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My grandmother was fond of saying “G-d writes straight through crooked lines.”  It was in fact a way of saying that it was all for the best, in the best of all possible worlds.

They say that the impression of this, like the impression of seeing a face when you look at an irregular stain on a wall, is just a trick your mind plays.

To an extent that has to be true.  I mean, if you cast your mind back and you see all the things that could have gone wrong in getting you where you are, you can come up with a ton and conclude indeed that you were brought dry shod through the ocean bottom.

On the other hand, if you’re not particularly happy with your situation, you can look back and think “If only I’d done this and that.”  In the times when I was probably clinically depressed (there were reasons, but once you get into the spiral, it’s hard to pull back up.  I did, but– ) that sort of replay, and how “stupid” I’d been (to sign up with Berkley, to write a “literary” trilogy, to…) could occupy most of the day, and it formed part of the spiral that drove everything down.

It’s important, when you’re caught in that, to remember that too is an artifact of your mind trying to make sense of the situation.  Pratchett captured that very well in Lords and Ladies when the Chancellor and Granny Weatherwax are replaying their lost romance and he says “We should have got married.  We’d have grandchildren” etc. and she says “But what about when our house burned down and killed us and all the babies?”  It’s sobering to realize that even your soppy fantasies are not written in stone.  You could have done everything right and still get whammed.

And that’s the other side of this.

As humans, we need to have sense what we’re doing is a path, that it leads to something.  Yes, this post was prompted by all the musings of “I was going to be.”  It’s fairly reasonable of me to give up on being an angel (the first to make a comment on the color of the wings gets carped) or a cat when I realized these were impossible.  It’s much harder to give up on more reasonable ambitions, when you know it’s what you’d really like to do.

I’m a special case.  I don’t count.  I’ve tried to give up writing… tens of times, starting when I could barely put a story together and all I got were rejections to two years ago, when I wrote to Kris Rusch explaining that the stress was killing me and I didn’t like my publishing houses (not Baen but Baen isn’t enough for me to make a living) anymore, and I was just walking.  That’s when she told me about indie.  (Yes, it was that recent.)

There in the middle, there were times I could have walked away (you don’t want to know) but Dan said he thought I should continue writing.  (Was he right?  It depends on whether you believe there’s some sort of plan for the universe or not.  And whether I’m going with it or against it.  As someone once said, it’s above my pay grade.)  But that took serious aversion therapy.  Before that, the need to write drove me.

It drove me so much that it’s almost stopped me asking “am I doing the right thing?”

I was talking to my son the other day about careers and prospects, and my husband said “If you encounter too much difficulty, it’s probably a sign you’re doing the wrong thing.”  It’s a nice belief, but what’s “too much” and why didn’t he adhere to that when I tried to walk away from writing after years of running in place?

Because it’s not logical.  Because none of us is rational.  Because unless it becomes a matter of life or death, we all like our own way to much to just give up on it, even if we start suspecting our talent – for math, for music, for writing – is largely imaginary.

Growing up hurts.  Changing directions hurts.  Admitting you were wrong and moving on hurts.

None of which adds up to my telling I’m ready to walk now.  That would be… stupid, when though I’m not there yet, for the first time I can sort of glimpse a place where I can support us from this, and if it weren’t for the insecurity about Dan’s job (on again, off again) or the fact groceries and heating have gone through the roof we’d be starting to feel better about things.

But it adds up to one of the things I repeatedly hear, from the young unemployed, from people trying to make society “better” – people should be allowed to pursue their “dreams” and “We shouldn’t have people give up their art just to be able to eat.  Look at J. K. Rowling, she wrote while on the dole.”

J. K. Rowling is the exception.  I actually know/have known friends who found themselves able to subsist for a while either from coming into some money or from being on unemployment and said “I’m going to write a book.”

While in the old days this was stupid ANYWAY because well… publishing a book took longer than that, so unless you were on permanent disability, it wasn’t going to be there as money when you desperately needed it – the fact is that people very rarely actually DO use the time to follow through.

I don’t know why, except that it’s hard.  It’s hard for me, and it’s where my income comes from.  I don’t mean the writing is hard.  Oh, sometimes it’s a stone b*tch.  Sometimes it flows though.  I mean, it’s hard working from home, in the middle of the daily ebb and flow and not get distracted and nibbled by ducks so that no writing happens.  And, as I said, I live from this. In ultimate instance, the reminder that we DO need the money sends me back to the keyboard.  But if you’re being otherwise supported, it makes it three times as hard.  (I know.  When I was making no money from this, and we were living from Dan’s money it was very hard not to just go off and play with the kids.

The other part is – what if you’re just REALLY bad?

Those of you who know me know I don’t believe in talent.  I believe in learning.  Given enough work, given enough drive, given enough wanting, you can be a very good writer, or at least a well-selling one.

But if you start with a tin ear for language, no sense of plot, and a Disney-channel understanding of humanity, that slope could take fifty years.

At which point do you give up?  At which point do you think there are better things you could do with your life?

The communist republics solved this by telling you what you were going to do with your life.  I don’t remember its resulting in any mad success.  Even in science and sports, both heavily subsidized, they often ended up trailing the chaotic capitalist(ish) economies.  In science, almost always.  In sports sometimes.  I guess it was easier to pick someone for physical ability.

Most people pretended to work, and they pretended to pay them.

So someone outside you deciding what you’re good for is probably a forlorn hope.  And someone subsidizing you will probably not take you where you want to go, unless you happen to be J. K. Rowling.

Which brings us to “how do you choose?” and “When do you decide it’s enough and you’ll try something else?”

Most people decide by what they want to do “Follow their dreams” and quit and try something else when they can’t take the failure anymore – either monetarily, physically or emotionally.  Sometimes the failure was really the result of a concatenation of incidences of bad luck, not of the person’s making.  This is when we think “if someone had supported them…” or “But that’s unfair.”

We all know stories of people who persisted against failure for decades and then became massively successful.  And we know stories of people who failed at career after career until finally they find one at which they do very well.

But we all also know stories of people who followed either of those paths and were miserable failures.

Unfair?  For it to be fair, you’d need a kindergarten teacher closely making sure it’s “fair.”  And even those of us who believe in G-d don’t see him that way.  (I once read a Jewish interpretation of the story of Cain and Abel which stained with me.  In this interpretation, Cain was the smart one, the innovative one.  He came up with the idea of sacrificing to the Lord, but then Abel did it and his reward was bigger, etc, until Cain, upset at the unfairness of it, killed him.  I think everyone who is by nature creative has gone through this, seeing the “follow-mes” doing well when they didn’t.  There are reasons for this, of course.  Innovation in a group is hard, and the second person (or the tenth) is more likely to be rewarded.  It helps to remember that.  Might prevent the stone-to-brother’s-head end of the story.)

Even if you believe in “fairness” as an outside principle, you have to back up and ask if it’s really fair.  Perhaps your art is too far ahead of its time.  Or perhaps it tried to take the field where it didn’t wish to go.  Or perhaps…

So – do you persist and risk always failing?  Do you go in search of something you might be better at?

I’d say it depends on the person, the situation and the pain.

Robert A. Heinlein failed at his naval career.  His health simply made it impossible to go on.  But then he technically failed at his writing career.  For more than a year things got really bad and nothing would sell.  But he persisted.  And then he succeeded. (Though someone who knew him told me once that financially he “ran scared his whole life.” – which is typical of a writing life.  No security.)

As part of the “G-d writes straight through crooked lines” – We can well imagine a brilliant naval career for RAH – though if it would have come to pass or not, who knows? – but I know I for one have trouble imagining a world without his writing, and so the temptation is to say “it’s all for the best.”

Is it?  Or is it the illusion of a face?

I don’t know.  And I can’t make the decision for you. And neither can anyone else.  The state should neither subsidize your pursuit of “your dream” nor tell you what dream you should pursue.  They don’t know.  Your parents/brothers/spouse might, but the state doesn’t.  And I’d wager from having observed such things, that even your parents/brothers/spouse are probably wrong.

In the end the thing you can be most useful at and probably happiest at, is that which you want to do so badly that you’ll endure all difficulties to do it.  Against all odds or with them, fair or unfair.

How it relates to the rest of the world, leave as an exercise for historians.  If you have a need to do something for a living, and aren’t going to starve doing it, give it a try.  If the pain gets too great, quit.  If the pain is just constant, unrelenting but not large enough, keep trying.

Who knows?  Maybe there is a face in the stain.

And maybe it is what you were “meant” to do.

Different post up at MGC

When I was eight years old, my life-plan was to grow up, live in Denver and be a writer.  Somewhere along the way between that age and fourteen, marriage to a man named Dan Holtz became part of the plan.  Okay, so I got a letter wrong, and one superfluous.  Also, he was supposed to be a redhead and an astronaut.  (Sigh.  Reality just fails to conform.)

How much of my current life was influenced by that?  Well… living near Denver to an extent.  (Marrying Dan had nothing to do with my deciding he was the one for me despite his name.)  I say to an extent, because of course first I had to live in the States.

Not only didn’t my 8 year old self know nothing about immigration laws, she had no clue where Denver was located or what precisely it was.  (I’m convinced in retrospect that I had it confused with Dover, since for the longest time I thought it was in England and near the sea.)  And by the time I’d acquired that knowledge – somewhere between fourteen and fifteen – I also had an idea of what moving between countries would do.  I mean, I was aware of the price to pay.

No, I never felt like I fit in in Portugal.  There are reasons for this.  My friend Kate found a website that charted nations according to characteristics.  Portugal is apparently very consensus oriented.  I’m an Odd.  Consensus gives me hives.  There are other characteristics.  They call this the national software.  It don’t sit well with my hardware.  We’ll put it that way.

However, Portugal is where my family lives and has lived for generations.  I like the land, I like the climate, I like being near the sea – and the price I paid to escape the wrong software — was to give all that up, to give up my parents – when you move across the ocean even if I could go back every year, it’s like dying a little.  I’m giving up the years I’d have with my parents and trading them for a week a year ON THE GOOD SIDE.  (More like a week every three or four years) for the rest of their lives.  More, when I got married I also gave up my (paternal) grandmother.  And all my cousins.

Everytime I go back, I’m reminded of the price I paid.  The land, as such, is largely gone.  It’s impossible to feel much attachment to the village when I can no longer find my way around it.  However, as I get older, I see my extended family get together, supporting each other.  If I were to lose Dan – G-d forbid – after the kids move out I’d be very alone.  This is impossible in Portugal, where the family go out of their way to drag the widowed and the sick out to parties and excursions. And it’s not charity.  They’re really wanted, because they’re part of the whole.

It was the price and I paid it.  I paid it because I wanted my children to grow up here, not there.  Over all I think I was right.

However, for those who think I aimed to live in Denver – I didn’t.  First I came to the states.  Then we found ourselves in a mighty tight space, in South Carolina, and Dan said “there’s nothing in this area, where do you want me to look for a job?”  I said “Denver.”

We ended up about 100 miles away.  That’s fine.  However, from the moment we drove into the state, I knew it was home.

This sort of bridges the gap between the political and the weird.  Was I meant to be here?  Who knows.  But I made “here” mine.

It was also – Colorado Springs in fact – the center of a Libertarian project to “get as many of us to move in as possible” and “take over.”  It worked for about five years and then…

So, now to everyone who keeps sending me notes asking me what I intend to do about the Colorado legislature and its laws to ensure we never get to have a say in governing again.

I’m not stupid.  I see the Detroit writing on the wall.  I’d feel the same way if this were the Republicans ensuring we never had a say in government again.  Whenever you get single party rule, you get corruption and decay.

So, am I going to move?

Where?

Sure some places are now becoming less crazy – TN, maybe portions of Ohio – but Colorado was going that way when we moved here, and look at us twenty years later.

Twenty years from now I’ll be seventy and it will be too late to fight the encroachment wherever I am.  And besides, I think the sh*t hits the fan well before then.  We are running out of our grandkids’ money (and perhaps ensuring most of us never HAVE grandchildren.)

Barring us having to move because there’s no money or jobs, we stay here.

Now, I’m not saying that won’t affect our plans.  We always wanted to live in Denver, but this might not be possible, if the area is going to Detroitize (totally a word.)  Heck, where we are is not nearly as safe as we used to be.

So we’ll cast about perhaps for a more defensible place, balancing this with the need to have access to hospitals which yeah, we’ll need as we age.

But other than that…

When I was eight, I was going to live in Denver and be a writer.  I’ve almost made it, and I’m not in the mood to let the larcenous and petty Colorado legislature dislodge me.  It’s impossible for them to believe same day registration and voting by mail makes elections more secure.  Unless of course they mean it makes their positions more secure.

But I refuse to go running from my chosen home just because they’re playing games with bureaucracy.  If we keep just moving on and leaving the places they take over, they learn nothing but that they can take over.  I’d say moving on was a good strategy if we had other worlds to colonize.  We don’t.

I mean to prove to them that what they captured is a booby prize.  What makes this country is not government.  What makes this country are the people who create and work and raise their kids.  Colorado still has plenty of those.

I plan to be prosperous without them, avoid their schemes as much as possible while staying on the side of the law, and oppose them and ridicule them every chance I get.

The Colorado legislature shall learn: Molon Labe.  Also mene, mene, tekel, upharsin.

As I’ve said recently, I’ve been reading a bunch of stuff about ESP and the paranormal.  This of course is a great relief as last week it was “gruesome unsolved crimes” and “ghosts” – a decidedly more unwholesome mix.  And incidentally possibly in itself a symptom of being ill, since weird hormonal fluctuations and sinus infections both send me to the “unclean” side of the mind.  (By which I mean MOSTLY the gruesome unsolved crimes.)  I spent months reading truly strange things like stories of Roman atrocities when I was pregnant with #2 son, which involved both hormonal fluctuations (natch) and my having a massive upper respiratory infection which we couldn’t treat without antibiotics, not advisable in my condition.

But the fact that the reading “craving” (there is no rhyme or reason to it) has now moved from crimes completely and is only touching ghosts peripherally as I research other “psi” stuff, leads me to believe that what set it off is Rye Crisp.

Rye Crisp is something Amanda Green and I wrote as a proposal and outline YEARS ago.  It was supposed to be ALMOST a straight mystery, with just a hint of supernatural.  My agent refused to send it out flat.  (Actually through my eight years with her, she turned down everything I ever tried to write with anyone else and, I’m now convinced, either got horribly confused lied about one that had been submitted before I hired her saying my partner had withdrawn it.  This cost me a friendship, and in retrospect – and having talked to my now ex-writing partner again and believing her – was probably not true.)  Why?  I don’t know.  Perhaps the books really weren’t that commercial.  (Amanda and I might have been taking the fine edge of supernatural/not supernatural too tightly.) Or perhaps – given the 5 for 5 turn down rate of collaborations, my agent simply hated dealing with multiple authors, one of them not her client.

Anyway, recently we started kicking it around between us again, because what it could become – once we were afraid it would be too supernatural for mystery – was sort of a cross between CSI and Monster Hunter.  (More CSI, I’m not plagiarizing Larry.  Nor could I.  In fact the collaboration with him is going to need major assists on guns from some of you.)  What I mean is that there is an organized police force dealing with the paranormal.  Yeah, I know, not a new concept, (just like a force that kills monsters is not new – I mean Buffy) but our schtick is to make it as realistic as possible.  Which means having enough techno-babble to make it sound “real.”

This means I’ve fallen sideways into a world of weird to very weird reads.  It’s appropriate to where my life is just now, because I can read a chapter or two while having breakfast or doing dishes, and there’s no story continuity I must mind. In fact, I have a book in the bathroom, one in the kitchen, a different one by my bed.  Which is okay, as hardly any of them are riveting reads.

Look, I have reason to know there are SOME psi phenomena – we’ll leave it at that.  Though if pushed I’ll point out I abandoned the office in our last house (and sort of because of other stuff eventually moved out) when I came up the attic stairs, and my computer was on (it turned off after ten minutes.  This was early morning.) which could be a glitch.  What couldn’t be a glitch was the mouse moving on the pad.  I don’t mean the cursor.  I mean the mouse.  On the pad.  (Before you ask, the kids were too young to rig anything.)  I could ignore the creepy feeling I’d been getting while I was in the attic/office alone (like someone reading over my shoulder) and I could think the creepy “messages” I’d found typed on the screen were the guys freaking me out, even if they denied it.  But that mouse moving around sent me running down the stairs and to working remotely on the laptop for a year before we moved.  And no, this wasn’t an isolated incident.  More on that later – but if I ever need to convince myself that they are all fakery and become a confirmed skeptic, I’ll read more books on psi research.

One I bought for its truly wonderful title (which I might steal for a fantasy novel) for instance the gentleman writing starts telling us how he got interested in the paranormal because he had a near fatal illness.  As you read the FIRST chapter of the book you realize he had all these interesting experiences and feelings because he was doped to his gills.  And the “messages” he feels are important to transmit to the world are just what you expect in the circumstances.  When I read them aloud to older son, he said “That sounds like that take off parody on what Moses would have been like if he really had been smoking pot ‘We should all be kind to lizards, because they’re awesome and stuff.’”

Then there’s the UFO conspiracy books (they’re sort of sideways related to psi) in which the aliens all give the sort of messages parodied in Good Omens, “Take care of your planet and be nice to people” doesn’t seem like the sort of thing anyone would cross the galaxy to tell you, does it?  I mean you can get the same from your priests, shamans or teachers and for that matter from the manned drones in government (who seem to think of themselves as priests, shamans and teachers.)

Then there’s the psi researchers on a tour of the USSR’s famous psi research facilities who meekly believed it was an accident when their visas were cancelled before the greatest demonstrations.

You sort of look at these books and go to the back and see where these people have degrees, real degrees from real institutions, and then you look at the page again and you think “you can’t be THAT dumb.”

Part of the reason to persist – in fact, part of the reason to own these books at all – is that Heinlein at least was convinced that psi not only existed but that it could be researched and harnessed.  He not only used it in his books, but talked about it extensively in at least one essay.

Partly of course, it was because it was the seventies, and people were taking psi at least somewhat seriously, and both sides of the iron curtain were at least making gestures towards researching it.

And I wonder how much the fact that it got swept away – far far away – from all respectability has to do with its big push being in the seventies, when everyone was on drugs.  Cause or effect, take your pick, but yeah, the phenomena might have “manifested” because everyone was swatting away purple lizards (and being kind to them.) But I also wonder if the loss of respectability – which in turn means it attracts more mentally-unstable and “I wanna believe” types… and writers, natch – was related to the same sort of reaction that consigned shag carpeting and bell bottoms to the ash heap of history.  (And the attempts at reviving them have only sort of worked.  I keep wondering who in heck was nostalgic for the seventies.)

However, I think part of the problem, and the reason the “scientific harnessing” of the subject matter might never be possible, or at least not until a scientific breakthrough in another area makes it possible to figure out better instruments to view it, is that the subject matter might fall (with quantum) in that broad area of “the observer influences the observed.”  I.e. we get silly and unreliable data because the researchers are silly and unreliable.  If the universe truly is full of quantum thingies and powered by narrativium this is quite possible.

Something to consider is that the experience I described above, of coming up the stairs and seeing my mouse move by itself on the pad, while I KNEW everyone else in the house was asleep, is not even unusual for writers.  Nor is the creepy, disturbing feeling of someone reading over your shoulder.  Or finding stuff written you know you didn’t write.  (And I don’t mean like the Medieval Romance, because that one, by the date was right after I hit my head, which in case you wonder was AFTER I moved from the house with the auto-moving mouse.)

Almost every writer, including friends who are atheists will tell of this sort of experience.  (Of course, they have to trust you to tell you that, so I’m not naming names.)

Apparently there’s something with working with story and invoking people who never exists that invites WEIRD “supernatural” events.  The pattern seems to be that these happen after you live and write in a house for about five years, and it will center on your writing area.  (Which holds true of all except the house we rented in SC and there our experiences were neither unique nor isolated.  I mean, I thought I was going nuts till I heard that the chick across the lake who let loose with the firearm occasionally in the evening was shooting at the fairies that lived under the lake and who had stolen her boyfriend.  Yeah, I wish I was joking.)

Anyway – what part of this is the mind influencing the world and the world influencing the mind?  The narrative telling the story or the story imposing itself upon the world?

I don’t know.  I wouldn’t presume to guess.  I don’t even know where precisely my stories come from.  And every time I get sick and can’t write, I start worrying it will never come back.  I totally understand Stephen King keeping his teaching certificate up to date “in case the writing goes away.”

Like all those psi researchers, I’m making my living on the margins of the “not quite reputable”

Only, unlike them, I’m not absolutely sure all of this stuff – including my writing – is real.  In fact, I’m sure the story he tells of someone controlling the Chinese population through psi isn’t real.  I wish I weren’t sure, because that would mean I’d never have heard to forced abortions and dying rooms.

On the other hand, the books occasionally make me laugh aloud (unintentionally.  Particularly the ones written in the seventies.)  And you know, lizards ARE awesome and stuff.  And besides, we should take care of our planet and be nice to one another, because the guys from Alpha Centauri say “Don’t make me come out there.”

 

I try not to get in political arguments on Facebook, unless I’m going in to support a Baen buddy (and because of my erratic hours, I rarely see those in time) or someone starts it with me first.

I assume what people post on their walls is their own d*mn business and they’re allowed to be stupid as they wanna be on their home page.  After all, people can have posters of Che in their living room, and when I find a neighbor or acquaintance has one of those, I simply make plans to ignore them in the future, I don’t say “So, you like mass murderers who delighted in killing kids, personally, uh?”  Also, to be bluntly honest, I’m away too busy to teach history to people who seem unable to reason from fact to fact.

Yesterday something got in under my defenses.  Call it Sarah being too sleepy and still very angry at the Colorado legislature.  Or perhaps it was the irreducible stupidity of the post or its sheer lack of contact with reality, or its hatred of life in a free society.  Indeed, there was so much to choose from, that it’s useless to wonder what first set me off.

To begin with, the note the poster put with the post (which was one of those “images” that people repost, this one just black background with letters on it.)  She said “This is their secret agenda, believe it.”  Since the post was about the GOP I presume she meant the GOP’s secret agenda.

Given the general disorganization of the Republicans, I wish someone would tell them that they have a secret agenda and that the only people who seem to know about it are the opposition.  Also, for the love of heaven, someone tell them that the agenda is so stupid that even I am shocked, though I’ve come to expect mentally-damaged decisions from them.  In fact, their agenda will achieve exactly the opposite of what it purports to want.  And FYI a two year old with experience in pre-school would realize this.

So, what was the charming post?  It said “The GOP wants to abolish government, so the corporation (sic) can rule us.”  At the bottom of it was an elephant in a “not” sign.

Let’s start from the bottom, shall we?  What in heck do they think they’re saying?  In a two-party system they want to abolish one because….  Massive responsiveness to the people will ensue?

Look, I have a lot of right wing friends, socons, libertarians, insane, sane, erudite and not.  They sometimes post pretty hateful stuff about “liberals” (they’re not using this in the “classical liberal sense”) “progressives” or “Marxists.”  The most common is “Liberalism is a mental illness” – and taking in account what they mean is “Marxism” they’re right.  Or rather, it’s a dogmatic religion, which induces mental illness to the extent it doesn’t agree with reality.  However, I have yet to see anything that says “Abolish the democratic party” or the symbol of the Democrats in a forbidden symbol.  Now, one or two of them might have done it and I might have missed it, but this doesn’t match the countless pervasiveness of it on the left.

I am baffled by their bizarre idea that removing one of a two-party axis would lead to anything good.  I recommend they study the history of single party systems, as well as the history of absolute monarchy.  When the state doesn’t have opposition – loyal, disloyal or completely lost in its own pants as the GOP is most of the time – it becomes by definition tyranny.  I mean, why should they care what you say when they know they’re going to be elected/reelected anyway?  Why should they care if the people get upset?

That stupid little “no GOP” symbol at the bottom is a sign of mental illness.  It’s a sign of people who have become so upset that someone disagrees with their position on how to do things that they want to silence the opposition.  It is a sign of people who think that anyone who disagrees with them has to be EVIL – there’s no other option, since, they are so blindingly brilliant and obviously right.

Do I need to point out that first they are so far from obviously brilliant that that short post has a huge logic error (forget the factual errors, etc.)  Or that at some level they know they’re not brilliant or their answer would not be “because, shut up.”  Or that this by itself justifies anyone who wishes to post “Marxism is a mental illness”?

But this “the other side is wrong and must be silenced” is what leads to panicky conspiracy theory inventing, because they can’t figure out why everyone doesn’t see the dazzling brilliance of their position, and they, themselves, don’t want to look at it too closely.

To begin with – I was tempted into an answer that was in itself not quite factual.  It went something like this “First, you’re wrong.  The GOP merely wants to reduce the government.  It is us libertarians who want to abolish it.  Second, it is a centralized government with all its rich opportunities for graft that causes corporations to have undue power.  See China or Hitler’s Germany.  This is a fantasy of washed-out drug-addled rejects who buy into the fantasy that the democrats are protecting us from corporations, and are allowing the so called progressives to drive us back to the thirties.”

I was tempted into a post not quite factual?  Well, yes.  While we libertarians could – you know, if we weren’t all about as social as feral cats – hold our hands and sing, kumbaya style, our own version of Imagine “Imagine there’s no government; it’s hard and we can’t try” – we’d like, in the end, you know, come the millennium and a higher state of man or something, to be able to have a society without government.

Most of us however are aware that it will never be possible, not for communities larger than about to dozen people all committed to doing what’s best for each other and, at that level, whether you have perfect libertarianism or perfect communism is a debate we’ll save for another time.

I simply didn’t feel up to explaining clear political lines, to people who were so blinkered as to think that the GOP had a “secret plan” (really, all of the GOP?  Including your local level?  And the press who are so fond of bugging political meetings where – shocking – Republicans debate who to defeat the opposition has never got a memo or a letter or an email?  Remarkable.  I guess Republicans aren’t humans at all, but pod people from alpha centauri.  Because the best way to keep a conspiracy with three people secret is to kill two of them.  And the best way to keep a conspiracy involving millions of people (or if you believe it’s only the top levels, hundreds of thousands of people) secret is not to have one.)

In the political continuum, you have anarchists – I used to be one when I was 14/15, mostly because anarchists had all the hot guys in black leather jackets and work boots and one of them had long, curly black hair.  Deal.  I have never understood why in the states anarchists want “A strong central government.”  Don’t try to explain it to me.  The last I heard was something like “We need a strong central government so people can live government free.”  Wait, what?  I think the anarchists, who at least at their start had a strong anti-royalist and anti-society strain (as in, destroy society — ???? – Paradise) have long since gotten taken over by the Marxists, who can, after all, organize.  Anyway, other than getting out their cool bandanas and flags in the service of daddy government you can safely ignore them.  They’re so far lost in their own underwear they can’t see the light of day.

Then you have the Libertarians.  I think by now what most libertarians – there are exceptions – want is a government small and hampered enough to adhere to the founders plan.  I subscribe to that.  I don’t subscribe to their own magic belief that if we don’t seek “foreign adventurism” other nations will leave us alone.  It’s a peculiar American illusion.  It has led to blood in the past and will again.  Between that and the obsession with legalization of drugs (yes, I am against the war on drugs.  Yes, I am pro-legalization.  It is simply NOT my only criteria for choosing candidates, and I’m willing to grit my teeth and wait 8 or 12 years while we fix other more urgent stuff – as annoying and civil-liberty-violating as the war on drugs is, yes, there’s more important stuff.  Besides, in Portugal I saw the result of legalization in a stagnant economy.  Let’s say there’s a reason the ganja coast is prone to mysticism and tyrannical governments.  Drugs are a great way to keep the restless and unemployed young quiet while you do whatever the heck you want.)  Because of that, post 9/11 I dropped out of the Libertarian party, where I’d been active and vocal, and started defining myself as a small-l libertarian.  (Or a Rational Anarchist.)

So, you have Anarchists, Libertarians, libertarians, some undefined but not short length of division, in which I would put my “social libertarian/economic mercantilist” friends, and then, at arms length, the outer fringes of the GOP which have people who are at least partially small L libertarian.  These people are considered insurgents and dangerous by the main GOP establishment which are, let’s be honest, statists.

Part of this is the same effect that ended up turning all the “conservative” parties in Europe into Social Democrats (or Christian Democrats, forever trying to get Caesar to fulfill THEIR obligation of charity.  They are so many levels of wrong…)

It is hard for those of you born in the seventies or later to fully get this, but even people like me, who hated the idea expected the communists to win the cold war, eventually.  It made perfect sense.  They were more organized, everyone knew central government was more efficient, the press was full of the glories of the Sov Union, and those of us who thought it was morally atrocious and a horrible thing for the individual had to shut up or be thought crazy.

For my generation – born in the sixties – enough had come out, and we passed Gulag Archipelago around like Samizdat (No, we wouldn’t be arrested, but the school would be very upset we were reading it, and we could kiss college admission goodbye), so that our reaction mostly was “I don’t care if it’s inevitable they’ll win.  They’re evil, and I will go down fighting.”  At least that was my reaction and those of my friends, and I submit those of the martyrs of Tiananmen square.

It wasn’t the stand of the people older than us. They really thought that communism (or its soft sister, socialism) would bring better social outcomes for the most people.  As conservatives they might hate it for peripheral reasons, but they still felt communists “cared about the people” and “held the moral high ground.”  This sort of mental concession is visible in the older ranks of the GOP who are, of course, the ones in positions of power.  I don’t know if they were too old when the wall came down, or if they simply know too many people on the other side whom they judge to be good people.  I know that it’s implicit in their attitude the idea that the Marxists are nice guys with the wrong idea.  The other side, meanwhile, is playing by the rule book that says anyone who doesn’t believe in Marx MUST be eliminated so paradise can happen.

This is sort of like a street fighter going up against the Marquess de Queensbury.

What it means is that with one side apologizing and bowing and the other calling them evil or worse, while the press is definitely to the left of most politicians the “consensus” of each party has moved left ever since I first set foot in the US in 1980 (before I moved here.  Four years before I moved here.) (The other mechanism for this, of course, is that a government will grow unless it meets opposition.  It’s the iron law of bureaucracies.)  Back then I judged the Democrats to be socialists (Carter’s speeches were almost word per word those of socialist leaders in Portugal.  So much so I still wonder if they were faxed/translated from a central location.  I know it’s unlikely, but…) and the Republicans to be Social Democrats.  (Yes, even Reagan – though at least he hated communism as much as I did.)

Now… Now I’d guess the center of gravity of the GOP hovers somewhere between Social Democrats and socialists.  They’re no more willing to REALLY cut down government than the Democrats are.  (And no, the sequester was neither a Republican idea, nor is it a CUT.  Reducing the rate at which spending EXPANDS is not a cut in any sane vocabulary.)

As for the democrats…  Heinlein said they were taken over by hard core Marxists starting in the thirties.  I see no reason whatsoever to doubt him.  There is a startling disconnect between the crowd in the streets (I want to shout at all these people supporting Democrats because the Democrats TALK about being for the little man AND talk about sexual freedom, that the end result of any Marxian regime is like something out of 1984.  There is no space for the little people except as chattel.  And as for sexual freedom, both the USSR and China (still) strenuously denied the existence of homosexuals or adultery or… and made contraception either mandatory or impossible to find – in the USSR largely impossible to find since about the seventies when the state had realized it needed more kids.) and the people in power.

And part of this is that though the Democrats haven’t been “in power” very long, they’ve been in power in a lot of places: most entrenched bureaucracies, teaching, entertainment, the media, and some of the larger blue cities.  Which means they’re already running to “end stage Marxism” in which the society is, in all but name, Fascist.  Or if you prefer, the softer word, crony capitalist (which of course is not capitalism at all.)

One has only to look at everything this administration has done, from taking over the auto industry to the billions squandered on Solyndra and its sisters, to the massive unwieldy regulations that make it impossible for small businesses to hire, survive, expand, to know that whatever the rhetoric, what they really are building is a society with MASSIVE government which in turn picks and chooses the winners from MASSIVE Corporations (bureaucracies like other bureaucracies) who are in turn inured from competition by the government’s aiding and abetting (Almost every monopoly – and the almost is only there because though I know a lot of economic history there MIGHT be a freak occurrence somewhere in history that I don’t know about – REAL monopoly was brought about by government either openly or through regulation.)

The end result of a strong central government with near unlimited power is to attract the greedy and power hungry, both to work for it, and to lobby it on behalf of other organizations.

The end result of growing government is a country in which there is no room for the little guy – and which, incidentally, slowly starves to death because – I know you’ll be shocked, shocked – turns out centralized government or economy or ANYTHING really isn’t the most efficient.  Because when you don’t have to be responsive to the consumer, it’s the same as not being responsive to the voter – you can meet your shoe production goals by making only baby shoes and only for the left foot.

Making government small and getting its regulatory claws as much as possible out of business, OTOH, leaves precious little room for a corporation to take over (Much less “the corporation” whatever that is) because there will always be competitors who can do it smaller and faster and more targeted.  (Corporations that get large enough become STUPID.  See IBM.)

But Sarah, you say, you wrote about corporate take over in a world with no government!  Yes, the same way I wrote about an anarcho-capitalist society in a world without government.  It’s possible if it’s small and if people have no written law (or ignore it, as we’re doing!) Even then, for a corporation to take over without governmental aid, I had to make it a situation where they had a natural monopoly over the energy source.  Break that (as my characters do) and their strength is gone.

Which leads us to “if we abolish government the Corporation will take over” – unless the left now has their version of the illuminati conspiracy, really… what in heck are they talking about?  What is “The Corporation”.  I have to sort of assume that these people posting this once took a look at a job where ties were required and ever since have been afraid of “the Corporation” coming after them and forcing them to tie on neckwear.  Nothing else makes sense.

I don’t want to abolish government, I want to restrict FEDERAL government to its enumerated powers.  Which would leave me free to say hire an assistant and pay him/her a negotiated package that includes stuff like eating with us a couple of times a week, and perhaps going to cons with us.  This would allow me to grow my business, and perhaps hire more assistants at above the now federally mandated minimum wage (supposing I could hire the first below it)  And eventually the Hoyt-writing empire might rival what the ever charming Sabrina Chase calls the Media-industrial complex.  (Well, you never know till you try, and there are, after all, four of us.)

A strong central government OTOH is considering an internet tax which would make it impossible for people like me to sell anywhere but Amazon or other equally large corporations.  (Which is why they’re all quiet as little mice.)  Because the keeping track of paperwork would make it impossible for a small vendor to maintain its own store.

This in turn removes what I always tell people who tell me Amazon if evil and will turn on indie publishers “If that’s true, someone else will come along, offer us a better deal, and Amazon will be history.”  With the government regulations giving it overwhelming advantage, Amazon WILL (guaranteed) turn evil and turn on the indie publishers.

Because large entities prefer negotiating with large entities, a large government favors large corporations who in turn favor other large corporations.

I’m fairly sure this is not the Democrats “secret” plan.  Most of them seem to think government power makes people angels.  And those who are trying to get more power like this story and lie to themselves.

However, I guarantee to you that the Democrats want to grow a central, Federal government and remove all restraints on it.  And that at the end of it is a very poor country populated by massive and massively inefficient corporations.

The other is a fantasy for people who haven’t yet recovered from the sixties.

UPDATE: To whom it may concern.  Stuff now up in subscriber space!

Today I should do the chapter, but I’m still not QUITE up to it (though no antihistamines today.) I should also – in the sense that it’s my obligation – write about why the voting changes in Colorado are wrong, and can’t even be covered by the fig leaf of “greater voting opportunity.”  There is in fact no fig leaf except the destruction of the individual right to vote.  It has to be the intended result.  (And btw, would there be a remedy via the courts?  That at least ties it up long enough that we get a couple more elections and throw these clowns out?)

But writing about this will just make me depressed.  It probably helps understand my feelings if you “get” that at eight, when I had no clue where Denver was, I told everyone I was going to grow up, be a writer and live in Denver, and that the more I found out about both ideas, the more I wanted to do it.

I don’t want to move out and I don’t think it does any good, either.  When we moved to the Springs it was trending Libertarian.  If all it takes is for these vile progs to get power, and they change the rules so it can’t ever be taken away, ANY PLACE is vulnerable.

Anyway – I’m not going to talk about that.

Instead, I’m going to talk about the many heads of the writer – mostly because I think the current problem I’m having is due to being stuck in the wrong head.

I’m not talking about pen names.  That’s a problem all its own.  Humans are, as you know, weird people.  You know this particularly if you’re one.  What I’ve found with pen names – caveat emptor – is that once you give something a name, it acquires its own personality and ideas, PARTICULARLY if it’s secret.  This was part of the reason I had to drop my nom de political blog.  This woman was living in my head rent free.  I could tell you what she was doing at any time of the day.  It got creepy.

The open pen names aren’t as much of a problem.  Sarah D’Almeida is just another name for me.  (Interesting side note – my maiden name was de Almeida but I figured D’Almeida got me better shelving, in the Ds which used to be important.  It wasn’t until talking to my dad that he told me that de Almeida was ONLY adopted by his father and before that our family name was D’Almeida.  Now I wish I had known that before I got citizenship, when I could have changed, and before I named the boys.)

But the secret names – and in these days of indie writer, every I writer I know is at least trying those with short stories – quickly try to become multiple personalities.  My kid was groaning about his romance pen name, which hasn’t even been published yet…  And I once overheard one of my colleagues say “My pen name and I go into a room, only I come out.”

The levels of insanity in that could potentially make normal people think we should all be locked up, except they can’t because we’re writers and we’re supposed to be nuts.  It’s right there, on the box.

But keep that in mind, because it will come up later in this ramble.

Right now the heads I’m dealing with are all mine – no pen names, no secret names.  They’re more what you’d think of as toolboxes.

If you’re a writer there’s several things you do – you have to do – research, edit and creative writing as such.  These all employ different thought processes.

I don’t know how other people do this, understand, so what you’re getting is me, and how I do this.

I do three types of research: unfocused “craving” reading, often on subjects that I have no idea relate to anything I’m writing; focused general reading on a time or a subject; spot-research where I look up words, locations or names to fill in a hole in a story that’s being revised.

You’d think the middle one would take up most of my time, but no.  The middle one is controllable.  The first one comes from wherever the impulse to write comes, and it can become overmastering and interrupt things that need to be done, and generally drive me nuts.

Did I say I have NO idea where these needs to read obsessively on a subject come from?  Worse, that sometimes the idea that I’m groping for doesn’t show up for years?  For instance, I spent three years reading everything I could about Queen Victoria’s empire, with a sort of compulsive intensity.  It wasn’t until ten years later that it became the proposal for the Magical British empire.  Worse, by that time I’d forgotten the reading.  I’m only sure it was sort of there, all the time, buried deep, because I bought a bunch of books to research the proposal and then, when cleaning to move, found the exact same books, bought ten years later, at the bottom of a closet.

Right now the craving readings are on true-crime cases – bizarre ones, like the Black Dahlia case – and paranormal activity.  That these are hitting together is making me feel skivvy.  I’m not sure I want to write anything that presents that way.  (OTOH isn’t part of what I do to bring stuff into the light?  It’s what I try to do at any rate.)

Anyway, that’s taking up a whole lot of time when I should be writing, and it’s hitting “that” part of the brain, that is neither writing nor revising and making it very active.  (We should light the rat signal and get Dr. Tedd Roberts to come xplain how this works.)

At the same time, I’m editing a bunch of manuscripts, and that’s a different type of mind again.

There are three different types of revision.  There’s story revision, but I call that rewrite.  There’s coherence revision and there’s copyediting.

I know a lot of people who write in revising mode.  If you can, it’s best to revise in writing mode.  What I mean is that your revising mode tends to be more word focused and … petty, frankly.  It can’t see the story and it goes nuts on commas and concordance.  Or it picks at “you said he was standing, but now he’s getting up from the chair.”

I’m doing that type of revision on Musketeer’s Seamstress, because it needs it, but it brings out a type of thought that doesn’t LET me write.  I call him Bob.  He has a clipboard and wears glasses.

The problem with both of those parts of my writing brain being very active is that it seems to cause a “different” type of block.  As in, I can see what I should be writing, I just can’t do it.  I can’t get in the story mind.

The research mind is a dreaming and putting things together mind, but it’s not coherent enough to write in, and the revision mind just won’t let me write more than three words at one go.

Usually I can flip between either of these minds and the story mind, but both at once are driving me nuts.

Which brings me to a book I read for research this week – It’s called “the Trickster and the Paranormal” and it analyzes the trickster both as a parapsychology phenomenon, enshrined in the religions of the world and tricksterism as part of being involved in these marginal fields – what they call “at the edge.” This is used both in the senses of low-status and the fact that what people do in these fields isn’t rightly understood.  So it’s easy to cheat.  And almost impossible to do scientific research.

It occurred to me when reading it that a lot of our scientific fields have gone “at the edge” in pursuit of cash, and that there too the waters have gotten too muddy to know what is going on, precisely.

However, by definition, being a writer is one of those fields.  Heck, we’re not even sure what we do, ourselves.  There is a lot of “and then something happens and I have a story in my mind.”  It seems like shamanism even to me at times.  And the impossibility of relating these subconscious processes to others leads us to making them, instead, rational and ordered, which involves lying to ourselves, which in turn messes us up.

Anyway, they defined the type of personality involved in this and it seemed like a description of most artists, including writers.  People who have trouble describing what is true and what isn’t, and who often have issues with relationships,etc.

I’d say it confirmed my rather smug idea that I’m too sane for this field, except that a person who complains two of her heads are blocking the third, probably shouldn’t say that.

And that, my dears, is the state of the writer for today.  I am going for a walk and then seeing if I can revise a chapter so I can put up a coherent chunk of Shadow Gods in the subscriber space.

I hope to post the chapter of Rogue Magic tomorrow.   Today I’m skipping out which is par for the course this week.  I truly can’t explain WHY when I take anti-estamines (sp?) it turns off the writing thing, but it does.

So…  I’m going to clean and stuff and will post the chapter tomorrow.

Meanwhile, it would be helpful if one of you has been collecting the chapters of Rogue Magic, if you send me a unified copy.  I swear I’m missing every other chapter which doesn’t make things easier.

And now, pray for me, I’m headed to litter box territory.

Meh — one of those days when I skip out and all that.  Thank you for putting up with these occasional glitches.

Yesterday after an attempt at writing that felt like I was trying to extrude my brain through my nose (sorry for the graphic image, but that’s exactly what I felt like.  For some reason sinus infections make me slow.  On the good side, it’s now on the way out, I think.  I might help it along with a light hydrogen peroxide solution snort.) I went downstairs to watch an episode of Columbo.

It wasn’t one of my favorites, since I rather liked the guy you know is going to get killed, and this one had way more lead up to the ‘being killed’ than most episodes.

It was the chess tournament episode, and here’s the thing: the challenger is clearly Russian.  He was also a good ol’ boy and you couldn’t help liking him.  Even if, like me, you were aware that the people they let out, even “athletes” (which chess players are sort of sideways) were vetted on loyalty to an evil regime.  (Not saying all of them adhered to it.  Clearly a lot defected, but saying that they had to stealth better than I managed with all my might to stealth in a less evil regime.)  And even though this character is not showing as wishing to defect.

But he is almost little-boy endearing in his escaping from his handlers to go eat snails, and he is clearly a good person in coming to the rescue of … well… thinking he’s coming to the rescue of the guy planning to murder him.

And it got me thinking.

People are weird creatures.  Very weird.  They can believe the most outrageously evil stuff – like that people can somehow be forced to become mere automatons in the service of the state; or that those who’ve worked hard for something should be despoiled; or that a particular race/culture/ethnicity is the repository of all evil in the world; or that a particular gender is not quite human – all while remaining at heart good people.

Were there good Nazis?  Almost surely.  And I mean good people who were Nazis.  And I don’t mean just the ones who had no clue what was going on in the camps.  I mean of course NO ONE WHO KNEW THE DETAILS (the details were unforgivable) but any number of people who thought other people were “cleanly” or “Humanely” being put down and who were essentially good people in everything else.  They just believed Jews (and gays and gypsies) must be exterminated for “the greater good.”  I bet you there were people who believed this who would forego their last morsel of bread to feed a stranger, or take off their coat on a freezing night to give to their neighbor.  And I bet you some of them too KNEW Jewish people and wouldn’t approve of THOSE being killed, making a compartment in their minds called “but he’s not like other Jews.”

Were there good communists?  Of course there were and are, in the same way there are good Nazis.  These are people who think only of the end they desire.  “I want everyone to have a good meal” etc.  They look at the glossy pictures of celebrities wasting in a night sums that would support a family for a year, and they think “why do they need to do that?” From there to thinking all private property should be abolished, it’s a step.  It’s a particularly easy step if your society has long ago foregone teaching real economics or real individual ethics and teaches that all bourgeois virtues come from having bourgeois wealth.  (And also teaches that if you’re poor it’s somehow more “authentic” to be thuggish and uncouth.)

Why am I bringing this up?  Do I think we shouldn’t condemn the “good” members of these evil cults?  Do I think that their good intentions justify their actions?  Do I think we should surrender, because some of them are “good”?

No.  Quite the opposite.  I do think in the “how we got where we are” that some of the older “right wing” – republicans, libertarians, anyone to the right of Lenin – got where we are by doing exactly what I just said.  They knew these people.  They were good people.  They had good intentions.  And up through the late eighties it seemed like the march of international communism couldn’t be stopped, which led to…

The entire attitude we see in RINOS today and which makes us howl and rage, and which is “Their hearts are in the right place; maybe they won’t screw up this time; we will just try to slow them down.”

That misguided tolerance has got us where we are.  It isn’t just the left’s intent and determined long march through the institutions – though it is that too, particularly mass media and mass communication institutions – it is also the soft certainty that these people are good, we like them, and we don’t want to offend them by speaking up.  Because they mean well, really.

The problem of their meaning well is that nowhere have their well-meaning intentions come to fruition.  From Asia to Europe, everywhere communism or socialism has touched it has brought misery and poverty.  And there’s no point at all talking about societies not being “quite right”

Everywhere a touch of economic freedom has gone, even hampered by the society or the culture, or the fact it was so watered down as to be ridiculous, it has brought prosperity.  For a case study compare China and Hong Kong.  North and South Korea.

Yes, this post is in a way a companion piece to the civil war in science fiction, and to “being normal.”  The civil war in science fiction is a mirror of the civil war in the larger society.  (Only we go to battle wearing Spock ears.  Deal.)  Only I think the sides are more balanced in the larger society.  I think the left outstrips the right in science fiction, at least among published authors and those who read NOW.  Because everyone else has been run off.

In the larger society, it’s anybody’s guess, though I think if the issues were brought to point, the left has gone so far left that it commands maybe a quarter of the population and a lot of those are impaired in some way.  Compare the tea parties to the OWSers, not just in size, but in slice of the population.  (And if all you know of tea parties are the media portrayals let me assure you they’re wrong.  I attended two in my region when they first started.  Not only was it not just old white males, but more than half the people were female and we had a slice of minorities probably larger than the general population in this white bread city.  In fact, probably, the larger group was Hispanic (which is to be expected, here.))  And before you bring up the results of the last election: first – unimaginable levels of fraud.  I said it, I stick by it, I saw it up close and personal.  It might or might not have involved a fifth column in the challenger’s campaign.  I think it did, but that’s my opinion.  Second – a media which reports nothing.  Now, still, most of the populations has not heard of Benghazi.  Third – the media portrayal of the opposition as the “church lady” circa 1950.  And it’s no point at all saying that the republicans shouldn’t have furnished them ammunition.  Do you have any idea how difficult it is to make sure a group that large and that diverse NEVER slips?  The same media who never mentions goofs like Guam tipping over, or the events in Benghazi is quite ready to jump on malapropisms like “real rape” when it comes from the opposition.  And for now, at least, the media shapes “normal” for a good part of the population.

As all groups that are getting suppressed, stigmatized and written off the national discourse, anyone to the right of Lenin has been getting upset.  And considering the effect that the economic policies to the left of Lenin (No?  Crony capitalism is always an effect of communism.  More or less dressing of it is the only difference.) are having on most of our lives and livelihoods, people are getting VERY upset.

I’m hearing more and more “It’s going to come to shooting.”  I have a sinking feeling in my water that it might very well come to that.  I’d prefer not, though.  Look, I have sons.  Also, we do not live in a nice world.  If our world were really the black-and-white world the liberals believe in, where the USA is the big bad wolf and everyone else is a sweet little lamb who wouldn’t hurt anyone but for fear of the wolf, a civil war might not be a bad idea.

Of course if the world really were like that, we’d be dealing with a species other than human and perhaps communism would work.  Who knows?  May be worth an SF story.

But the world is not like that, and the US even if it is rapidly flushing generational wealth down the toilet is still much wealthier than most of the world, and is way wealthier than most of the Americas.  (This btw is taken by the communists as proof of malfeasance.  It’s a religious dogma.)

While we are involved in a civil war – and let’s assume it’s only half as bloody and half as long as our last one – do you think the other nations of the world will sit still?  Forget a Chinese invasion (though G-d knows you shouldn’t) or Russia getting involved on one side or another with a  view to ruling portions of our country when all is done (and if you dismiss that, you should study the roles of France and England on the past civil war) and just think about the people who hate us and who think (and our media has HELPED this perception) all their woes are our fault, and who  think they’re accumulating virgins in heaven – and prestige on Earth – by hitting us with acts of terrorism writ large.

How many cities do you think we’d lose to random acts of revenge?

What I mean is that it might very well come to that.  But do you want it?  Talk about setting us back generations.  Yes, I know you’re furious and I’ve heard the “we have all the guns” boast.  It’s not true, okay?  Yeah, we have most of them.  And sure, we probably could win in days.  Except that you forget how many third world armies would gladly fight on the other side, once it got started.  And would be promised everything they want if they do.

Oh, sure, they’d probably still lose – but I’m predicting we’d all be wading in blood to our ankles before it’s said and done, and parts of the country would be radioactive for a century.

Again, it might still come to that.  And I think the other side wants that – probably more than even the nuts on the “right” – because part of their religion (don’t fool yourself it’s not one) is the belief that history has favorites and that they’re it.  They think in the end they win.  (They might perhaps want to consult the Norse legends, to figure out which said was believed to win in the end.  Never mind.)

But before the shooting starts – in this moment in the heart of the storm – perhaps those of us to the right of Lenin should try something we haven’t tried before.  Perhaps we should try speaking out.

Look, I’m as cowardly as the rest of you.  I spent more than twenty years, between breaking in and finally losing my mind, listening to digs about “the rich” from people who could buy me and sell me outright; I spend years at parties and meetings listening to Marxist pap and not pointing out how stupid it was; listening to public figures on the right being denigrated as “stupid” when it was obvious they weren’t, etc.  And I shut up.  Because I wanted to make a living in my chosen profession.

I’m still not half as brave as I’d like to be, though I try to speak out if I’m present.  And yes, I know I’ll pay a monetary price.  But I don’t go out of my way to look for fights, because I’ll pay a monetary price.  And also because, frankly, I know many good people on their side.  I don’t want to upset them.

But consider—

My grandmother used to say “silence is consent.”

Consider that when they say ridiculous stuff in public like “the fat cats never pay” or other bits of Marxist agit prop and we stay quiet, they don’t know that we disagree.  And they take what they’re saying for normal and tilt further left, until you get stuff like “We live in an evil patriarchy” (in a society where women are LEGALLY given preference for almost everything and while these same people stay quiet on the societies that whip women for showing ankle.)

Every time we internally go “oh, that stupid slogan again” – every time we stay quiet because we like the people as much as we despise their stupid religion; every time we shut up for the sake of peace or a job, or …  We’re allowing “normal” to be moved farther left.  And most people want to be normal and fit in.  And the truly extreme ones then feel more justified in being extreme.

Every time our silence gives consent, what we’re giving consent to is the inevitability of eventual shooting.

You know those massacres that have happened in every communist paradise?  Here the would-be victims are armed.  To quote the title of some Baen anthologies There WILL be War.

Unless we stop it now.  Unless we’re as brave with our words as we eventually will have to be with our guns, if we stay silent.

I came out of the political closet and fought like h*ll to elect a man who would have been at best as statist as George Bush.  (No, he was not my horse in the race, ever.)  I did so because I thought it would keep us from the shooting war.

Now, it might be too late.  Or it might not.  Staying quiet and cleaning your guns might be expedient.  But is it the best for everyone?  What about the good people on the left?  What about the innocents who will be caught in this?  What about the rest of the world that will undoubtedly sink if the US as we know it vanishes.

Yes, we’re all ready to take our piece of flag and head to the bunker, to preserve the idea of the US until we can rebuild it.

But wouldn’t it be better not to let it pass from this Earth?

Speak now.  Maybe we can hold our peace.

 

Wayne Blackburn Happy Crow threatened/promised that on Wednesday all of you would do posts on “in my copious spare time” and link to mine.  I’m fairly sure he was joking, but I thought just for the heck of it I WOULD do a post on all the stuff I’m supposed to be doing, all the stuff I’d like to do and the stuff that’s waiting my “copious spare time.”

Is this whining?  No.  It’s a bit of a complaint, because with all these things to do, I often end up not doing anything all day.  Or rather, I do a ton of little things (like today) but nothing of what was on my to-do list.  And then I get upset, but mostly at myself.  And my main reason for getting upset at myself is how easily I get ill.  Like, right now, I’m battling a sinus infection, which is a ridiculous disease that should not make you feel this low.

However, for some reason, my sinus’ being out of kilter just makes me want to sleep the day into the night.  Which is also why you’re getting this excuse for a post today.

And in case it does sound like whining…  It’s not because if I had to choose, I’d much rather and by a great amount be over-busy than not busy enough.

When I first got married, I came from a situation in which I had been teaching, going to college full time, and taking four language courses at other institutions.  There were days I left the house at seven thirty am and didn’t come home again till nine pm at night, at which point I’d eat dinner in solitary splendor and do whatever homework or studying was needed for starting at seven thirty am again.

I was perfectly happy in this routine.  I squeezed in a social life around the edges and usually took Sunday afternoon and just slept.

Then came my first two years of marriage, when I had no job, no car, and was stuck in the house all day.  I went so nuts I started trying to write for publication.

Then I got a job in which I got paid normal amounts, but had to work unpaid overtime.  We were so busy I often bought clothes because I hadn’t had time to do wash.  In the end we realized that we were spending more money with me working than we did with me not working.  Even though I was being paid decently, it didn’t compensate for the sheer amount of work which meant I didn’t cook at home, or wash clothes, or… and besides it was really interfering with the infertility treatments.

Then came the kids, and Robert’s first three years of life I moved three times, and I was sometimes so tired I couldn’t think.

Then came the crash of my writing career in 03 and days when I had nothing to do but clean and decorate.  And then it took off again, and I’ve been writing multiple books a year and unable to take the time to breathe.

I’m not sure what this means except that there doesn’t seem to be a happy medium, (possibly because he/she keeps getting struck) and if I had to choose I’d rather be insanely busy, because it seems to give the opportunity for things to get better.  Also, as grandma used to say, “to stop is to die.”

If that’s true I’m going to live forever…

Right now, on the plate and getting more overdue by the minute:

Five short stories.  One isn’t due till June, but the rest need to get out there.  These are proving a small issue because I haven’t READ short stories in too long, and what you read absolutely affects the habit of mind you get into.  Yeah, I can probably write shorts without reading them; I have enough practice.  But actually sliding into them would make things easier.

Through Fire: technically not due until August, but I’d like to do an extra book this year because it’s pushing at me, so…  Well, it’s started and I am actually working at it.

The subscriber space: It hasn’t been updated this week, mostly because all I did was editing.

Finishing A Flaw In Her Magic for Naked Reader Press before my editor crawls out through the monitor and beats me.  I have maybe three days of work in it, but I need to get back into the head space.

Ditto the second vampire musketeer’s book – and here’s the craving belief that I should just let it slide till the rights revert to the first next year.

Getting a sketch to the artists doing the cover for Witchfinder.

Finishing editing Witchfinder.

Finishing editing Shadow Gods.

Finishing editing Musketeer’s Seamstress.

(The problem with these is that if I get interrupted, I get popped out, also for things like the musketeers, I need to immerse fully.  I THINK I need to take a few days and do them sequentially.)

Picking cover art for a few Naked Reader Properties.  (Why am I the cover director?  Ah.  Well, the person doing it had a death in the family, and things got weird, and… yep, I was the one who could squeeze it in.)

I have to read a couple of friends’ books for quotes.

I’m doing an introduction to the annual collection of someone who will eventually be a friend and is right now an online acquaintance of whom I am a – squee  type – fan.

These are all things (except for writing the WHOLE of Through Fire) which must be done by the end of the month.

Then come the things I’d REALLY like to do:

I’d like to write the first Orphan Kittens mystery, before Everitt Mickey physically crawls through my computer to get it.

I’d like to start cleaning the room in the attic we call “the beach room” because it needs to be empty before we can even start preparing the house for sale.  (It has a gross beach mural from the seventies.  And we use it as a storage room, which means you can’t even get into it.  And some of the stuff that’s in there, like my good sewing machine, I need to fix other stuff.)

I’d like to go to my hairdresser.  I’ve been overdue for an appointment since JANUARY.  My hair is becoming too long to manage easily, but I have yet to have the time.

I’d like to do some research I’m going to need for Darkship Revenge.

I’d like to read a few books that have been waiting patiently.  This is not just for fun.  When I’m this busy I just re-read, but you need new input, now and then.

I’d like to finish the re-do on my website, but unfortunately it will take a bunch of figuring out ways to make the interface behave, so I need about a week.  I ain’t gonna get it, so I have to cram a week’s worth of work in the spare hours.

These are things I’d like to at least have started in the next couple of months.

And then – in my copious spare time –

I’d like to learn to use the new art computer, and poser.

I’d like to read the three books I got for Christmas on interstellar travel.

I’d like to start studying Latin and Greek again.

I’d like to finish putting up all my trunk short stories and organize a listing of the future history stories, in order, as well as revise the thirty or so that need serious revision, so I can sell them to webscriptions and also make collections for Amazon.

I’d like to start writing a short story/novella a weekend again.

And I’d like to go somewhere for a week and just sleep…

I could get rid of this entire backlist in a couple of months if I could just take it one at a time, but life doesn’t work that way.  So…  I try to make plans, but it’s like making a budget when we were newlywed.  It always showed we couldn’t possibly be surviving, and yet we were.

So I go on.  To stop is to die.  And I’m not anywhere near stopping.

Different post over at Mad Genius Club.

Oh, yeah, and my novel in thirteen weeks thing is up at PJM.

*Sorry, I did it again.  Put post up and forgot to push the “publish” button.  I swear…*

An article came out recently saying that the brains of 25 year olds today resemble those of  15 year olds in the past. (I’d link it, but, as usual, can’t now find the article.  If one of you puts it in the comments, I’ll link it.) (Thanks to Alert Reader RES for the link!) To some extent this sounds like a good thing.  Note the “to some extent.”

I grew up in a society where it was clear that there were different rates of maturation for those who started working at ten and those who went to school to their early twenties.

When I was little, ten was the most usual age to get a job in the village.  Yes, the law was that kids had to stay in school later.  Portugal was, if not the first, among the very first countries to pass anti-child-labor laws.  But there were loopholes – there always are when a well-intentioned law is out of step with the economic reality of the country – and so people got certificates saying their kids were educable mentally retarded – despite often flying grades from elementary which ended in fourth grade – and got them jobs in the textile factories or apprenticed them with various craftsmen.  Later there must have been a crack down on these certificates, so every middle class family acquired a maid of ten or twelve years old, who was according to parents “Sent to live with relatives” – well, I suppose that was right, right?  After all go back far enough we’re all relatives.

This is btw a prime example of how both well intentioned, completely unrealistic laws help nothing, and how crackdowns make things worse.  In the factories the kids were treated well, because there were inspections and labor laws to follow.  Once the factories were forced to stop hiring kids – but a family still couldn’t support itself from just a salary or even two — those little girls were all but slaves, because they had no recourse to any legal authority, their wages such as they were were mailed to their parents, and their conditions depended entirely on the benevolence of their employer.  It made me faintly queasy.  (Made mom faintly queasy too.  Her reaction was “I can’t ‘hire’ one of those girls, because what would happen was I’d adopt her and do the work for both of us, and pay her parents to boot.  She also thought less of – and lost – a few friends who ‘hired’ these kids.)

Anyway, it was very easy to see – and I mean physically – the difference between those kids and we, pampered children of the middle class.  They looked older.  And I don’t mean older in the sense of aging.  There is some of that, but mostly I see that in paintings of the nineteenth century or so, where little kids have these aged, on the verge of lined faces, and I’ve always wondered if that was vitamin deficiency.  The kids I grew up with weren’t like that, but two years after I’d left elementary (ten, fourth grade was the end of elementary and fifth and sixth grade were middle school) and was ready to enter high school, these kids whom I’d played with and who had looked pretty much like me back then looked… grown up.  Yes, they were usually smaller than I – at 5’5” at 12 and weighing in at 120 lbs, for my generation in Portugal I was what is known as a moose – and often less developed, but they stood with more confidence, they could do things I couldn’t (like navigate opening a bank account or a savings account.)  They were adults despite the lack of full adult growth.

But even that changes.  We just bought the entire Columbo series and we’re going through the second season – listen, I DO have a sinus infection, which, btw, is annoying because it’s something no one dies of, but my mind becomes total mush – and I swear the women who are considered “young and sexy” look my age now (though thinner, I’ll grant you.)  I.e. to the modern eye they read “forty to fifty.”  How much of this is improved health care and vitamins and all that, making us look younger?  I don’t know.  But I do know that twenty something year olds now look like we did in our teens (only usually pudgier, but that’s a talk for another time).

And that makes me wonder.  People are maturing later physically and emotionally.  I remember watching Friends and thinking that might have been stuff my friends and I did in our early twenties, (not really.  Well, some of my friends, but in general we weren’t that sex-involved.  OTOH the stupid pranks and such?  Totally.) but these people were turning thirty and were still not established in life; still had no direction.  I’m afraid that’s slipped further still, due to a combination of many things, including the horrible economy.  I now sometimes see “a bunch of kids in coffeeshop” then realize some of them have white hair coming on and are probably early thirties.  But their faces still look like kids’ faces, their movements and everything still says juvenile.

I wonder how much of this is the brain regulating the body.  We do know that in the history of the species we’ve been moving to extend our childhood and that to an extent this has helped us because we had more time to learn.  This particular brand of naked apes, after all, hasn’t conquered the world through our special speed or whatever, but through our learning and brain.  We have been extending childhood so we can cram more and more learning before we hit our adult years.

There are only two problems: we haven’t really pushed off senescence much.  We mitigate it, sure – through stuff like better nutrition and MUCH better medicine, but that doesn’t really push off getting old.  We’re still hitting the beginning of old age – white hairs, decreased energy – at around thirty five, just like our ancestors were.  We’re healthier, so it’s showing less, but it’s still there.

And this applies to having children too.  By the time today’s children hit “grown up” they likely are no longer able to have children.

All of which might or might not mean much of anything, but what worries me is the idea that our kids – all our kids – are now behaving like the kids of very wealthy people in the past.  They never mature, they live at an infantile level forever, and they waste their lives in the pursuit of “juvenile” stuff.

More, I’m worried that at some level we’re creating the exact same type of personality as the royal prince whose parents lived too long and prevented him from taking adult responsibilities for far too long.  I’m afraid we’ve entered the territory of “we’re making their lives so easy, why do they hate us?” (Which could also very easily apply to home-grown terrorists.)

What precipitated it was this prank that some cute comedian came up with. You were supposed to text your parents with “I got two grams for $40” and then “Sorry, wrong person” and sit back and watch the results.

Yes, I know there’s a whole genre of “fake texts” and that some of these might or might not have been doctored.  OTOH the whole thing, both the prank and the responses rings true to what would happen in most of our social circle.  And it baffles me.

Our kids know we’re giving all aid and support we can, PROVIDED that they keep their noses clean and bring home nothing worse than Bs.  (This is only necessary because younger son messes up tests on a routine basis, and “does not test well” has always been his issue.  Even he has mostly As.)

If one or both of the kids had sent us that text, they’d find themselves on the front porch with the clothes on their backs, as we waved goodbye.  Yes, even knowing that it was a prank.  Perhaps particularly knowing that it was a prank.

The idea of kids who are, probably, mostly, legal adults, who think it is fun to play on their parents by pretending to be drug buyers/dealers (considering all the legal penalties that attain to both kid and parent if the drug is in the house, up to and including forfeiture of the property) have proven that at some very deep seated level, they resent the parents who are looking after them.

I don’t even know what to say other than that, other than “when you artificially prolong childhood in homo sapiens, till it starts blending with senescence, it seems to create a backlash.  Perhaps Heinlein’s thing about there being however many words for “Thank you” in Japanese and all of them involving some level of resentment should be invoked.  Or perhaps the thing about never ruining your children’s lives by making them too easy.

Yes, as a parent, of course I want to ease everything for them.  On the other hand… How much is adversity or at least struggle needed to form the adult brain?  And what happens when people never encounter any growing up? (Addition thanks to alert reader Bearcat.  [someone has to be alert.  This is my brain on sinus infection.])