In case you worry, I’m really a lot better today, but we need to go and pick up Cedar Sanderson from the airport for the workshop… so, I need to be clean and ready to go in a few minutes, and this AND blogging won’t fit into my early morning.

I was talking to Kevin J. Anderson the other day and he was telling me that most people are missing how big the ebook thing was, because even our “old” books largely haven’t been seen outside the states.

The eBook Invasion—Taking over the World One Text File at a Time

The world is about to explode—and I mean that in the best possible way. A major change is happening right now in international reading and book-buying. For most people, this is occurring under the radar, but it’s big.

A friend in the computer gaming industry sees the same thing from her perspective:  Tablet and smartphone games/apps are already booming in the US, Europe, and Asia—but those devices are just starting to catch on internationally. The market hasn’t reached its peak yet, not by a long shot. In fact, international smartphone and tablet use is where the US market was several years ago.

Think way back to, say, 2010 and consider how the US market has boomed in such a short time:  Droids, iPads, iPhones, Galaxy Tablets, Slates, Nexus, and countless clones are ubiquitous.  One-third of American adults have tablets and over half own a smartphone.

And the potential market in Asia could be even larger.  According to my insider friend, the gaming industry is holding its breath, waiting for the Asian market to reach a critical mass when everyone has a smartphone or tablet—and therefore become potential customers for games and apps.  It’s going to happen soon, and then sales will explode.

You see where I’m going with this?

A Slow Start

EBook sales in the US burbled along for years, even decades, barely a blip on anyone’s tracking sheets.  High-tech prophets talked about the coming revolution, how electronic text would take the place of words printed on paper. Eventually, we stopped listening because people simply didn’t want to read books on their computer screen.

In 2002, Tor Books released the electronic version of my novel with Brian Herbert, Dune: The Butlerian Jihad.  Their electronic-rights person called me one afternoon, extremely excited to tell me that  The Butlerian Jihad was the #1 bestselling eBook title in the nation, and it had held that position for the entire month!  That sounded like great news—until I asked him how many we had sold.  His voice held an undertone of awe:  “Three hundred copies total!”

Well, that novel ended up selling over 140,000 copies in hardcover, and many more than that in paperback.  From that point, I didn’t pay a lot of attention to electronic books.

But when portable reading devices finally became inexpensive enough, usable enough, and (let’s admit it) cool enough—that’s when eBooks took off. And it happened with astonishing speed, taking many in the publishing industry by surprise, even though they had been thinking about electronic books for a long time.

Suddenly, everybody wanted a Kindle, a Kobo, a Nook, a Sony e-reader or similar device for Christmas or a birthday.  And as soon as the proud new owners had their own little toys, they loaded up their libraries, often with public-domain classics of literature (which they never actually read) or grabbing the complete works of their favorite writers.

Indie authors, fed up with traditional publishers or too impatient to wait for a deal to appear after years of submissions, decided to put up their own titles, charging 99¢ for the novel they had slaved over for years.

Authors like myself, with a substantial backlist of out-of-print titles that no traditional publisher wanted to reissue, released eBook versions . . . and stared amazed at the sales figures that rolled in.  And no wonder—for years, my established fan base had no way of reading my older books except to hunt them down in a used bookstore, and now they suddenly had access to dozens of novels they had heard of but could never find. All for five bucks or less.

Enter the next phase: Today, it’s no longer even necessary to own a dedicated Kobo, Nook, Sony e-Reader, or Kindle device. If you have a tablet or smartphone for other uses, all you need is an app.  You have an iPhone?  You have an eReader.  iPad?  EReader.

Read the whole thing here, and I’ll answer comments as I can over the day.

Things I’ve discovered in the last twenty four hours: it’s a really bad idea to fly with an ear infection, and it might turn you into a zombie.

As in, my ears are still doing weird poppy things, I was zonked by the time I walked off the plane, and  I spent most of yesterday, after landing, asleep. Right now I’m on my second cup of tea, and I’ve not yet decided if I’ll stay awake most of the day.  The goal, of course, is to rest enough that I can teach the workshop this weekend without killing myself. (Or eating my students’ brains.)

Mind you I am medicated and according to my doctor it’s not a virus, so I should not make anyone sick.  I just caution anyone attending to find shelter if I start muttering “brainz… brainz.”

Which brings us to a topic we’ve covered before but which can never be covered enough: How do you cope with physical weakness when your “job” is as much vocation as a way of paying the bills?  When the one thing you want to do when you start feeling better is the work?  And yet the work still takes it out of you?

I don’t know.

What I do know is that, as a society, we’ve become very cavalier about illness.

I meant think back on Jane Austen’s work.  In Pride and Prejudice, Jane catches a “trifling little cold” and is laid up for days.

Nowadays she’d take Sudafed and go on about her daily work.

Which brings me to – are we increasing contagion because we don’t take these things seriously, anymore?  I start getting sick the moment the kids go back to school.  That’s because people go to school while sick, because school doesn’t make allowances for sickness – yes, sure, you can skip classes, but for instance older son says there are no provisions for  grading skipped labs.  And younger son dragged himself in to take midterms on a serious sinus infection.

And of course, they bring stuff home, and I tend to catch it more severely than they do, partly, I THINK because I’m more isolated, most of the time.

We have medicines that mask the symptoms enough we can function, and, of course, we have antibiotics.

Only our antibiotics are becoming less effective.

What do we do?

There are thing I don’t know, like “Is it really bad for your to stay in bed that long?  Is it really better to be up and moving around as soon as you can?”  Or is this just what we tell ourselves because it fits our societal notions, and because our jobs/school/etc. no longer have any “give”.

I laugh everytime I read about the flu lasting “three weeks.”  Do you know anyone who can take that kind of time off?  And that’s a virus, and antibiotics won’t work.

What occurs to me – and it might be induced by stuffed ears and a feeling like I need to sleep rather a lot – is that we have the technology – we can make it better! – to not force people into the office while not quite the thing. (Except for my boss.  I work for myself, the boss is a stone cold b*tch.)

And what further occurs to me is that as antibiotics stop working it will take a while for societal modes to change.

So… how many people are we going to lose when either the first really bad virus (bird flu?) or the first bad bacterial infection rip through the population, while everyone is still obediently dragging themselves in to work?

Wouldn’t it be a better thing to start telecommuting and giving people some room now?

Do you want to be the first person to die for some student’s perfect attendance?

*As most of you know, I’m flying out to Bedford TX today to teach a workshop this weekend.  We’ll forget the fact I hate flying (No, we won’t.  Ya’ll keep my plane in the air till it’s SUPPOSED to land, you hear?  Or you don’t get any more books!) I woke up late, and am trying to remember all the last minute things, so thank you Alma Boykin for stepping into the breach with a very interesting piece. (Yes, I have other guest posts waiting and am likely to use them all over this weekend.  But Alma’s was the first one up.)*

Can a Dragon Play a Flute? Random Musings on Music in and Around Fiction

A guest post by Alma Boykin

Can you build a world without music in it? Would you want to? If space aliens have something analogous to our music, would we recognize it? What sort of music do you play in a space elevator?

As far as we know, humans have been making semi-musical sounds at least since the Mesolithic (i.e. the ice ages). We probably mimicked bird whistles and other environmental noises, and then started creating our own variations on whistles, cheeps, and thumps. Flutes and percussion instruments, or what seem to be flutes and percussion instruments, are found in graves all over Europe, Anatolia, and other places. Why do we do it? Because it’s fun? As a way to communicate with animal spirits? For religious reasons? To irritate the people in the next cave by banging loudly on a hollow log while they’re trying to sleep? Heck if I know. But over the course of time humans developed all sorts of ways to make noises, then put those sounds together into patterns that we call music. And then they put that music into their stories, or vice versa, since sung or chanted ballads predate novels by thousands of years.

Music appears in many, many sci-fi and fantasy stories. It ranges from religious music to bawdy ballads to formal instrumental compositions to something played for friends at a party. Music heals and kills. Can anyone who saw the original 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea movie from the House of Mouse hear the opening bars of Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D-minor” without seeing Nemo playing his pipe organ? Who here remembers bits of the Harpers’ ballads from McCaffrey’s Dragonriders and Harper Hall trilogies? You can put your hands down. Anyone willing to admit to listening to or even composing filk? Didn’t think so and I never have either, even though that’s what got me reading C. J. Cherryh. Slightly to the side, how many members of the general public had ever heard of Vangelis before the TV series Cosmos first aired?

Music can make the world for the reader. Sometimes literally, in the case of Aslan singing creation in The Magician’s Nephew. What people sing, play, like or consider unacceptable can give large amounts of flavor to a fictional world. Much of the Pern story falls flat without music, to the extent that you could argue that music IS the culture on Pern. The teaching ballads preserve the most important bits of history, the warnings about the Threads, and reinforce the social order. In fact, there’s an amazing amount of music in all of McCaffrey’s books, even the Ship Who series. She and Mercedes Lackey just might have the record for musical notes per page of text (although O.S.C. has a few moments, as does David Weber).

Music also helps make alien cultures more alien. Which can be a technical challenge for writers. Take, for example, a reptilian species with a complex society that has instrumental music suitable for religious and secular events. What sort of instruments will they use? Percussion is an easy and safe choice, since most limbs can beat on things or hold sticks or strikers of some form. What about wind instruments? Sure, except . . . your reptiles don’t have lips. Can they exhale through nostrils? How would you design a wind instrument for that (not counting P.D.Q. Bach’s nose-flute.)? Or would they use something powered by bellows, giving you versions of bagpipes and organs? How about plucked string instruments (harp, harpsichord)? Talons and catgut might not get along well, unless the musician chooses to wear a protective guard over her talons, or to clip them, which brings an interesting conundrum if those talons are needed for self defense. Are some musicians members of a special protected, but dependent, class? And what would their music sound like? If the aliens hear a broader frequency range than humans do, that could be an interesting plot point – a spy passing messages through music that human ears can’t register.

Often there’s a social aspect to music. Do the upper classes or castes listen to different music than the lower? Perhaps the political elite listen to simple instrumental selections, savoring the purity of the tone and melodic line, while the lower classes favor complex harmonies and catches, like bawdy bar songs with dropped rhymes (see “The Farmer” by the Wicked Tinkers for an example of the art). If religious music must be acapella, then is party music purely instrumental? Maybe that society’s really radical social rebels sing dirty songs acapella as an insult to the religious establishment.

For a while it seemed like every third short story included music as a way to communicate peace and harmony with aliens. Um, what if the first music they encounter is Queen, Iced Earth, and Black Sabbath, with a little Ramstein just to for variety? Earth might get turned into a smoking ember as a proactive step to keep such a violent species out of the stars! Or we could discover that the Little Green Men are headbangers who revere The Clash the way some of us look at Bach, Buxtehude, and Vaughn Williams. Or perhaps their favorite themes sound a lot like New Country (in which case, there is still no evidence for intelligent life in the galaxy, IMHO.)

Do aliens ever get earworms? No, not the Star Trek kind, but the “oh gads, make it stop, it’s stuck in my head, arrrgh” kind. I ended up writing a story around the MC getting an American folk hymn stuck in her head, and it keeps playing as she’s dealing with a medical mess. Does a character have a tune he always whistles or hums? Does it drive the rest of his work shift up the proverbial tree? And who managed to break into the interstellar fighter-carrier’s PA system and start singing an updated version of “Stand to Your Glasses Steady” without being caught?

And then there’s writing to music. Either here or over at the Mad Geneii’s place, the topic came up (or was it at the Passive Guy’s blog? Anyway.) about using music when you write. If memory serves, it came down to half the group eschewed music as a distraction, and the other half either used it for white noise or depended on it.

I will confess to preferring silence, except when I am fighting a mood or the TV. Gurney Halleck said, “Mood is for cattle and for love play,” not for fighting, but there are times when howling bagpipes or black metal are necessary to get me into the right frame of mind for a battle or combat scene. And sometimes a quiet, reflective movement calms me down when I’m bouncing too much to write a slow passage. It’s hard to beat the soundtrack to the remake of Battlestar for “creepy, something-around-the-dark-corner, did-you-hear-that” moments. For white noise, I have to have instrumental, or vocal music in a language I don’t speak, although some of the great masses are so familiar that they vanish into the background (Mozart’s “Coronation Mass” and “Requiem,” Hyden’s “Lord Nelson Mass,” the Faure and Rutter Requiems, Brahm’s German Requiem, Lauridson’s “O Nata Lux,” I think you can see a pattern here.) The trailer music compellations can be useful as well, again for bits of mood.

How musical is your reading and writing? And what does it mean if a culture has no music? Or if it had music and then rejects it as anathema, as a certain human sub-culture does today?

UPDATE: completely different post up at Mad Genius Club

So, first an update on the – physical – state of the writer.  It turned out that the sinus infection doubled back, and had hit the ears when I thought I’d got rid of it.  Ie. I got better for a little while, then it got way worse, fast.  Meaning I had the wrong anti-biotic for this particular bug.  Yesterday I felt like I was somewhat drunk (as to balance) and completely foggy in thinking.  Now if I’d been drinking nearly enough for the symptoms in the last day I’d have thought it was that. But because I hadn’t, and because I’d been this way before, I said “uh oh, doctor.”

I got the megadose antibiotic that cleared the last time things got this far, and I’m pleased to report my thinking is clearer.  I just don’t have “strength” to pull from.  I keep thinking I can do things, like I volunteered to make Robert an omelet, and afterwards I felt like I’d done a 12 hour shift as line cook.

Very annoying, since now both Through Fire and Darkship Revenge (they’re related, though I don’t think they share chapters.  Through Fire ends, then DSR2 begins.) are literally trying to dictate themselves.  This means I’ll try to write a bit before the workshop (supposing after the trip I’m not laid flat) tomorrow and Thursday (for those not initiated, I’m teaching a workshop in Bedford library (TX) Friday through Sunday (then flying back Monday.  Yes, I’m still terrified of flying, so ya’ll keep my plane in the air, okay?)  If you are not yet enrolled and decide you need it, ping Amanda S. Green on Facebook or email me.  Next year we’re going to try to do it at a different time, perhaps just after Liberty con.) and if I’m sort of spacey over the workshop you’ll know why.

It’s very frustrating to have the whole d*mn things (and btw The Brave & The Free thought it was a good time to start unspooling, too) in my head, knowing they just need to be typed, and have NO strength.

I guess I didn’t have strength before the meds either, but I also couldn’t think clearly enough to want to do anything, so that was okay.

The funny (but not ah ah) part of fever dreams is… they’re fever dreams.  Not to get into whoo whoo stuff, but when my health is weird, my dreams become unmoored in time.  It was in this situation I dreamed of Draw One In The Dark.

For those who don’t know the DOITD story: This was at a time when I couldn’t sell my books even if I printed them in gold.  I’d just crashed and burned with Shakespeare. My agent had dumped me, and no one would touch my stuff – and my agent wouldn’t let me send it under another name without informing the publisher.  This is when I got sick and while sick I dreamed someone brought it up to sign, and it was a bestselling series, though I’d broken into bestseller with another series.

What I dreamed specifically is that I was at the Mission Palms (my favorite con hotel) in Tempe AZ (though that might just be it had been the last I’d been at) and we were having an outside signing at night (when it’s warm, not sweltering) and someone came up with a box of my books to sign and started unpacking them.  They had the Shakespeare, and then they had this other series, including the hard cover of DOITD with the horrible cover and I said, “Oh, man, you are a collector.  You even have the terrible cover.” And she said “Well, I discovered you with – I don’t remember what she said.  MIGHT have been Darkships for all I know.  It sort of slid over me – but then I found everything you ever wrote and the shifters are my favorite.”  And I thought “shifters?” and since I hadn’t written any shifters, the me dreaming was smart enough to read the description.

Then the book sold, and it had a terrible cover, and I thought my career was over and then… well, I don’t know if it was a prophetic dream, but it MIGHT happen.  And if it does and you’re the person who brought me the books to sign, smile, you’re on candid (dream) camera.

Well, last night I dreamed I was receiving an award for my “bestselling” YA SF series.  What made this dream notable is that a bunch of Baen fans had thought it necessary to show up at an award that was CLEARLY normally intended for teachers and librarians and such.  They stuck in a group and stuck out, and made colorful commentary, and I was highly amused.

Well, I don’t know if the books were Baen, but since the only YA sf/fan series I have planned (yes, it’s betwixt and between) is Tiltamouse, and I didn’t think that would win any awards, I thought I’d look at the book.

I did as soon as I got off the podium from getting the award.

Let’s just say that the idea is so stunningly simple and yet so odd that… well… it’s something I always wanted to write it, only I didn’t know I did.

And I tested it.  I told it to son over breakfast.  The reaction was “if you don’t write that in the first two weeks you have free I’ll never talk to you again.  I WANT to READ it.”

I won’t go into how weird this is for older son, much less younger son, so I’ll just say I’ve got more stuff added to my slate.  (The question is will he be willing to do cleaning and cooking so I have two weeks free?  Greater love has no son…)

So, apparently there’s YA SF (With aliens, yet!) in my future, as long as the other stuff dictates itself.  This might postpone Bowl of Red till January.

Do I think it will win awards or be bestselling?  I don’t know.  Don’t care.  I think it will be – son’s word – “kickass” and therefore I want to write it.  And if Baen doesn’t want it (I don’t know how they feel about YA right now.  This is maybe late middle school early highschool – kids all between 14 and 17) then I bring it out.  It’s that powerful.

BUT today none of that is going to happen.

Today I’m going to do overdue page proofs, and edit a story and if there’s strength (maybe after a nap) do an overdue short story.

I am however going to take it easy, because I don’t want to get sick again.  This year has been ridiculous.  I’d resent it less if it were really illnesses – you know, the black plague or even brucitis of the cleaning woman knee.  Instead, it’s these half baked things: sinus, ears, colds, stomach flu.  I mean, how impressive does that sound?

Part of it is stress – no, we still don’t know how we make it for the next six months.  I’m fairly sure we can make it after that, but those six months are a blank.  There are things we can do, but we’re going to be sailing mighty close anyway.  (Never mind.  Right now the most important thing is to write very fast and get both Baen and indie stuff up.) And even after the six months I don’t see the surplus to finance a move.  However – we’ll have to find it because most of our money is locked in this house.  Trying to figure out ways and not seeing them, stresses me.

But that’s not the worst.  There’s the HVAC situation (today I need to call and get an appointment – hopefully – set to do the work next week, after I come back) and other stuff that is too tedious or not mine to report, that is making me tired and unable to sleep well enough, which in turn affects everything, including my ability to exercise.  (I’m still walking 3 miles a day.  Okay, not this week, because ears, but normally.  BUT when I was doing well, I was also doing ½ hour either running or elliptical every morning before breakfast, and I’ve just NOT had the strength for that.  However, it needs to restart, because my ankles are starting to get weakened from not enough exercise, and I’m gaining weight again.)

So, if I can muster it, I’m also going to put the first two of the musketeer’s mysteries up on ebook today, then fiddle with the paper re-edition after I get back.

BUT right now, I’m going to shower and maybe take a nap before I do any of that.  Which makes me feel like a total wimp, but it’s about where I am right now.

So that’s the state of the writer, the state of her dreams, and the state of her lack of time.

This blog post is written in haste.  I woke this morning with a raging ear infection which makes me about moron-level for reasoning, so bear with me.  As I put the last punctuation mark on this, I am going to grab my purse and run to the doctor.  (Well, amble.  I’m not really up to running.)

Yesterday pohjalainen  made a comment about lost civilization stories and how much she likes them.  I like them too.

Of course I don’t exactly believe in them.  It’s not that they’re impossible.  The 10,000 year old city temple they found with magnificent carvings of animals (some of which are either imaginary or long-extinct) and which had no middens (something that makes us think of, say, our modern malls) is not fully explained and could not have been anticipated.  And it seems like every other day a discovery pushes the date at which humans did x further back.

I was reading Dave Freer’s blog this morning and it occurred to me that the thing about highs and lows, and an irregular line of evolution applies not just to history but also to human evolution and to pre-history as well.

We start with the fact that further back than a certain time our information is, of necessity, fragmented and scant.  No, we haven’t discovered everything there is to discover about the people alive in those days.  As with the “missing links” in evolution, likely we are missing most of the stuff that is still there to discover.

Then take in account changing coast lines and where our most advanced population centers tend to be.  Then imagine that oh, ten thousand years from now, after a massive civilizational collapse, our descendants find remnants of a “great civilization” – some long lost village in Arabia stuck circa 700 AD.

This revolutionizes their idea of how advanced we were UPWARD.  Then they discover something, say, a turnpike in Podunk Kansas.  Who in hell is going to believe it.  There will be all sorts of papers explaining how it’s natural.

Because humans like our history tidy.  And I suspect it isn’t.  Depending on what you consider advanced civilization, there might have been several in the past.  And yes, they might have been wiped out without a trace (It occurs to me an ice age would do that very handily.)  And meanwhile there are things we’ll discover that are much older/more primitive, because, well, look at the world today.

When genetic markers first came up, people were saying crazy stuff like we only split from the chimps 100k years ago and therefore they know exactly how deep human history is.  Even at the time reading it, it occurred to me those speculations had a lot of baked in assumptions and precious little solid to stand on.  In fact, every time I pick up a book on the evolution of man I feel like I’m back in my literature courses, where people call each other names over minor disagreements, then go on to make up stuff out of whole cloth.

Again, I suspect evolution is not as simple as we see it.  Not that humans aren’t much different from our ancestors, we are.  But … well, guys, we are a randy species.  And in this case species is blurred as a line.  Turns out that you can, every once in a while, not often, for instance, get a fertile horse/zebra hybrid.  In the same way the more we know of our genome, the more we find other “species” in our line.  Which frankly makes reading our genome like reading a book written by a hundred writers and figuring out whose style it is.

So, have we “advanced” towards our modern form?  Or did we sometimes recede towards more primitive forms.  “Yes.” “Maybe” and “Who are you studying for modern?”

So it is possible that there have been higher civilizations than ours, and it’s very possible that there have been civilizations around the level of say the 18^th century several times before.  Perhaps wiped out by the ice age or other natural disasters.

Or perhaps the little things out of place were created by time travelers.

This is the stuff of magic, the stuff stories are built upon.

Unfortunately you can’t read or write good non-fiction speculation about it, because ten pages in, it all falls into mystic New Age or UFO nonsense.  You get the “And then the Earth changes when the goddess returns” and the book goes flying across the room.  And we won’t go into the greys orbiting the Earth, waiting to take us back.  No, we just won’t.

So I don’t believe in it, not because it’s utterly impossible, but because of the company it keepers.  (Which is not only everything for which there is no proof, but everything which has been disproven but is too much fun to let go.)

So, given all that, what is it about lost civilizations that holds such great appeal?

To me personally it is the idea that no matter how badly we screw up, someone of our genes – or our genus, at least – will be here thousands of years from now, and will be “civilized” if very different from us.  It’s the idea that, once kicked from the garden, we don’t wander in mud and darkness forever.

It also puts a fantastic spin on most myths and fairytales.  The Egyptian pyramids?  Totally the result of a muddled memory of cold sleep!  There were giants?  Well, with our food now…

You see what I mean.  It allows me to dream the past as well as the future.

And I like the idea of cyclical and near eternal things, which is why I love the seaside and the tides.

So how do you feel about the idea of lost civilizations (as story fodder, not necessarily as having existed)?  If you find them appealing, what appeals to you about them?

I don’t remember when or where, but the other day – no more than six months ago, and no less than two weeks – I came across an article saying that the US was very bad in comparison to other countries in educating and promoting people of exceptional IQ.

There is a lot to be said for that, in comparison to the sort of daft worship of high IQ that other countries do.  Being a genius doesn’t make you good at anything in particularly (in fact, most geniuses will tend to drift aimlessly through life because they never learn study habits.)  It doesn’t give you empathy for other people or make you socially adept.  In fact, what it does is make you automatically an “odd.”

I know this because I’m raising one (and by some measures two) of them.  The smarter one sometimes needs a cue card to remember how to tie his shoes and becomes obsessed with things till he learns them, which means giving him an interesting puzzle is a bad idea, no matter how much he loves puzzles, because he’ll spend the next two weeks in his room, in his underwear, unable to think of or do anything else.  (It’s particularly inadvisable during the school year, but we sometimes like to see him during Spring break or summer too.)

We could go into what causes the obsessive periods, which are apparently normal in highly gifted people.

There is also saltational learning – which makes gifted children such a pain in class – it basically means that most gifted kids aren’t good at most tasks they’ve never encountered.  Instead, because they develop their skills in highly targeted bursts, they might be lacking some skills normal kids have.

Say that the task in kindergarten is to color inside the lines.  Most kids at three or four can do this (I couldn’t, but that’s a different reason.  Having been born severely premature, I had issues with fine motor until much later.) They can do this because they’ve spent hours – days perhaps – playing, let’s face it, very weird games like pick up sticks, or whatever which refined motor control.

But let’s take your supergenius (super genius to the rescue!)  He found this “play” boring beyond belief.  So he taught himself to read at three, and has been reading his way through Roman history and (in younger son’s case) “How things work” series of engineering books.

Put him in a kindergarten class and tell him to color inside the lines,

He’s never practiced that fine motor skill, and he won’t know how to.

Let alone the fact that these kids tend to be blunt to the point of rudeness and are likely to tell you “this is boring, may I translate the Iliad from the Greek, instead?”   My kids wouldn’t (well, younger one is STILL teaching himself Greek, but that’s something else) because by the time they went to class they had a modicum of social grace.  But even when they applied themselves wholeheartedly to coloring, they were very bad at it.

So, what does your average genius do?  He or she hates coming in last (younger son didn’t care, and until the competitive gene kicked in at puberty was the hardest person in the world to motivate) so then they spend the next two weeks learning coloring, until they can do it with shading, directional light and depth.

Of course, in the meantime, in your average kindergarten, they failed the rubrics on learning your own address and sorting by colors, but by gum, they’re better at coloring than all their peers and many artists.

That is how geniuses learn and their interaction with the school system if a problem and one that points to the larger point of this article.

In the meanwhile I just want to point out that the lack of sense of proportion, obsessive behavior and cluelessness about things other people don’t even remember learning is why what many countries do, promoting their geniuses immediately to positions of power over others is wrong.

The entire science fiction myth of “you’re a genius, you’ll be the best governor/king/president ever” give me hives (as some people who read my books can probably guess.) because you’re more likely to make a very bad ruler.  The closer you are to your people, the better you understand them and how they see you, and how what you do affects them.

So when the article said something about the US wasting its geniuses, it didn’t worry me a lot.  I mean it worries me in the personal sense.  I think we’re eating our seed corn.  I think that we should have the ability to educate our geniuses in ways that make them better balanced, happier, and more useful members of society.  (At least I hope there’s a way.  I’m trying to make sure younger son doesn’t end up locked in a trash-filled room, muttering to himself.)

But in the macro sense, wasting our geniuses is perhaps smarter than putting our geniuses in charge.

Yes, extraordinarily gifted people can become very good at something, but it takes them a lot of work to “tune” to the level where they interact successfully with other people.

However, the US is wasting ALL its odds.  Our school system is designed, metaphorically, to turn out square pegs.  It’s bad enough to pound cylinders into square pegs, but our system is worse than that: it also pounds star shapes into square pegs.  It flattens circles into square pegs.  And if it can’t do either, then it shatters them.

When my kids were going to school my best friend was the mother of a profoundly mentally disabled child.  Why?  Because the school was failing us both in the same way.

We won’t go into the insanity that’s “mainstreaming” which is pretending that your not-normal child is normal and making everyone feel better, but not teaching the child the things he needs to know and which are within his reach.  So you have a child with an IQ of 48 in a normal 5^th grade class.  His “aide” is doing, oh, sorry, helping him with his homework in fractions, and he “passes”.  BUT HE WON’T be taught to button his shirt, or tie his shoes, or sit quietly or… any of the things that WILL help his caretakers in the future.  This is even worse with kids who are healthy enough they might be able to live independently and who aren’t taught the basics of life and maybe a basic job (counting things, or sweeping, or sorting stuff, or things that people who are impaired still can do and get paid for and feel they’re supporting themselves) because instead the system is so busy pretending they’re “normal.”

They don’t even try with gifted kids.  They tell you that the gifted child will be “all right, anyway” because “he’s so smart.” And so there’s no money to even try to help them.  Which is fine.  They’d probably assign them aides to pretend they’re normal.  Sometimes – and this will tell you the crazy conflation in their heads – they’ll tell you of some special school for gifted children.  (In Marshall’s case, at his level, middle school and higher, the school they found was in CT, boarding, and cost more than we made per year.  They threw that at us as though “Well, if your kid is so smart you must be rich, why do you insist on inflicting him on us.”  Crazy.  As though IQ were bought with money.)

It’s not true that gifted children are okay “anyway.”  I know several Mensans and they’re more likely to work awful, mindless, low pay, and often dangerous jobs than they are to be “captains of industry” or even – and this is the true waste – quietly competent technicians or mathematicians.  The Dilbert comics pegged it exactly when the janitor is the Mensan. More importantly, most Mensans I know are walking wounded, who have trouble forming relationships and always feel marginalized.  (It might be the inevitable result of being odd, but…)

Given this it probably shocks no one that the system is even worse with children who are mentally ill, or handicapped.

I’m fortunate in that neither of the kids are mentally ill.  But for at least a year we feared the younger one was.  We feared it because he has sensory oddities.  (I’ve heard this disparaged as not existing.  Bad news, I probably had the same issues Marshall had.  It’s hard to remember clearly, of course, but I remember complaining that clothes that bothered no one else were ‘prickly” and hearing REALLY low sounds perfectly.  And like him, I had trouble with my eyes working together enough to write on the line, so my handwriting was atrocious AND I wrote really slowly till I was about 10.)  It’s not even unusual.  Something in your brain doesn’t allow the eyes/ears/etc to work together.  In conjunction with this, you might have odd sensory effects.

We knew nothing about this, though as I’ve said above, once they described it I went “oh” – and I know that everyone in the family writes really slowly till the end of high school.  But the system we went through had more “give.”  My teacher in the village might think I was dawdling, but she also knew I knew the subjects and she might complain to my mother about my odd ways, but she wouldn’t send me to detention.

Marshall had always acted “odd” – I had him tested for mid range hearing loss (which I have.) because I noticed that if there was the slightest background noise, he had no idea what you’d said.  He didn’t write or draw until he was much older than his brother who was winning contests at 4. And there was the thing in which he swore to me cotton sweaters were scratchy.  Other minor things, like if you rubbed your fingernails against the car upholstery, he used to get really upset and scream to stop it, because it hurt his ears.  We though he was “eccentric.”

Elementary school his teacher though he was odd but she liked him.  Then he hit the regimentation of Middle School.  Beyond the fact he got heinously bullied by a group of girls in sixth grade, Middle School is when they try to standardize you and give you “standard behaviors.”  The unwritten curriculum is to make the kid behave like every other kid.

We started getting odd reports like that he’d thrown a fit because the girls in front of him were breathing so loudly he couldn’t hear the teacher.  Sounds loony, right?  The teachers thought so.  They wanted to medicate him.

Honestly, if it hadn’t come with the bullying and if he hadn’t got clinically depressed, we might have gone along with it.  We thought he was nuts, too.  And his grades were trawling the depts., and it seemed to us like he wasn’t even trying.

But he was depressed, and well… we took him to a psychologist, who said “uh” and gave us a recommendation to a hearing center that deals with kids like him, and then to a vision center, and then…

He was so horribly disabled (for instance he heard all sounds at the same level) that they couldn’t believe he’d made it through sixth grade with good grades, could read and write and could generally “pass”.  Then they tested his IQ and went “oh” – because he’d been using his IQ to cover his issues.  (And it explained something in kindergarten where his teacher thought he didn’t understand spoken language at all – or at least she didn’t understand why she gave instructions and then he looked at what his classmates were doing to know what to do.)

We started working with him on physical therapy for the senses and now, if he’s not normal he’s so close as makes no difference.  (We need to take him for what we hope will be his final appointment at the hearing center.)

But if we hadn’t had reason to be suspicious of the school, we might have gone along with medication.  I wonder how many parents do.

And then comes “what if your child is really mentally ill?”  My friend Pat Richardson wrote about his family’s issues with this over at PJM.

In the comments people started blaming him and his wife for their child’s problem.

Let me say right away MAYBE some parents are responsible for their kids’ neurosis.  BUT it’s physically impossible for parents to make a child seriously mentally ill.  You might manage an approach to it if you lock him in the closet and feed him through the lock, but the facile Freudian nonsense which is ruining your education, which (mostly through movies and popular entertainment) projects the idea that if you thwart your child’s interest in eating his socks at two he’ll become Jack the Ripper at 30 is nonsense.  I hope all of you knew that, because it’s pernicious nonsense.

As I said, my child was never mentally ill – but he did have problems we didn’t understand, and which made him act very oddly.  The school’s response to it was to treat it as though it were a moral failing on his part and ours.

Society does it one better.  It couples that with treating them as though they’re “perfectly normal.”  It’s mainstreaming all over again.  Pat’s child might do fine in an institution which medicates him regularly.  He’s not going to get that, because while mentally ill he refuses it, and they pretend he’s a fully responsible adult.

Could the school have trained him to take his meds.  Maybe.  My guess is the attempt was never made to explain why or train him.  And now he’s an adult and our laws don’t allow us to do anything.

Peter Grant talked about what we DO do with the mentally ill – we jail them, by and large.  Which is another pounding of pegs into shapes they aren’t.

Do I want a place where society can say “you are crazy” and lock you up?  Not particularly. The problem is that medical illness is not QUANTIFIABLE and things like sensory issues can masquerade as mental illness.  Then, you get the same effect you get in the school where if you’re a little odd, they proclaim you learning disabled or a “problem”.  Or you get the Soviet medicalization of dissent.  (We might get that anyway.)

BUT at the same time there should be an objective “caused arm to self and others” standard that just gets you sent to a quiet place and medicated for the rest of your life.

Perhaps the answer is a delivery system like depo-provera.  Under the skin capsules that dispense your dosage over six months, and if you don’t come in for your shot, they check to see how you’re doing and whether you still do need it. (Do these even exist?  Or is contraception a higher priority than sanity?)

Or perhaps there is no easy answer.  There probably is no easy answer.

No one ever asks you to choose between 100 lashes and a bowl of chocolate ice cream.  Usually the best choice you have is the “best of a broken world”

But what we’re doing, starting with school, is pretending the odd don’t exist, and not only letting them drop, but actively shoving them down through the cracks, so we can have our tidy and “rational” world.

The standardization of human beings is a bad policy.  One designed for an industrialized, one size fits all world, which by and large never came to pass.

And we should be able to do better.

I won’t say the measure of a civilized society is how it deals with its odd members — who knows how to measure civilization, when we only have our race to go off of?

But I’ll say we’re wasting good people and causing suffering that could be avoided, by pretending that all the pegs should be square.

UPDATE: New chapter up at Mad Genius Club

So I just woke up from this dream in which I was watching TV (the unlikelihood starts there) and it was a fashion show centered on these “green clothes designers” who were making brides’ dresses out of people’s trash.  I sort of endured the woman in a wedding dress made of “dried thrown away spaghetti” (Sounds awfully scratchy.)  And the dress of freeze-dried potato peels was kind of cute (you had to be there) but I woke up with a “right, that’s enough” at the wedding dress made of boil-in-the-bag-vegetables bags.  They hadn’t even turned it inside out.  Her veil, starting right at her forehead, was packages of boil-in-the-bag-snap peas, and the announcer was talking about the shadow and light of the design and the symbol of renewal and life from the pea pictures.

I say this as a way of pointing out that you probably shouldn’t listen to anything else I am about to say today, which is fine, since I think it’s one of those days when I’m going to get myself in trouble.

No, not politics. Or even society or aesthetics.

Well, maybe society and aesthetics, but only as a side blow.

The problem I see with trying to promote and sell our books, in a world gone mad.  (Maaaad.  Maaaad I tell you. They make veils out of peas packages!)

All of us saw a dramatic drop in sales this summer, and there’s unaccountable stuff too.  As in, no one knows how to account for what sells and what doesn’t.

So, how are we Human Wave and indie and mid list authors to promote our stuff? (In a world gone Maaaaaad.  Maaaaaaad.)

I don’t know.  I just took a promo workshop with Dean Wesley Smith, and I can see some things that will help… but they help by making the books more like traditional, which involves some expense on my part.  I can do that for some of the books (and am still debating whether to do it for Witchfinder.”  Yes, I know there are authors I can compare it too, like Diana Wynne Jones Crestomancy series, but guys, I’m talking about selling to the distributors, so it’s the old rules.  Is this a “big enough” book in the old terms for bookstores to order?  Now mind you, their ordering even a tenth of what I sell in traditional would be a lot of money (we’d never go hungry again!)

But it means, too, that my laydown is set at that level, and that might affect the Baen books.  And then my publisher kills me.  (Even if I don’t kill my career.)

Are stores still ordering to the net?  Indie stores?

Who the heck knows?

So, that’s not something I’m doing that for all the books (and I’m still teetering on the Witchfinder one.  I will 100% sure do it for Musketeer’s Confessor, because that series has fans.)

So – what to do, what to do?

Stand back.  The libertarian is going to suggest… banding together!

Honestly, I don’t know why I do this.  It’s sort of like half my books end up being about groups.  It worries me.  Maybe that early Marxist indoctrination twisted me beyond reclaiming?  What is wrong with me?

The idea goes something like this “There’s a bunch of human wave writers who read my blog.  If we could have a group site and then make brochures and split the cost of printing, and then whoever is going to a convention can take 100 brochures or so, and everyone gets advertising.”  The follow up “We can call ourselves The Human Wave Surfers.” is totally up to you to consider or not, when you realize that it comes from my mind and that I dreamed about dresses made of pea packages.

No, the problem is not web hosting.  Yes, we do own the human wave site.  We have more hosting capacity than we’re using.  The problem is ALWAYS time.

See right now I need to put up my back list as fast as humanly possible.  It SHOULD already be done and would be if it weren’t for the combination of illness and depression (and you know when you start in one, you don’t know which is driving the other.  No, it’s not clinical depression.  Yes, I know what that feels like and trust me, I’d run for treatment so fast I’d leave a trail.  It’s more this tired, beaten down “oh, what’s the use feeling.”  Which could be caused by real tiredness – I still do a lot, the issue is it becomes uncoordinated and a bit pointless and doesn’t drive towards an objective – or it could be caused by a series of upper respiratory infections.  Or yes.  Until I break one, I can’t tell you where the other is coming from.  I’m working on getting stuff done because that’s doable.)  And I need to do books for Baen.  That’s the priorities.  My own website needs to be redone, and then this blog needs to be moved – an endeavor interrupted by younger spawn being in classes and with a heavy load this semester.

But I could totally design a brochure.  One of my “my brain is dead” is designing stuff.  And if we use Human Wave Surfers, someone (note not pointing at self) could put up a site with snippets and pictures, and stuff.

And we could also, well, more pointedly help each other.  Cross links at the back of appropriate books.  “If you liked this book, you might also like other Human Wave Surfers.”

That sort of thing.  And I’m sure others of you (you’re even sicker than I am.  Sick, sick, sick) can come up with other group cross promotion endeavors at a low, low price.

Or I could be completely insane.  I mean, if I told my dreams to a psychiatrist the poor man would end up spending the rest of his life in therapy.

So, what do you think?  And do any of you have spare time to contribute to the cause?  The end of this is all of us crossing the country in a bus on the Human Wave Surfers Signing tours, wearing t-shirts that say “I’m in the Band.”

Watch and see – all that collectivism when I was young twisted me beyond belief, I tell you!

 

*I know, I know, I owe you a chapter of Rogue Magic.  I’m actually going to take a two week hiatus.  This week because we have a friend in town and we’re having a party a day, pretty much, next weekend because I’ll be in TX teaching a workshop at the Bedford Library.  After that, Rogue Magic will resume.  No, I’m not doing guest posts for two weeks, though I might do them every day next weekend.  (Not this.) Because I’ll be really busy (the workshop beats the stuffing out of you.)  I had to cancel Fencon due to family stuff that requires I be in town.  (That too is a long story.)  So I’ll be away Wednesday through Monday, next week, and that might be mostly guest posts.  Not right now.  I just am not in the head space to do Rogue Magic.  Part of this is that the book finally TURNED — I figured out what I was doing wrong, so I think I can finish it.  IF I weren’t going to TX next week, I’d say I could finish it by next Friday.  As is it might be the Friday after, but it will be done soon.  Which is good, because we rather need the cash and also because I want to do Darkship Revenge (which broke open at the same time.  They’re linked, though not as closely as DSR and AFGM. ) Okay.  I’ve babbled long enough.  I’ll let Peter have his say, and I’ll go clean the house.*

Writing from the heart and soul

 

 

 

I’d like to thank Sarah very much for inviting me to contribute a guest blog post about my new book, and how writing it affected me.  She’s a good friend and faithful supporter.

 

One reads a great deal about how, when writing fiction, characters develop wills of their own.  They drag the author off at a tangent from the ‘scripted’ plot, insist on growing into people very different from those originally in the eye of their creator, and interact in ways that can change their planned relationship altogether.  I’ve had some limited experience of this, having published two SF novels so far and being busy with a third.  The latter, in particular, has surprised me – the relationship between my two leading protagonists has developed very differently from what I first envisaged.  Who knows where it – and they – will end up?  (You’ll be able to find out in December!)

 

However, I don’t experience that sort of writing as involving my heart and soul.  It’s fun, it’s creative, it’s enjoyable – and sometimes very frustrating! – but it’s something I’m basically observing from outside.  One can remain dispassionate if one chooses, allowing one’s characters to dominate the story as far as one wishes, but always ready to reassert control, delete a few thousand words, and take the plot in a different direction.  (Other authors’ experience may be different, of course.)

 

That hasn’t been the case in my latest book, which is a non-fiction memoir of service as a prison chaplain.  ‘Walls, Wire, Bars and Souls’ was very difficult to write, emotionally, spiritually and intellectually.  Some of my memories of prison work are very amusing – for example, I’ve written previously about Sam The Sex God – while others are soul-searing in their utter evil.  Close encounters with murderers, drug cartel bosses, terrorists, religious and other fanatics, sexual predators and the like are often so difficult that one simply can’t describe them in clinical, dispassionate terms.

 

I’d deliberately blocked many of those recollections, not wanting them to be a constant burden.  To relive them in writing this book was sometimes very difficult.  I haven’t included all the gory details, because if the memories are nauseating to me, what will they do to readers who’ve never been exposed to the reality of the sewers of life?  Words on paper can’t adequately convey such moral filth… but even so, I’ve had to try to describe some of the truly evil people who are locked away behind bars.

 

I doubt very much whether most of those so steeped in darkness of soul and character will ever reform.  Nevertheless, if we write them off, aren’t we writing off all humanity with them?  If there’s hope for reformation and renewal in a single soul, isn’t there at least some hope for every soul?  Many will argue that there isn’t, that some people are so far gone that there’s no way back for them:  but if so, doesn’t that deny any possibility for divine grace to move in them?  (Of course, if one denies the divine in the first place, that isn’t a factor for consideration, but I’m not of that opinion – otherwise I wouldn’t have been a chaplain in the first place, would I?)  I provide some examples of how what I consider to be divine grace can, indeed, change souls and lives.

 

I’ve long been unhappy about the very poor, biased and inaccurate portrayals in books and other media of life behind bars.  Those by current and former inmates tend to dramatize and glorify their side of the story, and demonize prison authorities (mostly unfairly).  Those by former guards or executives go to the opposite extreme, while the entertainment industry debases the truth on both sides in favor of sensationalism and whatever sells best (usually sex and violence).  I haven’t yet found a book that struck me as fully balanced;  so that’s what I tried to write.  It’s as fair, honest and even-handed as I know how to make it.

 

I wrote the first draft of this book in 2007, three years after a serious on-the-job injury led to my enforced medical retirement from prison chaplaincy.  It was raw then, too much so to be ready for publication.  I put it aside for three years, letting time heal some of the scars in my memories even as I learned anew to walk properly and adjust to the physical limitations imposed by my injury.  In 2010 I rewrote major sections of it, making it more objective, adding facts and figures and statistics;  then I put it aside once more, because (as I’ve mentioned elsewhere) I didn’t think my writing skills were yet ready for publication.  Finally, I took it up again last year and this year, polishing it and getting it ready for prime time.

 

I hope and pray my book succeeds in getting more people involved with and interested in one of the largest social problems confronting the USA today.  We’re spending as much, if not more, on the criminal justice system as we are on national defense – and much of it is wasted or unnecessary expenditure.  We incarcerate proportionally more of our population than any other nation on earth.  If we don’t reform the system soon, it’s going to grow into an unmanageable, self-perpetuating monstrosity.  Some maintain it already has.

 

I hope ‘Walls, Wire, Bars and Souls’ will contribute to finding a solution.  I’d be grateful if those of you who read it will join in the discussion on my Amazon.com author forum, or here, or on my blog.  There’s a lot to talk about.

 

 

I meant to write a post about something else – three something elses.  They came to me one after the other in the pre-dawn hours, when blog posts usually attack.

The problem is by nine am when I actually could sit down and write, I couldn’t remember what in heck I was going to write about.

We’ll start with an announcement – clears throat: A Few Good Men has been nominated for the Prometheus Award.  Keep in mind, it’s not yet a finalist much less a winner.

Maybe I should talk about books and stories that are heart’s blood and favorite children.

This is something I’ve never fully understood – nor will I ever, I suspect.

I like everything I write – of course, I do.  Okay, not strictly true.  There was stuff I wrote that I can’t remember.  Plain Jane is one of those.  I wrote it in three days, and I can’t for the life of me remember what I wrote in it.  I was very shocked going back to find out that it’s divided in sections.

BUT for the normal, not written in a rush because I need the cash, books, I sort of like all of them, more or less.  At least, they do, as it were.  I might not like the edits done to them, or the cover, or whatever, but I like the books.

And of course, I’m going to rise to the defense of any of my books, if you should diss them.

But in the end, most of them…

Okay, this is best explained by going back to when I was doing submissions on paper and to magazines more or less indiscriminately.  Stuff would go out, stuff would come back, I’d send it out again, it was just what it was, no big.

And then…

And then I wrote Thirst.  When Thirst came out it felt like an insult to the system, and I was crushed for a week, before I sent it out again.

Other stories have had the same effect.  Ariadne’s Skein, which I never sold traditionally, and all of space operas, ditto, and then Darkship Thieves.  These stories, somehow, were “Heart’s Blood” and “Favorite Children” and seeing them rejected felt like I’d disintegrate.

When Darkship Thieves was nominated, I held my breath, afraid it would not get it, and I tried to console myself in advance.

With Darkship Renegades, while I loved the book, I didn’t get that feeling of “I’ll disintegrate now if it doesn’t get it.”

Which, btw, is a stupid feeling to get.  It might never have been nominated at all.

But Darkship Thieves having been nominated, I felt I’d be CRUSHED if A Few Good Men wasn’t, and now I’m holding my breath again – because that book is Heart’s Blood and Favorite Child.

Why?  Who the heck knows.  I’m donating my mind to science, but not till I die.  So for now, it’s a big breath of relief that AFGM is nominated, then breath-holding for almost a year.  (Unless it gets kicked out earlier.)  And it’s not impugning the process or the people doing it, btw.  They of course select what they think best.  This is internal, a feeling of protectiveness and tenderness for the book.  Which is also stupid, since books have no feelings.

I’m a writer and I’m stupid.

On that – we’ve just paid tuition for the boys, and we’re about to crash land.  This is worsened by the fact I’m late on delivery for Baen.  The reason I’m late is that I’ve been obsessing over … tight money.  Makes no sense, does it.

I don’t want anyone to denude him or herself.  I KNOW – good Lord, do I know – most of us are holding on by the edge of bleeding fingernails, and I haven’t even put up anything new in my subscriber page for a while, mostly because I’ve been stuck in a novel.  HOWEVER, if you can hit the donate button, it is much appreciated.  As I said, we have tuition to pay.  There are things that need to be done, including moving – but right now we’re stuck because we don’t have the extra money to rent somewhere for the year or so needed to sell the house.  (No, trust me.  It’s impossible to sell a house with four cats in it.  Particularly these four cats.  And then there’s the guys.  Even if they’re being good, messes pile up and you can’t show a house that’s a mess and not sell it at a huge loss, which we can’t afford. Or rather, it’s not impossible, but it takes ALL my time until it sells.  Which comes to the same loss.)  But until we can move, we’re operating at a loss, because… everything has gone up.  And my income is delayed because of stress over income.  Which, yes, yes, is mind boggling but I have already confessed to being stupid.

At least the indie sales are picking up, which means I MUST get off my duff and put more stuff up.  That also has been affected by worry.  But it will get one.  It has to.

And I’ll resume putting things up in the subscriber area as soon as I resume processing stuff for indie.

For now I’m going to do battle with Through Fire.  Just on the effort it’s taking, it should end up being Heart’s Blood, but weirdly that’s not how these things work.

Two days ago I ignited a fire storm by mentioning that men and women were different: shaped differently by evolution, shaped differently by gestation.

The funny part there is that this wasn’t even the main point of my post.  The main point of my post is that men and women had different wellsprings of strength and gentleness and trying to turn men into women would only break them, not improve them.

I thought the part about men and women not being the same was self evident.  Ask any biologist.  Yes, there are outliers.  Yes, some women are stronger than some men.  Some cats are bigger than some dogs, too, but that’s not the way to bet.

Even the most tomboyish of  girls is more feminine than 99% of men.  Again, statistical distributions – it’s the way it breaks.

But apparently saying this makes me bigoted and a “hater” – I’m rather puzzled at how stating a fact that any biologist will know makes one “bigoted” or who I’m supposed to hate when the fact is rather that I don’t hate men and I do grant them the right to be different.

I find that it’s mostly a lot of reading stuff I did not say that drives people insane – like I’m supposed to be homophobic, because you know, people who are gay think the genders are indistinguishable, and that’s why they are only attracted to one of … Oh, wait, that makes no sense!

Or the gentleman who objected on my facebook that there was sexism against women (of course) and therefore we should stop considering adjectives feminine and masculine.  The example he gave was sensitive, which was a bit of a puzzler for me.  He says we shouldn’t consider it feminine and since I never have (how many characters have I described with sensitive features or sensitive hands?  Go and check how many are female.  Probably none.)

And this is going to lead me to tell you something that is probably a real shocker.

I’d almost guarantee if you’re the average person everything you think you know about the relationship between men and women is wrong and most of it comes out of movies, and a lot of it comes from the sixties obsession with rebelling against the fifties.

What am I talking about?  Well, about twenty years ago, a friend who was very well educated and also genuinely intelligent was talking about men and women and said men had ways of doing things “because men couldn’t cry in public.”

She was talking about the middle ages…

Now there have been times and places where men couldn’t cry in public (the Romans had issues with certain kinds of crying for males…) but it was not universal and certainly not forbidden in all situations.

In the same way, she was convinced that women never worked except at domestic tasks.  This is true, of course, for societies wealthy enough to keep their women immured indoors and busy only about the comfort of the house.  I think if you look at the totally of the human experience that might account for oh, 1% of the times and places.

Even in Victorian England most women HAD to work outside the home.  It wasn’t a choice or empowerment.

Throughout most of history women and men worked side by side – they had to.  There wasn’t enough surplus in the system.

Yes, there were professions reserved for one or the other, usually because it fit the normal man or woman better.  Mostly the men did the brutal, dangerous stuff.  (Not that housework wasn’t brutal or dangerous by our view.  All of it was.  But home stuff was COMPARATIVELY less brutal and dangerous.  And yeah, most of it was deadly dull.)

But it wasn’t unusual for men or women to take on the other gender’s tasks.  I mean, it wasn’t unusual over history.  It was unusual – but existed – at any given time. The outliers – all 1% of them – often crossed over.  Thus we get a lot of women soldiers, though most of them would inspire no one’s romantic fancy (which was the fly in the ointment of the maiden who goes to war tales.  But ah, that makes a better story, and therefore the troubadours do that.  Mind you, not being able to inspire anyone’s romantic fancy didn’t mean they didn’t reproduce.  Witness how many pirate queens and mercenaries pled the belly.)  I don’t know any legends about men who did the equivalent, besides one or two about princess’s maids who… weren’t.

There were certain facts of biology – which science has all but abolished – that dictated treatment of women throughout history.  I.e. a man wanted to make sure the children he was rearing were his.  What is curious is that in most cases this didn’t lead to systems as restrictive as sharia.  Yes, women had to mind whom they talked to and whom they were alone with.  Yes, in many societies they were treated as property.  In many others, though, they were considered equal with restrictions.  Of course men had restrictions, too, but not the same.

To interpret this as men oppressing women is a big piece of folly.  Given how much stronger than us they are, they could have made our lives unremitting living hell ALWAYS.  (And if you’re going to say it was, keep in mind that the life of the average peasant until two hundred years ago was living h-ll to us, whether the peasant was male or female.

Yes, women were restricted, but if you read even regency romances (and keep in mind that’s the upper class) so were men.  At least if the romances are accurate.  You could get a bad reputation for very little.

And yet… Read the beginning of Our Bones Are Scattered about the Kanpur massacre.  Just at the opening it relates the career of a Victorian lady.  Three marriages, children from each marriage, and a thoroughly modern life.

Individuals were still individuals and rebellion ain’t nothing new.  I would almost bet you none of even the most restricted Victorian maids fit the pattern – quite.

And now?  Now the pill and the ability to genetically test offspring has changed everything.  To keep hitting men and screaming “help, help, I’m being oppressed” is not only wrong, it’s a very ungentleman-like trick for people who want to be considered “equal.”And if you want to be equal you should be a gentleman, because those are the virtues for public life.

No good will come of this.

And no good will come of telling those of us who chose to stay home and raise our own kids that we’re gender traitors or – worse – that we’re oppressed.

The funny thing, you know, is that – I was thinking of this yesterday – when we got married we sat down and evaluated our chances for surviving and for one of us, at least, being able to make it in the arts (I wrote.  Dan wrote and composed.)

We judged that because he had a much higher earning potential (if we lived here, something we decided for reasons having nothing to do with money and complex enough they’re not worth putting here) I’d stay home with the kids (because what’s the point of having kids for strangers to raise) and pursue writing. (He tried to convince me to do it before kids, and if I knew what I know now I’d have done it. I’d have gotten in before publishing because completely non-functional and we MIGHT have been able to have him quit and pursue his stuff too.

I considered this a gift – He was sacrificing his artistic aspirations, so that we would have three squares, a roof over head, and enough to raise the kids on.

Was it easy?  Well, no.  I was often – still am – more housekeeper than writer.  Days can slide by when I get only an hour or two a day to write.  But then his path isn’t easier.

I’m completely puzzled by the dogma that man’s work is better than women’s work. It is different, of course, but I’ve done both: skilled office work and housekeeping and for me, for the way my mind works, I’ll take housekeeping.

You see, it’s brutal but I set my own times, and can approach tasks the way I want.  And I can save a few hours to write in.  Dan has had jobs where he worked eighteen hours, came home to a colicky baby and volunteered to take over, while I got a couple of hours of sleep.  Then he got a couple hours, shaved and went back to work.  And even now, he manages the money side of my business, and he works, and he’s rarely “alive” enough to come home and work.

So I thought of being able to stay home and try my hand at making a living from writing as a gift.  In fact, I have male friends who were given the same opportunity by their wives, and they too consider it a gift.

Why should I consider it as oppression just because it fits tradition?  Why should all “tradition” – and this one very recent – be tossed over?  I value questioning everything – I’m American — but surely there is a baby in that bath water.  Why should I consider it as oppression because someone else’s doctrine demands it?

Why should I take in account the opinions of people so wholly unconnected with myself?  People who think all of history was the Victorian ages and the Fifties?

People who think saying men and women are DIFFERENT and each has different approaches to the world is “hateful” and “bigoted”?  People who think adjectives apply only to one gender?

Pfui.

It’s not elegant, and it’s not eloquent, but that’s all I have to say: Pfui.

UPDATE: Different post over at Mad Genius Club.