Category: Uncategorized

*Robin is my lawyer and he insists all sorts of things should be treated as trademarks.  Like “Darkship series.”  I don’t think “Musketeer Mysteries” qualifies, being too descriptive and I refuse to call the Henry VIII queen’s series, if I ever write the other books the “Divorced Beheaded Lottery Series” while the “Dead Queens Books” which is what we call it around the house is way too generic. But he has his own ideas… as you see, and he’s more knowledgeable and experienced in the field than I’ll ever be, (as well as smart and a genuinely nice guy) so he might be right.*

A Guest Post By Robin Roberts:

Trademark Law for Writers

Sarah didn’t appreciate the latest video of skateboarding cats I’d sent her, and asked “Where are you with that guest post?” So I had to cough this one up or get relegated to eating with Havey.

I’ve wanted to write a bit about trademark law and writers for awhile now because its something that I think the publishing business is not handling correctly either in its practices nor its contracts. I’ve looked at a lot of book publishing contracts over time and especially recently, and they can be quite frustrating.  As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, sometimes my frustration is more from the ambiguous drafting than the actual effect of the intended contract language. And one of the things that isn’t as well handled in the publishing business as I think it should be are trademarks.

This is a bit baffling to me, specifically why their treatment of trademarks embodied in the book trade is so unsophisticated.  But let us discuss for a minute what trademarks are.  The classic definition that I use is “a trademark is a distinctive word, symbol, design, phrase or other thing that is intended to distinguish the origin of goods or services”. (Technically “trademark” is for goods, and “service mark” is for services but I’ll just use “trademark” or “mark” here). So a trademark can be almost anything, indeed Harley Davidson tried to register a trademark in the sound of their motorcycle exhaust note and only failed because of a functional doctrine that I won’t go into here.

What are more common trademark issues for writers are book titles, series titles and such. Recall that, by statute, you can’t copyright a short phrase or a title.  So if I write a book, I can’t protect the title using copyright law.  That’s why we often have books published with the same title.

What Is Protectable?

In trademark law, we have a concept of a spectrum of marks with varying degrees of strength. A “strong” mark is one that is very distinctive. The spectrum, from strongest to weakest, is: Fanciful, Arbitrary, Suggestive, Descriptive or Generic. Fanciful mean a word that is madeup or coined for the mark.  A common example is “Exxon” – a word that means nothing in any language. Arbitrary refers to the use of a word that has meaning, but unrelated to the product. “Banana Tires” would be an example the USPTO uses in its trademark booklet. Tires have nothing to do with bananas. These are very strong marks and easily protected.  Suggestive marks are marks that suggest a product characteristic but don’t describe it.  QUICK N’ NEAT for “pie crust” and GLANCE-A-DAY for “calendars” are examples from the USPTO. Suggestive marks are almost as strong as the first two categories.

Descriptive marks are marks that do describe the product. A classic, that seems to appear in every phone book (you remember what phone books are … right?), is “Accurate Accounting”. That’s a very weak mark.  Probably utterly unprotectable or only protectable with a lot of proof that you are widely known under that mark. The USPTO trademark booklet gives us examples of CREAMY for “yogurt” and WORLD’S BEST BAGELS for “bagels”.  Lastly, Generic marks are words that simply mean or have become to mean the product themselves and can never be protected.

In our world of book publishing, series titles are trademarks whether we realize it or not.  I’ve had amusing arguments with authors where I asked about their trademarks and was told that they don’t have any … even as I was looking at the series title on the cover of one of their books.  But where do they fall within the spectrum of marks above?  Sometimes they can be weak if not well chosen, from being too descriptive. A series title like “A Bodkin Nettlesworth Mystery” is going to be easy to protect.  But a series title like “Valkyries In Hell” is going to be weak, as its either descriptive or even generic.

Descriptive as mentioned is hard to protect without a lot of proof of existing recognition in the market.  Lucasfilms’ “Star Wars” ® is an example of a descriptive mark that was protectable because of its rather obviously large amount of market recognition.

How To Clear a Mark?

Clearing a mark means to ensure that you won’t infringe another’s trademark rights with your use. Trademark law works in the United States on a principle of first in time, first in right.  In other words, the first person to use a mark has priority.  (With some caveats on geography that we won’t discuss). So how do we find out whether someone else is using that mark?  Aye, That’s the rub. It is impossible to ever perfectly clear a mark without a literally infinite expenditure of time and money. Just doing a search on the internet search engines is not enough. Frankly, its not even a start. There are commercial firms who will for a fee dump out their databases of state and federal trademark registrations, corporate filings, advertising materials, phone books, etc. for a proposed trademark but then that dump of data has to be reviewed closely by someone who knows what they are doing and each potential conflicting mark evaluated.  For an international company that is proposing to clear a new mark that may be used globally, the costs of a trademark search alone can be millions.  I know, I’ve seen the invoice. Something far less ambitious can still cost hundreds of dollars in search firm fees and attorney time.

So one has to decide how much money the mark is going to represent in revenue and decide when that revenue needs to be protected by due diligence in clearing your mark.

Do I Need to Register My Trademark?

In the US, trademark rights are created by using a mark to sell goods or services or offer them for sale in commerce. Registration is not required.  A mark that is used within a single state can be registered at the state level but that provides very little additional protection and only a limited amount of notice to others.  Marks used in interstate commerce can be registered with the USPTO which provides a lot more benefits in statutory rights (e.g., it’s the only time you use the circled R mark) and a lot more notice to others. Registration cannot be made of any generic mark obviously, and the USPTO will reject marks it considers descriptive unless provided with compelling evidence that the mark is already widely recognized.  Registration costs in the low thousands of dollars in attorney fees and USPTO fees. The USPTO charges fees for each mark for each category of goods or services in which you are registering the mark. So I recommend that a business decision must be made on how important the mark is, what it would cost to register and how much business revenue is protected by a registration.

At a minimum, include in your rights notices that you are claiming a mark and who owns it. After the copyright notice, include something like “’A Bodkin Nettlesworth Mystery’ is a trademark of A. Author”. Using the parenthesis “TM” or superscript TM on the cover will probably be unattractive but it could be done on the title page at least once.

The more important question is who owns your trademarks?  This is where some of my frustration resides in the publishing business.  Traditional publishing houses’ contracts are very uneven in whether they treat the issue at all. Some don’t discuss it, and most are ambiguous at best.  And what happens if your book series’ title was chosen by your editor, if you get the rights back on the copyright of one or more books, do you also get the trademark? If not, will you have to omit the series title from it when you arrange independent publication?

Infringement of trademarks is something I want to address in a later article.

Robin D. Roberts

http://www.robertsandroberts.net

UPDATE First chapter of what will become a shared world series up at Mad Genius Club.  Elf Blood, Free Novel, Chapter One.

Yesterday I spent a considerable amount of time fighting software which meant that I didn’t do much productive.  This was rendered more “fun” by the fact that thunder kept cutting our internet out.  Unfortunately that means as soon as I’m done here I need to go do litter boxes and general dusting.  I cleaned the kitchen while making coffee, which is probably against the Geneva conventions, but we had too many dishes from dinner to actually fit in one load, so it had to be done.

Speaking of which, have dishwashers gotten smaller, or is it my imagination?  The external size takes about the same, but I swear fewer dishes fit in dishwashers today than did thirty years ago.  Is this a memory caused by my getting older (In my day, sonny, we had DISHWASHERS.  Now you have shoeboxes!) or what?  The only way I can figure for them to have shrunk would be better insulation so that it reaches higher temps with lower electricity.  But in that case, like the low flush toilets, it’s misguided because you have to run it twice, which makes it worse.  End of digression – well this digression.

So, once I’m done here, there’s the boxes, and the dusting and the vacuuming and I need to go out and spray weed killer out there – my life is that exciting, yes.

After that, I will do some hours of editing Witchfinder and maybe actually finish it so editor can get it.

Which brings us to…

I’ve got back No Will But His edited, have gone over it and am in the process of getting it ready to put up.  It’s very easy with Atlantis and Sigil, although being html er…  — can I say retarded, in reference to myself?  Because that’s the only thing that describes my relationship with html.  My kids look at me when I say “I can’t edit html” as if I’d just confessed to being unable to feed myself.  (Ah, well, think how much fun it will be in another thirty years.  “What do you mean you can’t zoom, mom?  Everybody can zoom.  My five year old can zoom.  You just warble the govars, and you’re zooming.”) – if I find an error in Sigil I have to take it back to Atlantis to fix, but it’s not a big deal.  (Anyone making Atlantis – if you figure out how to make it open the ebooks/mobi you just created, you have a winner. It can take you from minor to major leagues, and heck, Microsoft will probably buy you.)

Anyway, we’re now trying to figure out if we need to buy ISBNs (yes) and under which identity to buy it – it’s complicated – because we need to get the 1k ISBNs and even I can’t exhaust those in ten years.  (Dan thinks I can.  I’m not sure that’s cute or scary.)  Then I’ll need to contract out typesetting due to a ban totale (imagine that with a Spanish accent) on Adobe products on our machines instituted by the man who says they’re dirty software that can’t be removed.  (Adobe, you’re a dirty, dirty girl – never mind.  The exciting lives of programmers.)

That’s on the slate later tonight, as well as working on the publicity workshop I’m taking.

The Human Wave Garage sale had interesting results.  I had fewer free downloads than previously, and fewer sales than most of the participants, but since then I’ve sold ten of Wings at full price.  (!)

Now keep in mind all the books I put up I had either had for free before, or had been in the free library.  Curiously I had free downloads in every country BUT Spain.  (Go figure.)

Anyway, another uptick since the collection was advertised in Book Plug Friday, so clearly that helps.

Other than that I’m all at sea about how to publicize, which is why I’m taking Dean Smith’s workshop.

My sales overall are very weird this first week of the month.  Normally I have half a dozen short stories, but this week ALL I have is two of the Marlowe short stories, one in England and one here.  The rest is the novel or collections – none of which makes any sense.  Perhaps the price point for short stories has changed again, though I can’t believe it’s up from 2.99.

Further on the slate today is actually getting some stuff up on Kobo and doing an All Romance account for Goldport Press.  I’m still not sure on that one, since now the only nominal romance I have is No Will but His.  People who think that Draw One In The Dark is a paranormal romance are misleading both themselves and potential readers.  People who read PNR would throw Draw against the wall because PNR is the most sex-soaked of the romance genres.  But more than that, the structure is adventure not romance, although because I’m establishing the couple who will carry the series, there is romance.  And because they’re both young and broken, it’s DORKY romance.  (Yes, I know someone in comments will mention a dork is a whale penis.  Yes, yes, let the games begin.)

So, I’m not sure that I’ll ever write much else that can be classed as romance, even at a stretch, but the madman I live with tells me I can do the rest of the Queens and my distaff side war of the roses and – yeah, let the games begin.

Anyone have a spare head and a couple of hands?  I need to double my production.

UPDATE: Oh, yeah, and the musing I didn’t put in.  Are writers emotional vampires?  Was talking to friend last night about how I now want to write the Red Baron as dragon story and I explained that what attracts me is the emotional pain caused by the contradiction about how dignified and well buttoned-up the man is, and the situations the dragon ends up in or puts him in — as well as the inherent fact that the dragon is considered a repulsive (and illegal) shape for a human to assume.  (All shapes are other than human, but you know what I mean.)  This generates such an amount of pain and fracturing that it makes the character irresistible.  And then it hit me “Oh my heavens, we’re emotional vampires, torturing the characters for our fodder.”  I’m adding this to my “Creepy facts about writers.”  Because you know, me, Sarah Hoyt, not the writer, I’m a rather compassionate being who will go out of her way not to hurt people and who will even try to avoid striking back at enemies unless in self-defense.  (If you REALLY p*ss me off, I won’t help you when you’re in desperate in.  But I feel guilty NOT helping.  — and to be honest most of the time the help I DON’T give is help I can’t give to people I don’t trust.  Like, I can’t recommend you to my editor.  BUT I will give you bread if you’re starving, of course. Yes, even if I want to beat you with hammers.  Because I repressed the beating people with hammers thing early, and humans as humans still deserve my compassion.)  But the writer?  Sarah A. Hoyt — THE WRITER — is a stone cold bitch.  Particularly for characters.

My feeling seems to accord with a post on FB by Michael Grant this morning, dealing with his own uneasiness at being a writer — uneasiness I’ve also described as well:

I don’t write, you know. Some guy who lives in my head writes. I just set the table for him. I feed him. Sometimes he does what I ask, and sometimes he goes away. So I show him pictures and hope to get his attention. And then, like today, he appears and says, Here you go, Michael, here’s your book. This is the story. See how it makes sense now? See how fucking easy that was?

This is exactly why for so long I resisted becoming a writer. I knew that was the deal, that I would be a step out of phase, not be part of but apart from. Like I was ever part of. Like I wasn’t always this person, this lurker. Yeah.

I’m a fucking alien, an anthropologist. None of these people becomes a character in my books, they just feed data to the algorithm. I drink and watch and steal an expression here, a clothing choice there, a strong tanned leg, a pale face, a sigh, a too-loud laugh. I think of a funny line. I whip out my laptop. Idea: tattoos that reveal souls. Idea: The old feasting on the memories of the young.

And if you’re dying for a less scattered post, Peter Grant is up at MGC with Sam The Sex God.

For previous chapters, click here

*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 half done.  My wretched health this year delayed everything.  I hope to finish MY edits and cut and add this weekend, at which point it will take another two weeks at the editor).  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.  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

In The Lair Of The Monkey God

 

Miss Helen Blythe, sister to the Earl of Savage:

 

“What darling little monkeys they are,” Betsy said, as yet another bowl of steaming soup was put in front of her.

The soup was hot and fishy, and I felt the great need of some bread.  But Betsy had eaten two bowls, and I’d eaten three, because it was hot and filling.  And they’d got all three of us baths, first, and how and where they’d found or managed to distill clean water without salt I didn’t want to know – but obviously they must have some to drink too.  We’d taken turns in a large tub, with plenty of soap to hand, and Mr. Merrit had insisted that I bathe first and then Betsy before he made use of the rather used water.

They’d found us clothes also, produced with great reverence and a great deal of signs and gesturing between them, while the few monkeys who could talk exchanged words.

The clothes were new, though they smelled musty, and Arya the Voluble, Arya the right hand of Hanuman, as he always insisted on referring to himself, had explained to us that they’d been gifts which they were taking to the lady of the many eyes and the lord of the star bow while sailing “on the power-filled oceans of our own native land” when “suddenly we found ourselves here in this dank prison, and with lamentations we have kept the dresses, for there are no women among us, and certainly hour chance for offering appeasement to the great one of the silvery hands has passed now.”  They had not used the men dress either because “you must see it is all wrong proportioned for us – and to sew it anew would cause the ruin of the garment.  But I’m glad to have it for our honored guests.”

And so the honored guests were dressed and I must say I’d never fully appreciated the difference clothes can make to one’s judgment of a man.  In his normal, sober day to day clothes Mr. Merrit looked like what he was: a man who worked for my family.  A man of decent habits and frugal living.  His face, no one could have recommended, being blunt-featured and almost surly, and his hair – cut short and very badly – was a course and unremarkable dark brown or black.  He would pass unremarked in any street, save maybe for people who had had dealings with him.

In the clothes procured for him by the monkeys – whom he kept whispering to Betsy and myself we should call apes, because chimpanzees are apes, a nicety the monkeys themselves didn’t apply – he looked…  Well, not handsome in the sense of having beautiful features, but—

The clothes he’d got were a blood-red pair of pants, loose and caught at the ankles much like what the monkeys wore; and a bright green top with embroidered little flowers in gold.  Around his waist was a sash in green, gold and red, which I suspected served to hold the pants up, as whoever the lord of the star bow was, he clearly was broader at the hip than Mr. Merrit.  With his blunt features, his eyes narrowed in concern, he looked exotic and vaguely dangerous.  If only, I decided, I could have convinced him to tie a headband around his forehead, he would have looked like a pirate king.  But the idea of making him wear a headband made me wish to giggle, and I had to remind myself of the predicament we were in, lost in a confusing world with allies who were equally lost and who might be unreliable.  One of mama’s acquaintances has been in India – indeed she says he’s not quite the thing, being a nabob but not at all of good birth or a person of consideration – and he talks a lot, and I thought I remembered the name Hanuman as that of a trickster god, like Hermes in Greek mythology, who if I remember was a shocking thief and a liar, and not at all the thing, as mama would say.  And the thought that Hanuman might be one such stopped the giggling in my throat.

Besides, I was sure I looked a complete fright myself.  Or at least, I looked part shocking and part fantastical and, had she seen me, mama would have much need of her smelling salts.

Whatever the great one of the many eyes and the silvery hands might be, she was about my height thought perhaps rather more… ample on the top.  The skirt fit about right, though.  Both were wretchedly large on Betsy who could have used the tunic almost as a dress and – her insisting on the skirt for the sake of modesty – who had forced us to do a hasty sewing job on both tunic and skirt.

Betsy had first been amazed the monkeys had thread and needles, but I pointed out that sailors must, after all, be provided with those commodities.  Then she’d tried to convince me that we should sew both “properly” in tiny stitches that hid the work – the kind of repair she was wont to do on my clothes.  I’d talked her out of it, urging that we didn’t have enough time, but I could tell it pained her, because she said those were the first quite new clothes she’d ever had.  I made a note to get her clothes that were not hand me downs as soon as we got back home.  Then it occurred to me we might never get home, and I felt heartily guilty for involving her in this, it now being clear she had not the least desire for adventure and had only followed me because she liked me and felt some misguided loyalty to me.

She looked well enough in her borrowed garments, I thought.  They effected the same sort of transformation on her as they effected on Mr. Merritt.  In her day to day clothes, she was just Betsy.  And in boy clothes she looked odd and rather too plump in all the wrong places.  But in the green gown embroidered with silver, except for her very short hair, she looked like a little lost princess trying to pass as someone unremarkable.

My own transformation, as I said, would be less of that kind and more of the shocking kind.  The top of my own garment was a sort of little tunic in dark blue embroidered with silver and gold tread, and there were tiny bells sewn to the hem of the tunic, which jingled when I moved.    The skirt was also blue and gold and silver, with bells all along the hem, voluminous but made of very fine silk which tended to cling to my limbs when I moved.  So did the top, a problem worsened by the fact that I had no way to bind my breasts, and no corset or support was provided.

I’ve heard that fashionable ladies often wore nothing underneath their dresses and misted the fabric so it would cling.  This didn’t need misting, and I was very much afraid I was shockingly fashionable.  Mr. Merrit had taken one look at me, turned a dark purplish red, and since then talked while staring at my feet which were still wearing the very scuffed and dirty boots that had been part of my male costume.

He talked to me now, coming back from a discussion with the Monkeys.  “Arya says we can talk to Hannuman now.  Miss Blythe, I must entreat that you try to pay him the reverence due his status, no matter how nonsensical or strange he may act.  I need not remind you, we are entirely in his power.”

I wondered what he thought I would do, but I assented, and presently we were led into a sort of cave, with Arya leading the way, Mr. Merrit after, and Betsy and myself bringing up the rear.

The cave had big heavy doors which were opened to make the way, and two monkeys holding lances straightened up.

Inside it looked like a palace, which had to be by magic.  First because I perceived the “cave” was the same pink tissue as everything else, and I wondered if this were a boil in the poor monster’s flesh in whose gut we were uninvited guests.  And second, because no one could have brought marble floor tiles and silk wall hangings unless their ship had extended to other dimensions.

They certainly could not have brought the throne, massive and heavy in itself, and seemingly made of gold, but – what was more – set on a platform with twelve steps, covered in silk tapestries.

We looked up and up and up.  Atop the throne was not, as I’d expected, a monkey but a rather good looking man, of swarthy complexion, with glossy black hair and very intent and lively black eyes.  He smiled at what must have been my  obvious surprise, and spoke in a good English accent, “Ah, Miss Blythe.  This is my other form.  It makes it easier to converse with mortals.  And we must converse, for I wish a boon of you.”  For a moment my heart sank, as I wondered if this one too would have need of a human wife.  But then he said, “Of all of you.”  And to what must have been our blank stares, he added.  “You see, I need your help to escape this vile prison.”

You wanted a green monster with an ax called Copybook Headings ready to bring on the terror and the slaughter?

Lo and behold, one of the Huns who wishes to remain anonymous has sent me an even more AWESOME sight — it’s a green RUDYARD KIPLING with an ax called Copybook Headings.

When I was a kid I hated, with a burning passion that whole “if you love something set it free.  If it comes back to you it’s yours. If it doesn’t, it never was.”

I confess part of it is that I saw it everywhere in posters filled with the iconography of the seventies: some chick letting go of a dove against a red sunset on the beach, or something.  I can’t say I’m totally against everything that was immortalized in that way in the seventies, but I have the sort of reaction someone has when jabbed with a sharp pin to a lot of them, and any maxim received that way is worthy of skeptical scrutiny.

Since this was mostly advocated for love affairs I have to tell you that I, and Jane Austen and Agatha Christie for that matter think it’s dead wrong.

If you have a relationship and it’s working, but not fully solid yet, sending your partner away (or having him go away) for a long period will break it 9 times out of 10.  And even if it’s solid, the breakage rate for long distance relationships is something like twenty percent, judging from the village where men went away to work abroad and women stayed home.  And even then, I’d bet it wasn’t higher because most women didn’t know and didn’t want to know what the guys were up to while they were away, and the guys pretended they couldn’t count and that the new kid didn’t inexplicably come out with blue eyes.

Okay, it’s more men than women who stray while away, because men are more tactile and visual.  Maybe it was why most traditional societies had a built in “man’s infidelity is not as serious as women’s” or maybe it was because men couldn’t get pregnant, women could and there was no serious way of preventing it and therefore women straying threatened the structure of society, while men didn’t.  Or maybe the feminists were right and it was just seeeeeeexis! (Why isn’t this as easy to wail as raaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaacis!)

Where was I?  O yeah, out here, in the weeds.  Right.  To get back to the purpose of this post, if you have a romance going for the love of heaven don’t tell your girlfriend/boyfriend that you should see other people in the hopes that he/she will come back to you afterwards, because that’s just stupid on stilts.  Every time I come across this plot on a TV show I lose all interest in the rest of the series because it just means both characters have mental issues.  (Not that I’m opinionated or anything.)

A lot of love and friendship – “I’ve grown accustomed to your face; it almost makes the day begin” – is what used to be called propinquity or to put it in Agatha Christie (and Jane Austen) terms “They were thrown a great deal together.”  I can hear that in Portuguese and in my grandmother’s voice.  It was the “discrete” way for older relatives to arrange your marriage when I was young.  Grandma or great aunt would invite so and so’s cousin over a lot while her grandon/nephew was visiting and “they were thrown a great deal together” with no other amusement.  Most of the time it worked.  (What?  It would have worked on me to.  In fact, it was in a fair way to, but it went astray for reasons beyond everyone’s control.)

Likewise, I had a friend in college, whose wife went away a week after his daughter was born.  She came back three years later (he’d been raising this kid on his own while attending classes, mind, and working to pay for both their living, so he never slept.  I never had a romantic interest in him – not my time – but I admired him greatly, because he lifted his burden without complaint even though it was killing him) very ill, and he took her in and looked after her.  Was she his then?  I doubt it.  We graduated and I got married in the next year, so I never got to hear it, but I bet the minute she got over lingering effects of illness she was off again.  So the test is not even a test, it’s just stupid.

So the revised Sarah Maxim is “If you love something, hold on to it.  What, are you stupid that you need to be told this? And if it comes back again, make sure you put it in sheep dip first because who knows where it’s been?”

However the maxim “you have to be willing to break it” does apply to relationships, as well as to everything else.  It’s a matter of levels, though.  Someone who breaks a marriage because they have an argument over painting the bedroom or mowing the lawn is not proving they are strong – they’re just proving there’s something wrong with their head.

OTOH if Dan suffered a brain lesion and started beating me and there was no cure and no way to stop him, I WOULD walk away.  However, our case is different, we’ve knocked through – pardon – most of those “you have to be willing to break it” moments and because we were, and because both of us knew it, we never went too far and we stayed together.

Same thing with friendships.  I mentioned here the friend I lost after 9/11 – actually around 2006 – because she wouldn’t shut up about politics, and she wasn’t DISCUSSING them either, just shouting talking points at me.  “War criminal!” “No WMDs” “Are going to put all homosexuals in camps” etc, etc, etc.  (The total lack of irony in ignoring what Islamic regimes DO to homosexuals—no, I won’t go there.  I actually pointed that out and she looked confused then told me it was cultural and accused me of being racist.  Never mind.)

The thing is it had gotten that far because I wasn’t willing to break it.  I liked her, the kids liked her, she’d become part of the family.  I knew – to be blunt – that something wasn’t right up there.  But which of us is totally sane?  Okay, so her hangups were particularly extreme and she would go on rants for extended periods about things that made no sense.  But it was only sometimes – so I let her rant even when it offended me.  And when she made crass political statements I deflected it with a joke but I never told her “that’s asinine” or more often “that’s heinous.”

And so she had every reason to expect she could push it yet again, and she could push it that far.  Only she couldn’t.

It is an unfortunate trait of my character to let myself be pushed around, until suddenly my back is against the wall and I can’t be pushed further and then I turn and fight.  I’m fairly sure it has been a great shock to people – like my ex-agent – and it’s not quite fair to them, either.  I’d change it if I could to give more warning, but see the reason I let myself be pushed around is that it’s less trouble and the white-hot-heat of my attention is on my work and my family, which means I don’t have room for any more trouble. So it needs to rise to the point of impinging on the things I DO care about before I snap.

My relationship with my agent is actually a good example of what goes wrong when you’re not willing to break it.  For years she’d been “pushing” it by rejecting things before sending them out or by getting such weird answers that I wonder what the letter she sent out was (Kris Rusch found out one of her agents was sending things out with “this is awful. She insisted I send it, so I am.” Not literally, but that was the gist.  For various reasons, I think that happened at least twice.  I never got to see the letters out though.)

But it wasn’t until Sword and Blood that it started truly annoying me.  First, because the answers I got back seemed to indicate people thought it was a comedy, which they couldn’t think if they had READ it at all.  Second, because they couldn’t get that idea unless her letter out said something like “A fun adventure” and their heads broke trying to picture vampires/a world in darkness/a fun adventure.  (It’s dark, with sexual overtones.  Oh, fine, yes, “Oh, Sarah!” It’s dark with female dominance sexual overtones.  Deal.  It is what it wanted to be. There’s a certain resemblance between me and “Oh, John Ringo, NO” We both get abused by our muses who periodically make us write stuff that we don’t want to.)

Second because she then pressured me to sell to a small press who didn’t seem to know what to do with it, including having it checked by an “amateur” proof reader who – for the love of heaven – presumed to correct my French by using google translator and my names for the musketeers by deciding the ones from the first (silent) film were the right ones.  (A piece of trivia for you: Dumas only named Aramis – Renee.  Also those people who say “but D’Artagnan really existed, the story was based on real people, so D’Artagnan was Charles” – PFUI.  PFUI with bananas on it. – The story was based on a story about four cousins from Gascony who might or might not have had an adventure involving the Queen’s ring.  In other words, it’s “real” like The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress” or “A Few Good Men” are based on the American revolution.  However, that doesn’t mean that Manny was really named Thomas or for that matter that Jefferson and Adams were involved.  The people who think that Dumas just wrote down what the musketeers did and were need cold compresses or perhaps a rock to the head.  “Based on” doesn’t mean “it’s an account.”  In fact, I think the only thing “real” about the musketeers was the “rumor of an adventure with the ring” and the fact there were four of them.  Okay, and he picked the name D’Artagnan, from near the Charles de Batz’s domain.  DOESN’T MAKE THEM THE SAME PERSON, even the locality is riding it like a rented horse.  Ahem.  Where was I?  And who put this soap box under me?)

Note I signed the contract with the small press, and it wasn’t just because at the time I was still under the impression I needed an agent to continue working – it was just too much trouble to break the relationship and I kind of liked her, and we’d worked together for eight years.  But it rankled, and it acted like a burr under the saddle.

And then there was the whole “we’re now going to publish select works” from her agency and that broke it for good and all, because I could no longer trust them.

It might not have broken it, if I hadn’t already been feeling impinged upon, and if I’d given her warnings it might have saved the relationship, at least to the point of breaking with greater decorum.  BUT I didn’t realize how resentful I was until it was ready to explode, and then I did at a touch.

Is it the same with publishers?  Yeah, sort of.  I love Baen dearly and I can’t imagine them doing this unless Toni dies (please don’t die, Toni!) tomorrow and is replaced by someone who was trained in NY publishing and (it goes without saying) isn’t all there – however, if Baen said  tomorrow “You can only work for us, under any name.  Look, we put it on the contract.”  I’d be out a there so fast I’d leave streak marks.  No, the indie doesn’t (yet) pay even vaguely enough to allow me to live from it.  But that would impinge on my ability to work by forcing me to write ONLY what they wanted and I’d be willing to starve rather than submit.  They know that, too, and even if they were crazy enough to do it (actually stupid.  Nothing can be gained by “owning” a writer.  Art doesn’t work that way and, malgre moi, writing is a form of art.) they wouldn’t because I’d just walk and what’s the point.

However, if you’re a newby signing with an unknown publisher remember that.  Make sure they know you’re willing to break it, and what your break point is.  Kevin J. Anderson has told me he never got a good contract on a deal he wasn’t willing to walk away from.  The ones he REALLY needed and was willing to sell at any price, he got treated like cr*p on.

But – at the bottom of the fourth page – what I meant for “You have to be willing to break it” wasn’t even for relationships, but for any work of creative invention, any living arrangement, anything that is not quite right but you’ve grown accustomed to.

You don’t need to break it, but you have to be willing to.  I talked yesterday in Mad Genius Club of breaking a character by having him do something heinous and out of character and how this was bad.  It is.  But I’ve done it – in outline and first draft – more often than any of you wants to know.  The thing is, until you do that, you don’t know where the boundaries are and when “The character breaks” and if you don’t know that you risk doing it accidentally and sending it out there and having the readers hate you.  You have to break them a few times before you know where the boundaries are.  Which means you have to be willing to break it.

This might sound obvious and easy, but I used to be so careful of my novels and so afraid of breaking them that I often got blocked for fear of going wrong – of introducing the wrong incident or the wrong tone, or making the character go too far.  Don’t be afraid.

Particularly in series, being willing to break it is important.

And my husband once got me out of a deep blue non-writing funk by sitting down at the computer while I was getting a cup of coffee and having my characters break out into a wild bisexual orgy in the middle of a court appointment.

I was so indignant because my characters would never do THAT that it made them come alive in my head again.  Because I knew what they wouldn’t do I knew what they SHOULD do, and the novel went on (after I erased the orgy.  No.  It’s never been published.  No, when I rewrite it the orgy won’t be on it.  No, I erase it and won’t put it here for your prurient enjoyment.  SHEEEESH.)

If you’re creating something alone or with someone you have to be willing to break it to know how to make it really strong.  This applies to works of art, relationships, and works of mechanical invention.  It doesn’t apply to babies (unless you think changing their diaper breaks them.) Your mileage may vary.  See your dealership for details.  The author is not responsible for acts of criminal stupidity on or off stilts committed by acting on this advice.  Caveat Emptor and don’t go acting like you don’t have a brain.  Just consider where your limits are before they’re hit. That way you might save what would otherwise be irretrievably broken.

 

 

 

 

There is a joke I THINK Terry Pratchett makes, but which we were making before we ever read him because my family used to make it (about me.)  When the kids were little, we used to say that they were most likely to get kicked out of the human race for shoving.

We don’t do it much anymore, because we achieved our goal, and now both legally adult, they are reasonably human.  Though I’ll point out one of them might be an alien.  (We just haven’t decided which yet. Right now I’m inclining to Robert because he’s sporting a beard and we all know beards mean you come from another and evil world.)

This brings me to the whole “what is human” which excited much discussion here a few days ago. No, for the record animals aren’t human, though they might be sentient to an extent and that might entitle them to some protections for the sake of OUR humanity.

What do I mean by that?  Well…  Humanity is earned.  Oh, not before the law, and not for others, but for ourselves. As individuals and as societies we must each earn “humanity.”

And what is this goal?  What is so wonderful about being human?

Well, nothing if you don’t make it so.  When I say we must earn human I mean we must attain the right to the protections due a human being – the right to be respected by other humans.

In some parts of the world and in some cultures, what you have to do for that are things that I would consider sub-human or inhuman.  But this is why each human and each society must earn it for themselves: the standard to aspire to is internal and so must the proof be.

Note that I’m not making moral or multi-culti equivalence.  As an heir to the great Western tradition and a student of history, I believe our cultural norms and what we consider “human” is better than what other people consider human (and yes, whoever asked in comments – not enough coffee yet – we should cover “the things they no longer teach in school.  Because.  Hey, would there be interest in you tube “courses” on great literature from a non deconstrutionist  perspective?  Ditto history?  I’m not an absolute expert, but I can do some of it and I know people who know the rest. I will not pretend to systematic knowledge, but it’s more than is being taught in schools – or even was thirty years ago, since I’ve had to acquire most of it myself, step by step.)

My idea of human is firmly based on Western tradition and therefore in the roots of Christianity and Judaism.  It includes such things as behaving decently to others; looking after yourself and those dependent on you; taking responsibility for your own actions; not hurting those who have done you no harm/are defenseless.

It also involves recognizing in other humans creatures like myself and respecting them for the sake of THAT if for no other reason.

This is what makes it so hard for me to even discuss whether those babies whom Gosnell dismembered were human.  If they’d been allowed to develop, they’d have been creatures like me.  Therefore a crime against them is a crime against me – against my own humanity and my idea of my own humanity, which is what keeps me from going around and killing everyone who gets on my nerves.  It is also a violation (of course) of the “do no harm to the helpless and harmless” and… too many violations to count.  I get sick when I think about it.

But here’s the thing, in my view the worst violence people like Gosnell – or the sainted Che whose favorite pastime was kill entire families personally, because he believed in artisanal murder – did was to himself.

I don’t know if there is such a thing as a soul – there might be.  I think there is, for various reasons for which I have no proof – but whether there is a soul or not, or whether it survives physical death or not, there is something integral to each individual, something unique and personal and that makes them what they are.  (In a character these are the internal, inviolable characteristics about which I go on at length in MGC today.)

Okay, so maybe Gosnell and Che were born broken.  I have no way of telling they weren’t.  We know some people are.  I can almost guarantee that just “they were abused” (or indulged) as children isn’t reason ENOUGH for what they became.  Ditto Stalin and of course Hitler and all the “large scale” monsters. I’ll leave the discussion of whether psychopaths are “real humans” for other people.  One thing I know is that we can’t decide psychopaths AREN’T real humans and treat them as things, because we CAN’T identify psychopaths.  There’s no measurable, scientific proof.

However, if they weren’t, somewhere back there  they were normal children, who, in growing, became people who do things that people shouldn’t DO.

They broke the fundamental laws of what makes them human and therefore cast themselves outside humanity.  (There’s that old story about a mark and stuff.  Might not be wholly stupid.)

So why can’t we decide people who do that aren’t human?

Because we have no way of telling for sure.  There are things that can make people act as non-people but which are recoverable from.  And no, I’m not going with “illness” theory of crime.  We’re all ill.  It’s called being human.  There are cracks in the design.  And I’m not going with the therapeutic approach to murder.  Sometimes, when someone is a clear and present danger to himself and others, removal from society by death is the best thing you can do for them and others.  It should of course be done with dignity owing a human, not for them, but for you.

(Of course there are all sorts of things to be discussed about giving the state power of death over any citizen.  But that’s another and more complex discussion.)

To remain human – to remain true to myself – all things that come in the shape of a human and present externally as a human need to be respected for the sake of myself and our common humanity.

Now that respect varies in kind, and different respect is owed to the helpless and harmless than to the hardened criminal who is threatening you.  Self defense is acceptable for humans AND for societies.  And let’s face it, if the person is really that far out of his/her mind, the best thing to do for the sake of whatever humanity remains conscious in them is to stop them doing more harm by putting it beyond their ability to do so.  If court systems and jails were secure enough, that would suffice.  But we know they aren’t.

(I find it particularly perverse when people advocate death to the unborn – particularly the viable unborn – or the newborn, or the disabled — who fit harmless and helpless but are against the death penalty for proven and unrepentant criminals.  I can’t even begin to imagine how one gets to that state of broken, though I believe it starts with good intentions and trying to be holier than our peers.)

However, in principle, unless I’m really mad, regardless of the people’s crimes, I do NOT advocate setting them on fire in the public square.  They might deserve it, but they’re human as I’m human.  And for me to respect my own humanity I must respect theirs.

The same applies to respecting the limited sentience of animals.  I should respect animals where possible and not torture them not because they have “rights’ but because I’m human and humans don’t/shouldn’t hurt the helpless.  This does not exclude killing them (as humanely as possible) for food, but it excludes abusing them.

And if vat meat becomes available at a decent price (yes, the recent hamburger thing was actually not that bad and the price will only fall) yes, I will give up on eating little bah lambs.  But not until then.

Pardon me the scattered post – there are a billion things needing done today and I can’t seem to settle.  But this should be enough to start a discussion and because I’ll be absent much of the day, I’d appreciate troll patrol from the regulars.

If it’s not clear what I’m saying is that you don’t make others earn being human.  You assume they’re human so you can earn YOUR OWN humanity.

There’s a somewhat related post by me at MGC.

 

To vary our fascination with English poets, today we’re going to hark to Tennyson who, yes, is an odd choice for this blog, being very much an aristocratic court poet, but who, never the less was touched by something.  (I’m not going to presume on what touches poets, though I’m to understand Tennyson was a very moral man and all.)

I like his cadences, but most of all I find his poems are a never-ending source of titles.  And if I can remember not to spell it like a type of onion, the lady of Shalott is one of my favorites among his poems.

Of course, this is not about poetry, except in the sense that I like to pretend to lecture you lot (ATH is culture) when most of you are way more educated/better read than I.

No, this is about separation, distance, and what it does to people.

The Lady of Shalott first commended itself to my attention when I was going through puberty because it was such a perfect resonance to my situation.  The poem, itself, of course, has a lot to do with a woman’s sexual longing and a wish for (a form of) liberation even if it costs you your life.  Well, at least it does to me, but it might have a lot to do with identifying with it as a teen.  We never studied Tennyson in school because he was an icky Victorian and everyone knew Victorians were repressed prudes, and exposing young people to them would probably scar them for life.

For those of you not conversant with the poem, it’s about a Fairy Lady living in her own enclosed space and looking at the world outside through the magic web she weaves.  Like her I felt very much set aside, though it wasn’t a matter of space.  I attended the local school until I went to school in the city; I shopped in the local general stores; I walked the same streets.  But though my family was materially poor (not that we knew it) we were still massively wealthier than the people around us (often a matter of the use we put resources to) and we were also educated.  Up to fourth grade I could have been one of the local girls, except I read too much.  But after fourth grade, when most of my classmates when to work in the textile factory, and others went to the local middle/high school, mom decided (having looked at scores) that my only hope at college was to go to a magnet school downtown as my brother had done.  And in our family college was sort of expected, because – I’ve told my kids this too – we were not wealthy through land (what there had been in the family had been lost long ago) and we were not wealthy through business or not in a general way.  My family has always eked out (or often icked out) its living in the affairs of the mind.  Mostly through engineering and medicine, but some have gone into law, psychology and even writing (no, I’m not the first, but I’m the first non poet.) My only inheritance as my parents pointed out to me and I point out to the boys is a mind and the ability to use it.

This meant that though I still came home every day, and spent a lot of time hanging around the village, I was no longer of it.  A year or two, and I couldn’t really talk to my old classmates and friends.

And then there was the old mating game. There simply wasn’t anyone in the village whom I could date.  It’s not just the fact we’d have nothing to talk about, but that well… there was a social distance.  Most of the local boys treated me as though I were a vaguely threatening alien.  (To be fair, my being an odd, most boys treated me that way once I opened my mouth.)

The normal way for this to go for people in my situation is that you met boys going to high school and you formed your circle there.  I went to an-girls’ high school (which is why I’m here to tell you that all-woman planet is not an utopia but all the circles of hell in one.)

I had classmates who made arrangements within the school (I know this because two of them were found beneath some bushes in the ornamental garden.  I’m still in the dark about how they managed to drag a double mattress there.  They lived nearby, but no one had cars. I’m also still flabbergasted about how I never noticed it, since they were both second-circle friends – i.e. not inner circle but the next level.) but I never had any interest in female bodies.

The more common way to cope was to do “classes in the café” where you cut class and hung out at the coffee shop where the boys from the all-boy school across the street hung out.

Unfortunately there was that thing where I was expected to make it to college.  Also, I was an odd, and probably wouldn’t get flirting if it bit my nose off and ran away giggling.  (In fact all relationships I’ve had, and those that I declined, the other person eventually had to come out and be blunt as in “Do you want to date?” or more such.  Because I’m VERY VERY DENSE when it comes to emotions.)

So I felt like I was living in a bubble where nothing ever happened while real life took place around and past me.  In that situation I couldn’t help but be fascinated by The Lady of Shalott.

This situation applies to what I’m going to say – but more applies, too.

What you have in the Lady of Shalott is someone very busy with work that’s not directly related to her sustenance and which only allows her to see the world at a remove.  Her life is comfortable: She lives with little joy or fear.

But everything new and everything exciting comes from outside.  She’s in a world of her own, both remote and insulated.

If you’re seeing our ruling class, you are right.  They too live in a world that has very little to do with the everyday world of men for most of history.  They weave their web – of theories, of regulations, of the involutedly just so stories that are Marxist analysis – and then they see the world only in it, reflected in it.  This is what I refer to as “drinking their own ink.”

They have been schooled to such an extent that instead of testing theory in the world, they view the world through the theory.  The stimulus didn’t work?  More stimulus is needed.  There are more unemployed? Well, we need more assistance.  Health care is too expensive?  Making it government controlled will make it cheap.  People want to kill us? We need to stop being racist, because little brown people.

Any one of those circumstances can kill us and destroy society, because stimulus only destroys the value of money; unemployed don’t want perpetual assistance and to the extent it works it encourages dependence and lack of initiative; as far as it’s observable from history, since the pyramids, no government project was completed on time or under budget; thinking that people with a tan are inherently oppressed and unable to have just as crazy and non-legitimate grievances as your next door neighbors is not just a form of racism, but one that can kill you when the other culture interprets appeasement as weakness.  (Oh, and for the record, I am a person of tannitude, and I can have just as crazy ideas as the my pale-skinned husband.  Crazier, arguably, given what I write.)

BUT since they can only see the world through their web, they can’t break out of it.  Curiously, they are also enamored of the more ah… carnal aspects of “normal life.” If you go over the Lady of Shalott and even without being an English professor (Maypoles, really?) you’ll see that a lot of courting and mating behavior is highlighted, and when Lancelot bursts on the scene it is as a vision of manly boldness.  There are also funerals, though, and that too is important.  Because what the Lady of Shalott is seeing in her poem was the “real life” through the rituals that people have imbued in it.

Charlie Martin and I are doing a thing on ritual and its need for writers, over at PJM (yes, yes, doing the piece after this.  Yesterday was eaten by re-doing some covers.  Sue me.) But ritual is not just needed for writers.  It’s quite possible (I ask those of you who know this better) that ritual is the thin layer of lubricant between humans and the world.

There is a tendency in Marxist analysis to view ritual as “the opium of the people” —  mayday and Halloween and all being ways of keeping the serfs from revolting.

They’re wrong on that as on so many things.  There is a fundamental lack of “getting” humanity which is needed of course, because if they “got” humanity, their beautiful, utopian vision would be ruined.

Humans, serfs and rulers alike, except where impairment exists, are all quite smart enough to know where this life leads.  You can say it bluntly, “We’re all dying of a fatal disease.  It’s called life.”  Shakespeare said it better.  Heinlein stole it better.  But your average guy on the street knows it too.

Into this knowledge that our time here is brief and that like those who came before us, we too will eventually be dust and bones and our memory forgotten, all we have is ritual.  There were ways in which life was supposed to go, and each of them was imbued with its own ceremonies – religious or just customary.  There is courting, and it has rules – though those of us who are Odd tend to not get them unless they’re written on the inside of our eyelids – so we have to contrive our own approximations) – there is marriage, there are children, and then there’s death, with its own rituals.

This is how life used to be.  The rituals changed, but they usually changed slowly enough – except through invasion or conversion, and even then it wasn’t instant – that people know what they were “supposed” to do.

I’m not going to tell you – I’m an odd, okay? – that I approve of people being forced into a pattern, but even for people like us it is a good thing to know the pattern is there.

The problem with our ruling elites is that their theories say all patterns must be discarded – all traditional patterns.  They take the idea of culture-influenced development so far they think ALL development is cultural.  They see life through their webs of theories so much they think only the theory is real, and reality can be infinitely molded.  Thus their ideas on raising “genderless” children (because hormones don’t matter before the beautiful theory) their ideas on how women should act just like men in sex and life (because hundreds of thousands of years of different evolutionary pressures are for sissies!  They have theory, d*mn it), and their theories on how punishing the producers will make us all rich, rich I tell you!

The problem is reality is hard and has sharp corners, and Tennyson knew no less than Kipling that contact between the lovely visions in the web and the real world ends only one way.

At least the Lady of Shalott wasn’t trying to govern those people out there that she knew only from glimpses and longing.  But our intellectuals are.

As things spin more and more out of control, their theories are becoming more tattered and strained.  Despite their fascination with and longing for “real” – for violence and sex and anything that will break them out of what they know to be an artificial paradise – they cannot see where the true problem lies.

The true problem is in that wheat harvesting and reaping, in the marrying, in the business of life.  They’re disengaged from it, separated from the rituals that gave meaning to the lives of humans for centuries.

Instead, they have theory and they want to “change the world” and “make a difference.”

Only the web only shows shadows.  You can keep printing money and mask things for a little while.  You can keep more glitz, more glamour, more cowbell coming. It has to be kept going, in frantic running to catch up with what can never be caught, like the curse of the lady of Shalott:

No time hath she to sport and play:

A charmed web she weaves alway.

A curse is on her, if she stay

Her weaving, either night or day,

But the web affects the real world, not just threads and not just watching it.  And the web doesn’t match with the world.  And the more they do the more things break.  Their theory tells them they are on their way to paradise, but things keep getting worse.  The only way they know is to keep weaving – to keep supporting models that don’t work, because if they say or even notice they don’t work they’ll find themselves ostracized.

Maybe they like their ideological predecessors eventually they’ll fight those people affected by their crazed weaving.  Maybe they’ll decide it’s all the fault of humans.

Let’s hope not.  And if yes let’s hope we have enough guns and enough gumption to keep the mass graves from filling.

But one way or another, the web will tear and the lady of Shalott will make her doomed trip to Camelot, where she can only arrive dead.

One way or another – the long route or the short – whether they get their very short splendorous (ah!) reign of equality in poverty or not, the history of humanity shows that sooner or later sanity returns and the rituals of human life: plant and reap, marry and reproduce, die and be briefly remembered.

They can take many forms and I’m not advocating a return to agriculture – but the underlying form will be there again – because despite moments of cultural insanity, our species usually finds a way to survive.

So – be not afraid.  1984 is impossible in the long run.  Brave New World also.  There might be choppy waters ahead.  They might last the rest of our lives.  But in the end, we win, they lose, because reality is on our side, and all they have is fairy weaving.

‘The web was woven curiously,

The charm is broken utterly,

Draw near and fear not,—this is I,

The Lady of Shalott.’

 

 

 

 

I keep running into people who say that you should never, ever, ever mention your politics, because you’ll lose fans.  I will grant you this is true, and when it comes to someone bringing their politics into a casual social occasion – say a dinner or a con party – particularly if they come completely from the “Uh?” side I’d say that’s true.

If politics is a sort of Tourette’s to you and you find the need to interject, in a conversation about how good the wings are or how tasty the peanuts “It reminds me of the house budget resolution” and then a crass comment that assumes everyone is on your side in this – let it be.  You will lose readers.  Of course, in my case the reason you will lose me is not because I agree or disagree with your politics, but because I dislike violations of social spaces and am appalled at your lack of social empathy in not figuring out in a group of ten/twenty strangers, some will disagree with you either completely or “yes but” type disagreement.

Of course there are a ton of ways you can go wrong after going wrong that way.  For instance there’s the fact you’re repeating some media-created trope which has been exploded a million times by anyone who follows the subject more closely.  Or the fact that – worse – you’re repeating some comedians joke in the belief it’s a factual analysis.

Note that all of these are first and foremost a violation of social decorum.  But they also betray a certain type of mind that goes something like “all right thinking people agree with me” or even “I have to say this so they’ll know I’m one of the good people.”  The idea of someone smart enough to make a living through ideas disagreeing with the person never occurs to these people.

Hence, when faced with this type of violation, I’ll be predisposed to not read them, because I expect a certain trend of conventional thinking and little originality.

Mind you, this is just an inclination not to read them.  I.e., faced with shelves and shelves of new authors to try, I will avoid this one on the assumption that I’ll enjoy him/her less than the others.  OTOH I have a lousy memory for names so unless you really get under my skin, sooner or later I’ll pick you up and I might even like your reading.

The amazing thing is that I have met more people who write with their hindbrain and are brilliant while being public life dolts than I care to mention. This is both a good thing and a humbling thing. When you do anything artistic and I have to reluctantly include writing, because I do other stuff also, and I know the process is similar, as hard as it is to admit, it must be accepted that it’s not quite under your control. Your subconscious can be way smarter than you allow yourself to be – or at least more plugged in.  We had an acronym for this back in the eighties when it was a thing for artists to devote paeans to the Soviet Union and berate the US because they’d been given the VIP tour and made to feel like important opinion makers in the Sov Union: BAPI – brilliant artist.  Political idiot.  Most singers fell under this category.

I never had the illusion that I could cut loose at any party and have everyone agree with me.  This is because my opinions are idiosyncratic and arrived at one by one, sometimes painfully.  There are things I’d really prefer to believe, because I’d sleep better at night – such as that government agencies devoted to causes I approve of would never be corrupt – but though I approve of many things, like better education, I can guarantee any efforts made by government to improve it, like a follows b, will mean that it spirals down the drain harder and faster because the person in desk A is building a fiefdom on the current regulations, and the person in desk C won’t let go of them And the person in desk B starts empire building on the new ones.  And in the end what you have is soup.

So I adhere to the Heinlein dictum that only a fool or a sadist tells the absolute truth at a social occasion.  Social occasions are for the purpose of socializing.  Unless you’re at a cocktail party thrown by your social action group, or you’re among friends whose opinions you know, you should assume that you can give offense with an ill considered jest.  Heck, even friends whose opinions you know might not agree with you in everything.  They just might never have rammed it down your throat at social occasions.  You shouldn’t assume – particularly if one political opinion is prevalent among those who have power over your career (say, colleges) – that just because someone gives you a sickly smile and doesn’t say anything they agree with you.  Maybe you just made the spicy wings curdle in their stomach and they want to beat you upside the head with the clue by four, but they’re too polite to mention it.  Or they want to make sure there’s money when baby got to have shoes.

I’ve managed to be offended by what I call “whole politics buyers” on both sides of the isle, though in professional occasions mostly by the left. On personal occasions sometimes by the right. And on both occasions, I started avoiding the venue because I couldn’t talk and I didn’t want to be discomfited.

Then there’s the “don’t let it go.”  I lost a friendship I valued and of some years standing because this person had recently become a political activist.  She would initiate political discussions out of the blue, repeating talking points on topics in which sometimes I knew a lot more than her, but worse, on topics where no one sane could take her seriously.  Let’s put it this way – if she’d been on the right, she’d have been screaming at me that any minute the black helicopters and Soros-funded mercenaries were going to come and take half the population to FEMA camps.  The logistics didn’t work, the economics were cacked, and these were rumors that, in a form or another had been around since the seventies, and were just as loony.

I’d known, of course, through the ten years of our friendship, that we didn’t see eye to eye on most things.  This was okay, because our friendship was funded on furniture refinishing, carpentry and writing.  And on that level we agreed on most things.  I highly disapproved of some of her opinions, but she’d proven resistant to change (you all know this.  You point the facts, they agree with you.  But next time it comes around their opinion has reset to where it was to begin with.)  And what the heck I didn’t want to marry her – just to talk a couple of times a month and go to lumberyards/writers groups together.

Only suddenly she amped up her “activism” and suddenly she was full of talking points and wanted me to listen to them.

Now, I had engaged her in the past in philosophical discussions and others, but never political.  And when she started politics, I made a joke and changed the subject.

Only now it didn’t work.  She’d tell me I was disrespecting her for not listening to what she had to say.  The “friendship” became an endurance test and I allowed it to lapse.

Which again is a lack of social decorum and a lack of understanding of time and place.  Also, a lack of listening on ONE part.  If she had been at all aware of facial expressions – as I said, I’ve discovered recently that I’m glass-fronted – she would have known that I didn’t agree with her in most things and that it was a disagreement of the sort she wasn’t likely to bridge.  (I did tell her that what she told me was illogical and why, but she just kept on shouting talking points – it wasn’t a dialogue.)  And if she valued our friendship she would have avoided those topics.

I still have any number of friends who disagree with me in varying degrees.  In fact, if I had any who agreed with me completely I’d be confused, since most of my friends are as much independent cusses as I am.

But we either discuss the point and find out that our disagreement is of degree, not kind (or sometimes of words, not real) or we realize that for whatever reason our views of the world differ in ONE thing – and we agree not to talk about that one thing.  Though for close friends, we sometimes tease each other about it!

So – why don’t I keep politics out of this blog?

Because I found it impossible.  If I’m going to talk about things about which I care deeply, I will impinge on the political.  Not because as it was common in the seventies “The personal is political” but because the side of the equation that views every facet of human life as likely to be improved by government regulation also tends to consider anything political.  Over the years I’ve found that saying something like “I believe that public schools are doing a serious disservice to children” is political – even though it’s very personal and I experienced it.  Or “I believe men get the wrong end of the stick in law and society these days” – political.  Or “I like the old fashioned incandescent lightbulbs best” – political.  Or “Low flush toilets are really multiple flush toilets” – political.  Or “Animals are cute and tasty with mustard” – political.  Or…

Given that, it’s impossible for me to have a blog without being political.  Why?  Because it’s impossible for me to have a blog without revealing something of how I think and feel, and if one side is determined to control how you think and feel, that makes blogging impossible.

Am I worried this will lose me readers?  Meh.  The sort of people who think in shouted slogans would probably have a heart attack at my books, or quit reading them within ten pages.  And the ones who actually think about what they believe, even if, like me, they have the sort of political opinions that would get kicked out – with force – out of anything but a group of radical libertarians (where they would get shouted down by twenty discordant opinions but PROBABLY not kicked out, because they couldn’t organize enough collective action to kick me out) will roll their eyes at some of what I say, but will read my books for my books.  They might avoid my blog, but they’ll enjoy my stories – even when a character now and then acts in a way that makes them urk – because the rest appeals to them.

None of the writers of the past were apolitical by our definition of political.  Jane Austen had people eat meat.  She had strong opinions on marriage, finances and even the equality of man.  If she’d lived in our times, some people would want to set her on fire.  And Shakespeare, within the confines of a society that had political censorship was more free to think and create than we are.  So long as he bowed obeisance towards the Tudors, he could have his women characters marry or not marry, sleep around or not, disobey their parents, have children, all without someone getting in his face and screaming “The personal is political.”

And that’s because the personal is not political.  Or it shouldn’t be.  If you live in a society where the government thinks it has an overriding interest in whether you use incandescent or fluorescent light, the government is out of order.

The only system of belief that should intrude into every act of your life and how you do it is religion – and that should be a matter of individual choice.

Government is a creation of collective humanity, and I have yet to see a group of humans – outside specific situation like the army – know what each human should do best to his own advantage than the individual himself.

Just because an individual craves power over others it makes him neither smarter nor better informed about those others than he was before.  The tendency to consider political leaders “very smart” is one of the most gaggingly stupid trends of modern life.  Most politicians might be “socially smart” – i.e. know how to engage people – but that talent is rarely if ever united to a talent for administration or indeed a talent for anything else.  Just like writers can be brilliant and total pants-on-head political idiots because the only thing that TRULY interests them is writing, and therefore they acquire their politics from the “Whole politics store.”

Now if – like me, and it is a form of deformity – you were bit by politics early and you have a sort of allergic reaction that keeps you interested in politics to make sure they don’t bite again, because there’s no epi-pen against stupid revolutions for instance, your politics will leak into your stories.

I try very hard not to make politics the point of my stories, though.  Sometimes my characters have political opinions of their own, too, and express them loudly.  It doesn’t mean I agree with them, and I try to show that by the events in the book.  (This is very much a thing in Through Fire.)

However I’ve decided to let politics hang out.  First, because my keeping them secret was always a forlorn hope.  Apparently, as I said, my face shows all my thoughts.  Second, because I spent years hiding and pretending to politics I didn’t believe in, and it gave me ulcers, made my hair fall out, and made it impossible to sleep at night.  I’d reached the point I was going to stop it anyway, and Baen and indie just made it easy.  Third, because when I don’t speak, or worse pretend to agree with positions that are morally repulsive to me, I’m lending credence to the idea that “All good people think this way.”

So, I say what I believe in this blog.  (Forgive me, Heinlein for I am opinionated.)  And if my political or any other opinions leak out in my books and fall outside the approved norm, too bad, so sad.  If you’re the sort of person who reads for a recitation of cant, (or Kant) you have an embarrassment of offerings and probably would never get to me anyway.

But if you’re my friend and disagree with me, you need never be afraid I’ll ambush you at a cocktail party with “You know, it’s amazing that the red sauce for these wings works, because communism never does, ar ar ar ar ar.”

Because that’s neither the time, nor the place.  And contrary to what the bien pensant would have us think, sometimes the political is personal.

This isn’t quite a post about writing.  It is more a post about writing and real world intersection.

It is also of course good advice to any young lady contemplating matrimony.  It’s also fairly useless.  To the extent that a willingness to be violent and to push people around is read by the back brain as “oooh, he’s gonna lead the hominid band” and most women like marrying upwards.  Mind you, I’m not sure it’s as universal as believed, or at least most romances show the hero as being clean cut, rich, and kind. Regencies will sometimes allow him to be a “bad boy” in the sense that he keeps mistresses (which he immediately discards when he falls in love with the girl) or gambles, or is excessively reckless, or… Never that he’s really rotten through and through, kills babies and tortures puppies for fun, or steal old ladies’ false teeth or something.

Which leads me to believe that the whole thing “girls like bad boys” is wrong.

There is however a hook where ladies like bad boys and readers like bad boys, if you do it as “he did it but it’s not his fault.”  It stimulates maternal (and possibly paternal) feelings and feelings of specialness too, as you’re the only one who understands and can rescue this wounded creature and make him what he was meant to be.

This is the same reason that giving your character a great handicap or an awful history works.  We always want to be the knight on the white horse who saves the victim, even when the victim is not exactly simon-pure and has a five o’clock shadow.

So… This brings us around to where Kilted Dave asked about how to write villains so that they’re not just moustache twirling evil but have reasons and are to an extent sympathetic.

I’ve never found that particularly hard to do, though when I was a young and inexperienced writer, it caused a few of the books to flip on me and make the villain the hero.

I know why that happened and I see dangers in it for both writers and readers.

It happened because once I’d given the character sufficient justification for what he’d done, then what he’d done was no longer unwarranted, and it blurred the moral lines between right and wrong.  The most obvious result of this for a writer is gray goo.

Supposing you don’t flip it enough to make your “hero” a villain, what you have are two characters fully justified in going at it and then any suffering is one of those things, and it all ends in goo.

But it’s more realistic, isn’t it?

Yes, and no.  I mean, was Germany after WWI fully aggrieved and a victim?  Oh, sure.  Was Hitler justified in what he did? Oh, hell no.  Even if he thought he was.  For one he was attacking his own people, as well as trying to establish a system that couldn’t work.  (We’ll leave aside all the other stuff, okay?  Not getting this into a discussion of WWII.  We know where that ended last time!)

For another because, well – what he did was still his own responsibility.

The cases in which both people’s or both people are forced to be at each other’s throat for reasons beyond both of their controls are probably less than one percent, if that.  And the cases in which they’re both fully justified is even less.

So, why have we learned that this is “good storytelling.”

Partly it’s the post modern thing, and part of it takes us back to WWI again.  The only way Europe could heal was to say “it was neither of our faults.  We were pushed to it through circumstances beyond our control.”  Only it was both of their faults, so the narrative didn’t take.

But it took in writing.  “More sinned against than sinning” is an intoxicating thing to write.  “How can I justify this REALLY bad thing?”  You can’t, but you try, and so you pile on injury on your villain, and then you know you’re the only one who understands him, which is intoxicating.

And if it results in gray goo the reader can say it’s more realistic, and they’re clearly “smarter” because they “get that.” Etc.

But carried on long enough it destroys readership and writing and the feeling of “right” in an adventure.  It too gets infected by the ambiguity that has been so in vogue since WWI. Worse, because our brains are really bad at distinguishing fantasy from reality, we end up looking at real life through the prism of these stories our subconscious thinks we witnessed.  We will look at someone who’s done something heinous and wonder what happened to them to make them that bad.  Next thing you know, we’re writing soppy poems to the Boston bombers.

When I was very little, I liked westerns and other such books.  At one time I was talking to my brother about how villainous a villain was and he said, “Well, he’s a victim of society.”  He proceeded to explain to me how the villain was marginalized, viewed as the Other, and therefore nothing he did was his fault.  I think this view held till I was sixteen or so.  And it was wrong.

We’re all victims of society in the sense that none of us gets everything he wants from the cradle on, or if we do, that might be the greatest violence you can do to anyone.

BUT to consider that everyone who commits a heinous crime is just a “victim” of something worse in his past is to ignore the millions of walking wounded and decent people: victims of every sort of abuse under the sun, can’t win for losing strivers, people who are genuinely cast out, sometimes for reasons they can’t either understand or correct – people with aspergers, for instance – who yet don’t feel the need to kill anyone, attack anyone, rob anyone, or commit worse abuses on their fellow men.

In the end, unless there’s great mental impairment (and that’s really not easy to write) your evil is your own.  You might have been influenced to it, but you can’t say you were made to do it (unless it was blackmail or possession.)

Sure, your villain might think he’s fully justified.  In DST as we learn more through other stories of Athena’s father’s grievances, he probably was partly shaped into what he is by his upbringing, being betrayed by his best friends, etc.  BUT it does not justify what he does.  He chooses what he does.  He chooses his means to stay alive and young.  And in the end, it is his villainy, and not anyone else’s.

In writing as in real life, too much sympathy for the devil leads to injustice towards those who might not be angels, but who are still honorable, decent and trying not to hurt others.

*OT: I have updated subscriber content.  If you’ve subscribed or donated above $35 and you’ve not been given password to the subscriber page – look in tabs at top – you should email me at goldport, and I’ll send it.  A couple I tried to send bounced back, I think because I did something wrong.*

First a state of the writer short update – for those of you who have been waiting with baited breath for the edited Witchfinder – it is coming.  I am halfway through my edit, which I unfortunately can’t outsource.  Because it was written piecemeal there’s “beats” missing and internal inconsistencies and–  You know.

What I found is that I tried to edit it early on, and it seemed a hopeless mess.  But I picked it up again last weekend, and it reads surprisingly clean.  As a note to self, clearly getting more distance helps.  Now my instincts are on.  I still need to do this part myself.  Then it will go to a professional editor for probably two weeks.  Then back to me to page-proof.

I have contracted for a cover.  Depending on how long that takes – but the artist said something about three weeks – we should have a book both electronic (and going free to those who paid in advance and the high subscribers, in epub, mobi and/or RTF – sorry, I’m not going to do the weirdest forms of ebooks.  If you have a really niche reader, you probably have become intimate with Calibre by now, anyway.)

Curiously, I needed this time too to see what the cover HAS to be.  I’ve had ideas before, but they weren’t right.

Meanwhile, sometime this week I’ll start re-releasing the backlist.  (Whee.)  Probably first up will be No Will But His.  I’m trying to find a cover, and wondering if I should do a pastel for it.  We’ll see.  Dan had a brainstorm and thinks I should re-write all of Henry VIII’s queens, to keep poor Kay Ho company.  I don’t know.  I’d only be re-writing Jane Seymour.  The rest didn’t fall to my lot.  But yeh, I could.  The problem is time.  We’re trying to figure out how to deal with that.  We’ll see if it works.  (Yep, we got a tardis.  How did you guess?)

RES in the comments of the post from two days ago made snippety snap comments about saving me the indignity of buying 100 blog topics – for the record, I didn’t buy them.  I got the 100 free ones.  Good thing, since I could only use one and only sort of sideways.  Of course, at least half of his topics I can’t use.  I watched Star Trek because my husband loved it, but I don’t think I care enough for it to analyze its politics (which at any rate seem incoherent) or to discuss its economics (why do they allow people to write who can’t understand the basics of life as defined by economics – and that economics is a basic function of being human, no matter where or when – if I read one more novel where the main character has astonishing magical powers and yet is very poor, I’m going to hurl.  Actually I never read those.  I hit the telling point and the book goes against the wall in a bouncy bouncy sort of fashion.  Ditto for universal replicators.  Why work? Why have credits?  What limits replicators?)

He also suggested Buffy and redemptive female love because he’s a BAD man.  Of course the series is full of that mythos, and I’m thinking I’ll watch it from beginning in the next 100 or so ironing sessions.  It should help with the YA too.

I have three posts sketched up for next week – which means I need a few more, of course.  Even counting the fact that I do Rogue Magic on Fridays.

So, if you guys want to throw topics at me, go ahead.  Just remember I’m a total ditz when it comes to television shows (as in, I’ve watched about half of Stargate while ironing, but still haven’t got around to watching the rest of it.  Also, I only watch Big Bang Theory when I happen to be in the room while the guys are watching.  Seems fun, but I’m not a “watcher” – if I’m not doing some handwork, like sewing, or some housework, like ironing, I can’t sit still long enough to watch a full episode, let alone a series.  The only reason I watched Buffy was that I was profoundly depressed after 9-11 and it was in re-runs and/or we bought the tapes (I don’t remember now), so we watched ALL of it.  But when I’m not depressed, I’d rather be writing or reading.  It’s somehow more vivid in my mind.

To open the bidding on this “come on, throw topics at me, come on!”

-How does narrative technique in books differ from tv/movies.  What are the advantages of books?

-When is the last time you’ve read really transgressive work, one that said something that shocked you because you never see it anymore.  You know, stuff like “men have their own strengths, and civilization couldn’t exist without them.”  Or “Humanity is good in and of itself and worth fighting for.” Or “western civilization outcompeted all the others because it provides best for society?”

-Would you like that as a blog topic, or would you like me to blog on the statements?

-Civilization is built on what we don’t do.  Requiring internal barriers is a characteristic of civilization – any civilization.  They’re just different in primitive civilizations.  How much is man a creature of “this you do not do?”  Is it necessary for us to be human.

-Is that a blog topic or two?

-How my life has changed since I went indie.  Look up at the beginning of this post – I’m contracting cover work.  It blows the mind.  Five years ago, covers were something the publishers did, and if I didn’t like them, I had to lump them.  There’s other stuff.  Like, when I come up with an idea the question is “where do I put it on the calendar” not “will my agent send it out?”  Of course, this means the poor calendar is bursting ta the seams, so I’m arranging to make time – yeah, I know.  Deal.  I’ll explain if it works. Also there’s a rumor eventually the kids will move out, we can downsize, and our life will be much simpler.

Anyway, shoot topics at me.  I’ll put them in the topic notebook TM and do them – if they appeal.

And now I’m going to do litter boxes, which don’t appeal but have to be done.

UPDATE: I have updated subscriber content.