I’m going to write a soppy post.  It’s Father’s Day and I’m entitled.  I don’t think it’s Father’s Day in Portugal, they have different dates.  But later today I’m going to call my dad and tell him I love him, anyway.

I’ve talked, in the past, about how moving abroad robs you of the years you’d have had with your loved ones at home.  It is not something undertaken lightly.  Well, it might be undertaken lightly if you’re still within easy distance of home, but it’s not if you are going to cross the ocean and if going back costs thousands of dollars, and demands serious time away.  (Yes, there are tons of things my family has given up because we try to go back – the four of us – every three years.  My parents always help with the flights, but it never quite covers it, and then there’s other associated expenses.  I can honestly say without those trips, we would probably be able to take a moderate vacation every year, more exciting than two days and a night in Denver, which is our “normal” vacation.  [One year we went wild and crazy and spent four days and three nights in Denver.  It was awesome.  We still talk wishfully of affording that again, someday.])

The two people I had the hardest time leaving were my paternal grandmother and my dad.  Understand what I’m saying here: it’s not that I don’t love my mom or don’t miss her.  I do.  It’s that my relationship with dad was less verbal – still is.  Our phone calls take all of three minutes.  He’s uncomfortable on the phone – and therefore more hurt by the distance.

Dad and I liked hiking together, and visiting monuments together, and sitting side by side on the sofa reading, and, sometimes, swapping books.

I’m as bad as he is about the “I love you” thing.  I have been trained to say it to my husband, but it still sounds like it should be said drunk.  So I used to buy dad warm socks and make him his after-dinner coffee just the way he liked.

He used to save all the new bills he got, from the bank, and give them to me.  What I mean is, when he got a bill that looked newly minted, he’d save it and give it to me.

(My relationship with grandma was similar.  She was a woman who did things and was awkward about conversation.  Sometimes she just told you everything she’d done that day, because she had no idea what to talk about.  Weird, since she told wonderful stories.  But follow her around and listen to what she said as she gardened or looked after the animals, or whatever, and you’d get conversation and information.  It was just the phone.  Maybe because of course she didn’t grow up with a phone.)

I first became aware when dad was home it was the weekend.  He worked halfway down the country and what was then a long and expensive train ride away.  So he came home on Fridays and left midday Sunday, so he could be at work on Monday.

It was rough.  I think it was rougher for him than for us.  As a mother, I imagine it must have been particularly hard when I was a very sickly infant and young child.

Mostly I remember his coming home when I was well.  And in my head it’s always spring or summer or fall.  Dad would take me out of the house on Saturdays, so mom could clean the house without me in the way.  We’d jump the wall at the back of grandma’s garden and go off for hikes in the woods.  Often this entailed natural history lessons (what dad didn’t know about local plants and animals wasn’t worth knowing,) history lessons – there were ruins in those woods , and language lessons – he deciphered Latin inscriptions to me.  We got tadpoles in buckets.  He taught me to make a flute out of a reed.  He lifted me up to see eggs in the nest, then told me about the birds.  We took bread crumbs to give to ants, and watch them carry them back.

In fall we’d come home with my hat or his handkerchief full of blackberries, and in my mind (I’m sure it wasn’t always that well timed!) we came back to a freshly-scrubbed patio, a clean house, and tea all ready for us.

In summer, we’d walk out in the evening to the local pond, so I could see the fireflies.

In December, he’d take me by train to downtown Porto to see the lights being put up, and we stayed to see them lit, after night fell.  At this time there were usually vendors selling stupid toys downtown.  Hard to explain.  Think the level of a MacDonald’s freebie.  It was a ritual to carefully select and buy me one of those before we went home.  Weirdly, the only one I remember was the plastic chicken that laid plastic eggs.

But there were times when I wasn’t well.  Those are hazy, possibly because I was low on oxygen (grin.)  Mom – poor mom – of course bore the brunt of those night when I couldn’t breathe, and had to fight for every breath.  She’d stay awake and watch through the night and then the next day she’d work, because she actually made about twice what dad made at the time, and we needed her income.  I remember those nights of fighting from breath to breath.

But if dad came home and I was in crisis, he’d stay awake all night, carrying me in his arms, singing to me.  And if he got me to sleep at all, he’d put me in bed next to mom (we lived in a shotgun apartment cut out of grandma’s house.  My brother slept in the little hallway space between kitchen and bedroom.  Mom’s workshop was in the living room.  There must have been all of 500 sq feet.  There simply was no room for me.  When I was well, I went next door and slept with my cousin, Natalia.  When I wasn’t well, I slept with mom.)  He would then take a blanket, roll himself in it, and sleep on the bare wood of the hallway floor.  Sometimes I think he netted maybe five hours of sleep the whole weekend, then turn around and go back to work.

I was happy when he was transferred back to town, and could live with us.  It’s a funny thing, because in Portugal the father is assumed to be the disciplinarian.  So as the day for dad to come work in town approached all the old women in the village told me “Now you’re going to have to behave, or dad will make you.”

This amounted to insanity to me.  It wasn’t even understandable.  Dad was the person who let me get away with stuff, was always ready to plead my case, would sneak me forbidden treats (ice cream!)

He yelled at me three times in my life.  I can honestly say it hurt him more than it hurt me, and even then I knew it.

When I got married and decided I wanted to be a writer, mom’s reaction was along the lines of “You’ll starve in the gutter.” And also “why don’t you take your degree and flush it?”  Dad’s was “How can I help you?”  He has over the years sent me research books, given me very brief (remember, three minute phone calls) pep talks, and sent me money – all in the name of keeping me writing.

One of the things that always amused me was strangers’ reactions to my dad.  Dad was six one (he’s shrunken some) and built – for those who know them – like my younger son.  Not exactly brick shithouse, but one of the better class of Roman statues.  In Portugal when I was little, and even a young woman, this made him very large.  Pugnacious little men who came to the window of the car to “have a word with” him about his driving, would turn meek and appeasing when dad got out of the car and stood to his full height.

The thing is, only humans were fooled – by his size, his stern look.  Animals never were.  Dad could wade into a dog or cat fight and pry them apart without getting hurt.  He petted strays and ferals.  Cats, dogs and rabbits came to him.  I suspect they still do.

When I was in college he became “everyone’s dad.”  If one of my friends got in a sticky situation, I was the one they called, and this was partly at least because of my dad.  If a friend had gone to a party with some guy who was trying to pressure her for sex, or threatening to leave her out there with no transportation; if a friend had gone out with friends and found they were all doing drugs; if a friend got drunk and needed a place to stay till she got over it, so her parents wouldn’t kill her, she’d call me.  I’d wake dad.  He’d put on his clothes – at two, three, four in the morning – and drive miles with me to go pick up the lost sheep.

One of the compensations of growing – my younger son looks so much like my dad that sometimes it hurts a little.  He has the same gestures, the same tastes.  It’s funny to talk to dad about Marshall, because Marshall apparently hits the same developmental points at the same age dad did.  (Dad is still not very good with the “I love you” so every time we go over if Marshall admires one of his shirts, or his robe, or his scarf, he gives it to Marshall.  He also gives him brand new, freshly minted bills.)  I have great hopes Marshall will grow up to be just like his grandfather… and like his dad.

You know that thing about women marrying men like their dad?  Well, not exactly.  Dan is not as massive, and he grew up in a different time and place.  He’s not as much into natural science, not as much into history.  He certainly doesn’t have a thing for Latin (that’s older son.)

But he has the same quiet strength my dad had.  He will trade everything, just about, for time with his kids.  He too used to take the kids to see the Christmas lights lit.  For a while when they were little, he’d get them out of my hair on Saturdays so I could clean.  (Mostly they went to Garden of the Gods and came back with pockets full of pebbles and rocks.  Guy stuff.)  As the kids got older, they bonded over movies, over computers.  His idea of a really great time is when the family goes off to the museums (Bohemians, I tell you.  We sure live it up.)  And when the kids need him, there’s never any doubt: he drops everything to take them to the hospital or even – if it’s something they want to do, and I can’t take them – to take them to a movie, or to go to them to an art Gallery.  He’s gone without stuff for himself to buy the kids movies or music they wanted.  And, given half a chance, he takes young ones: the kids’ friends, fledgeling writers, under his wings and goes all paternal and protective.

I’m privileged and honor to have such good fathers in my life.

Happy Father’s day, everyone.

UPDATE: (Still by the inimitable, pants-wearning Sabrina who is offering us all an opportunity at promo —  Calling all Human Wave authors! A group promotion is being planned for early August. All you need is minimum one available ebook and a willingness to price it at $1.99 or lower for a week. I’ve got publicity planned for some high-traffic blogs to announce it, too. I’m calling it the Human Wave Garage Sale but my mutant talent is NOT marketing so better ideas are encouraged. Send smoke signals if you want to join in.

A guest post by the inimitable Sabrina Chase (who-wears-pants and everything!)

Createspace for the Lazy

An ancient software principle is that laziness is a quality of a good programmer. They hate writing extra code so they get very *efficient* at what they do. I revel in my laziness, and have figured out a lazy way to do CreateSpace print books. I’ve formatted six books so far, and this is the system I figured out.

First, a bit of prep and the Naming of the Parts. You will need…

• One (1) complete manuscript in Word format. In my case it is originally written in OpenOffice (because Word is evil and puts all sorts of goop in that is bad when converting to HTML for the epub/mobi versions). However, I also convert a copy to Word format for my editor (may her name be blessed) so she can do the official markup thing. You want a version in Word, with styles, that has all the edits done.
• Cover art. My artist very kindly puts my name and the title of the book in the actual graphic file for me, but it is simple to do yourself if you need to.
• a CreatSpaceinteriortemplate for the trim size of book you want to produce (I have standardized with 6×9 for no particular reason). I have also customized the base formatted template for my own needs, putting in my standard end matter, Also Published, author bio, and other non-book-specific content, because, lazy. Get the templates here: (link)
• Some kind of graphics manipulation software. You can get a free version of Photoshop here, (yes, perfectly legit just no longer supported software) but be aware it is a computer resource hog. This is what I am using. Anyone with experience using Gimp or other graphics programs, please chime in.
• Once you have completed Part 1 below, you will need a covertemplate from CreateSpace, but you need to know the *finished* number of pages so we’ll do the interior first.

Part 1: the interior

Using the CSinteriortemplate (use the formatted one, at least at first) will get you a professional-looking print book, but no bells and whistles like drop-caps or other, truly professional layout features. I’m not a layout expert and frankly neither are most bookstore owners so I argue it doesn’t matter. All of my detailed instructions below assume Word 2003. If you don’t have that version don’t panic–you just may have to search around the web to find the steps to get to that particular thing.

1) Open the template in Word and decide which sections you want to keep. For example, I usually remove the table of contents unless I have funny chapter titles I think the reader would enjoy anticipating.

2) WARNING! Here abides math! Simple counting math, but it still tripped me up a few times. After removing the sections you don’t want you need to make sure the page COUNT and the page NUMBER match. Because the template puts the gutter, the margin that meets the spine of the book, on one side or the other depending on whether the page is odd or even. It’s magic. Therefore it is crucial that the even and odd page COUNT match even and odd page NUMBER.  A page can be the third page in and be numbered 7 and that is OK because they are both odd. All of those previous sections you removed? They had page numbers even if they weren’t displayed. You may need to insert a blank page just to get the page numbers to work out. The way you check is at the very bottom of the Word window, it will have something like “Page ii  Sec 2 4/40”. That means page (roman numeral) 2, second section, actual page 4 out of 40. Make sure as you go through that every even page has an even number, and also that all 40 (or whatever) pages are there. Somehow you can make it think there are invisible pages if you delete sections, I have no idea why. Just humor it. If there is a missing page add one to the previous section using CTRL-Enter.

3) Change to Header/Footer view by clicking View in the upper menu, then selecting Header/Footer. You will be doing this a lot. Go to the beginning of the first fake chapter. Notice that at the top of the header it says “same as previous”, meaning it is copying the style from the previous section. A handy little menu bar should have popped up with header/footer stuff. Disconnect the style from the previous style by clicking on the icon with two little pages with a dotted arrow going from one to the other. Do this disconnection procedure for the next two pages (this cleans up First Page, Odd Page, and Even Page styles). Start the page numbering at 1 in the footer of the first page of chapter 1, add your author name in the header of the first even-numbered page, add the book title in the header of the first odd-numbered page. Format font style according to taste.

4) (this is the fun part) From your original Word document, copy the whole bloody thing, from “Chapter 1” to “THE END”. Select the section of the template from “CHAPTER 1” to the beginning of the end matter, and paste.

5) No, not done yet but it’s just a mopping up operation from here.  First, open up styles by going to the menu, clicking Format, then clicking Styles and Formatting. The handy list of available styles is displayed, including a lot of CSP-Blahblah that came over with the template.

• Convert your styles to the equivalent CSP-STYLE WHATEVER for first para of chapter, chapter title, and regular body text. See why we use styles now? Put the cursor on a block of text with your format. Look over at the format list, scroll down until you see the format name in a blue box, and right click on it. It will have an option to “Select (x) instances”, click that. THEN you can pick the equivalent CSP-style, click that, and hey presto, everything changes over. the first chapter section you get for free, but now you need to go find each successive chapter and do a section break insert (select Insert in the menu bar, then break, then section break/next page) between the last line of the previous chapter and the new chapter title. This will make the pages and margins all happy. DO allow header and footer inheritance and continue the page count from the previous section.
• Styles are where you can set your font. I usually go with Garamond 11, the important thing is being consistent in the text. (Although I use Times New Roman 9 for the header and footer and nobody has yelled at me yet).
• If for some tragic reason you didn’t use styles, no time like the present. All you really need are the chapter title, first para, and body text. Search for your chapter titles, select the text and pick the CSP-chapter title style, select the first paragraph and set its style to CSP-first paragraph, and the rest of the chapter to vanilla CSP-body text.

6) Gross violations check. *quickly* skim through the whole thing without reading. strangely you will be able to catch a lot of egregious formatting bobbles this way. You won’t get ‘em all but that’s what the proofing pass is for. Usually in my case it was some rogue style that weaseled its way in when I wasn’t looking. Select the offending section of text, pick the correct style and continue on.

7) Extra Credit: Fleurons. I use clever little graphics instead of # for scene breaks. There’s no style for that, so I go through and make sure they are centered and look right. Sometimes the AutoProofer (see below) complains that they aren’t flattened images, but it’s a warning and not a failure and it always comes out looking fine.

8) Get the final page count. Go all the way to the end of the document, past the end matter. (note page COUNT not page NUMBER) That’s what you need for the CS Cover template (link).

Part 2: The Cover

This will all be done assuming Adobe Photoshop CS2 , which is the only graphics program I know (and none too well, at that). See the introduction for a link to a free copy if you have nothing.

Go to Creatspace for a CS Cover template (link). Here you will need to decide the paper color (color makes it thicker or something, who knew) and use your previously determined page count and trim size. Download the handy template, which is an image format Photoshop can handle.

1) Open up the template in Photoshop. Admire the ghastly pink borders, and treat them as lava. This means, no text or important graphics can appear there. You must also avoid putting important stuff in the reserved area for the bar code. Swaths of pure background color are OK. Don’t worry, the ugly stuff will go away when we don’t need it any more.

2) Open the graphic file of your cover art. This will be a separate window in Photoshop. Click to select, and drag over to the template. Resize as seems best to you, remembering to avoid the pink lava areas. What I usually do now is use the Rectangle Tool, click and drag to create a rectangle that completely covers the front cover area (including the pink) and then use Fill to make a nice background for the cover image. Selecting a color already in the cover art using the Eyedropper works well. If you can’t see your art, that’s because the fill layer is on top of the art layer. In the layer menu just click and drag until everything is in the proper stack order (the template layer should be at the absolute bottom).

3) Use a similar procedure for the back cover and spine (I usually use a single rectangle for the whole area). For extra credit, I also sometimes copy a section of the front art that looks cool, expand it, and set it at something like 40% transparency for the back. Again, stack the layers with the fill under the transparency if you use one.

4) Text: Clever but readable fonts for front cover tag lines (“She thought the penguins would save her. She was wrong…”) and the spine title and author name. Use the Text tool. I like to assemble my text then select it with the Move tool. If you move it a handy menu appears that lets you rotate the text exactly 90 degrees for the spine. Text for the back copy (“Marooned on the ice station, menaced by penguin pirates, Mary Sue longed for a cruller. By the award-winning author of “Where’s My Walrus?”) should be non-fancy, readable and professional. Make each paragraph of back cover text a separate Text box to make rearranging more convenient.

5) Extra Credit: Press Logo and Book Style. Since I have my own publishing company and a cool logo, I put that on the back too. I have a consistent “house” style for the placement of the name and logo, which I have saved as its own file (lazy!). Opening a previously formatted book cover, I line it up with my new cover and make sure everything looks the same as much as possible.

6) Cleanup: By selectively turning off layers (click the eyeball icon next to a layer to hide it) make sure no critical graphical elements are in the Lava Zone. Turn off the layer with the template, and save the whole thing as a Photoshop PDF. Make sure the Layers checkbox is not checked.

7) Yay, you have a cover!

Part 3: Uploading

Go to CreateSpace. If you haven’t already done so, start a new project with your book title and fill in all the pertinent information (be consistent with your trim size, paper type, etc.)

1) Upload the interior text file. It will take a while to riffle through it electronically with their automatic checker. Definitely open the proofer, even if it finds no issues. CHECK THE PAGE NUMBERS and the header/footer behavior. If pressed for time still check the first chapter and last chapter. If the auto-proofer comes back with hundreds of errors it’s probably just our friend the odd/even page problem, so refer back to Part 1 and the importance of page number continuity. Easy fix. Keep fixing and uploading until it says you don’t have any issues.

2) Upload the cover. Submit the whole thing for approval and wait. (If you have more books, just proceed with them). When your book is approved, order a proof copy (REALLY recommend this) it is cheap, about $4 and you will catch all sorts of errors.

3) Thoroughly proof the proof. Check the headers, page numbers, styles, etc. again. Make sure the cover doesn’t look goofy anywhere and the whole package looks like something you already have on your bookshelves.

4)Fix any problems in interior and cover and upload again. I usually don’t order a second proof copy but when it is approved I do check it out in the online proofer to make sure my changes took place and didn’t screw up anything else. APPROVE THAT SUCKER! and start picking out the custom features you want on your yacht.

5) Picking the sales channels. Here you may want to hedge a bit. I didn’t pick extended distribution the first time around because who was going to buy a print book anyway, and it cost $25 per book. Also, I found some goofs in my print versions I didn’t catch in multiple rounds of proofing (I’m better at this now). If you make a change in a book *after* extended distribution is picked, it costs an extra $25 per change of file, so that saved me a lot of money when I fixed them, then signed up for Extended Distribution. You may well want to order that second proof copy but it takes a long time to ship, and it might delay your yacht order. Depends on what you want and what you can put up with.

6) That’s it!

 

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 (And at this point I’m hoping that will happen by the beginning of July at the latest).  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

Come Into My Web

The Honorable Jonathan Blythe, Earl of Savage:

The carriage started trundling along at last.  I’d tried pulling back the curtains on the windows, but they seemed to be of some magical material that would not budge to all my frantic clawing.  I was at the point of considering using magic, though in a container with unknown magical potential that was playing with fire near a pile of lint, when the carriage stopped.

The stop was odd.  There was no slowing down, and no sound of the horses’ steps spacing further apart.  Just one moment we were bowling along, and the next moment we were completely stopped.  Just before that moment there had been a tingle, as though we’d crossed through a veil.  I filed this away for future thought, though I had no idea at all what it might mean.

When the door opened, I was shocked to find that the outside was enveloped in such dense fog that there was no seeing anything much past the tip of my nose.

Through this sort of grey-whiteness, I perceived what looked like the guards who’d picked me up at my house, but it was impossible to see them clearly through the fog.

In front of me was the open door of an house that looked very much like the building in Cheapside where Seraphim had made the offices of the Witchfinder.

I looked at the door with some misgiving.  There was no reason at all to be wary, except that the fog didn’t feel right, that carriages don’t go from full gallop to a complete stop in ten seconds, and that I’d forgotten to scan the envoys for their origin.  A glancing magical probe aimed at them now, showed them covered in the full protection of his majesty’s magic, but by that time I didn’t trust any of my senses, including magical.

I considered running in another direction – any direction but that door – but I had a tingle down the middle of my back, and the uncomfortable feeling that if I ran, there would be nothing under my feet.

So I went to the door.  At some point a man has to trust in his magic and in his dagger – of which I actually had three, concealed about my person.  I always did, because sometimes you come to a point where you need a blade and it saves your life.  There was this one time, when Freddy and I were boxing the watch–  I swept the thought away from my mind.

As always when I felt in danger, I also felt awake and alive in a way I never managed at other times.

Inside the open door, in the comfortably dim but not dark hall, I noted that everything looked like the ante-chamber of Seraphim’s office.  Don’t ask me why, but this made me more suspicious than ever that it – in fact – wasn’t Seraphim’s office.  Perhaps it’s a defect in my character?

In front of me a page who looked strangely indistinct, considering there was no fog inside, opened the door and sang out, “The right Honorable, the Earl of Savage, Jonathan Blythe.” And I walked into Seraphim’s office.

There was a fire burning in the fireplace, and Seraphim himself sat behind his massive desk which was, as always, covered in papers.  I’d been in Seraphim’s office often enough to know that the desk looked just so, including the two cups of coffee forgotten atop a pile of paper who knew how many weeks ago.  Seraphim’s servants at the office were afraid to touch anything, lest they disarrange a field of magic that the prince consort was keeping carefully tamped down.

The man behind the desk was looking through a pile of papers, and said without looking up, “Hello, Jonathan.”

This too was expected and normal, since he rarely did look up.  But I had it now, even from this angle, and with the grey light from the windows playing sideways on the man’s bent head and his features.  I sighed as histrionically as I could manage it.  “You have an odd sense of humor, your majesty.”

The man looked up.  I read unguarded surprise in his eyes, and he cleared his throat.  “The prince consort can be addressed as his grace but not as his majesty,” he said, sounding vaguely hurt.

I pulled at a nearest chair, felt it with both hand and magic, because in this place it was hard to tell whether it was real or not, then dropped into it.  “Yes, indeed,” I said.  “I’m very nice on all matters of etiquette, your majesty.  I’m fairly sure that I wouldn’t call the prince consort his majesty.  Just like I wouldn’t call the king of fairy your grace.  Give up, Penn, do.  I remember you from Eton.”  When he’d been considerably less insane than at this moment.  I wondered, fleetingly, if it was the amount of magic that fairyland put out that made its inhabitants insane.  Mind you, Gabriel Penn, given his family’s peculiarities and the fact he’d managed to be at the same time a son of the house and a servant, depending on who was judging his status and how it suited them to act, had more than enough reason to go insane long before becoming the king of fairyland.  But with all that, he’d always seemed, with Seraphim, fairly sensible for a Darkwater.

Now he looked so disappointed he might have been a child promised a sweet and given a kick.  He dropped to sitting on his chair, behind the desk, and stared at me, “How did I give myself away?”

One of the things all the fey delight in is fooling humans.  I’d never expected it from Gabriel Penn who until a few months ago had been full human, or at least passed as such, but I wondered if it was a need of fairyland.  I ticked his mistakes on my fingers, “The carriage stopped too suddenly, there was no sound of hooves slowing down, there was no sound from the horses in the front of the carriage either, the fog was a bit much and didn’t feel right.  It was like being inside clotted cream.  Oh, and Seraphim calls me Jon, not Jonathan.  And if he’d been fool enough to send for me, as though under arrest – that didn’t ring true either, your majesty – he’d have kept those two men one on either side of me all the way in here.  Because he doesn’t trust me more than he can help.  Perhaps with good reason.  Oh, and your spoofing of the Avalon king’s magic was too perfect, like… like a memorized spell.”

To my surprise, he grinned at me.  He looked a lot like Seraphim, though if I remembered correctly, at least when he’d been fully human, he’d been somewhat shorter.  He had the Darkwater aquiline nose, the oddly bright eyes, and the dark curls that had all been the old Duke’s – and very liberally spread all through Avalon and not a few other countries besides, given the old man’s proclivities.

Gabriel Penn, a year older than Seraphim Ainsling, Duke of Darkwater, but not legitimate and therefore not the heir, had been raised with the family from childhood, and had attended school with Seraphim, rooming with his younger brother and occupying a slippery position between roommate and valet.  As far as I could tell from their interaction, Seraphim considered him a brother and roommate, and Gabriel Penn considered himself Seraphim’s valet.  This made it impossible for any one else of us to know how to relate to this strange figure in our midst.

He was still a strange figure.  Perhaps more so, since through a series of odd circumstances he’d become the king of elvenland almost a year ago.

His smile discomfited me, and now that he wasn’t bothering to hide it, I could see tendrils of his power spreading all over, so that the person I was facing, what used to be Gabriel Penn, my classmate at Eton and Cambridge, was … something fully powerful and not fully human.

He sighed, a very human sigh, removed one of the several rings on his fingers, and played with it nervously between his hands.  “I was hoping,” he said.  “To have a little more time to lay out the problem to you, which is why I thought if you believed I was Seraphim…”

Which would be like his believing I was a bunny.  Again, what is it about fey magic?  Does it render them all a little mad?  Gabriel had lived in the world of men and knew the rules.  Surely he could have pretended better?

He seemed to read my thoughts, something that always discomfited me.  “Time is odd here,” he said.  “Or perhaps it is that the change was so great.  It feels like centuries since I lived on Earth.  One forgets details.”

One might very well, but this one, I thought, was rumored to visit Earth often enough, to consort with his lover, my brother in law, and to spend time with his half-sibling and other family, that one would think one would maintain some grasp on earthly realities.

I didn’t say it.  If you argue with a king, you’d best be prepared to kill him.  Instead I said, “I have a meeting with Seraphim at noon.”

“I know.  I wished to talk to you first.  You can decide how much to tell him.”

“I thought you told your brother everything, your majesty?”

He looked puzzled.  “Seraphim and I have different…  I don’t want to burden his conscience unnecessarily.”

“But you’d burden mine?”

“You have one?”

Touche.  I raised eyebrows at him and said nothing, though in fact, I do have a conscience.  It’s just constituted differently from other people’s, and I do not even know why.

“Very well,” he said.  “My brother will have told you the magic has gone rotten.  What he’ll not have told you…”

He sighed.  “You know there are many other worlds?”

“Elementary.  Else the need for a witchfinder to rescue the magical from a world where it’s forbidden would be none.  Besides, we learn it in nursery.”  Fine, so fey really made these people mad.

“Indeed.  Well… we were taught when very young that fairyland was a parasite world, which sucked magic out of other worlds, and that in fact some of the known worlds without magic were sucked dry by fey.  As you know that has been revised to fairyland being the spoke on the magic wheel, the one thing that keeps magic flowing.”

I nodded.  All this had been explained through our late and rather unpleasant adventure.

“So…”  He brought the fingers of his hands together, tip to tip, a very Gabriel Penn gesture, and leaned forward, colored motes dancing in his eyes in a way that was nothing human.  “Suppose there really is a world that is a parasite.  It has for years been confused with fairyland, partly because humans ascribe divine attributes to both – erroneously, in our case at least.  We’re just… more magical.  A world that needs human worlds to survive and that has been careening from world to world, hitting where might, stealing magic and moving on?”

“I’d need some proof before—”

He waved that away.  “I can show you proof.  Proof enough.  Mathematical proof.  Marlon worked it out for me.”

Ah.  My brother in law was one of the true geniuses of our generation.  All the same, I’d talk to him outside this cursed place.  Fairyland is not good for even part-elves and it can twist their reason, and if this king was going as mad as the last one, Marlon wouldn’t be far behind.  Propinquity and all that.

“So, what would this world be?” I asked.  “A… anti-fairyland?”

The thing that had been Gabriel Penn pursed his lips and looked for a second wholly human and very worried, at least if one ignored unseen magical winds making his hair flutter and the tendrils of power extending from him, power that would be enough to kill a mortal man if he held it for a second.

“You humans called it, among other things, Olympus.  Also, Valhala, also many other names.”

Part of the reason I wrote what I did yesterday is that this last week has been difficult.  Look, all I have is a resurgent sinus infection.  It isn’t even anything particularly bad.  It makes me want to nap rather a lot and I’m a wee bit congested.

The effect on my mood is all out of proportion: I feel tired and rather hopeless about everything in general.  If I wrote about politics right now, it would be “witness to the apocalypse” stuff.  Of course, a lot of people are writing in that same mode.  I wonder how widespread sinus infections are right now.

I’m trying to finish short stories, because there’s deadlines on those, but lifting enough of a thought to make a coherent post seems way too much effort.  Go figure.

Right now it seems well nigh impossible that humanity even got this far, given its sheer inability to find it’s *ss with two hands, braile instructions and a seeing eye dog.

Never mind.  This too shall pass.  I’ve learned long ago that when I’m ill this sort of mood passes as I get better.  And actually, it is often towards the end of the illness that the mood gets worse.

Part of it is this sense of tiredness and weakness that makes any request, any effort an injury.  “How can you ask me to walk across the kitchen?  Can’t you tell what an imposition that is?”  It makes me think that if I make it to ninety I will be an evil-cranky-old-woman.  Which is fine.  Makes me think of the crazy old woman in the village and wonder if she was crazy or just had found out that keeping the elementary schoolers away from her house equaled peace and quiet.  She used to stand in front of the house shaking her walking stick and screaming: May you be sent to the congealed seas, where there crows neither chicken nor rooster, where there is no bread or cheese nor good red meat.

We were terrified of her, though I don’t think we ascribed her any superpowers or supernatural knowledge.  We were just afraid she’d get louder.

I think I just discovered my plan for old age.  (Nah.  Screaming scares the cats.)

So, I’m taking today off.  The sinus infection ate my homework, yadda yadda yadda.

Tomorrow morning (I’m posting this on the night of the 12^th) and until mid afternoon, I will be unavoidably detained by obligations (yes, yes, I’ll be spending time with more important people, people who wear pants!) but I’ll be back to hang out after that.  Hang out somewhat, at least.  I do have writing to finish.

Oh, yeah, wildfires: we have friends in the affected zones, but none that seem to need us so far.  (Most of our friends are near, but not in the evacuation zones.)  And, unlike last year, the chances of the fire coming to us are REALLY low.  To get to us it would need to burn through most of Colorado Springs.  Let’s just say it would be a disaster of Biblical proportions.

So, unless another focus of fire starts, I’m safe.

Oh, yeah, I have it on reliable information (mom) that tomorrow is St. Anthony’s day.  The Portuguese summer is marked by St. Anthony, St. John and St. Peter in quick succession a week after the next.

The holidays are truly not even vaguely religious, at least not in a Christian sense.  I’m hazy on St. Anthony because it is celebrated mostly in Lisbon, but I presume it’s the same as St. John.  St. John – Sao Joao (with two tildas over the last two letters) was celebrated (at least when I was a kid) by going off downtown all night, roaming in vast groups singing folk songs of the “it was a morning in may” type, hitting people on the head with elephant garlic at the end of stalks and then later (as the holiday became more civilized) with giant plastic squeaky hammers.

Somehow, everyone made their way to the seaside by morning, often two by two.

In the village – people not of an age to go maying – St. John was celebrated by lighting an immense bonfire in the center plaza (everyone contributed.)  Young men jumped over it to show bravery and couples often jumped over it together.  I have it on good authority that early on this was considered a legal (or at least ritual) marriage.  Oh, yeah, people gave each other pots of basil.

If you stayed up till morning, and you were supposed to you had breakfast of café au lait and toast before going to bed.

The whole thing is such a mess of traditions accreted to what I believe was originally a Celtic mid-summer holiday that it’s almost hopeless to try to pull it apart.

To make things more completely insane, kids in my day built outdoor nativities: with plaster figures, much cheaper than the expensive (or in our case severely incomplete.  It’s a long story) nativities used at Christmas, but far, far more elaborate.  It was sort of “nativity meets model railroading.”  It wasn’t unusual for these to include all of Bethlehem with figures of people going about their lawful occupations.  Some of us —  okay, some of me, I think I was the only girl to get this involved – would actually put in rivers and fountains.  Anyway – again, to make things odder – by tradition kids under ten would run around with a figurine of St. John clutched in their fist hitting up every adult in sight for “a penny for the saint.”

I completely got Guy Fawkes when I first heard of it, and at the same time I wonder if both have a common substratum, or if it’s just that kids are shameless beggars and take every opportunity to monetize popular sentiment.

Let me point out that at least when I was young, Portuguese were so bad at publicizing this that tourists caught downtown at St. John’s often looked between excited and terrified, since they had clue zero what was going on.  They’d go bouncing along with the dancing groups, but their eyes would be going “Is this where they kill Americans?” (It was usually Americans.  There was a higher chance the Brits knew something like this.)  When I was between fourteen and sixteen I spent a lot of time explaining St. John in broken English to the visitors.

Anyway, St. John’s connection to bonfires seems grim in Colorado just now.  Robert told me that firefighters would probably take it badly if we run over to the fires and hit the firefighters on the head with squeaky hammers.  This led to a discussion of where the hammer might have come from: the hammer as both symbol/tool of artificer gods like Vulcan and Ptah and as a symbol of warrior power: Tor.  The discussion shed more heat than light.  It usually does.  But we had much, much fun with it.

But it makes it clear to me how insane it is to read too much into local rituals or mythologies because the layers come in and drift, and after a while it’s hard to tell what the pots of basil have to do with the cafe au lait and the toast.

It also makes me wonder how much we really know about civilizations that we know only by representations of events on pots, and by fragmental literature.  Perhaps if we could go back in time, we’d all be “Is this when they kill time travelers”?  (I now have a great wish to read The Fox In The Forest by Ray Bradbury.)

And it seems I wrote a post after all.  Disjointed and odd, but a post.  And I’m perhaps a little less depressed.  Maybe tomorrow I’ll buy some potted basil.  The cats will eat it, but that’s not the point.

So, behave yourselves till I get back.  Absolutely NO setting fire to the internets, and no bonfires on the blog.  And I’m CERTAINLY not giving you a penny for the saint, even if you say you’re under ten years of age at heart!

When you look into the mirror, who looks back at you from behind your eyes?

Those who read me know that this is a central theme of my work (as self important as that sounds.)

It is one of the things that worries me and disturbs me, and intersects with writing science fiction in weird ways: If you upload your personality into a machine, who are you uploading?  Will it change?  Why not?  You change.  What if you could live forever?  Or even two hundred years?  Will you be you?  After all that, will you be you?  Are you the same you that you were at three?  At five?  At twenty?  How much less would you be you if you’re now, say in your forties, two hundred years from now?  Would you have studied/read/learned/lived things that made you someone quite different?  Perhaps someone quite scary?  Or perhaps detached and tired?

Being a woman, I can tell you my reactions are different not only depending on when in my cycle you hit me, but also which time of life.  As I approach what used to be called euphemistically “the change of life” I am becoming bolder and more… myself than I was in my twenties and thirties.  But it’s not just women.  I live with three guys and they’ll react differently to the exact same event if they’re tired, hungry or just out of sorts.  If the shock they get is the third in a row, they’ll react differently than they do to the third.

Right now, I’m finding myself being vaguely tired by the resurgence of Colorado fires, after everything we went through last summer.  No, we probably won’t be affected, (except, as last summer, by needing to give shelter to friends who were closer to the turning point.)  Or at least we won’t be affected unless new flash points appear – then all bets are out.  Because we live in an older part of town, full of Victorians, which in this climate might as well be firestarters, if one corner catches we’ll barely have time to run.  So, I’ll bring down the cat carriers tomorrow, and make sure all my backups are in my purse.  Then, if there is enough time, we grab the laptops and the fireproof safe with all the other papers.  But even if the personal danger were much higher, the excitement would be much lower (not a good excitement, but you know what I mean.)  We realized last year that there are certain things that matter: documents (for convenience); my work and living things.  The stuff that’s hard to replace.

How different would my reaction be if this were the 200^th wild fire in vicinity of my city?

I don’t know, and neither do you.

I can’t even tell you if I was myself when I got concussion and went around for six months in a complete daze.  I mean, my thoughts weren’t right.  Was I me?

What we identify as “I” – the person behind the eyes – seems to be less a set of beliefs and more a set of feeling.  I am the one who feels.

I know how to do this for a character.  I do not know if I’m different.  For a character, you can have them change love, interest and life-ambition.  BUT to keep the character “himself” you have to have a certain set of things you can’t break.  Your character who loves children cannot suddenly start killing them (unless he thinks by killing them he’s protecting them.)  This cheap trick of breaking the character, beloved of pseudo-psychologists, in fact renders the story gray goo.  It’s one step above (below?) making the character go mad and do things randomly.

Is it the same with you?  I don’t know.  Several times in the last couple of years or more, sometimes on matters personal, sometimes on matters professional, sometimes on matters national, I felt like I needed to talk or stop being me.

Inconvenient this.  When the principles of the animating character push the character to act, in a way that might break the character.

And yet I’m still here, and I’m still me.  Right?

And you’re still you.

But would we remain the same… as time goes by?  If the future turns out as fantastic as we hope, would we still be human enough to meet it?

A different and slightly more coherent post (it’s the sinus infection, I swear!) over at Mad Genius Club.

Okay, I didn’t mean to be angry in my post today.  It was just late, and the flesh is weak.  I feel as though for the last week or so I’ve been metaphorically speaking standing in the corner, holding the broom as a Samurai sword.  Enough.  It grows tiresome.

It needs done, of course.  Sometimes people need a good thwack.  And it must be exorcised in ways other than fiction, or the fiction becomes terrible and brittle and eventually mere sloganizing.

Though I suppose I could write slasher fic under another name.

Which brings me to my problem.

I know that every profession has problems not obvious from the outside, dilemmas people face that no one who doesn’t do the same thing for a living would believe.

Mine is ontological uncertainty.  Or perhaps morphological uncertainty.  The phenomenon defies explanation.

A day this week, I was coming out of the shower when the love of my life, who’s been married to me for twenty years, after asking what a (writer) friend is working on said, “You know, I’m still not convinced you’re not her.”

This might make perfect sense if a) my friend weren’t published mostly in indie.  The man sees my returns from indie, so any secret name can remain secret from him for about a quarter.  And then he gets to go in and do my tax work.  Surely, he’d know?  B) My husband has IN FACT met this friend and her son.  A few years ago my friend came over to stay while her son looked over the Air Force Academy.

I pointed this out and he sighed.  “Yes, but I read her Mad Genius Club post today, and you still sound exactly alike.”

I want to say that Amanda Green and I dispute this.  We’ve read our own stuff and we’ve read each other.  Not once have I paused in the middle of one of Amanda’s pieces and gone “Wait, is this me?”  On the other hand perhaps it’s like my kids.  Now they’re both grown up, total strangers, and even our banker say things like “I know you’re not twins, but—”

The kids then start listing everything they are different on.  And it’s true.  Robert’s nose is much flatter.  Marshall’s hair IS curly.  Robert’s brow ridge is a little heavier.  Robert’s face structure is rounder.  But does it matter?  No.  they are the same general coloration (Robert is less olive and more pink, but not enough to be really noticeable) and have the same expressions. They’re also about the same height.  People receive an impression of equal.  After that they don’t see the differences.

Half in self defense and half in laughing, Amanda and I have developed this theory we’re really twins.  (Given she’s a redhead and a head taller than I this is odd, but not impossible.)  I was just sold at an early age to Portuguese Gypsies, who then abandoned me in my family’s coal chute – thereby following the origin story my family told me when I was very young!  See, it all fits.  And think of it as Ransom of Red Chief not once but twice.

However this week I faced a different bit of odd.  In the middle of the week, someone asked me if I was Ellie Ferguson.  The funny part about this, is that Amanda and I have been looking at Ellie’s very, very good numbers climb up and scratching our heads and going “Maybe I should write Paranormal Romance?”

Amanda THINKS she might be able to, but I don’t think I could.  Because see, once you bring in the paranormal, then I want to explain it.  It’s always part of my issue with writing fantasy.  I either create such a complex magical system it becomes a multi-series system, like the one in Witchfinder – or I create such a complex magical system that in fact I write science fiction in all but name.

From what I understand – the second problem is that I don’t READ the stuff – paranormal romance is shorter on explanations and larger on hiding-the-sausage in a REALLY safe place.

I think I’d get bored.  I mean, I don’t care how much fun the characters are having, it’s not my fun.

But when my friend asked me if that was me, I went back and read Ellie.  I don’t see it.  Not only not my genre, but not my style.  And Amanda can shut up already with the “But you could totally do it” because I can’t.  If she keeps this up, I’ll close her down as a pen name and we’ll see how she enjoys vanishing mid-air.  Though, of course, her mom might get worried.  Drat.  None of my other pen names have real life relations…

Then yesterday, another friend, who is an agent and should know better, also asked me if I was Ellie Ferguson.  I swear I don’t get it.

Have five secret names.  No, wait, four, and no one trusts you.

However, I swear this one isn’t mine.  Even in Austen fanfic, where I wrote what could be termed “romance” for a good while, what I wrote was regency romance.

There is an element of fairytale and distancing in romance that I cannot do if it’s apparently about everyday life.  I suppose the shifters could take care of that, but I don’t do shifters that way.  In fact part of the reason I don’t READ paranormal romance or UF of the shifter kind is all the dominance and submission stuff.  While it can be fascinating to read ONCE, I much prefer my critters to be self-willed and at least pass for rational.

Anyway, considering the last week, I’m waiting fresh accusations of my being someone else so I’ve decided to come clean.

I am Kate Paulk.  The Aussie accent and completely different appearance — for those of you who have met her at conventions – are just a ruse you haven’t got yet.

And speaking of ruses, I’m also Dave Freer.  Weirdly, the hard part of being Dave Freer is not swimming with sharks, or gluing that wild beard all over my face every morning with spirit gum (good disguise.  Why did you think he wore it?) or even keeping his wife of decades convinced I’m male, or even fathering two sons (that’s just a ruse they haven’t got yet – they’re actually characters, loosened on the world.)  No, the hard part is writing at a completely different and much higher level.  That ability comes, of course, from using the name Dave Freer.

When I was little I went to a sorcerer (shud up.  Did too) and was told that the name Dave Freer immediately makes one write better by at least a magnitude.

I couldn’t pass that up.

It’s just a ruse you haven’t got yet.

You will forgive me if this is not a very complete post, and also if it has nothing to do with Niven and Pournelle.

Today, I tried really hard to work, but did a grand total of about five hundred words, because the sinus infection – which is right now hitting older son full on – and which I had pretty much defeated, fell on me again.  I’m feeling better again, because I DID sleep most of the afternoon, but at the expense of actually working.

And I was thinking about arguments, particularly political ones.

I will admit that this was due to the incensed (and psychic) SFFWAan – presumed feminist  (a very low grade of troll this blog attracts, my apologies, but to be honest, the commenters’ tendency to chew, spit, and toss behind the fridge any unwary troll tends to discourage the more creative ones) who commented on the post That Ain’t No Lady.

Her/his/its/mutable comment began with a presumption of malice on my part, by saying “You know very well” – which, if true would mean I’d chosen to lie.  (In fact I don’t know very well, I still don’t know and the people who read the full article and reported it to me didn’t find this oh so very offensive mention of how women looked in bikinis – rolls  eyes.)  It also pulled this rather rambling accusation which somehow managed to yank Robert Silverberg and James Tiptree Jr. into the discussion (Woman – or man, or small animated dragon or steer, for all I care – what does Silverbob have to do with me?  The closest I came to a discussion with him was when he informed me it was no great feat to grow up speaking Portuguese, learn English at fourteen in a Portuguese public school,  and write for a living in English, because they are both Western languages.  This amused me. Note I don’t hold it against him. I don’t have a voodoo doll of Silverbob nor do I think he hates Latinas.  I simply found it amusing that he was sure it would be easy without ever having done the equivalent.)  And then it preemptively removed my legitimacy, in the unlikely event I could defend myself from such a carefully articulated thesis, by saying that I was probably prejudiced against women.

Take a deep breath ladies and gentlemen – consider that this person, who has never met me (to my knowledge) and never had any personal contact with me, can reach through the internet and know EXACTLY how I feel about women.  Why be a writer when you have that kind of second sight?  My lord, the lottery numbers, alone…

Ahem.  I had a point – oh, yeah, right here on top of my head. —  And we’ll return to the point in a minute.

Preemptively, though, let me assure you I don’t hate women.  I don’t hate men, either.  (I do have problems with lizards.  But since those aren’t human, I’m okay.)  I do hate specimens of either.  Mostly those who go through life making a virtue of envy.

Do I tend to assume that women are going to get into tizzies?  No, actually.  Only American women.  I’ve learned throughout my twenty eight years here to flinch when American women go hunting for male scalps for imagined “misogyny” because, oh, my Lord, do they watch commercials?  If American men chose to be offended over androphobia, they’d never shut up.  And they’d have reason never to shut up.

I will give American women that some men are stupid.  Some hate women.  Some hate men.  Some hate cats (unforgivable.  Into the outer darkness with them.)  Some even hate Heinlein (I shall strike them from MY book I wrote.)  Some men – oh, heck, let’s be daring – all men are human.  Which means some men are not very bright and some are brilliant, some are prejudiced against women and some aren’t.

I’m not sure exactly what the point is in bringing up individual cases where men were less than perfect to some women.

Let’s establish for the sake of argument that Robert Silverberg said something about how James Tiptree Jr. had to be male because only males could write that well.  (Lacking the verified quote and context I’m not willing to assume that is true – but let’s assume it is for the purpose of this discussion.)  And let’s assume James Tiptree Jr. is in fact the be all end all of female expression (not to my taste, but tons of writers, male and female aren’t.)  What would Silverberg’s words prove, other than that HE thought men wrote better than women? What would it prove about my thought?  Or Malzberg’s?  Or Resnick’s?  Or the guy playing his boombox next to my house RIGHT NOW?

To our purpose, nothing.  Silverbob’s opinions are his own.

The ladies (urk) of SFWA were talking about Mike and Barry being old white men and acting all prejudiced themselves.  Is that evidence of institutional prejudice? Is their opinion that of all women?   No.  Of course not. Women don’t have collective minds.  It’s evidence that these women have no clue that “projection” can apply outside the TV market.

HOWEVER the media, education and oh my heavens Marxist analysis have managed to convince a large portion of the American womanhood that every man is out to get them.  This is of course, because then it can be assumed the government is necessary to stand between such poor aggrieved females and the mean, ugly men who would subjugate them.  (Actually it would be a very stupid man who would bother.  They’re already subjugated.)

So, while in the States, when a woman opens her mouth to go on a victimhood rant I go “uh oh.”  Which means sometimes I miss legitimate complaints.  Rarely mind.  And these LEGITIMATE complaints are NEVER by privileged middle class, college educated women whining that two articles read by maybe a hundred people have materially hurt their rights.

Listen, not-ladies, we used to know that sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.  And if you come back and mutter something about fires and crowded theaters, I’m going to let my commenters ambush you behind the bike sheds after school.  Bikinis never hurt women either.  I used to have one that consisted of three tiny triangles.  I wish I still had the figure to wear it.  (Okay, maybe THAT hurts.  Just a little.)

So I am IN GENERAL prejudiced against the whining of upper class American females who are dead-set on their own victimhood (this does not apply to non-American or even to non-victimhood-craving American females, many of which I’m honored and privileged to call friends and not a few of whom post on this blog).  When I see one of them – ONE OF THE WHINERS – break a nail over their sisters who are treated like chattel and worse under Islam, I will consider that they might be concerned with the welfare of women and not with getting more benes for their own pampered selves.

Until then, I recommend they look to the mote in their eye when it comes to prejudice and misunderstanding of cultures, including, yes, their own.

You’d think they were created in vitro and have no fathers, no brothers, no sons, so that they imagine every man’s sole desire is to subjugate women.  You’d think they never read a book written by a male, never read genuine appreciation of female minds and modes in them.

And you know what?  I don’t think they have.  I think they hold the mote of Marxism between them and the world.  Having been taught they are oppressed they read oppression in EVERYTHING, including two gallant men talking about women they admired, and one of whom was exceptionally beautiful.  This is sad for them, because it robs them of the joy of life, not a little of which is derived from the rather glorious difference between male and female (which extends far beyond the obvious sex characteristics.)

Poor pitiful creatures, who can’t look at a cover with a beautiful female without thinking “exploitation” – I think “beautiful.”  Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus has graced my wall in one form or another since High School.

They prefer instead to embrace the certainty they are victims and the world has done them wrong: even when this belief robs them of joy and reason.

But ah, it demands nothing from them.  And for some sad, insecure creatures, that is enough.

We’ve talked about group-think that consists of thinking in bumper stickers.  Believe it or not, after I went through all the trouble of writing a long post about the evils of letting mentally ill/drug addicted/otherwise alienated people overrun downtowns —  evils which include harm to poor families thrown into homelessness and having to share their space with truly dangerous people and harm to poor children who depend on libraries for books and learning materials – I got someone on facebook answering with “someone needs to take care of these poor homeless, and most of them are families, and it’s heartless not to want to face a little inconvenience to help them.”

… Even though we’re not in fact helping them and letting them run through cities with no restraints of law or even of “conditions to receive social services” put on their behavior is causing harm to a lot of people, particularly poor and marginal ones.

That is slogan thinking.  This woman learned that she should “Afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted” and she’s not going to stop and think for nobody.  Because as long as she holds on to this idea that anyone trying to curtail homeless services is heartless and hates the poor she doesn’t have to wonder if the way we’re (not) “helping” the chronic homeless is destroying families, and communities, and small businessmen, and the simple trust of citizens in a civilized society.

She doesn’t have to think about anything, because she has her slogan, and it’s a security blanket.  She can clutch it and sleep through the night in the certainty that she’s one of the good guys.

These slogan-thinkers, when you consider they vote and also scat all over public discourse with their unthinking affirmations are bad enough.  But there is worse.  Oh, man, is there ever worse.  Let’s call them the herd thinkers.

Wait!  Didn’t I identify as one of the slogan thinkers’ characteristics that they wanted to fit in?  Yeah, but the slogan thinkers tend to hold onto a magical set of words buckle and tongue, and are sometimes quaintly out of touch with the current cant.  Meanwhile, the herd thinkers will change on a dime and say they always thought this way.  They are the original “We were always at war with Eurasia” and they don’t even need the government to dictate it.  They do it to themselves, to fit in.

This allowed them to pivot from the seventies “pollution is going to make us all freeze” to the eighties/nineties “pollution is going to make us all burn” and now to “pollution is going to make some people burn and some people freeze” while the scientific evidence remained scant and not very conclusive.  But the herd moved and mooed in unison.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the SFWA “storm in a b cup” though what it’s displaying is the multiple pivots of feminism itself.  First, women were supposed to go into the working world, take it by storm and be tough grrrrls with nothing to fear.  They wanted all the rights of men and no quarter.  And they got them.  Good and hard.

Except men were used to treating women in business in a certain way.  It might not have been as bad as television portrays it, but I read Rex Stout.  Treating women in business as sweet young thangs or old scary dragoons was normal, both because that’s sort of how women fit into male hierarchy (They should argue with evolution) and because most women worked until they got married, which means most were sweet young things, and might have been open to wooing.

Was it terrible?  Well, I wouldn’t have liked to put up with it while trying to get work done, though I’ll point out that in every official interaction with men, letting old eve look through my eyes and smile at the old Adam in them gets things expedited wonderfully.  It’s not dangerous if you know where to draw the line.

Guilty?  Not a bit.  I am a woman.  I’ll use that as well as my brain to get what I want.  By which I don’t mean I’ll whore for the desired results.  I love my husband and I’m very monogamous… but flirt?  Oh, please.  Being two sexes and having the ability to interact along that tension line, and the endless possibilities of fun it provides are one of the reasons we know G-d loves us and wishes us to be happy.  People who want to behave as though they were genderless should have been born amoebas.  Sex is too good for the likes of them.

Unfortunately most American women – some Southern ladies excepted – have no clue how to draw the line, or even that they should.  Sometimes they seem to have no idea they’re flirting.  I’m not sure, since I came here at the time of second generation feminism, whether this was always so, or it’s a new thing.  In other words, I don’t know if our daughters are for some reason born without some essential component that allows them to understand how genders interact, or if they’ve been despoiled by an environment that tells them it’s wrong to work with nature, and that they must be some sort of genderless super-robots.

I suspect the second, because again I read Nero Wolfe, and early Heinlein, and…  other stuff written at that time.  American women then seemed as capable as any of knowing what to permit and what was a step too far; when a man was being agreeably complimentary and when he’d crossed that line.

Perhaps early feminists believed they could, by virtue of words on paper, redraw the old, old battle line that has been going on since before we were even humans.

Perhaps their daughters believed the words on paper and didn’t even know there WAS a battle line.

I can’t tell.  What I can tell is that the young ones have sold their birthright for a pot of message, and are wandering around like blind people, not only unaware of how men will react – INSTINCTIVELY – to certain signals, but also of how they, themselves, instinctively and without thought react to signals and/or what signals can be sent back.  (This is less of an issue with us, Odds, because, well… we don’t ever get signals very well and tend to process everything in word-thoughts.  Only… Only even our word thoughts get confused by the mooing of the herd.)

In this funny, funny world, women can dress as provocatively as they want to, because they’re empowered and they’re grrrrrls.  But it is evil of men and “lookism” to comment that one of them is beautiful as Resnick and Malzberg did.

Women can have as much sex as they want to – and often when they don’t want to —  because they’re just as empowered as men (forget that sex serves different evolutionary functions for male and female) but don’t you dare call them sluts.  But then, they have slut walks, in which they call themselves sluts.

And all of these coexist because they’re different slogans, mooed by the leaders of the herd, and repeated by a portion of it but not yet picked up by all.  (Oh, yeah, watch the shrieks of outrage that I’m calling them cows, in three, two, one.  I’d like to register for posterity, before the screaming starts that some of the worst mooers are steers. Also, I’m not using the metaphor to be offensive, but because it’s the one that best fits observed behavior.)

I got very – as opposed to a bit – worried in the eighties when women started claiming that men talking them into sex was “rape.”  The reasoning seemed to be that men had awesome talking skills and a mere woman could not defend herself against all those double-slick words.

I thought “OMG, they’re going Victorian.”

Since then we’ve gone to lookism (the ugly girl’s attempt to take attention from the pretty one) and to a man even looking at a woman too long, or asking for a date being considered “harassment.”

In fact, any man NOTICING another person is female is now harassment (witness the offense at “ladies” in Barry and Mike’s article.)

I feel for Barry and Mike.  I’m sure they were full supporters of the initial feminism which only wanted to give women access but assumed that evolution was not going to be reversed in a generation, and if women wanted to work alongside men, they’d have to endure men being… male.  And if they used a little of female wiles to get what they wanted… well, that’s how humans are and they go two by two.  This was a somewhat rational idea, and if it had stopped there…

It didn’t.

Their articles were salutes of the women who made it in (at that time) a very hostile male environment.

Barry and Mike had no idea that the herd had changed step and that the mooing signals from the top had changed.  Cattle are very stupid animals.  They identify their herd by a series of not very rational signals.  Fall out of step, and you risk being mistaken for an intruder and gored.  And people who didn’t realize there was herd behavior going on, and who got to their positions by rational thought, are more than likely to get that treatment.  I know, it’s happened to me.

And meanwhile the herd of tough grrrl Victorian maidens, “don’t call me slut” but “I’ll sleep with guys I’m not even interested in, and I’ll call myself slut,”  “asking me on a date is sexism” and “I can’t understand where all the good men have gone”, “we’re just as good as men”, “it’s rape if a man talks a woman into sex because men have awesome men neurons we can’t compete with” goes on its merry way changing directions as the leaders change rationals and demanding more government intervention to handicap men more, because otherwise, how can they compete with wonderful male superpowers?  They who are fragile flowers who get peristaltic disturbances because someone mentions most top scientists aren’t female?

Never mind that we all know where a herd ends up being led.

Moo like this!

 

NOTE TO SUBSCRIBERS: I did not put an update up last week, because our entire household was passing around “what is going around” and what it did to me was make me sleep a lot.  Since Dan slept, he recovered faster, but I have issues just lying there (I bore easily) so it took me till yesterday to fully shake the thing.  Now I must finish stories (one of them at least for sure for Baen.  I might have blown the deadline on the other two) and since these are under contract, I can’t share them.  I MIGHT do an update later today, but it won’t have free stuff.  Sorry.  I’ll get back to it by Friday.

 

My older son was born in 1991.  That summer for the first (and last time) in a long while we found ourselves with enough money to visit Portugal.

It was very odd.  Kindly remember this is Portugal, no one’s idea of the great Western civilization dreamland.  Portugal is often sneered at as second world by other Europeans.  Portugal throughout the entire time I had lived there was a net exporter of people.  Labor is still very cheap, unemployment still high.  It always was.  People went from Portugal everywhere in the world and during my lifetime to Germany and France driven by the direst necessity and often illegally.

So it was jaw dropping to find Portugal flooded with Eastern immigrants, some seeking to find work, some trying to make it overseas or to England.  I swear it can’t have been that bad, but everywhere we drove that summer, by the side of every highway, under every underpass, in fields, abandoned in woods, there were cars I’d never seen or heard of, and some of which looked homemade from found materials.

A lot of them, my mom informed me, were Trabants.

As far as the people in Portugal understood the events, as soon as the wall went down and it was obvious they wouldn’t be shot leaving, citizens of the DDR, and those who could get to the DDR got in whatever makeshift vehicle they could find and started driving.

This is what happens when your country is a virtual prison.  At the first whiff of freedom people just want to get away – far far away.  So far away that, if you change your mind, if you manage to get hold of the reins of power again, they can’t get you back.  The destination isn’t so important and even a “second world” many-centuries senescent potentate will do, if it’s the farthest you can get from your prison.

I know it sounds melodramatic to outsiders when writers call the old state of affairs, the old way of doing business “a prison.”  But considering how difficult it was to get in, and how many factors were selected for that had nothing to do with your ability to, you know, write a good book, how opaque the marketing was, how little control you had over it, and how bizarre things could get if your agent/editor/anyone connected with the house took offense at anything you did or thought, it felt like a prison to many of us.  Don’t take my word for it.  Go to any blog of anyone who is successful self publishing and the substratum of all of it is “ah, ah, I’m free, I’m free.”

We saw colleagues fired for associating with the wrong public figure, for saying the wrong thing, for being rude to the wrong person, for trying to market a different work and even – yes, indeed, this made for happy friendships – for hanging around with the wrong (as in someone the editor disliked) friends at cons.

So we lived in constant fear and watching our step EVERY second, particularly when in public.  But you also didn’t know when an email might be forwarded.

We could have walked away from it all.  We could.  But we had this writing habit.  And let’s face it, most of us are incompetent at LIFE.  So we stayed.  And we tried to fit the mold, even if it meant filing our round shapes into sharp corners.

And for most of us the reward was ONLY “not dying.”

Among other things it was assumed that we would pay our own way, we’d expend our money for publicity, we’d give good work on time, even though we had a full time job, and anytime we got tired of being the one pony in town we got told to shut up and act like a professional.  (And yes, I’m excluding Baen from all of this.  They’re more like family.  I hear DAW is too.  Don’t know. The other houses I worked for weren’t.)  On top of that you had to go through agents.  Read this week’s Kris Rusch column for how fun that could get.

Was it a prison?  Well, we could pretend the bars weren’t there, but…

Now we have the possibility of indie.  For most of us it is an uncertain, unknowable thing, and we’re all thumbs.  My friend Amanda Green is great with the conversions and the pretty-pretty ebooks, but frankly, I’m still doing it by the rough, ready and ugly method.  This needs to change, of course, and it is, as I cram some learning into the spaces.  We have to find stock art (or have art done.)  We have to do covers.  What sells and what doesn’t is trial and error (mostly error) and the old models don’t always apply (hard to when you are selling something the size of a postage stamp. That lovely detailed art?  Invisible.  Going bold and clean seems to work best, but of course it’s also far more difficult.)  Then there’s pricing – do I price up, do I price down?  Do I paint it purple?

It’s a lot like being a teen again trying to learn the only game in town — Should the skirt be shorter?  A little off the bottom?  Should it be tighter on the butt?  Do you think guys like green skirts?  What do you mean no matter what I do it won’t work because he’s gay?  How can I tell if he’s gay? – and I never wanted to go through my teen years again, not for half the time and double the pay.

I keep thinking “D*MN it, I’m fifty, I’m too old to be doing this.”  Then I see people older than I thriving on it, and I shut up and try again.

But through it all there is this feeling “no matter how well or how badly it does, I’m in control, and I can try things that relate to the book, to the story, to the cover – not to my politics or whether some guy at a book show thought I was rude, not to what my agent thinks of my work, not to whether some big name thinks I’m a terrible terrible person because I was wittier than she was at a panel.  What people whisper behind my back doesn’t matter, not unless I engage in epic battles with my fans on the internet.  (Yes, of course I might.  But that’s why I have secret pen names.)

Am I making a ton of money?  Not yet.  I’m still working on putting stuff out.  And what I’m making so far is about what I made from one of my other houses.  But you know, day old bread tastes better in freedom.

This is me, in my Trabant, waving the old chains goodbye.

And this is what is fueling the “war in science fiction” – in the old days, we’d have shut up when the crazy wymen went hunting for Malzberg and Resnick.  What’s more, their nuts (nutsy – say it aloud, you’ll get there) behavior would have got them perks form publishers, “visibility” and “committed to equality” and such poppycock.  And when none of us spoke up, they’d think that “the entire community agrees.”  Not anymore.

What’s more, I’m looking around and seeing signs of the same everywhere.  Friends in Journalism were even more buttoned up than we were, but they now go “Oh, yeah?  Well, if you fire me, I can go on a blog.  I might starve, but I’ll be able to sleep nights.”  And stories break out.  Such as the fact that the NSA is spying on everyone, all the time.  Yes, even you.

Cracks are appearing in all the old fields.  The figures of the establishment in almost every field are saying and doing the things they always said and they can’t see that EVERYONE can see the truth and is laughing at them behind their backs, or behind our hands, because there are other ways of doing things.

The wall isn’t quite down yet, but there is a crack, and the crack is enough, push-pull for friends to get their buggy buggies over and start driving towards freedom.

We might not get very far.  We will be strangers in a strange land.  G-d knows we might starve.

But there’s no going back, and now the old ways seem like an iron jacket.

Get on your Trabant and ride!

*This gentleman is the person who got me my rights to my backlist (all but Baen and two of the mysteries) back.  I’ll warn you he told me upfront he wasn’t “right” because he didn’t practice in NYC … but I had a feeling, and I liked his mind, which happens to be twisty, and I insisted.  He still says it wasn’t him, it was the good bond paper.  But I was there, I saw it.  It was him.*

Greetings all, thanks to Sarah’s generosity, I have the opportunity to write a short post here on her blog about … well, I guess I better figure out what the post is about before the end of it.
I’m Robin Roberts and I’ve been practicing law for about 17 years now, first in California and then here in Colorado. My wife and I have a law practice in Denver. Intellectual property law was my original interest in getting into the legal field from my software development career.
Sarah has written often in this space about how the publishing business has been in so much turbulent change in recent years. We noted just a couple of weeks ago Kristine Rusch and Dean Smith’s short-lived Ella Distributing venture – for getting Indie published works into bookstores – which looked like a great idea just months ago but was subsumed by changes in the existing distribution systems. The reality is that the legal field has been undergoing similar chaotic changes in recent decades. I’d like to write about the kind of legal services that I think writers need and how to get those services at a reasonable price. First I want to talk about the areas of law that affect writers – especially indie published writers – and then I want to talk about the need for legal services to navigate those areas.
I have done a bunch of local seminars at various venues where I speak on Copyright Basics for Writers. About an hour and half where I cram in the basics of copyright law – the scope of copyright, the term of copyright (I want to do a short post on why you see authors lodging the copyright of their works in corporations e.g. Tom Clancy, Kevin J. Anderson), work for hire, fair use doctrine and infringement. But for this post, I just want to talk about licensing, which is what a traditionally published author does with his/her work and an indie author basically doesn’t.
Once a work exists in a tangible form, i.e., you’ve pounded out your work on that keyboard and have it saved to that hard drive or USB stick – manuscripts are just so 19th Century – you of course have a choice in how to proceed to publication. If you try indie publishing, the main hurdle in form of legal gobbledygook for you is the terms and conditions of the publishing channels you use – Smashwords, Kindle Direct Publishing and Nook Press. Recent changes in Nook Press got some coverage as Holly Lisle and others dissected the terms of Nook Press’ agreement. That resulted in some changes to those terms, but the reality is that most of the core issues there come from the clauses in those agreements on pricing. That’s really where the important issues arise in those channels – how you are allowed to price your work among the competing channels, the resulting royalties and the amount of control on pricing you surrender. Holly Lisle, on her blog, recently reacted negatively to some changes Nook Press tried to adopt but in reality the indie author still retains far more control of their work in those channels than the traditionally published author on pricing and royalties.
The traditional publishing route presents a far more complex legal hurdle – that of the publishing contract. But first, I want to make a short digression about agents.
Recently, I had a conversation with an aspiring author who was being courted by some name agencies, and I tried to explain to that author why the agency model has been breaking down in traditional publishing but in truth Dean Wesley Smith does a better job of explaining that here. The bottom line is that the agency model is not doing a good job of representing the author’s interests while fighting hard to protect the agencies’ interests. And one of those areas of conflict shows up with the publishing contract. Since your agent is representing many authors to each publishing house, their own interest is dominated by their relationship to that publishing house – not to an individual author. So that conflict of interest can result in an agent not looking out for the author’s interests in the terms of a contract. As another aside, many states’ ethical rules for lawyers won’t permit lawyers to have a percentage stake in a contract that they are representing a client regarding. Think about your opinion of lawyers’ ethics and consider what it means that often attorney’s ethical rules are too strict to allow them to do what “agents” do …
So that is where I recommend that a writer with a publishing contract in hand get that contract reviewed by a good attorney with an intellectual property law background. (Perhaps later Sarah will let me write my rant about the difference between “intellectual property law” and “entertainment law” – but for now, be wary of “entertainment law” practitioners). You want an attorney with some experience in Copyright law issues over and above an understanding of contract law principles because Copyright law includes some provisions that supersede common contract law principles. You want an attorney who is going to make sure you understand the contract you are considering – even if you don’t want to be “bothered” – so that you can make a rational business decision.
There are several important areas for an author to scrutinize on a traditional publishing contract. First, the issue of what exactly you are licensing to the publisher. This sounds obvious but it is a very complex question in modern publishing contracts. The industry has a lot of terms, which it pretends are all “standard” terms, but are not always so, to describe the various ways that the copyright of a work is sliced up. Copyright law provides several “exclusive rights” in a work and the first is the eponymous “Exclusive right to make copies”. And the publishing business divides that up into a score of variations upon “hardcover”, “trade paperback”, and “mass market paperback” and divides up the geography by country. So one can license the mass market paperback rights to a work for the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand countries while the author retains the rights to all the rest. Many variations upon this exist and nothing is truly “standard”.
Also important, when reviewing a contract’s licensing clauses, is understanding what kind of derivative works rights you are transferring. In Copyright law, “derivative work” refers to things that are straight forward transformations of your work like translation to another language. But “derivative works” also refer to transformations to another media like audiobooks, video games, stage plays and screen plays. These rights are sometimes left to the author and sometimes they are transferred to the publisher who then owes the author some share of what the publisher receives. All is negotiable regardless of what an agent or a publisher tells you. Most of the time if an editor says that the contract terms are not negotiable it is more likely that they don’t understand their own contract in the first place.
The second issue of a traditional publishing contract review is how royalties are calculated. Intertwined with this issue is that of how the advance is credited to the author for those royalties. The issue of how publishers account for royalties and advances for multiple books – often in contradiction to their own contract terms – is fodder of a blog post of its own. The music business taught publishers a lot of dirty practices and poring through a publisher’s statement for an author’s titles can be an exercise equivalent to working for the NSA decrypting Russian transmissions. And in fact, there is an undercurrent in the business that publishers have been dishonest in reporting sales for some time. But the author should still clearly understand how royalties are being calculated, what terms like “reserves” mean and the exceptions for when an author will be paid little or no royalty on discounted or clearance books.
Third, an author really needs to understand how and when that author will get the rights returned to him, e.g., how to terminate the contract. Because sadly, too few people think about what happens when the publisher loses interest in a work, and yet the author thinks that there is still market value for it. Termination clauses in publishing contracts are very obtuse, and it is where the objective eye of the attorney is most useful. Because authors have a common practice of reading a contract for what happens when all goes well, and good attorneys read a contract for what happens when things go bad. You should understand how and when you are going to get the rights to the work back when you want to put your work out before your fans, and you want to exploit any market for sequels you think that the publisher is ignoring.
When I’m done reviewing a contract for a client, I either talk to the client about the contract and my concerns or I write a report to them in memo form, whichever they want. What I don’t do is simply say “You can’t sign this” or “You can sign this”. That’s not advice, that’s making their decision for them. A publishing contract is a business decision and the author has to consider the advantages and disadvantages of the contract in detail and make a rational business decision of their own.
The costs of a attorney to review a contract for you can seem daunting. Certainly, sometimes people focus on the hourly rates of attorneys without considering context. An agent is going to take his or her percentage of every dollar that the author’s work ever generates but an attorney is going to bill you for the time actually spent and no more. Because of their overhead, attorneys in such metropolitan areas as New York charge very high rates but there is a lot of competition for legal services in this country these days. Hourly rates in Denver for instance for good attorneys outside the white shoe firms range from $175 to $225 an hour. A review of a publishing contract plus the time spent by the attorney to explain it to you should not exceed more than an hour and a half to two hours billed time. Some attorneys will happily quote a flat fee for services if you are concerned with an indeterminate cost.
The reality is that the legal business is in a similar state of chaotic change regarding how legal services are priced, you have a lot of choices. I currently believe that the large, high overhead, “Biglaw” law firms are a thing of the past and are seeing their pricing models crumble. The future is for smaller, lower overhead and more nimble firms and individual practitioners. I’m pretty sure that you can find such attorneys in your community is you look around.
There are membership based legal services like “Pre Paid Legal” which offer various bundles of services for a monthly fee including supposedly “free” contract reviews. I’ve had some experience with such services and while I’ve seen a few people get good value from them, in general they are not good deals. You have no control over which attorney actually reviews a contract for you, no control over their actual experience and competence or understanding of the industry-specific issues presented and so very uneven quality of legal services. Such plans also purport to offer “discounted” rates for legal services beyond those in the scope of the “free” services, but in reality the attorneys that are on the referral panels for such plans would often discount their services to the same degree for any client that they valued.
Robin D. Roberts
http://www.robertsandroberts.net
email: robin@robertsandroberts.net