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We emerged from Memorial day weekend with the certainty that it wasn’t long enough and the funny thing is I don’t think I had a single drink all weekend, and we didn’t even do anything fun – mostly because we used it to change stuff from the loaner freezer back to our regular freezer which seems to be – fingers crossed – working.  We also had to buy younger kid a new mattress.

Well, had to is a form of speech, but he was sleeping on a bottom-grade seventeen year old mattress, in a bed that was first ours, then his brother’s and finally his.  The mattress has been horribly broken for at least ten years, and he was too big for the bed and had to sleep corner to corner.  We’d meant to buy him a new one two years ago, but we hit a rough patch financially and it was impossible.  Also we had the vague idea he’d move out “any year now” and so we’d get him stuff when he left.  But with him fixed in the house at least till he finishes his BA (two and a half years) and the bed grossly inadequate…  well… The royalty check for DST – supposing the agency ever passes it along (rolls eyes) – should take care of it.  And they had a really good sale on a floor model.

Of course this means getting rid of the bed which joins a long collection of stuff we need to put up for sale soon.  That’s okay.  One of the hardest things to learn in life – from my POV – is that I can’t do things instantly.  Say I decide to write a novel – I can’t try to finish it all in a day.  The work doesn’t fit the time.

This seems subtly wrong.

Stuff like “I painted the room, but it will have to wait till tomorrow to finish moving stuff in” seems even more wrong.  Go figure that.

And just when I got used to the idea a task can take multiple days to complete, I find myself getting older and running out of spoons sooner, so that everything seems to take a completely unreasonable amount of time.  That’s life.

In the middle of the night — when my brain tends to come up with really strange jewels of reasoning like “the entire motor of human history is the flip flop shoe,” which seem perfectly logical in the middle of the night but when I wake up in the morning make me wonder what exactly goes on in my dreaming brain – I came up with this strange mirror moment.

You know how at least in my writing – I don’t know if anyone else uses this.  As far as I know I came up with the expression as it applies to writing – my characters face a mirror moment somewhere just before or after the black moment.  This is when they see themselves as they are, with no illusion, and it usually allows them the impetus to race to the finish with new energy/goals.

Well, for the last several years I’ve been having trouble getting things done in what even I think is a timely manner (meaning not a novel in a day) as well as organizing my day. I know part of this – which got worse after the possibility of indie – hinges on the sheer amount of confusion and work raining down on me.  The solution would seem to be to organize myself so I write in the morning and publish in the afternoon or vice versa.  BUT unfortunately these things are never that simple.  What happens when one of the cats is sick all morning?  Do I move the writing to the afternoon?  Do I go ahead and skip it?  What if something is due in writing?  Do I just skip publishing?

What ends up happening is that, in many ways I try and it all gets overrun and I give up.

But the mirror moment was more fundamental.  It was something like “I keep looking for little breaks and little consolations, and in the end destroy my concentration and my ability to finish things.”

Look, I suppose in many ways I had a fairly dreary childhood.  That’s not how I remember it.  And it sort of depends on how you squint at it.  I had free roaming rights of most of the neighborhood, I had books that I kept finding tucked away in weird places by my various ancestors.  I had grandparents always ready to entertain me and any variety of pets.

What I didn’t have, and this is in common with most people until this past century, was “variety.”  I was fourteen the first time my family went on vacation together.  Any book I had got re-read to shreds, because you never knew when I’d find a batch of new ones (buying them was really not an option till I was twelve and had a bus pass.  Then that’s where my birthday money went.  Asking relatives for books was worse than useless.  Even my dad seemed to think I should be reading fairytales, when I was in my Dumas phase.)  Even in terms of food, I woke up and it was a weekday, it was probably fish and rice.  (Sunday was chicken and rice.)  I could count on one hand the number of times we ate out till I got married. Chocolate had to be imported because Portuguese-made was indistinguishable from a bar of soap, so we usually got a couple of bars brought by immigrant relatives who came on vacation and stretched it.

No, I’m not complaining.  I wasn’t hungry (not till much later, and that limited) and I had clothes, and I had a warm place to sleep in.

BUT I got certain things stuck in my head as what we’ll call for lack of a better term “feast days” – I don’t mean liturgical feast, but special days, marked by something extraordinary: my mom baked a cake. We went on a picnic (this happened twice a summer or so.) We visited a castle or a museum.

There were things that got stuck there as “consolations” too – usually having to do with food.  For instance, if I was in finals and going nuts with anxiety (the kids come by it naturally) my mom would quietly come and put one of her hoarded chocolate squares next to me.  Or she would buy me a few (sugar-lemon) cookies when she went to the bakery in the morning.  Sometime after I finished the school year, grades being satisfactory –no more than two Bs though I was allowed a C in crafts and drawing (curiously though I’ve seen found I have a natural talent for it, that permission meant I never had more than a C.  The permission was granted because my brother can’t draw understandable stick figures – and my parents figured if he was allowed Cs I should be too.  Anyway, not sure what that means about motivation and talent.  I didn’t find out I had talent for it until I no longer had a class.) – mom would take me shoe shopping.  This usually – at least as I got older – extended to purse shopping, school bag for the next year shopping, hair ornament shopping, and just generally a day’s worth of girly things (it was in one of these we came across the hole in the wall dusty family shop where, high up on the wall, in shelves, they had between the wars (or possibly pre WWI) vintage millinery which the elderly lady sold at the price marked.  This is how I went through college in silk lace stockings.)  The trip ended up at a coffee shop which served something like fifteen scoops of ice cream in a cup that looked like a Viking helmet.  It was called The Viking, and it was doused in chocolate sauce, whipped cream and stuck with wafers.  Mom used to say she got ill just looking at it, but I loved it.  She would sip her tea and watch me eat it.  (Those of you who’ve raised kids know just how much fun that is.)

Dad was more likely – from the time I was twelve or so – to pour me out a little Port wine, or something of the sort, though weirdly – though I have a drink now and then (like twice a month) that didn’t get stuck in my head as a red letter day.  Probably because it was rarer than mom’s indulgences.

If you’re thinking I had an awful lot of fun – that’s true.  But what you’re not getting is how rare it was.  Same thing with say snacks between meals, or with taking the day off to do something fun.  I had to live on the last of those experiences for weeks, sometimes months.

According to my mirror moment, the problem is that once I was able to indulge myself, I started giving myself all sorts of consolation moments, until my entire life is nothing but a string of consolation moments, which leads to both difficulty keeping commitments, and to weight issues and other stuff.

Now, this is not strictly true.  These middle of the night insights are always odd and exaggerated.  I mean, lest you imagine I sit around munching bonbons and reading Museum today all day, I don’t.

On the other hand, it occurred to me I got into some bad habits.  You do things you have to do to survive tough times.  The toughest here, probably, were when I was trying to raise very small kids AND break into publishing.  I remember getting up in the morning at five am to get two hours of writing before I had to get the kids up.  From then on my life ran on rails – meaning there was a scheduled station every few minutes.  Drop kids off at school.  Come home and clean (or go shopping, depending on week day.)  Get smaller kid back at noon.  Feed him lunch.  Put him down for nap.  Do laundry. Get older kid from school.  Start preparations for dinner.  Have dinner.  Clean kitchen.  Get kids ready for bed.  Rinse, repeat.

When you have a day like that after day after day after day, the temptation to have just another square of chocolate or to bake a cake because you – and the kids – deserve it, is immense.  It is no coincidence my fall from grace after losing a lot of weight on low carbs came on 9/11 when, unable to take it anymore, I started frying batch after batch of doughnuts.

The problem with that sort of thing comes when the pressure comes off a little, though.  Suddenly you can take a day or two to just read.  You can go for walks because you can.  Take a day off and go bother the animals at the zoo.

And after a while your focus has shifted and work is an interruption in your consolations.

Is it that bad?  No.  Do I indulge myself in way too many “times off” (usually of an hour or so)?  A bit.  Maybe a couple of times a week.

But the focus is a problem.  Even though I don’t take weekends off, metaphorically speaking I’ve been living for the weekend, orienting my life to those escapes, rather than to what I must and want to do.

I need to refocus.  I need to wake in the morning, not with “I hope I can go for a walk today” but with “I must get this and this and this done.”  And maybe then I can hard schedule a day off a week.

It’s worth a try.  Or it’s possible that the middle-of-the-night insight made as much sense as flip flops as drivers of civilization.  We shall see.  Changing the focus to what means something instead of the little escapes seems a worthwhile endeavor, anyway.

I know why I shifted the focus away from it.  When I was going traditional publishing only, and everything was out of my control, to focus on the work would just make the burnout worse, so I focused on the hope of reward, of “break” which started coming all too often.  But that has changed.  And the mind must be retooled.  (Which for both individuals and societies is the hardest thing to do.)

I’ll put up some very slight subscriber content in an hour or so, (I’ll start it after I get another cup of caffeine, but I’m accounting for possible interruptions) and you should definitely read Mad Genius Club (Amanda Green’s post) today.

I’ll be in the back, building new hardware for my head.

 

Forgive me for quoting myself (from A Few Good Men):  Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.  Did you think it would be easy?  Did you think it was just a game?

And now I’ll quote a better writer: No state has an inherent right to survive through conscript troops and, in the long run, no state ever has. Roman matrons used to say to their sons: “Come back with your shield, or on it.” Later on this custom declined. So did Rome.– Robert A. Heinlein

Neither of the boys is on track for military service, though both considered it (hard) at one point.  Their plans might yet change.  I hope their plans aren’t forcibly changed.

However, on how motherhood of adult sons changes your perspective.  This story (via Ace of Spades) would at one time have been sad, but now I found myself sobbing halfway through the song.

The story behind I Drive Your Truck.

Yes, the idea of one or the other of the boys — or both — dying in a war almost destroys me.  But I’m aware it might come to that.  And if either of them chose (or chooses) the Service I’d be behind them all the way.  I told them from the beginning that regardless of where they want to go, their service and their sacrifice might be needed to keep America safe.  I couldn’t but be proud if they chose to do it.  Proud and scared.  They haven’t chosen to do it.  Not yet.  But if circumstances require it, I know they will.  They’re my sons, yes, but they’re also American boys.  Americans do what has to be done.  And I wouldn’t have them any other way.

I was going to take the day off today.  I’m trying to finish a short story, which – for whatever reason, but probably mostly because it’s been so long since I wrote short stories – is taking me forever.  So I thought “I’ll put up a holding pattern and go write my story.”

Only…

I was reading the comments and Foxfier had the dime drop on her, for part of the reason that the Jewish people were hated and suspected of everything and “otherized” throughout most of history.  I’ve “known” this for some time, but had never articulated it and its implications fully.

We won’t go into the theological reasons, or why it suited the Roman Empire once it became Christian to put the blame for the execution of Jesus on the Jews.  Those are obvious, as is why it stuck throughout the middle ages. Besides, if you guys get into another religious argument, I’ll stop this blog, come back there and give you whatfor.

What we’ll go into instead is what Foxfier said: They lived by different rules.  A lot of their rules allowed them to escape the general maladies of their fellow citizens in what for lack of a better term we’ll call “dark ages Europe” – between the decadence of the Roman Empire of the West and soap coming into common use.

Their food rules kept them from eating (too) contaminated meat; the cleanliness rules kept them and their children as clean as it was possible to be in the middle of filth; even their strange habit of teaching their women to read and their general dislike of physical violence from husband to wife, made them live better.  In a world where healing knowledge was generally kept by the woman in the family, a woman who could read had not only her own notes, but those of her mother and grandmother for things she might not have faced before.

No population likes strangers in their midst.  That’s a human thing.  We’re tribal.  But the pervasive anti-Semitism throughout history, starting with the Romans, had another origin.  “The Man is Hiding The Stash.”

When people in your midst live by blatantly different rules, which you know – because you’re tribal, and of course, your tribe must be RIGHT – are self evidently stupid, and yet SOMEHOW those rules allow them to in general live better than you, the fault must not be with your tribes rules.  The other tribe amidst yours MUST be cheating.  The man is hiding the stash.

It is probably the reason for the strong anti-Mormon prejudice, too.  I’m not Mormon.  I do have a lot of friends who are.  Leaving aside the more uh…fringe sects of the religion (every religion has fringe sects and some are very weird and leaving aside theology altogether, because one man’s religion is another man’s belly laugh) Mormons live among us, as modern people, except they have these WEIRD rules.  Like, they don’t drink alcohol, or coffee.  Like, they have a home evening a week where the family is supposed to commune and share and you know, spend time together.  Their kids tend to dress better (Robert is routinely mistaken for Mormon) or at least more traditionally.  They tend to be more polite.  Mormons have a strong community that comes through for their members in time of need.  And in general – though of course there are exceptions — they have this way of doing well in life.  Which, of course, must be due to double dealing and stealing because it couldn’t be the way they’re taught to live their life, which is conducive to doing well.

Leaving aside religions, this applies to practically everything else.  Even the terms we use “privileged childhood” or “underprivileged background” “gifted child” – all of it assumes that what makes for success or failure is something external to us and vaguely unfair.

We’ll start with gifted children.  I was identified was such early on.  I’m actually weird, and I blame it on at least three instances of brain damage, because my verbal reasoning is very high, my math is a little higher than average (except for digit switching) but my visual spatial reasoning is next to non-existence.  The other day I shocked the boy who does 3-D puzzles for fun and who’d nagged me into buying him a new form of the rubik’s cube that the only way I could even solve one of the basic of those was by removing the stickers and placing them in a solid block per side. I spent hours in my youth trying to solve it, because well… I was supposed to be “smart” and all my friends could do this in seconds.  Never happened.

Anyway, so I got to see this from both sides.  Yes, give me an assignment where I could bs my way, and I could totally do it with no effort.  Give me a math assignment and it was easy, except that I had to keep track of digits so six didn’t become nine, and so that I didn’t scramble digits in a multiple-digit number.  This required effort.  If I did what came naturally I failed every math test.  (This also happened if I was stressed or mildly ill.)  Give me something with a visual base, like… the periodic table, and it took me days to get to where people got in minutes.

Yet, I kept consistently at the top of the class, because it never occurred to me there was an out.  I never thought I could say “I don’t have the gift to do this, so I can’t do it.”  I never thought of it, because my mother would scream for DAYS if I brought home anything below a B.  And heck, depending on class distribution of grades, sometimes if I brought home a B.

I suppose from the outside it looked like being “gifted.”  I just wafted on the breezes of my high intelligence or something.

At one point, later on, I was tutoring kids who were having issues with their school work.  A lot of them were what I would call “gifted” – i.e. high IQ – and nine times out of ten, curing their school issues consisted of telling them that they still had to study.  It was just the effort required was far less than other people had to put out.  But it wouldn’t look that way from the inside.  (Yes, there were other factors.  Teachers tend to prefer normal-high-iq kids, and kids who are genuinely brilliant discomfit them.  Also, I know having raised the boy-genius, kids who are brilliant still lack enough knowledge of the world to make informed decisions/opinions, so what they come up with can often seem morally aberrant or just appalling, and it takes time to trace it back and figure out where they went wrong.  Few teachers have that kind of time, even if they knew HOW to trace it back. So to the kids it looks like they’re being discriminated against for no reason.)

And one of the times I’ve been most furious in recent times was when trying to give words of comfort to a starting writer, about how at least he didn’t need to go through the insane mill of the publishing houses and the push system, how he should stop the nonsense with trying to get published by tiny and increasingly shadier presses, and instead just put stuff up there and learn from his failures as well as his successes.  I was told that I was “lucky” enough to get traditionally published and therefore I didn’t understand his “need” to see his books on a shelf in a store.  Lucky.  Like the failure of my first three books, which was held against me personally, even though the first book came out one month after nine eleven.  Like, the seventeen proposals (with seventeen beginnings) I had to write to get back on the saddle.  Like the year I had to write six books, and incidentally, none of them made it onto the shelves of regular bookstores.

Lucky.  Not insane work.  Lucky.

All of this is relevant, not from the POV of “humans suck, they discriminate against those who are different”  (If you thought you were being born into a race of angels, I have news for you – you are human.  Your mind might conceive of things angelic, but you were built on the common clay of an ape, which brings us things such as tribalism, because at one time they helped your ancestors survive, so you could be here, now.) but because the success and failure of – not just an individual, but a species – depends on such things: on “hardware in the head” – culture, that is.

The bourgeois culture that replaced the aristocratic mind set gave us a belief in striving, keeping your nose clean, working hard, saving, being innovative in how you did the work.  Not only was cleanliness next to godliness, but so was thrift and good manners, and tidy apparel, and industriousness.

At one time, as hard as it is to believe now, those bourgeois virtues meant that you were a good person; and those who succeeded were universally regarded to have been living right.

Was this true?  No more than any other human myth.  A lot of the people who succeeded were given a leg up, or cut some shady deal or used the favor of the government to insure against competition.

That’s human.  BUT in general, if you applied those virtues you did better than if you didn’t.  It might mean you still didn’t do spectacularly well.  In a society in which the solving of a rubik’s cube was essential to holding down a job, I’d still be unemployed forever.  But being cleanly and working hard, and striving, might allow me to eventually have a cottage industry of refurbishing  used rubik’s cubes.  I’d never occupy the executive suite, but I’d succeed, to the limit of my abilities.

Why is this relevant?  Because since WWI and markedly since the sixties, when creative control and media control were enough to propagate this unified myth, we’ve been tearing this idea to shreds.

If in movie or sitcom or book I hear of an executive who lives a clean life, is married to his first wife, has a passel of clean, cheerful kids, goes to church and is nice to animals – I know I’m going to find out he’s secretly a Satanist Mass Murderer.  In the same way, the unclean beggar in the corner or the thuggish young man are always some sort of secular saints who have suffered.

I am sure there are some homeless people who are there through no fault of their own (but most of the time they are there because of mental illness or addictions.  The first is arguably not their fault.  The second not so much.)  And I’m sure some young thugs just need love and understanding.

I’m also sure the number of those people per million could be counted on the fingers of one hand. In the same way, some clean-living executives might really be Satanist mass murderers.  In about the same proportions as saintly vagrants, I’d say.

Now, some executives – maybe a lot of them – might be crooked.  But part of that is the culture nowadays which assumes that to get ahead you have to stab others in the back.  (I’ve actually found the best way to get ahead is to help backward and pay it forward, but maybe that’s just me.) This means a lot of companies, particularly big corporations which, by virtue of size, are more divorced from economic laws than small businesses, end up fostering this kind of culture.  (Until the small startup eats their lunch.)

However, if you have a small child, and you need to entrust her to someone for two hours, who would you pick?  The executive in a suit coming out of an office, or the homeless guy who reeks from a distance, talking to phantom people at the corner?

If you picked the second, you’ve lost all contact to reality.  Yet the movies, most books and ninety percent of the TV programming would make you believe that was the way to go.

The built-up image of society in our heads is of a world where if you’re not crooked you’ll never get ahead, therefore the crookedness is ASSUMED if you succeed.  At the other end if you’re a complete failure, you MUST be saintly.

The problem is that we, as humans, are too likely to justify ourselves that way.  It’s all “they were lucky.”  Never “I didn’t work hard enough.” (And if you’re wondering if I should take my own medicine?  I do.  I did.  Actually that was the mechanism that kept me from suspecting the publishing world was rigged for the longest time.  But finally the fact that the population is NOT uniformly left leaning but that 99% of the books that go mega bestseller have to be at least marginally left leaning sort of broke through that.  You can be paranoid, and yet they still might be out to get you.  The fact that the control is breaking and sort of validating my perceptions helps.  For instance, one of the best ways to break out as indie is military sf.  It’s even better than romance.  BUT before it wouldn’t even make it on the shelves, except from Baen.  No, I still haven’t written my mega bestseller.  Part of this is a fear of flying – more on that later – and part of it is breaking through the structures that supported my mid list existence [my own daily life arrangements, I mean.] More on that later also, probably.)

To have an ingrained system, propagated uniformly by TV and movies and books and newspapers, and all means of mass communication that there’s something wrong with spectacular successes and that failure by itself anoints you as “good” is precisely the wrong message to send.  To either people coming anew to this country or those whose parents aren’t the best model (the children of the fractured families of the twentieth century) we’re saying “fail.  Glory in failure.  It means you’re good.”  We’re also incidentally promulgating the lower class lifestyle of promiscuity, indiscriminate spending, violence and dependency as the way to be.  This is what makes you “authentic”.

Is it any wonder they look at the alien tribe – we used to call them civilized men – who is clean, law abiding, keeps stable relationships, raises clean-cut kids, as somehow cheating, when that tribe succeeds?

The fact is that the rules for doing well in life haven’t changed that much throughout time.  Sometimes societies just forget them and promulgate instead the rules of the crab bucket and the idea that failure means you’re good. It always ends in tears.

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

– Robert A. Heinlein.

Alexander Dumas, of whom I am moderately fond, said of his historical fiction that there was no use at all raping history if you weren’t willing to conceive a child by her.

And though it might turn out that Alexander Dumas was more of a book doctor than a writer – there have been rumors around this for years, and I’ve discounted them because, well, they were mostly based on “he wrote too fast” and that makes me chuckle.  OTOH The Black Count, a largely sympathetic account claims that at least The Three Musketeers were originally written by someone else, who sued Dumas for part of the proceeds.  On the third hand, this is the “original account” people talk about which they say was somewhat short of the charm and delicacy of a barracks story, so the book is still Dumas’ – I found out while writing my first trilogy that this attitude was the only way to stay sane.

There were so many, equally credible and well regarded contradictory reports, that I had to choose one.  And sometimes to make room for my story I had to go “Well, that didn’t happen.”  That was just dealing with Shakespeare – whatever the partisans of X-was-Shakespeare say, Shakespeare is actually one of the best documented, non-royal people of the last four centuries the problem being NO ONE even from the early 20the century is THAT well documented.  You Run into the ten-witnesses-ten-accounts problem you find when you try to get a description of an accident. – and even with the out that I wasn’t writing a straight history.  Couldn’t be.  It had elves in it.

When researching Jane Seymour (Henry VIII’s queen, not the actress) it got worse.  She was a royal person and you’d think things such “where she was married” would be a matter of public record.  Turns out not so much.  I ended up going with the version of the present-day-descendant of the Seymours, figuring that he brought with him unspoken family legends to add to the brew but also because he adduced reasons why the more traditional version makes no sense.  (If she’d got married at her parents’ place, there would be a local record of a royal visit.  Henry VIII middle aged was not the sort of man to make incognito drop ins.  And a royal feast was something that would have near bankrupted the region.  Besides, there’s no record of Henry VIII taking the time to travel there.  So the legend that she got married in her parents’ barn probably harks to some engagement celebration given while she was ruralizing there so that it wouldn’t be so obvious she was waiting for Boleyn’s head to drop..  And then my copyeditor found a website and tried to “correct” me and I had to take a mile-wide patch out of her hide, but that’s something else.

Anyway, all these things become vitally important when you’re writing, and you end up having to say “this far but no farther” and “from here on I’ll remember this is just a story.”

But there are other pressures.  I made a rude comment about Dan Brown’s latest oeuvre, and one of my readers did a note and tagged me on Facebook, from which I assume the comment that you can’t write authentic history, you have to write what people THINK happened, or else they won’t accept it, and to document the contrary would be very boring, so you just don’t write the truth, you write what people expect, and to make disparaging remarks is a stupid thing to do.

Maybe so.  It is debatable.

I mean, there is a point up to which you have to write what the people expect or at least what they’ll accept (which is not the same.)   For instance, in writing Shakespeare I didn’t mention the scarcity of bathing and clothes washing.  The people who know it know it, but the vast majority of people don’t want to be told that Elizabethans killed body-lice more or less constantly because they were all infested.

In the same way, I didn’t mention some of the more unsavory aspects of daily life.  And I made Shakespeare almost a man of our time, or at least willing to become a man of our time – because that’s what the public wants to believe.

With the Musketeers —  where I have a little more leeway because I’m dealing with a sort of Dumas fanfic, and Dumas’ work is not exactly historical to him (i.e. it’s set pre-revolution, ostensibly but Dumas didn’t let anachronisms worry him too much, so there’s a dash of Dumas’ own time in there – I found I had to make some radical changes to “sell” them to modern taste.

The very first one is that I had to give him some modern sensibilities.  No matter how they felt in the Dumas books about Huguenots or the bourgeoisie, in my books they couldn’t hate people because of their religion or social status; no matter how funny that scene is in The Three Musketeers, I couldn’t have the musketeers beat their servants to keep them in line; no matter how funny Porthos’ stupidity is in the original, nowadays people don’t want to READ about dunces.  (They want to watch dunces.  That figure has moved to sitcoms.)  In mysteries particularly, I couldn’t have one of the characters be a bumbling fool.  So I made him inarticulate, and a man whose brain works too fast for his mouth.  Also, Athos couldn’t be silent.  Not if I was in his head.  I still tried to have him talk more directly (and less) than the rest but not to the point of people suspecting he was mute, as happened in Dumas.  Also I didn’t let them run horses to death, because that was ick even to me.

This was all in the service of the popular conception of the Musketeers as being chivalrous and noble which is what the public expects and I couldn’t break.

But there was more.  For instance, I had to give the musketeers a uniform, when they were actually much more likely to dress in bits and pieces of stuff.  I called the Cardinal’s guards “guards” even though their name was “the red musketeers” or “the Cardinal’s musketeers.”  And of course, I made the Cardinal Machiavellic and super-humanly smart.

These are near-irrelevant details, so firmly fixed in people’s heads there is no point trying to dislodge them.

Even so, I fell afoul of pre-conceptions.  Part of the reason I ended up selling the book to Berkley was the bizarre rejections I got from the other houses, all of them based on the idea that in the main book D’Artagnan was a minor character and not the narrator.  One of them actually said “When you announce something with the Musketeers, your first chapter shouldn’t be narrated by D’Artagnan, because that’s like having Sherlock Holmes narrated by his maid.”

This was a pre-conception I didn’t even know was out there, but it’s at least widespread enough that four houses seemed to all have this issue.  (Maybe it’s part of an ivy league education?)

So, you should be starting to see some of the compromises an historical writer makes.  It’s a very bad idea, therefore, to base your view of ancient Rome on “This character was perfectly modern, in this novel” because that’s unlikely to be realistic.

On the other hand, if the writer is at least semi-competent, you could say something like “Romans had frying pans, because one was used in such and such a book.”  (And when an author is forced to put in a detail they know is wrong, or which at least they can’t verify, they should put a note on the back.  That’s the contract between author and reader.  Because otherwise I could write the Flintstones version of the pre-history and well, it’s my license as a writer.  You’re either writing historical or you’re not.)

In fact, what Dan Brown seems to have done in his latest – at least according to this review (yes, it’s a Catholic book site.  It’s also incredibly funny) – is closer to the Flintstones version of history than the careful compromises of a historical writer.  He’s not so much catering to or trying to bridge his readers’ pre-established notions, as he’s making stuff up out of whole cloth because he’s either too lazy to do proper research or he doesn’t care enough.  (In fact, we knew someone who knew him in his salad days, when he wrote his first three unheralded books and the answer to those is “yes.”)

I will upfront confess I haven’t read the DaVinci Code.  Even if it were a masterpiece, it is not my type of book – I read very few thrillers.  The fact they package F. Paul Wilson as a supernatural thriller kept me from reading his books for years, which was a shame.

My husband read it though.  And you need to understand how this works around this house.  When Dan is reading something, he will read me vast stretches of it because he finds them interesting, amusing or wants my opinion.  This means that I heard probably 2/3 of the book – the effect being rather as if I had skimmed it.

I also read an interview with the author and I read the book on which the author based this one: i.e. the book that comprised his ENTIRE research.  This is not a secret.  He named the two characters in his book after the authors of that book.  Also, the authors of that book – Holy Blood, Holy Grail (I keep calling it The Sword and the Chalice.  No idea why.  Deal.) – tried to sue DaVinci for plagiarism, until it was pointed to them they had to pretty much admit their theory is fiction.

I read HB, HG more than twenty one years ago, because a friend of mine managed a New Age bookstore, where the book was a big hit, and he thought I might like it.  (He also knows I’m fond of nutty conspiracy theories, the nuttier the better.)  Afterwards, either to wind me up or because he was genuinely interested, he asked my opinion of it.

The fallacies (the book has little else) took hours to list.  I will go with the two easier to grasp, though: the book posits that DaVinci was part of a secret conspiracy going back fifteen hundred years, give or take a few.  (This is sort of kind of sorta possible, with modifications.) And it posits that the royal family of France is descended from Jesus Christ and Magdalene.

We’ll start with this last.  Let’s suppose Jesus Christ actually had children (there are Christian sects that debate this, as well as the idea he was married to the Magdalene and that was why he could forgive her and be heard.  I’m not going to get lost in THOSE weeds.) Do you know who his descendants would be?  You.  Me.  The entire human race.

As someone has recently proven, except for very few, very isolated populations, you are descended from everyone who was alive a thousand years ago.

Genealogy makes you think otherwise because it concentrates on a few lines.  However, if you think about it, all those women the guys marry (or vice versa, if you’re a militant feminist) have to come from somewhere, and they too had lines of ancestry going back…

This is why all our presidents are descended from Mohammed, who, btw, didn’t even live that far back.  (For geographically close countries, you’re probably related to everyone 500 years back, particularly if you add in the genetic sieve of the black plague manifestations.  I mean, it’s entirely possible someone who lived 1000 years ago has no living descendants today – in Portugal, the black plague caused the loss of several family lines and it wasn’t even as bad as in the rest of Europe – but if they have descendants, they have everyone. Now this doesn’t mean they show in your genome, because genes don’t work that way, but you can rest assured if they’d died celibate, you wouldn’t be here exactly as you are.)

Also when I read that the royal family of France were descended from Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene, I snorted ice-water out of my nose.  I rarely come up against this  nonsense anymore, where I feel completely foreign, but this was one of those moments.  What went through my mind was “the things Americans will believe.”  In this case, the authors of the New Age book swallowed this hook line and sinker because  well… they hadn’t read enough European history to know that EVERY ROYAL HOUSE claimed this.  It was their way of making an end run and claiming to be descended of G-d Himself.  They also probably believe that everyone in the South was descended from Bonnie Prince Charlie.

There are other points, such as the fact that they based their entire theory on a DaVinci painting which was grimy and which they saw in reproduction.  Since then the painting has been cleaned and made a mockery of their theories.

But let’s imagine nefarious parties ALTERED the painting so as to give them the lie – if you read enough New Age conspiracy books, you know parties nef like nobody’s business – let’s examine the whole idea that DaVinci was part of a secret conspiracy that knew the truth about what happened at the time of Christ.

Was DaVinci part of a conspiracy?  Oh, heck yes.  Probably dozens of them.  Conspiracies were to the educated or professional or artistic man what writers email lists are to my ilk.  He probably belonged to several overlapping ones. They were faulty and weird, and almost as crazy as the UFO conspiracies these days, but through them science advanced because some decent knowledge would get transmitted with the dross.

Was he part of an unbroken conspiracy that had transmitted secret knowledge since the time of Christ?  Brother.  Can I interest you in a lovely bridge in Brooklyn?

First, why would someone only five or six hundred years from us know something about events fifteen hundred years back from them that no one else – not all learned men, not all the researchers, not everyone who has access to the scant documents remaining – could find?

Second HOW would such a conspiracy be transmitted and maintained?

Look, the recent weeks have shaken my faith in the idea that three can keep a secret if two are dead, which is what I used to think about secrets and conspiracies.  It is entirely possible I think to keep secrets for a limited time that involve a vast number of people, if you hold their livelihood under your power.  However, it explodes – as we have proof daily.

Now… conspiracies involving all the notable persons in Europe (some of which were less than sane even by the standards of the time – yes, DaVinci included) that lasted thousands of years?  Through wars, revolutions, changes of heart, changes of mind?

At best what you’d get by the fifteenth century was the equivalent of theology put through a game of telephone.  And there would be some proof of the original stuff, beyond the paintings of a half-mad genius from Tuscany and the relentless Vatican assassins (To quote older son “If the Vatican had assassins, I’d consider the priesthood”.)

To transmit it would require unerring choice of successors; unflawed character of those receiving the secret and, oh, yeah, superhuman memory.

In fact we know that the “secrets” we got via that sort of transmission – mostly Greek and Roman “science” — did look like something that went through a game of telephone and until we found the original texts/ surpassed their knowlege, we had no idea what they were talking about.

So much for the New Age book on which Dan Brown based his book – yes, he admits this.  He also believes in it, including the “great mother goddess” past, a bit of insanity our descendants will giggle at. – Dan Brown added his own insanity.  That review mentions the “austere” Spanish Cathedrals.  Never mind that.  There were more obvious things, such as the fact the Portuguese assassin has a name not pronounceable in Portuguese.  (I’m sure Dan Brown took it from someone he knows who is “Portuguese” – possibly from Africa or Asia.  Or perhaps only part-Portuguese.  One of the things he did in his early books was use the name of all his professors and classmates, so it’s probably no different.)

So… do I have the right to sneer at Dan Brown?  Doesn’t his success prove that he was right about people’s expectations?

I don’t know.  His success came through huge push (partly because he pushes the whole utopian matriarchy cr*p.)  It came at a time when it was easy to make someone a great success by making sure he had huge distribution.  Then the “everyone is reading this and I must too” operates.

On the other hand a lot of people (mostly pseudo educated people) are also stone cold stupid.  One of my art teachers, at one time, was extolling the careful research of Egyptian history in the books of… Anne Rice.  Egyptian history!  (Bangs head on desk.)

That is neither here nor there.  The traditional publishing establishment maintains their superiority over indie because they have layers and layers of fact checkers. Who clearly are all on heavy barbiturates, to let those elephants slip by.

I have private opinions on the morality of people who distort history to serve today’s political correctness – such as the entire stupid idea of a feminist utopia in pre-history.  OTOH they probably can’t understand why I don’t do it since it guarantees push and wealth and fame.  I’ve often wondered, myself, if this wish to be able to look at myself in the mirror, in the morning, is in fact a form of brain damage.

On the other hand, I don’t know much, but I know evil when I see it.  And convincing generations who are largely illiterate of history that history is something completely bizarre that could not have happened is evil – it’s evil because it robs people of the tools to deal with the future, and it does so unnecessarily.  Yes, his book would have fallen apart without the conspiracy theory, but nothing prevented him from putting on a post script saying “this is almost certainly not true because of this and this, but it makes a wonderful story and so I—” Certainly, nothing forced his publishers to publish it without that note.

AND – and this is what I was SNEERING about originally – nothing forced various academics to tell us that Dan Brown’s books were exquisitely researched.

Nothing forced them to do any of that except their meretricious craving for power and money, which can only be obtained by hewing to an ideology of lies.

Which means, at the end, I am entitled to sneer at them.  A writer can sneer at whores.  More importantly, someone who rapes history in order to conceive a bastard is entitled to sneer at someone who has snuff sex with history and leaves her bleeding corpse in an alley, entrails ripped out, unable to conceive ever again.

And that’s what I’m doing.

*  This is something I normally do on Friday, though sometimes on Saturday when things get… difficult.  It is a free novel I’m posting here a chapter at a time.  You get it free in pre-draft format, glorious typos and all.  If you want the edited, formatted and cleaned up ebook when it is done, a donation of $6 will get you that once it’s ready which could be a year or so (if you put in the field that it’s for Rogue Magic.)  Once I put it up on Amazon or other outlets, I plan to price it at  $9, but I can give readers’ of the blog the price break that amounts to what I’d receive from Amazon.  I will probably also have paper editions, but I can’t promise to send those out, as I think the costs would soon become prohibitive.  For previous chapters, go here.  It is a sequel to Witchfinder which will soon (we’re looking at early July) be taken down (once edited) and put for sale.*

NOTICE: For those unsure about copyright law and because there was a particularly weird case this week, 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

Chapter 9

Wolfe Merritt Superintendent to the Manufactories and Lands of The Earl of Savage:

 

The Earl didn’t check the provenance of the arresting officers – if such they were – but there wasn’t much in that, as anyone even with my limited magic could see, from the power coming off them, that they were powerful enough they could only belong to the Royal House.

Of course, I thought with a pang, although it normally didn’t occur to us, travel into our universe being difficult, since we had more powerful magic than almost any other, it didn’t necessarily mean they were envoys of the king of Avalon in our world.  It was something to remember when someone had just said that the Lady Helen had gone to another world, and also when it was obvious that we were getting a streak of rogue magic from another world.

But the Earl didn’t do anything obvious to check it, and I hadn’t even thought about it till it was too late.

As my mother used to say, what can’t be cured must be endured.  This looked like one of those times to me.  I turned to the chit of a maid, who sat there twisting a very pretty apron that was obviously ornamental, being all white and without a single smudge on it.  “You heard what the Earl said,” I said.

She nodded.  She looked mortal scared, as though she were afraid I’d turn on her and accuse her of some crime.

Look here, I know that I have one of those faces only a mother would think beautiful and even so my mother always told me things like “it’s not how you look, it’s what you do” and “You’re very well to pass” which I took to mean she wasn’t as easily deceived as mothers are supposed to be.  Or perhaps that I was uglier than normal for mothers’ sons.  It had never bothered me, and my homely face did all the turns I needed a face to do.  Only perhaps, briefly, I’d wanted my wife to love me, but I think the problem there was that I was human and she was fey.

However, my face, such as it was, had never cast anyone into despair or made them afraid for their lives, as this little creature seemed to be.  She was maybe fourteen at most, far too old to be my daughter, far too young to be my sister, but she reminded me of my sister Jane who is always afraid of strangers, so I tried to speak kindly to her, “If you would please, Annabel, show me to the Lady Helen’s room, so I may take a look at… at what they left behind and see what magical readings I can glean from it?”

Her eyes widened a little and she said, “You’re a magician, then?” which either meant her magic was very little indeed, or that she was being mendacious.  I didn’t answer.

She dropped a curtsey and said, “If you would, sir.”

I didn’t correct her, but followed her, up the back stairs of course, and through a maze of narrow corridors that I identified as the servant part of the house.  They were well enough, mind, and clean, but there were no rugs on the floor, the walls were white washed, and the glimpse of the one room I caught behind a half opened door was narrow enough to be a monk’s cell and furnished as one would expect of a monk’s cell, with narrow bed, a wooden box at the foot, and a little table for your candle at night.

None of this was strange to me, as my sister Agnes is in service, and I used to visit her when I was much younger.

We went up two flights of stairs and around a few corridors, and then Annabelle opened the door to what was clearly the main portion of the house.  At least we came out onto a landing paved in yellow and black marble, with a gilded table against the facing wall and a mirror in an elaborate frame above it.

She looked one way and another and led me firmly down the hall to a door, which she opened.

The room was not what I expected.  I don’t, in faith, know what I expected.  Perhaps watercolors on the walls, some musical instrument or some note of femininity.  I’ve never, as such, been invited to female bedrooms, certainly had never been inside a room of a well to do female, but my sisters while they lived at home had furnished their space with embroidery and lace, and pretty things, as they could afford them.

This room was somber, almost dark, with a four poster bed in the middle, with a plain white cover over it.  There was a vast leather chair next to a very large table covered in books.  There was a heavy and ponderous armoire, which managed to have piles of books on top.  Various tables, scrupulously dusted, supported yet more books.

For a moment I was taken aback, because I’d never have taken Lady Helen for a blue stocking.  But then some of the titles on those books jumped at me, and I realized these books were in fact those things commonly called novels: made up stories of mad passion and dazzling adventure and sometimes both, which contain very little factual knowledge and which in fact, according to preachers, pave young girls’ path to perdition.

I’m not wholly sure about that, as m’ mother likes a good novel, and we’ve all been known to read them when they’re adventure, taking turns reading aloud in the evening, while the girls are busy with their needlework and the men with other small tasks that might offer – and so far as I can tell none of my sisters has found that path to perdition and my mother might be the least perdition-ed woman ever.

But surely these many novels, crammed in every portion of the room, seemed to betray a great urge to run away or to have adventures, or both.

No wonder I thought, but then wondered if it was the novels that had caused the urge, or if in fact without the novels the Lady might have done something worse long ago.  I had cause to think that I, myself, would long since have gone insane without the ability to dream of a better life, even if the dream would never come true for me or for that matter for Jimmy.  Certainly not for Jimmy.

I realized that while I’d been looking around at all the novels, I’d missed Annabelle lifting the mattress.  Under it, like spilled gold and onyx were piles of hair clearly from two very different heads, one pale and sunny and the other black and twisty like an ivy plant.  I thought of those dark curls framing the Lady Helen’s face and thought how well they suited her.  If I hadn’t known the real thing and far too well, I’d have said her face had a touch of the fey – something not quite human and irrepressible.  Only, of course, the fey aren’t like that.  That is just what humans think of them.  They are in fact almost totally devoid of emotion, or at least of emotions we humans can understand.  As lief discuss poetry with an oak as have a talk of love with the fey.

I said, “That is the hair?”

Annabelle nodded.  She still looked scared.  I reached in and took a double handful of the stuff, and told her she could drop the mattress, and she obeyed, and then, as I lay the hair on the table, I asked, “Why do you look so fearful?  Know you something you haven’t told me?”

Her eyes widened in startled shock, then she shook her head, then she said, “No.  It’s only…”  She shook her head.  “There is very wrong magic… I felt very wrong…  I don’t know how to explain it.”

It was possible she was telling the truth.  I put my hands on the hair, and tried to divine where the possessors of the hair had gone.

The smell of spoiled fish, the roaring of the sea and the feeling of magic hit me so strongly I almost fell.

I let go of the hair, and blinked.  I knew now what Annabelle had meant.  Wherever these girls had gone was where the strand of rogue magic originated.

I first became aware of the concept of attractive nuisance when I was living in North Carolina.  A toddler had wandered off from home, and drowned in a neighbor’s uncovered pool.  The mother wasn’t sued for neglect – apparently there were reasons for this, like, she thought she’d secured the door well enough (as a mother whose kid would undo three latches, one of them safety and get out, I doubt you can secure a door well enough) and she was asleep due to a medical condition.  Something like that.  BUT the neighbor was sued for keeping an attractive nuisance, because his pool was uncovered and also unfenced.

This was a concept I’d never heard of, but then again, to be honest, in Portugal there was never an unfenced property, so the idea of its being unfenced was odd enough.

Look – we were talking about lack of rule of law yesterday – Portugal even at its best has always had low-rule-of-law.  Part of it I think is a Latin thing, perhaps dating back as far as the Roman Empire, perhaps to the invasions that destroyed it.  I can’t tell you.  What I can tell you is that Portugal would seem as alien (if you really went into the neighborhoods and mingled with the people) to you as the US did to me when I first came here.

What blew my mind was not that you had eight (?) TV channels on all day, or the fact that my future MIL (though I didn’t know it, of course) had a microwave, or any of the things that my host family kept pointing out and expecting me to be amazed by (the fact that their idea of Portugal harked back to my host mother’s grandmother who, btw, came from Azores, which is always behind the times didn’t help.)  No.  Two things amazed me: The sheer amount of forestation and the unfenced lots.

They’re related, in a way.

We took a bus from NYC to Ohio, and we passed miles and miles and miles of green, unmolested trees.  If it were in Portugal, those trees would be cut down so fast, and used for building, burning, etc, by people not the owners of the trees.  In fact, they would require armed guards to patrol them to stop people dumping their trash in the woods in such numbers that they would choke out the undergrowth.

In the same way, my parents live in a relatively well to do suburb.  Even back when there was “almost no crime” and the back door stayed open all day year around (it still does, but now there’s a locked gate in the way, which wasn’t there at the time) there were thick shutters on the windows at night, of the type that roll down and which here are only used by shop-keepers.  And there were low walls and gates.  As theft has become more common (because “strangers” have moved to the village and now outnumber the natives) the walls have climbed.  Now the walls of my mother’s house are eight feet tall and all the gates lock.

But even in the good old days, the mailbox looked.  To leave your mail unlocked was to have it stolen. And anything left in public and not attached to the ground is considered yours for the taking.  No, seriously, they get the covers on the air quality measuring units stolen on a regular basis, even though those are bolted to cement and by the side of busy highways (in case you wonder where the temperature readings come from!) and even though they are too strangely shaped for any natural use.  I asked mom what in heck people did with them, and even she couldn’t figure it out “Perhaps hen houses?  Or in-ground flower beds?”

What I know is that they get stolen on a regular basis.  And grocery shopping carts have to be checked out with a coin which gets given back when you put the cart back in.  Otherwise people would view the cart as “free gift with purchase.”

I’m saying this not to run down my native country, but to explain that the culture is very, very different.  The culture was shaped by a lot of things, including the country being trampled by Napoleonic invasions – something that meant two armies scoured the country clean (even monuments had portions of it stolen) and the common people could only live by grabbing what they could, theirs or not.

But it was also shaped – is shaped – by a legal culture that harks back to Rome, where official jobs are viewed as sinecures and opportunities for squeeze, and all jobs are viewed as something you do as skimpily as possible, because you can’t be fired.  It’s a post, not a job. Such as if you have an accident you’re better off not calling the police, because both of you will then have to pay squeeze, in addition to whatever needs to be paid.  Such as if you interrupt a retail clerk while she’s talking to her boyfriend on the phone and ignoring you, you’re the rude one, not she.  Such as writers turn in work completely unproofed because “THEIR JOB” is to write, someone else can do that demeaning typo hunting stuff.  (This was the hardest for me to adapt to – and yeah, I know I don’t typo-hunt in these posts, but then I don’t get PAID for these posts.)

It’s cultural.  It is the way it is.  You can trust a Portuguese as much as you can trust anyone else once they’re in a rule of law society and you probably can trust them more if they have some reason to think you’re a member of their tribe.  The culture – the software in the head – is very family oriented and very tribe oriented and very, in ultimate instance “compatriot” oriented.  Far more so than in the US.  The Arab proverb would apply, if you view it as the Portuguese NOT attacking others but rather viewing each successive circle as less deserving of respect to their persons and property: Me against my brother; me and my brother against my cousins; me and my cousins against the tribe; me and my tribe against the world.

But put enough Portuguese together, and you play by their rules.  The software in head is not – much as I like to make faces at Spanish – at all very different from Spain or Mexico or most of central and South America.

So, what does all this lead to?  In the past we discussed minimum wage here.  I think mandating minimum wage is about as effective and sane as mandating good weather on Sundays.  Okay, maybe a little better – suppose you could mandate good weather and enforce it for a period of hours.  You couldn’t do that everywhere.  Those clouds would still have to go somewhere.  So the price of sunny Sundays in highly visible areas, like say NYC or Chicago, would be snow storms in the hinterlands in July.  (I don’t know much about meteorology, so it might mean other stuff too.)

Mandating minimum wage is like that.  Dave Freer talked about the very generous minimum wage of Australia with approval.  Kate pointed out that yes, but it’s a trade off.  They trade a good minimum wage for beginning workers against a high unemployment rate and low entrepreneurship.  That’s a given.  I’d argue they also trade in high innovation, since that’s mostly started by wild cat small businesses.

If the people of Australia consider that well and good, that’s fine.  It’s their business.

All that is besides the point when it comes to America.  Australia’s nearest neighbor, whose citizens could get there without much effort is New Zealand, which has similar laws and is about at a similar level and has similar software-in-head.

I.e., Australia can have an open, in ground swimming pool, uncovered, because its nearest neighbor, in human house terms is fifty miles away.  No toddler can escape its mother’s vigilance and just wonder over and drown.  Attractive nuisance or not, it is highly unlikely they’ll be fishing toddlers out of the pool every Summer morning.

This does not apply to the US.  It applies to the US even less than it applies to Europe, and Europe is finding out and fast its nuisance is too attractive as is.

The US has always been a country of immigrants.  But most of our waves of immigration of the past came here to become Americans (present writer included.)  They came determined to leave everything behind and learn to be as American as possible.

As a kid, growing up in a country of emigrants, I noticed early on that the ones from America came back less often (even than the ones in Africa) and were more acculturated.  They were the ones less likely to be building a little house in their native village for when they retired.  They were unlikely to be sending money back, unless they had elderly parents they were supporting.  They came here to be here, not to earn and send back until they could return.

This is for two reasons: coming here involved a lot more effort, both in crossing the ocean and in getting a visa (coming here illegally was near impossible back in the sixties and seventies) that it wasn’t worth it to “scavenge-migrate.”

The ones most likely to scavenge-migrate were the ones who went to France.  This is because France was attainable on foot if absolutely needed, through two borders almost impossible to secure, and because it had GENEROUS welfare benefits which it wasn’t fussy about giving to Portuguese.  For Portuguese peasants living hand to mouth, going to France meant that you could cram ten to an apartment and send back as much money as possible, or if you took your wife, she worked mostly under the table, and you worked mostly under the table, and your kids got free schooling and assistance.  I remember as a little girl seeing people who’d been far below us in the social scale and completely untrained go to France for two or three years and come back with cars and fashionable clothes and…

They never stayed though.  They would take full advantage of French welfare and social benefits, while working far more than would be allowed if they were “legal” and they sent money back.  I suspect that other than the trips to Portugal and how well they dressed to lord it in those times, they lived near squalor.  Their goal was to build a big house and live well in their retirement.

At the time I viewed what they did as fully justified.  See, being far away from their “tribe” they could work hard without loss of face, so those lazy Frenchmen were getting all that work for near nothing.  I couldn’t figure out why they didn’t embrace Portuguese immigrants, or why there was so much resentment.

Now I sort of do.  It was the strain put on public services.  It was the fact that these people working under the table depressed unskilled wages.  It was also unstoppable.  Two things eventually stopped it: France became less attractive, as there were fewer jobs (and welfare alone is not enough to raise a family and send money back) and Portugal’s lifestyle became closer to France’s.

This is more what we’re facing with Mexico, but amped up to eleven, because we also give “Hispanics” special consideration in social services, in getting their kids in school, in deference of treatment.

These people come from a highly stratified society and mostly the ones who come here are treated like dirt in their homeland.  Imagine coming here and finding they’re special and we feel vaguely guilty for their “oppression” – which is a piece of Marxist nonsense.  Mexico’s “poverty” is largely self inflicted.

Are they despicable people?  No more than Portuguese are, no more than Americans are.  Some of them are probably despicable.  And most of them are just decent people, seeking to survive.  BUT their software in the head IS different.  And not all cultures are fully functional for a modern rule-of-law society.

Compound that with the fact that our social workers and the teachers of their kids tell them we owe them and that we stole their land from them.  Tell them they’re a separate race and can never integrate.  The stage is set for very ugly stuff indeed.

Then add in the tribal thing and the fact they will feel very little loyalty to those not of their nationality/group.

Do most of them work very hard?  Actually according to studies about fifty percent of them do.  But even the ones who work very hard are still using free schooling and emergency room visits.  Why?  Because they’re socking away the money so they can go back “home” and build the big house and impress friends and neighbors with how well they did.  They want to go back home and have their kids marry well.

What they don’t want to do is become Americans, except where it means receiving social security in their old age, when they go “back home.”

All of this is understandable and human.

Then add in our attractive nuisance.  We have enough unemployed, untrained people that we should have people willing to work.  Americans are no more lazy than anyone else.  Arguably we’re more industrious.  But the minimum wage means many kids never get their start.  They’re not worth that.  It’s too much to pay them that.

And meanwhile, there’s this tide pouring over a huge and unsecured border that will do the work for a fourth of the price and allow low-margin businesses (chicken boning plants; farms) to survive.

We’re an attractive nuisance.  I don’t know how much a toddler likes a pool, but I know that a man desperate to support his family will move heaven and Earth to do it the best way he can.  And somehow coming here illegally and working really hard is hard to reconcile with “crime” even for us, much less for them. Through their eyes, Americans are lazy layabouts who don’t want to work.  They grew up in low respect for laws.  They don’t GET why Americans wouldn’t work under the table and take advantage of social services to round out the money, as they do.  Their concept of honesty doesn’t include honesty-to-people-in-power because where they come from people in power treat those below like dirt.

There are other effects of the tide pouring over the border.  Socialists of various stripes like to scream that wages have been stagnant for blah blah years.  (This goes hand in hand with “innovation and tech is making people unemployable.”  Poppycock.  Laws are making people unemployable.)  It is true STATISTICALLY.  Not true in any other way.  Dan and I have struggled on our own, with no advantages, not even family help for thirty years, and our income hasn’t been stagnant.

Where income has been stagnant is what I’d call the “semi-skilled middle class” – mostly retail clerks, but also the vast number of women who would on very little training become typists or factory workers.

This is the result of two things: most factories can’t survive by paying current benefit requirements (and it’s about to get worse.)  It’s not the salary so much, it’s the other stuff and the immense amount of paperwork that is impossible to keep up with.  Faced with the choice of going under or hiring illegals under the table, they hire illegals and pay them a fraction of the full cost of an employee and let the collective “we” pay for their other needs.  Even retail to an extent is starting to hire with not too many questions asked.  That means the legal people still working retail are squeezed from below by people who are being paid a fraction of what they get (what they must get by law) and from above by our truly horrible education which has forced employers to demand at least community college diplomas before they hire you.  It’s the only way they can tell you know how to read.

This leaves nowhere to go for people with high school diplomas, who have been making the same amount since the eighties or so…  And they too end up at the mercy of our welfare system to survive, which in turn drives the call for higher minimum wage, which in turn destroys more of these jobs.

We’re keeping an attractive nuisance.  We create a vast number of jobs that Americans CAN’T fill and stay on the right side of the law.  And we share a large unsecured border with a people who come from a low-respect-for-law environment.

Amnesty won’t solve anything.  It won’t make these people consider themselves American.  They never wanted to be American.  They haven’t left their past behind as other immigrants have to do.  They just walked a few hundred miles.  (Or more likely drove.) It won’t make them a more open community – their culture will remain us vs. them.  They will take it, but they will continue working under the table and avail themselves of our social services and our social security payments.   In their code that’s not even slightly wrong.  Their history has taught you take as much as you can while you can because those above you will take from you as soon as they can.

Securing the border will do something, but not to the extent that we’re willing to do.  The only thing that would stop the tide would be shooting to kill or a massive electrified fence.  NO ONE is going to do that.  All you’d need would be a few pictures, and our resolve would crumble.

So… what stopped the Portuguese tide into France?  Two things.  France became less able to give lavish benefits; and there were fewer jobs available because more French (or more Portuguese who’d naturalized) were willing to work under the table.  And Portugal became a little better.  (Or more like France.)  The only people now streaming into France come from the real sh*tholes, for whom even French “scarcity” is better.  And Portugal has more generous social services, which are getting scammed by Russians and other Eastern Europeans.

There are indications that as our economy spins into the Khaki Mexicans are going back home.  I know my local supermarket (a tiny one) used to carry about half the magazines in Spanish five years ago.  Now you can’t find a single Spanish title.  And there are indications the flooding-back tide is helping Mexico too.

But our choices, other than continuing to spin into the hole, until no Mexicans or people from points further  South want to come here (except perhaps to cross to Canada) are stark: we can get rid of minimum wage, tighten the benefits spigot, and let the economy settle itself.  Or we can become the sort of regime that shoots people trying to come over.

There is no other choice.  And I don’t see either of those happening in the near future, unless of course we collapse.  Which is the inevitable result if we don’t do either of those.

To call people explaining the facts “racist” is to ignore that most of the people who are hurt by this unchecked tide are our own racial minorities.  It is also to ignore that economics is race-blind.

It is a dismal science and the results are always the same, no matter how much you scream that they’re insensitive.

 

 

I was going to write this before the election and I might have mentioned it, but then I got more upset about other stuff, so it never came out.  Though I’ll grant you I’ve written about this again.  Responsible for this incarnation are Foxfier in comments yesterday and Dr. Helen with her article which got infested by an incarnation of teh stupid in comments.

However, as someone who used to call herself a feminist (before feminism went off the cliff at a run) on the run up to the election I was appalled, disgusted and insulted with the “War on Women” meme ( you might have gathered this, once or twice) but most of all with the bizarre freak show of women who didn’t know well-to-do law student Sandra Fluke getting offended on her behalf for her being called a “slut.” (We’ll leave aside that Limbaugh was making a nomenclature error.  The lady wants someone to pay for something associated with her having sex, she’s not a slut.  She’s a whore.  All that remains is haggling about the price.  Sluts do it for joy de vivre.)

This was a bizarre demonstration of the brainless sisterhood, invoked ONLY because she, like these other women, had a vagina.

Even my sensible friends said “well, I can see where he had a point but no one should say those things about women.”

No?  WHY NOT?

Do you call men “bastards” in public life?  You might not if you don’t swear, and consider it swearing.  I confess to episodes of turning the air a deep blue when I get going.  (In my defense, English swear words don’t feel like swear words to me.  I think the taboo needs to be ingrained in you from earliest years.)  But lest some commenter decides I’m extrapolating from me (rolls eyes) I’m also politics addicted.  I’m not much for talk radio.  I’m not auditory.  But I read an awful lot of commentary online, I watch commentary on TV, and I’ve heard male politicians and indeed journalists called everything but a child of G-d.

Can anyone imagine the furor and the president of the United States calling some journalist who got called, oh, a bastard or a sh*t weasel?  Can we imagine it being called “disrespect to men” and used to build up the idea of a completely phony war on men?  No?  Neither can I.  (And men have more claims to a psychological war on them.  Just yesterday watching a commercial where all the boys in the class are morons and all the girls are soooo brilliant at math, I almost threw something through the computer screen.)

So, why women?  You’re going to say “Because women have to be respected.”  Really?  Why?

And now you’re sitting there staring at the screen and spluttering aren’t you?  I’d like to remind you “Because they have to” is not an answer.

This idea that women are fragile, must be respected and must be protected is relatively new.  Before that the human idea that anyone weaker was born to be enslaved/mistreated/killed without compunction/ruled.  Since most women are weaker than most men (yes, there are exceptions, but not enough to make a difference) women got the short end of the stick throughout history.

This is not because men are particularly evil.  They aren’t.  They’re human.  Women were weaker, so men ruled.  Women in turn took it out on infants and the elder in their care.  This is still normal in most of the world.

Yes, yes, Christianity had a lot to do with changing the way things were done, and before that Judaism, though not being a messianic proselytizing faith for most of its history, Judaism spread its beliefs on the humanness of women less.  And even then, the progress was slow.  The married lives of some of the patriarchs read to women as the sort of horror show you see in Islam today.  And the Christian married life till very recently doesn’t bear thinking about.

This is because in societies where physical strength is essential for survival, men will always have the upper hand.  At least they will barring some kind of bio enhancement that effectively turns women in to men.

There were bits of “equality” throughout history.  Greece and Rome were “more equal” than other times and places, but scratch the surface and you find it doesn’t go very deep indeed.  Female poetesses and noble females might have had ALMOST the freedoms of males, but the other women were bought and sold like chattel.

Again, remember this is not a male thing.  This is a human thing.  Get us in a position of pinching, and we ALL take it out on those weaker than us.  This is why centralized power is so scary.  It makes someone that much more powerful than everyone else, which removes the humanity of those subjected to that power.  (As we’re seeing proof daily.)  If we’re a particularly kind of sh*tweasel, we convince ourselves – and those we abuse! – that we’re doing it for the greater good.

BUT the idea of women as sacred, fragile, and not to be hurt by word or deed comes from the whole chivalric tradition and the troubadour poets.  (In case you think writing and stories can’t change the world.)

By making the ideal of woman perfect and pure (and yes, there were reasons for this, having to do with the structure of feudal society) it ennobled all women a little.  While that had not much effect until society became affluent enough and equalitarian enough (mostly due to the US) that every woman could be a “lady”, once that happened, every woman aspired to be treated as a “lady.”  You couldn’t say swear words in front of her, and certainly not to her.  You would open the door to them.  You treated her as both more and less than human.  The goddess of the house, the mother of children, the fragile, innocent, blah blah.

Few women lived up to this.  A lot of women exploited it.  Then came the feminism I remember, you know, the one that wanted to be treated as equals, forget the other stuff.

To me it seemed natural.  I knew nothing about history, nor what a great stride forward chivalric rules were (no?  Think about it.  In a time of enormous and indiscriminate turmoil, every man’s hand against every other’s, it kept the women and children RELATIVELY safe, because it would be “despicable” to treat them otherwise.  Yes, the kids might still be killed (but less often, and evolutionarily that’s important.)  The mothers might be sent to convents.  BUT that was a marked improvement over what would have happened before.)  And I came from a long line of “horrible women.”  I mean, seriously, by the time I was ten mothers in the village warned their little boys about me (and me not even aware of boys yet) because to marry a woman of my family meant you’d never “be master of your own house” and you’d never “be able to call your soul your own.”  (In the spirit of fairness, I DID warn Dan about it.  He didn’t sheer off.  Mathematician got courage. Or insanity.)

First of all, I haven’t heard (i.e. not in memory of people who were living when I was little) of any ancestress who couldn’t read and write (voluminously, usually.)  Second, if any of them didn’t run their own business and usually out-earn their husbands (yes, I’m falling down on the job, but I AM working at it) I also have failed to hear of her.  And they all did this while raising broods of children (though the family on dad’s side, to be honest, always ran to low fertility so three or four at most, still), running subsistence farms (everyone did at the time even when that wasn’t their job,) raising livestock, and – usually – helping neighbors, orphan kittens and whoever came to them for help.

I ran down the list of accomplishments that Heinlein thinks most humans should have and I’m sorely deficient.  But other than higher math my ancestresses could do all of those.  I am, in fact, a pale shadow of them.

So it never occurred to me that being fragile/protected was a good thing.  I viewed it as an attempt at infantilizing me and got upset.  And it never occurred to me anyone would oppress me for being female.  I remembered mom’s snort when a neighbor told her that she just didn’t realize she was oppressed and her answer of “I would just like to see the unlucky fool who would TRY to oppress me.”

Now, I want you to remember I grew up in Portugal.  Women in schools at the time were treated as men are in schools in the US now.  They were there on presumption of inferior intellect.  Getting called on?  What is that?  And teachers instinctively thought boys must be smarter.

Did that affect me?  Well… no.  I was aware of the fact that up to the first test I must put up with the assumption I was hen-witted.  Once the teacher read that first test I was treated like one of the boys or slightly better.  End of discussion.

Note I didn’t whine and scream and say “but I’m a gurl.  You have to cut me slack.”  I simply out-thought, out-studied and out worked the boys.

Of course, I also got treated as a half-wit because I was massive for my generation of Portuguese females (I finally stopped growing at five seven – for those who know me, yes, I’ve lost about two inches.  Eh.  Has to do with medical stuff. – and a size 12.  I adjusted my diet – as in, lived on espresso and half a toast a day — and got it to a size 7.  This was still massive by Portuguese standards.  I rarely could find ready-made clothes that fit.)  As you know from movies, etc, the tall, large one is always dumb and slow.  Eh.  That too was not worth fighting until they saw that first test.

But see, I believed in equality and in women being allowed to compete as men did in male fields.  I would have been very happy if they hadn’t assumed I was stupid because I was female, but I was willing to prove them wrong (cheerfully and with malice aforethought.)

I think – and here I might be wrong – that was the principle of early feminism.

Oh, my how things have changed.  Partly, they’ve changed because frankly most women don’t want to compete in male fields as men.  They want to be wafted up to success as a form of bizarre reparations.  (I mean, they’re compensating you for what your ancestresses suffered?  WHY?  Aren’t they men’s ancestresses, too?)  They – being human – want in fact unearned perks.  Every human (yes, men too) does.  If he or she can get it.

But the only way to enforce that is government.  And because government is very powerful, it’s now become de rigueur to – instead of competing with men – simply whine and stomp until the regulators come down from on high and give you the other kids’ toys and privileges.

So now you have the bizarre, distorted spectacle of women demanding to be treated as superior to men.  No?  They want to fill the same positions, do the same jobs, but NOT have to suffer the slings and arrows of everyday life like men do.

And part of this is that, due to political correctness in schools, we’re raising a generation of women for whom males are an alien race.  I don’t have the time nor the inclination to give them a full education, but let me give you a few quick hint: 1-Men are not women.  They’re wired differently 2-The three musketeers is not an aberration.  Some of men’s best friendships start with a massive – and often physical—fight.  3- If you think making the work environment “uncomfortable” with jokes or comments, some of them off color, should you ever be glad you’re not a man.  And never try working in an all-male environment.  4- males, particularly in Anglo-Saxonic culture often show affection by calling each other names.  I’m not sure if any other culture on Earth could have coined the term “you magnificent bastard” but from a linguist’s point of view I love it. 6- What males do they do very well.  They do things women in general can’t do – though a few exceptional ones can, and should be allowed to – mostly the dirty, heavy, dangerous jobs.  But also some jobs in science that require an unusual degree of concentration.  We’re multitaskers, they’re laser-focused.  There’s jobs for both in building civilization.

You want a man’s job?  Fine.  Do what they do and act like them.  I promise you that you will be accepted.  (It might take a little more effort today because they’ll assume you got there thorough affirmative action, but be competent and good and they’ll come around.)

And that last point is what I want to call your attention to.  This confusion where women not only want to be “just like” – but without the work – but also want to be treated like the belle dame of troubadour songs is poisoning both sides of our society.

Women think it’s their duty somehow to be “just like men” only most of them of course don’t want to be just like men.  And meanwhile the environments that NEED men and a masculine spirit are  getting feminized and less effective.

And for the love of heaven, spare me the idea that a post-grad student at Georgetown, and one who inserted herself in our national discourse by the force of her sex life, blenches at the word “slut” like a well brought up Regency debutant would.  THAT sad show both infantilized every woman in public life, who should now be regarded as a shrinking violet, and INSULTED everyone who happens to have a vagina.  I mean, am I now expected to faint at the word “slut”?  No?  (And let’s not start on the incoherency of the slut walks, which can’t decide if they’re pro or against sluts.)  Then what was that all about?

DO you want to bring back the stereotype that women – all women are shrinking fainting violets not well up on the upper story, and therefore must be protected and cajoled?

No?

Then stop acting like it.  Stop saying stuff like “every woman who cries rape should be believed, no presumption of innocence on the male’s part, because women must be protected.”  Your only defense – the only thing keeping you from the natural law where the weaker get it in the neck IS the law of the land.  Shred that at your own risk.

You want equality?  You have it.  Take your lumps like a man.  You’re playing with the big boys now.  Every time you demand special treatment, you’re holding back the rest of us who CAN compete.

Will men treat you differently?  Of course they will.  No man can forget you’re a woman.  Evolutionarily this leads to slightly different treatment.  BUT it’s both good and bad.  Their desire to protect you will both hold you back and keep you from the worst punches in the scrum.  At the same time, you’re not acting like a man either, even when you think you are.  A lot of the glass ceiling is women not ASKING – let alone demanding – what they’re worth.  Low dominance males get treated the same way.  Women are designed to do this.  We’re the link makers and the peace makers in the tribe.  This is because women, being smaller and weaker, couldn’t survive otherwise in competition.  You need to remember that to get anywhere in a man’s world.  But it’s nobody’s fault, and asking government to step in only creates ANOTHER layer of problems.

The morality and societal benefit of having men in women roles and vice versa is debatable and couldn’t interest me less.  I’m concerned only with individual liberty and pursuit of happiness.  As far as I’m concerned, you can be all you want to be.  Just don’t ask for special privileges.

You’ve come a long way baby.  Don’t skitter back.

UPDATE: Gypsies, Tramps and Writers is up over at MGC now.

We come back to how things are changing, how the future is changing, how work is changing.  Part of this is stupid government tricks, of course.  Yes, 30 hours work week has long been a socialist dream.  Besides drinking their own ink – i.e. believing their own propaganda – the rats in their heads about wealth tend to spread to everything else.  Since wealth is finite, then work is finite.  (Well, think about it.)  At least work on decently planned and properly efficient and NEEDED goods.  (Why would you want luxury goods?  Do you want to be better than other people?  You want to have a lollipop?  Did you bring enough to share with the entire country? I don’t think you’re properly committed to socialism, tovarish.)

Since work is finite, the only way to deal with unemployment is to put things in the law that make it impossible to work more than 30 hours.  In places like France they simply pass legislation making it impossible to work more than thirty hours – which is another reason it’s an American socialist dream.  You see, they’ve gone to France on vacation, and they’ve seen people lounging about with time to enjoy life.  What they don’t see is the outdated appliances, the outdated houses and the narrow lives of common people, because they also normally stay in the best hotels and hang out in the rich areas – but Americans are so… ungovernable, that if if you just did that to them, they would work seventy hours, just to spite you.  So instead you hide the 30 hour a week poison pill in the Health Care legislation.  Employers who would be bankrupted by it, are then forced to dial back everyone’s hours to 30 a week (at least on paper.  Look, I worked exempt positions before. Your hours are not what you put on the time sheet.  Your hours are what it takes to get the job done.)  In the bureaucrat’s mind (not in the real world) this means that the employer will have to hire a new employee for every three on the payroll.  More jobs created.  Everyone is up.  Up everyone’s chocolate ration to two grams a week.

As I mentioned in Drinking Their Own Ink (I really need to tag these d*mn posts.) what actually happens is that everyone lies about it.  People report thirty hours and go on working the normal forty or fifty or sixty.  (Remember the reason the employer is cutting down people’s hours on paper is that he’s already so close to the bone he can’t afford the mandated boondoogle of minimum insurance which includes hypnotherapy and weight loss or whatever they consider minimum.  Perhaps little Asian girls who run on your back for back pain.  Who knows?  It’s a government scam plan.  You will pay for treatment for Brucitis Of The Cleaning Lady Knee even if you’ve never been in the same zip code as a cleaning lady.)

So, everything changes on paper, but not in reality.  Except that analysts, bureaucrats and those of us who work with words, look at the figures on paper, confuse it with reality and announce that due to efficiencies and robotics and stuff we no longer need to work as long.  Then the big government types start talking about this vast underclass who will never find jobs again, and which includes everyone but the top two percent or whatever, and who will need structures to support them the rest of their useless lives.  How can you be against that?  Do you want the useless to starve?

(Rolls eyes.  Rolls eyes so hard that she should use a cup to contain them.)

I confess I would be far more impressed with this if I weren’t following the politics and the laws and seeing the pressures bringing it about, which have nothing to do with technology.  I also confess that I MIGHT still fall for it if I didn’t happen to have a good enough memory to remember Carter’s administration.  (Yes, I was in my cradle.  Shuddup.)

The exact same things were said then, and the science fiction magazines were full of stories about how most people would be unemployed forever, because… because… because… CHEESE!  Okay, they didn’t say cheese.  That would have made way more sense. They said that back then – seventies, remember – our tech was just too darn efficient, and so all these low-level employees weren’t needed and therefore we were headed to a world where the majority would be unemployed like forevah.  The kindly state had to take care of them or they would die – die I tell you, die!

Then came Reagan and near-full-employment and they forgot they’d ever said all that stuff and slinked off without even the decency of a “Never mind.”

Now it’s back.

Ignore them.  Ignoring people who think that a vast majority of people “NEEDS” to be taken care of by an incompetent, massive, bungling bureaucracy is always a good idea.  Look, these jokers aren’t even good at taking care of the few desperately needy people.  You think they can take care of a majority of people in a way that doesn’t lead to massive atrocities?  PFUI.  Most people – even the truly needy – dependent on the government have to exert themselves NOT to be destroyed by clerical error.

No, robotics didn’t become that all-better in the last four years.  Would that they had.

To some extent automated factories were already much, much better.  Eric Flint last week was talking about the hell of assembly line work, but the truth is that the only places that remains are places where it has to by union rule.  Back in 88 I knew someone who ran a plastics factory.  It was just him (and I don’t think he’d ever finished high school) and a bunch of automated machinery.  He poured the mixture in and he pushed buttons and voila, plastic spoons and forks and stuff just came flying out the other end.

This was sort of held back or perhaps dialed back by the commerce with China, where it’s cheaper to have five year olds carve the plastic forks from a plastic block (I’m joking, I’m joking.)  But the tech is there and has always been.

The robots, they shall always be with us.

So… what about work?  How will we deal with the vast army of unemployed people roaming the country side going “braiiiins.”

We won’t because as with zombies, they won’t exist.  At least they won’t exist if our government stops making it a crime to start/run/make a profit at a business.  And even if they continue their war on what you DID build, they still won’t exist.  They’ll just be unemployed on paper, collecting welfare, but inexplicably very busy and perhaps driving Mercedes.  (See Portugal and Greece for what people do when making a living becomes illegal.  And that’s Portugal and Greece, not the US. If you ask in Portugal and Greece, I bet you that they’d say their reason for living is their – hyper extended – family.  In the US people are likely as not to mention work.  Even those who mention family tend to mean their nuclear family, and then after that work.)

What this law has the potential of doing is making us all contractors.  Which means what is happening to writers is heading everyone else’s way fast.

Yesterday some of you in comments got rather lost in the weeds of “specialization versus generalist.”  But, truly, that’s not what’s at stake.

Look, I’m a contractor anyway, so it’s a little different, but being a writer working for a house (or many houses) is sort of a limbo thing, since not only do you license your copyright to them, but they expect you to do all sorts of other things which makes you sort of a contractployee.  What I mean is, the way things used to be, with the few gatekeepers and a lot of writers trying to sell, they could require you do all sorts of things beyond writing the book.  I’m always highly amused by the people who say they’re now going traditional because “that way all I have to do is write.”  Sure it is, if you want the book to tank so badly it leaves a dent.

Among the things I routinely did for my publishing houses were: paying someone to edit, so that if they missed something I’d catch it; paying someone to go over their edits to make sure nothing got changed in a weird way (and with Berkley this was a constant battle); working at publicity, including making publicity materials; paying someone (agent.  Yeah, that worked) to verify the contracts and make sure that everything was right, and to negotiate for me for less than appalling covers (that worked too!)

So, I was already running a little empire of sub contractors.  All that is happening now is that I’m adding another layer.  I might, for instance have to pay someone to put the books in paper, since I can’t seem to figure it out (though I might experiment with my How To Write Interesting Books and maybe I can.)

As an indie publisher it’s the same thing, only I’m doing it on my own and adding artists.  That’s it.  But I also get a much bigger cut of the money, so it works out better.

The only other thing is that you have to look for work, and see the opportunities for work.  And that’s the BIG, major difference.  Look, not all work will ever be automated because work like wealth is infinite.  If everyone automated everything we all do tomorrow, people would come up with new things they need.

Let’s not even go to buggy whips and candle makers.  What about the typing pool?  Every company used to have it, even in the eighties when I started working.  Where has it gone?  Are all those typists roaming the streets flexing their fingers in despondency?

No.  Some are now computer design specialists.  Some are serving coffee at Starbucks.  Some are doing other things that, like those two, were not major employment categories in the eighties.

Open your eyes.  Then (to quote Pratchett) open your eyes again.  See what you’ve been ignoring.  Don’t count on anyone to look after you.  You do not belong to the Government, no matter what the government thinks.  And if you did, yeah, they’d have to feed you but only to their standards, not yours.  And they could choose to stop at any time.

I’m giving you the same guidance I give my kids, who, though they’re both in STEM degrees, cannot – of course – be sure of being able to do anything with them, because – beyond stupid government tricks – the tech is changing so fast:

Look for things people might pay you for.  Then do them.  Get good at doing them.  In the future there might be no jobs, no “employment” as we have grown to think of it.  But there will be work.  And people will still pay for work that benefits them or makes their life easier.  Now, you might end up working four contract jobs in ten hour increments and taking the income from those multiple streams to make a full living.  I’m here to tell you it’s doable. (At least if you add the Jim Baen dictum “Don’t work for buttheads”.)

The future is wide open.  You just have to make it yourself.

NOTE:

Sorry to be so late on this.  I woke up to find out the marking wars were all over our living room and front hall.  Normally I’d have ignored it – I don’t work on that floor – and cleaned in the afternoon, but the fug was that thick that I ended up cleaning the living room and waxing.

Part of this, I think, is that I’ve been away so much over the last week, they haven’t got their due petting.

Some days, I swear, living with this particular set of bewhiskered miscreants is like living with fuzzy Hells Angels.  (No Hells Angels harmed in this metaphor.  These are imaginary Hells Angels that exist only in my head, which is good because I REALLY would hate for them to pee all over my living room floor.)

Also — I’ve put content up in the subscriber space.  And sorry to be late on all of these.  The good news is that things are getting done, which means there’s fewer of them to do, so it must calm down at some point — right?

FURTHER NOTE: I’ll put up the promo post of ya’ll probably tonight.  (And miss my free short story, but c’est la vie.)  It’s that copious spare time thing.

Sorry to be so late on this.  I got up very late, around eight thirty, and I’m trying to get ready for a dentist’s appointment which delayed everything.  This means this post might be incomplete or too breezy, but I expect comments will be interesting.

I grew up in a country with Earthquakes.  The North is fairly sound – being on granite – but the Southern part can add or lose strips of coast and horrible things can happen to buildings.  If you don’t know what I’m talking about look up The Great Lisbon Earthquake.

I grew up in the North, which means I had only experienced three relatively small Earthquakes by the time I moved to the US.  Experienced is a big word, since I slept through the first (I was three) despite my brother carrying me in his arms back and forth between front and back door, unable to decide whether the narrow street with its tall buildings which might collapse, or the backyard with trees and stone pillars supporting grape vines which might fall (the pillars, not the grapevines.  Well, those too) and crush us was safest.

The second happened at school and was truly minor.  The first started with such small foreshocks that I didn’t realize we were having an Earthquake.  You see, I’d been studying for exams and was really really focused and sometimes it would feel like things shook, but it was only astigmatism and tiredness.  So…

When the phone rang, I ignored the little tremblors, and headed for the stairs.  In my stocking feet.  Let’s say we should all be very grateful that I’m still here to tell the tale.  Mom and dad had a semi-spiral staircase (Only two half curves, and broad) of polished, waxed mahogany.  I was wearing fuzzy socks, since I hadn’t left the room all morning — and as I hit the center of the bend, at a half run, the real quake hit.  I was picked up and flung down to the front hall.  Fortunately I landed on my behind, which has always been exceptionally cushioned, and in such a way I broke nothing, though I was black and blue and couldn’t sit comfortably for weeks.

This is apropos what is going on in publishing and, from what I understand, in the rest of the professions – almost all of them.  I’m saying publishing, because it’s my field and therefore I’m hyper aware of it.

It’s also, btw, a good illustration of what fools we SF writers are.  Or at least we are when we try to focus on an invention and how it changes things.  Say you get flying cars.  The story is going to focus on being able to fly faster, and get there sooner.  You can live I Kansas and work in Denver.  Stuff like that.

But … but what about roads.  What happens when all roads revert to forests.  What happens to neighborhoods, when houses are no longer situated along roads.  What happens to commerce when “city” might be a matter of opinion?

Well, we didn’t – curse it.  They PROMISED – get flying cars.  But we got computers.  I remember feeling back in the nineties we’d got the booby prize.  “Okay, so I can email people instead of the post office.  And I can write faster than on the type writer.  Whatever.  I want my flying car.”

Except that was the foreshock.  I was focused on what I was doing and didn’t realize it.  I headed for the staircase of publishing, at full tilt, in my fuzzy socks…

For those of you not in publishing, let me tell you that looking at it, you should be able to think through how this will affect your field and whether it will be in the near future or you can relax a little.  Only don’t relax too much.  Things hit in weird ways.  I’ll put at the end some of the things I see coming for EVERYONE.

When I came into publishing we were at the height of the push model.  If you wanted to get published and get on the shelves, you not only had to go through the publisher, you’d BEST charm the publisher and do the politically correct thing.  They published any number of books that never even got on the bookshelves.  (No, don’t ask me why.  Maybe a tax thing.)

Meanwhile, as a reader, I was having more trouble finding stuff to read.  What was on the shelves didn’t appeal, and there was nothing I could do.  I spent five years or so re-reading old books, afraid to find a new author who disappeared after three books, and finding the effort of discovering gold in the dross all too much work.

But we had computers.  And then we had Amazon.  My book buying skyrocketed, because I could find all those books that weren’t put on the shelves.

However, by and large, the bookstores and the push model reigned supreme.  You wanted to be on the shelves, you went traditional, and you were a good boy or girl.

However, Amazon made a dent, and the old model started looking like it was in trouble.

But then came the kindle.  The first one seemed like a toy.  I still wanted one, but no one was seriously reading most of the stuff on them.  They were expensive too.  I thought we’d have… twenty years or so before the tech was viable.  No one but Baen was making money from ebooks.

But then came Kindle II and all the others, and the competing readers.  Smashwords, KDP and the other self-publishing programs.

Old style publishing looked a bit scared, but they were standing buff and saying that the ebooks were a fad.  And even though the bookstores were now also stocking according to how you sold in Amazon, the best way to get on the shelves was still to go traditional.  Validation, etc.

…  The shot heard around the world just  echoed.  Go read Kris Rusch, then come back.

Now self-published books can get on the shelves for a very little expenditure.  And the price is very little more than for traditional publishers (unless it’s Baen, but that’s something else.)  And the price WILL come down.

So… what is this all about?

Boom.  Unless publishing houses have been cultivating their brand (and who but Baen has?) they’re going to find themselves at the bottom of the staircase in a world of butthurt.

As for writers?  It behooves us now to bring things also in paper, if length warrants.  Particularly if we have a (very little) name that might make bookstores want to stock us.

Other than Baen – and I have sentimental attachment to the house anyway – I now can’t even imagine why any sane person would want to go with a traditional publisher.  Heck, I’m having trouble imagining why an INSANE person would want to.  Unless they’re masochists (Fifty shades of publishing.)

That is my field.  I’m sure the tremors aren’t done.  I’m picking myself up off the floor going “What?  When?  Did anyone get the number of that truck?”  And I’m awake and aware.  Half of my colleagues won’t realize this for a while.  By then we’ll be off to the next temblor.

Things will stabilize, of course.  Eventually.  In my lifetime?  Who knows?

Some of you might be immune from this, but I doubt you’re as immune as you think.

Look, computer control, distributed manufacturing, delivery of goods long distance, delivery of data at virtually no cost, three d printing, virtual socialization…

It’s a lot like flying cars, but more so.  It brings the possibility of rendering cities meaningless, but also countries.  (Which is I think part of the reason that governments have gone even more obnoxious.)  It will change the way we work, the way we relate to each other, the way we pay for goods (no?  Well, what if you live in a place where cost of living is very cheap but work in one cost of living is very expensive?  Won’t your salary affect local economy?  And long term, will it equalize prices?  Or will there be crazy pockets?  And with international commerce, where do fiat currencies fit in?) the way we fall in love, the way we marry, the way we have children.

I don’t have time to unpack it, but I’m sure you can.  Or I can unpack it in a post tomorrow.  I’m sure the following fields are next on the “hit with the change stick:”  Education, movie making, programming, real estate.

… but the others aren’t far behind, and the only thing I can guarantee is that the order and magnitude will surprise us all.

They’re exciting times to live in, and like all revolutions not a bit scary.

Hold on tight and be not afraid.  No one is promising you won’t have to fight and struggle, but there’s a good chance that the future belongs to those who want to be free.

So, yesterday Glenn Reynolds linked to this story at Hot Air about a home invader (IN TEXAS!) who was so unfortunate (as well as stupid) as to lock the son of the homeowner in the gun closet…  Hilarity ensued.

Only, as I was getting ready to go out and unable to work in those ten minutes or so, I thought it would be a good idea to read the comments.  Which was fine too, except…

Except that I came across something that made me sit down and think.  In fact, I thought all the way in the car to Denver (business) and all the way back, and decided this must be written about.

For those of you not inclined to click on that link, let me summarize.  Story goes something like this: a house in Texas was broken into by three home invaders (a completely different thing from burglars.  Growing up I was always told that the real danger from burglars was to interrupt them in the commission of the crime – please keep in mind that I grew up in a country where gun ownership is not allowed – and so was instructed that, if coming home and suspecting the house was being burgled, I should run next door the neighbors and call the police.  Home invaders are burglars who PURPOSELY go into occupied houses, which is a completely different ball of wax.  In fact, often – from what I read, though I confess I didn’t look at statistics – they’re there for a bit of bizarre sexual assault or other acts of random sadism, as well as property.)

After wrestling with the occupant of the house in residence, i.e. the son of the homeowner, they locked him in the closet.  He got his gun, broke out of the closet, exchanged fire with one of the invaders, the other two fled.  The one who was shot (shoulder and leg.  Cut the homeowner’s kid some slack.  He was probably agitated.  I would be) tried to run, collapsed, was captured.

So far so good and a fairly straight forward story.  And then I hit the comments.

Before I report on this comment I want to point out that from the replies other people made him, he might be a “regular troll” on the blog.  (AFAICT we’re the only blog with active commenters without a resident troll.  This is probably because I’m testy and an overheated Latina.  Deal.  I know it would give us great cache and also that I never let you guys have any fun, but you can MOST ASSUREDLY deal.)

However, the comment bears mentioning because a) if you tell this type of a story at a party, this is almost sure to come back as a talking point.  b) because when I was in college – or high school – while I would PROBABLY not have made this point myself, I would have bought it, hook like and sinker.  c) because not only it’s not a valid “counterpoint” but it’s not even a sane one.  d) because nine times out of ten someone not politically involved will buy it sight unseen.  e) the reason people will buy it.

So, now that you are ready – the comment was made by someone named “nonpartisan” and while I can’t find the comment itself (you can search!) it was quoted enough for me to get the gist of it.  Apparently this critter opened with a gambit that he didn’t think burglars deserve death.  And either in this comment, or in another, he identified himself as a Harvard Law graduate.  The commenters make much fun of this last.  They shouldn’t.  Having received an excellent liberal (!) education in Europe, this seems perfectly plausible to me.

But here’s the part of the comment I could find:

what if you know for a fact that the burglar is unarmed, would you kill him?

a burglar could be a father who is unemployed and at his wits end at finding options to provide for his starving family. Not every burglar is a violent, armed psychotic rapist.

nonpartisan on May 18, 2013 at 9:01 AM

This is exactly the type of story my text books, from middle school on were full of.  The criminal was a misunderstood soul, an exploited work, down on his last dime.  We were hammered with comparisons to medieval people stealing a loaf of bread and being hanged for it.  (Suburbanshee will know better than I, but I’ve come to doubt those stories too.  The Arab world might punish first-time thieves, but I sort of doubt western civilization did.)

When someone brings up a story like that, I’ve been conditioned to feel a pang and go “well, what if…”

Why have I been conditioned to do this?  Well, because that’s a plot for a Hollywood movie, and, beyond my text books, it’s been tossed at us a thousand times in movies and mysteries.  (Did any of you watch Boogie Nights?  Might be one of the worst movies ever made.  We watched it for the same reason we watched a lot of cr*p.  It was in the dollar theater.  Unfortunately once we paid for it, we had to sit and watch it, because Dan feels wasteful otherwise.  No, don’t ask.  It’s a thing.  Anyway, from what I dimly remember, Boogie Nights has that type of thing, where they decide to rob a store, because they’re desperate and stuff.  More on that later.)

We all know about the honest-but-desperate father who goes and robs someone for money to feed his starving brood.

We all know of him – but does he exist?  I’ll remind you that we all also know of Santa Claus.

Right now, off the top of my head, I’m going to say that not only doesn’t he exist, but that if he ever existed, in history, it was probably before the eighteenth century.

Look, in normal human beings there’s  a huge stop before “commit crime to solve my problems.”  There just is.  It might “simply” be fear of retribution, but it’s there.  And when one things of “committing crime” and is desperate enough to break that taboo, there are a bunch of things a normal human being would do LONG before burglary, let alone home invasion (which as we said, is a different animal.)  There’s swindling someone.  If you don’t have the brains for that, there’s credit card number theft.  There’s even up the scale, mugging.  (You get your loot in money.)  Further, burglary, let along home invasion, is a fairly sophisticated crime.  You have to know how to break and enter.  This might have been easy in a medieval hovel, but these days it’s not so much (Okay, I can break into a house in five minutes.  I never claimed to be nice.  What?  Mostly to not be grounded for coming home late.  “But mom, I was in bed all along.  Maybe I was in the bathroom and you missed me?”)

Second, once you break into a house, your chances of walking off with a bundle of untraceable bank notes are slim.  Most people simply don’t sew money into the mattress.  So, if you’re breaking in for money to feed your children (snort) you’re going to have to convert whatever you find into cash.  (I’ll note that I have never heard of ANYONE breaking into a house and making off with the contents of the freezer, so if it’s food they wants, they’re going about it the wrong way.)  This means you need to know fences, or you’re going to be a one-time burglar.

But before that let’s look at how an otherwise law-abiding person could get desperate enough  to become a burglar in order to feed his chil’uns.

Kids, I’ve been broke.  I’ve been so broke that merely being broke would be a relief.  At one point twenty years ago we spent six months paying our Visa with our Mastercard and vice versa.  Twice, we parked in front of soup kitchens, then decided we were NOT desperate enough to go in and went home hungry.

The idea of robbing another person NEVER EVEN OCCURRED TO ME.  In that situation, the hierarchy would go something like this: charities/soup kitchens.  This by itself, might be enough to hold us, until we could get back on our feet.  (who was that guy who moved to a town with his girlfriend and found he couldn’t starve even if he tried to?)  Friends and relatives.  No, I don’t care how broke your friends are, you can usually sleep on the sofa.  Unemployment/Federal/State assistance. (This might come first for most people.  Even for us, unemployment would.)  If you exhaust all of these, if you lose your home, there’s still the charity of strangers.  Look, our city supports a large (!) and colorful (dirt is a color!) population of homeless which I GUARANTEE haven’t done a lick of work in years.  NONE OF THEM IS STARVING.  (And most of them are also not burglars or even muggers.)  There’s soup kitchens.  There’s informal soup kitchens (college students host a dinner for the homeless near my house every weekend.  No. Don’t get me started.)  There’s begging on the street.

And if you’re not going “but all of those are demeaning.”  Yes, they are, but they’re not VIOLENT crime.  And which would you rather be?  A beggar or a burglar?

Neither, right, but begging is at least honest, and I’d bet you most NORMAL people would do that.

It turns out, weirdly enough, that a small percentage of the population commits 90% of the violent (or potentially violent) crime.  It’s not need.  It’s something broken in them.

A lot of these people are heavy drug users or mentally ill.

That said, I’m the first to say our mental health system is broken.

IOW you’re unlikely to find a starving father of four in your home unless he’s also mentally ill and POSSIBLY also an acid dropper.

The problem is that someone with that combination and willing to commit a violent crime has no breaks.  (A lot of mentally ill drug users just want to sit in a corner and talk to the lizards because they’re awesome and stuff.  The ones who get violent are inherently very dangerous.)

So, should you shoot someone who breaks into your house?  Yep.  What are the chances of your killing an otherwise innocent man?  Next to none.  What are the chances of you getting killed otherwise?  VERY high.

So, how come that comment, or the gist of it would have got even me to hesitate when I was much younger?

Because in a million stories, movies, novels, we’ve been sold the story of a creature that if he ever existed is vanishingly rare – so rare that his sightings are more scarce than those of Bigfoot.  – the “poor but honest, desperate father, driven to crime to feed his brood.”

And people tend to think of stories as things they’ve lived.  They “experienced” it.  So, of course, it’s true.

It’s a great story, of course, but I bet you it was much rarer in Victorian times.  (And if you read the bios of Victorian criminals, the being it depicts was almost as rare.  People would go to the workhouse, horrible as it was, rather than commit crimes.  Unless they were one of the few who PREFERRED crime over anything else.)  And it was even rarer before that.

What it comes down to is people have to be told these stories, and be told them over and over again, before they will be scared of defending themselves lest they hurt others.

Civilizations don’t commit suicide unless they’re brainwashed into it.  And destroying a civilization starts with corrupting its story tellers.

 

Go you, look closely at the stories you tell and make sure you do no harm.

Oh, yeah, and be not afraid.

 

Note: Will update subscriber content this evening.  To make things clear – I was at workshop Tuesday through Thursday and would have caught up on Friday, except I was cleaning form “fridge burst.”  The weekend is taken up with business relating to managing my business (because I DID build that, and I intend to keep it.)  But there will be content, and there will be a more detailed explanation in the subscriber side.