantasy and science fiction.  It can have characters and worldbuilding too, and it usually does, but the Baen brand means a certain… feel.  That’s why it’s a brand.  Look, say The Man In The High Castle, which I like is NOT Baen.  It lacks the pacing or the clarity of plot.  The same for say Dark They Were And Golden Eyed.

As you guys know my random mind can produce Baen stuff and non Baen stuff, including VERY non-Baen stuff: mystery, romance, pseudo-near-literary, whatever.

For years, I gave my non-Baen stuff to other houses (okay sold – waggles hand)  and I’m no longer doing that.  Why not?

Mostly because I wouldn’t trust them – contracts, reporting, etc – further than I could throw them.  I’m waiting till they either pull their heads out of their rearward facing orifices OR go under and something emerges to replace them.

But it’s more than that.  FOR YEARS I worked for them and got ulcers.  If you think there isn’t a political line, you’re nuts.  I had to toe it and keep my mouth shut.  Given the force with which my mouth tends to open – explosively – the unrelieved pressure was giving me falling hair and toenails.  (You only think I’m joking.)

And beyond all that, let’s be honest here, my indie books net me a lot more money in the long run, if not upfront.  So…  What are the other publishers not Baen doing that I should give them that 97% of my potential income?  I’ve already said that at least in my opinion they have no name brand recognition.

So, what are they doing?

Oh, they’re putting on a cover and putting it on shelves.  Um… the first is dubious (is the cover going to be the same for almost every book in the series and make it impossible to find new ones?  Because at least one house did that) and the second any more very iffy, because I once had six books out in one year and not ONE made it onto a bookshop in CO, and that was before the current contraction in shelf space.  And yes, all these books were by major publishers.

So, I bring out my non-Baen stuff indie, and some of it I admit might be Baen stuff, but it’s experimental “let’s throw it at the wall and see if it sticks” stuff like Witchfinder, but marginal enough that I don’t want to metaphorically clog the pipelines with it.  I prefer to send to Baen the books I KNOW they’ll be interested in, like the sequels to DST, or MIGHT be interested in like The Brave And The Free, or MIGHT be interested in like World War Shifter (Hurray for the Red Dragon.)

“But Sarah,” you say “You are a professional.  You sell other novels.”

Sigh.

Guys, the truth is that there are novels of mine I couldn’t give away for love or money and that only sold after my first novel sold.  And then they sold professional.  BUT until I had contacts I couldn’t give them away.

It’s not just QUALITY that sells a book.  It’s hitting at the right time, when you have the book they want.  I have at least one series that didn’t sell to a given publisher because they’d just bought a “similar” one.  If I’d sent it a week before, the other author would have been disappointed.

And I can tell you that the people I’m mentoring now, I recommend they don’t even SUBMIT traditional until they have the kind of book Baen might like.  People like Kate Paulk, or Amanda Green or, yes, Cedar Sanderson.  Or, oh, yeah, my sons.  Because NO ONE deserves the “traditional publishers” (which Baen never was) right now.

In the future, maybe.  But right now are the big bumblers (the big four and the boobsie twins, random-penguin) worth signing away your book for ten years, maybe forever?  Oh h*ll no.  I wouldn’t let my worst enemy sign up with one of the traditional.

But Sarah, you’ll say, isn’t it true that all self-and-indie published books are drek?

Eh.  No more than traditionally published books are all drek.

First of all drek is a highly subjective measure.  Second this is why Kindle (and most of the others) give you samples. You download the sample.  The ABSOLUTE drek in indie, like the absolute drek in slush announces itself on the first paragraph in horrible spelling and terrible formatting.

“But Sarah, I’ll have to go through hundreds of books to find one I like.”  Um… not in my experience.  Look…  Most of the really bad ones don’t stay up there long, or have so many one-star reviews you would only download them for funsies.

So, of the indies you might consider – not all uniformely one star reviews – and in whatever you’re reading at the time (Oh, please.  Sometimes you feel like an elf, sometimes you don’t!) you might have to look at three or four before you find one you want to read and settle in.

Are you going to stand there and tell me to my face that you NEVER in your life went through that many while browsing in a bookstore?  Lying is a sin, you know?

It’s just now the browsing is in your house and in your own time.  And yes, sometimes you’ll buy a dud.  Of COURSE you never did that traditional right?  Which is why there aren’t book-shaped indents on the walls.  (Of course you can’t throw the kindle.  It gets expensive.)

So, is indie all uniformly drek?  Smile when you say that.  A lot of my friends and relatives are mostly indie, or will be (younger son.)  And I think it’s the best decision for them.  And I will read (and finish) their stuff.

Besides, writers like Larry Correia went indie first.  Before anyone bought him.  Does that mean he was Drek?

Oh, please tell him so, and let me take pictures while you do it.  Better, let me take the movie of what Mrs. Correia does to you.  Just YouTube hits would be worth it.

Seriously – if a writer is so lazy he will uniformly cast a lot of good books by the way side because one of the clown car publishers (and no, that doesn’t include Baen) didn’t pick them up… they deserve to be deprived of decent reads.

I yield to no one in my devotion to the Baen imprint both as a writer and a reader.  And maybe someday Baen will publish the world, including Romance and Mystery.  Until then, there’s indie.  And for those odd SF/F that don’t quite fit the Baen imprint, there’s indie.

And this is why I walk between worlds, and I refuse to look down on those who don’t fit the Baen imprint and are making their own way.  They might not be Baen-style, but it doesn’t make them bad quality and heaven knows as a very eclectic reader I find room for them in my reading list.

I completely understand if your ENTIRE reading list is taken up with Baen – a vast portion of mine is – but if you have room for other books outside that particular rubric, consider indie.  There are gems out there, waiting to be discovered.