Category: Uncategorized

I’ve been promising to do a promo post for me and friends and readers of this blog and failing spectacularly, mostly due to my brain having fallen out of my ears.

Seriously, at some point one or more of you are going to need to point out the fact that the thing you DON’T do when your schedule is already full up is arbitrarily add more stuff.  “Daily blog and five shorts due this month?  Piffle.Scheduled for two novels?  No fear, add two more!  Then add an episodic one on weekends!  Not enough?  Add an how-to-write column at pjm on Tuesday afternoon.  Then start editing old shorts and just recovered novels to put out.  More! More! More!”

I keep telling myself this is insane, but myself knows self lies for a living…  I don’t believe a word I say.

The distressing result is that things tend to break down, and I can’t force myself to work for sometimes hours at a time.  And then when I come back to work I’m so out of it that nothing non essential gets done.  Hence the forever-breaking-down blog tour — yes, I know I still have three or four appearances to do!  And forgetting to promote you good people who deserve it.  (Also failing to do my web site, or even rebuild the “My books” section under this blog.)

Which brings us to today.  This weekend there was a rather sharp breakdown — mostly a conjunction of physical stuff and a really bad sinus hopefully-not-quite-infection-yet, which had me sitting in front of the computer, staring at the screen going “Okay, now I–” then realizing this had taken three hours, somehow (I blame Terry Pratchett’s monks of time.  They’re overactive in my life.)  I will be putting stuff up on the subscriber space, but later today.  First, I must do my post for PJM because my editor needs time to look it over before it goes live tomorrow afternoon.

Some stuff DID get done, like my finally getting the RIGHT opening for Through Fire and editing a short story and a novella to go up.  But it was not half what needed to be done.

Anyway, so I’ll hope you excuse me this half hearted post.  To compensate, I’ll list my “Free Soup” for the week, followed by things people have asked me to link.

Ill Met By Moonlight, the first book of my Shakespeare trilogy is free until the second of May.  We will also bring out the new edition in paper soon.  If these continue to sell well, I will do a kickstarter for the next three.  If there is enough interest. The cheap option for these is The Magical Shakespeare Omnibus, three books in one.

After the second of May I’ll take short stories free while I continue to revise The Musketeer’s Seamstress.  (Edit really, but heavy edit, as it was really badly edited before.)

My friend Ellie has her romantic suspense novel Wedding Bell Blues out for free.  She just released a paranormal romance Hunted.  While paranormal romance will never be my thing, it held my interest and didn’t get thrown against the wall, which from me to a paranormal romance is high praise indeed.  Be advised.

Cedar Sanderson has a YA fantasy Vulcan’s Kittens out and she’s also promoting other stories at her blog.

Travis Corcoran has The Aristillus Series a pair of science fiction novels about anarchocapitalism, economics, open source software, corporate finance, social media, antigravity, lunar colonization, genetically modified dogs, strong AI…and really, really big guns. (Sounds like fun — SAH) Free chapter here.  (I hear the first hit is always free — SAH)

Elizabeth McCoy has Queen of Roses.  She describes it as a story about an indentured servant on a cruise (space)ship, her fellow servant (the pilot), the crew, the passengers, and the stowaways. Bit of a fluffy SF, bit of a cozy mystery (I’m told).

Cyn Bagley has Urban Werewolf. (Cyn.  That cover.  Bigger letters!) and posts her poetry at Scrambled Sage.

Alma T. C. Boykin, our very own TXRed has Justice and Juniors out, the second one of her Cat Among Dragons series.

Sabrina Chase has The Scent of Metal out.  I will confess I haven’t read Sabrina’s books yet — but I have heard raves about them from people I trust, and also I’ve read her blog, and know the woman can sling words like a pro.  They’re on my list.

Tom Bridgeland has Iron Magic out.  (NICE cover!)

David Carrico asked me to mention 1636, The Devil’s Opera, his novel with Eric Flint.

If you’re not reading Older Son’s Robert A. Hoyt’s Ninja Nun comic, shame on you.  And if you have a few spare dimes to throw in his kitty, I’m afraid they go for school books and such fribbles.  I’m trying to convince him to run a fundraiser….

J.J. (James) DiBenedetto has asked me to mention his novels and been really patient in waiting.  His Author Page on Amazon is here.  The first novel is Dream Student. (And James, if you read this: bigger name and title!)

Russ Mitchell has Malik The Pawn.  (Heed me, for I’m the voice that cries in the desert — make thee the name and title bigger — SAH.)

Wesley Morrison has Let No False Angels out.

Celia Hays: Only A Paper Star (a short story collection.) The Heart Of Texas, collection of essays about interesting events and people in Texas history. Travels With Blondie— about being a single parent in the military.

Mary Catelli has a short story in Warrior Wisewoman edited by Roby James.

Archer Garrett: Flashback — a sci-fi novelette.  And here you can see samples of Pulse Chaser his steampunkish short story series/novel.

S. T. Gaffney has China Harbor — quoth her husband Frank:  Set in an island off the coast of China in 2012, which was the future when she wrote it, but then what is the future when you’re dealing with time travel anyway? It features a female scientist, as written by an actual female scientist. And yes, she’s heroic, and no, she doesn’t kick butt and shoot people. It’s a great read from many angles, including a full-on immersion in another culture, and a unique look at the laws of time travel.

J. A. Marlow – The String Weavers  From J. A. Marlow —“The String Weavers” is the first book in my String Weavers series. Disappearing food. Music no one else hears. An alien dropped off by a giant flaming bird… Abducted from Earth, Kelsey Hale finds herself in the middle of a deadly conflict among alien worlds and parallel universes. She must not only survive, but also rescue her father from a dangerous group of unknown intent. In the process discovering a family secret that will change her life forever.

Mike Weatherford didn’t give us links, so we’ll wait till he does it in the comments.  (Hey, Mike, did you know there are at least three people with your name writing?  No?  Well… some seem to do art and stuff.)

I know there are other people who asked me for mentions, who got lost in the shuffle because it’s been SO long.  Sorry.  This year has already been a year.  If you mention stuff I forgot in comments, I shall link here on updates.

And now I’ll go write weekly column for PJM before my editor starts pulling out his hair by the roots.

So… Would you read a writer with whose political opinions you disagreed?

Right now, I see you staring at the screen, going “Woman, if I didn’t, I’d never read anyone at all.”

Right.

However, as you know my blog immediately pre and after the election earned me a spate of letters saying “I was one of your greatest fans, but I’ll never read you again, as long as I live.”  I know Larry Correia gets those now and then too – as does probably any other conservative/libertarian/to the right of Lenin writer who dares to express a political opinion.

Most of those are fake (of course.)  They are another example of the tolerance brigade’s “shut up, you’re ruining the choir” techniques.

And some them, I’m sure, are absolutely right.  I’m sure?  Yes.  One of my favorite authors – not naming her, but arguably the person who got me back into reading SF/F after I dropped out in the late seventies/early eighties; someone I used to order every book as soon as advance ordering was available; someone whose books I evangelized, to the point of buying them in French to send to my brother (who, curiously, loathed them) – has remained unpurchased for the last five years.  This is all the weirder, since her books are not normally overtly political, and the opinions she does express are in no way left much less extreme left.

I had never thought about why I didn’t buy her since then – I mean, I know the precipitating incident, but not why it made me flinch from buying her new books – until we were discussing this last Friday with friends we had over for dinner.  Even then I had to think about it for a while.

This author’s great appeal to me, was how sensible she was about the insanity we call for reasons of easy classification “the twentieth century” because, I guess “insanity with year markers” was too long and “The Crazy  Years” might not be over yet.  In fact her entire oeuvre, even when it didn’t touch on history, was marked by such a strong common sense that it was one of its appeals to me, in a field where, back in the nineties half the writers were writing about people needing nose filters to go outside within ten years.

The precipitating incident was her starting to bring her politics to conventions – in the form of buttons worn, of speeches given at panels, of conversations that made me realize not only had she completely bought into the left nonsense but she had bought into some of the crazier left nonsense, wholly unexamined.  I don’t mean that she was to the left of Lenin (though I think by now she is.  That stuff has its effect) but that she had bought into things that, on the face of it, made absolutely no sense whatsoever, and that she too – like all the other crazies – conflated libertarian with nazi.  (Vee shall take over und vee shall leev you RUTHLESSLY alone.  You have been warned!)

That she brought this stuff in where it had NO REASON TO BE was the shock.  It was like she thought it gave her gravitas, or made her sound intelligent, or something.

And that’s why I haven’t bought any of her other books.  I am very afraid to run into this lack of sense in a new book, and then go back and re-read the older books, and realize that what I’d taken for excellent good sense was merely the regurgitation of what she thought people wanted to hear.  Which would, in turn, make those books and my memory of reading those books, into embarrassing faux-pas of interpretation on my part.  Because of that, I haven’t re-read any of her older books, either, because, well… I’m afraid of discovering bad things I didn’t know were there.

In case you were curious, no, I won’t stop reading some writer because his wife happens to act like a asshat (in a way not out of keeping with her profession.) And in general I won’t stop reading some author because he said something that makes me go “ew” – not unless it is pushed in my face when I don’t expect it, and the utter lack of tact shows less than common sense.  (I DO think that the penalties for asshat-dom being so skewed in our field ARE a serious indication of trouble, though.)

But the “I have found this about you and I’ll never read you again” can be real.  Which is why if you can, as an author, you should keep off politics – and religion, and any other hot button —  as much as you can, as long as it doesn’t relate to your books.

Right now you’re scratching your head.  Yes, I am aware I came out of the political closet.  But look here, the reason I did it was that I could either do that or continue writing largely about nothing.  Or worse, continue trying to stealth, which amounted to living a lie and was starting to twist me in ways I didn’t like.

Okay, not about nothing, but the layers of stealthing in my earlier fantasies and SF almost make them hard to understand and often when people latch on the superficial meaning, it loses me readers forever (which is why the Magical British Empire is getting revised).  Here’s the thing: when you write about history, or the setup of modern society (did anyone notice my shifters are NOT on welfare?  And they work?  And pay for things?) or just about anything at all that touches on society, economics or history, you don’t have much place to hide: not when you’re one of the damned.

What do I mean by one of the damned?  Well, the filter of the publishing world – and the critical world – is very fine indeed when it comes to opinions they cast to the outer darkness.  That is in general any opinion not to the left of Lenin.

Trips for that “I don’t trust you” or “I’ll never read another of your books” include your woman being insufficiently “strong” or your having women murderers in your mysteries, or your writing about warfare as though it were, sometimes, necessary, or your having a character who smokes tobacco (!), or your having a character who raises a middle finger to ANY authority (I had a huge argument with both agent and publisher over the refinishing – Daring Finds – mysteries because my main character won’t OBEY her addled, ex-hippie parents.  No, I’m not joking.  She’s 31.  They think her lack of following their plans for her life makes her “unsympathetic.”) or, of course, having the Baen logo on the spine.  (This is known in the field as “Baen taint.” – pour that taint on me baby!)

As I said, I don’t think I ever stealthed well enough to get that boost the establishment can give you – well, for one, note the lack of exploited Latinas in my books (rolls eyes.) – and so though I sold well enough to continue being bought, I was never going to win any fervent readers.  I was never going to be on the shelves enough to sell decently, even.  On top of that, writing while trying not to offend anyone was like running a race with both legs in a sack.  If you can’t put your deepest convictions in your books, and you’re always self-censuring, then your books are going to read bland and blah.  I couldn’t keep it up, and things leaked out

By the time I’d written the three space operas, I figured my politics were out there, for anyone who wanted to know them.  If people willfully avoided them and kind of winked sideways at my other books, they could pretend not to know.

Going “political” on my blog might erase that effect – maybe.  Here’s the thing… if I’m going to write every day my blog too has to be about stuff I care about.  Which means I’m going to write about what last hit my funny nerve; the latest news that made me think; things that interest me and things that revolt me.

I have tons of non-political interests, but they’re not the sort most people want to read about: I love cryptozoology and tin-foil-hat stuff – the weirder the better – and I like cats; and I’m passionately interested in the craft of writing.  Enough there to write blogs about?  Sure.  But not everyday.  Sometimes the idea/problem in my head is political, at least by the new definition of “political” which means it pertains to living in modern society, paying your bills and sending your kids to school.

And, as I said, there’s no way to make my ideas acceptable.  I could stealth enough for the OLD Marxists, by staying off stuff like TANSTAAFL.  But there is no way to stealth for the new identity Marxists, who think that who you ARE is political and unless your identity fits the right box, you’re a traitor of some sort.

So I gave it up.  Did it hurt my sales?  I don’t know.  I won’t know for a while.  BUT it was the only way I could continue working.

I’m betting on at least half the population being as disgusted by the whole show as I am.  I could be wrong.  And a good portion of that half might have never read sf/f OR have given up on it long ago.

I simply didn’t have a choice anymore.  And to an extent, too, I think, yes, we need to start revealing ourselves so that our brothers and sisters in the left (or simply wanting to fit in) don’t become ever more extreme because they think that’s what everyone believes.  And so that people can read genre again, without fearing that it’s just a never-ending left-propaganda show.  And to break the sense of “everyone believes this” the establishment has tried so hard to foster and which affects our type of Odd most of all.  It’s a duty.  A post of duty.  You don’t quibble with duty.  At least, I don’t.

Still, I try not to ambush people with partisan politics.  I still think most of my posts are of a social and philosophical bend, not political – and I run a greater risk of putting people to sleep than of inciting their animus.

And anyone on my facebook who doesn’t wish to know my political opinions or my off beat philosophy can simply ignore my blog.  I wish most of them were that discrete in their politics.

I try not to offend people, but you can’t stop those looking for a reason to be offended.  And then you have to wonder how much difference there is between them and the “shut up” brigade.

But do I care about an author’s politics as such?  Not unless they rub them in my face.  And in fact, though I’m not stupid, and I’m aware his politics differ from mine, if someone told me that there was a great political blog by Terry Pratchett, I’d probably stay away with intent for fear of reading something that would destroy the pleasure I have in his stories.

In the end, after it all washes away, only the stories matter.  None of us could care less that Shakespeare was a despicable propagandist for the Tudor regime.  We care that his stories touched the core of humanity.

And for writers who can do that any political taint will wash off.*

*This writer makes no such claims, except to say that she’s working on it.  It’s the only thing worth working on.

News: Our very own Foxfier has delivered herself of The Baron, a bouncing 7 and a half pound baby boy, who is focused on the important things of life – right now, eating.  Keep mommy and baby and the rest of her young family in your thoughts, if you’re so inclined.

My very first published book, Ill Met By Moonlight, is free, right now on Amazon.  Also, my friend Ellie Ferguson has her romantic suspense book Wedding Bell Blues out for free as well.

If you tell me what promotions YOU are running in the comments, I’ll make a post this afternoon.  And now I shall go for enough caffeine to de-zombie-fy.

 

 

 

There is a meme going around facebook, an innocuous little question of “What was the last female writer you read, and the book?”

It’s very popular and being echoed all over.  It’s also a good example of how people think when they get rats in their head.

“But, Sarah,” you say, “why would you object to being introduced to authors you might not have heard of?”

Brother!  This is not how book recommendations and word of mouth happen.  First, with few exceptions, no one in mixed company is going to admit to having spent the entire night awake reading something called “The Sinner” (a romance) or “Three For the Chair” (a mystery) or even “Martians Go Home.”  Instead they will mention the sort of book people buy and leave sitting around on their coffee table to look smart or caring or whatever it is society values this week.

Word of mouth book recommendations are far more targeted.  They’re done by people who know you or at least know what you like to read.  Even I, who read almost anything, have stuff I will not read.  One of them is insufferably stuffy books my kids were forced to read in school.  I couldn’t read them even to give them help with studying them.  In fact, I’d rather have a root canal than read most of those.  The other one is zombie fiction.  I truly don’t care if your zombie book is a masterpiece.  I don’t read zombies because yuck.  (Actually I don’t read most horror.  Not because I’m squeamish: I can write blood, guts and wading through both of those scenes.  I just don’t enjoy being either grossed out or scared.  So reading horror would be fatuous.)  You can recommend me those till you’re blue in the face.  I still ain’t gonna read them.

However, if it were “What was the last writer” or even new writer “you read and the book?” the meme would be merely stupid and vacuous.

It is far worse than that . “The last FEMALE writer” you read.  This is because female writers are supposed to be discriminated against.  Statistically (if you look at it sideways and squint) females get reviewed less than males, and this leads to their selling less than males and this leads–  Excuse me.  I’ll dissect this nauseating fallacy later.  First tell me the last book you read where you gave a good goddamn about the author’s sex.

Unless you are reading true accounts of childbirth or of surviving testicular cancer, if you were specifically looking at the gender of the name on the cover, you’ve got rats in your head.

The first rat is a cute and fluffy baby rat that leads you to believe that the name on the cover has anything to do with the gender of the author – but we’ll let that go by.

We’ll let it go by because the big rat is stinky and dropping pellets all over the culture, and will destroy us if we don’t trap him and kill him.  It’s stained with the blood of millions and it’s called Marxism.

One of the things Marxism does is treat people as widgets.  Take me.  Female, Portuguese origin, married, mother of two, liberal arts post-graduate degree.  I’m supposed to be exactly the same as anyone else with those characteristics.  You should be able to pop me out of this blog and pop someone with those same exact characteristics in my place, and they’re supposed to be indistinguishable.  (Stop laughing.  It’s impolite to laugh at the mentally afflicted.)

No?  How no?  What is the purpose then of all these comparisons “more men get reviews,” and “More men are bestsellers” and—

Even if those are true (some of them are for certain fields) what makes you think they’re fixable?  Or that they should be fixed?  Or that there is anything to fix?

Look up there to where, no, you can’t pop me out of this blog and pop someone else in its place and have it be the same.  So, let’s suppose – don’t I wish – my blog became one of the most popular on the internet.  Does this mean that Females of Portuguese origin, married, with two children and a liberal arts degree are being discriminated FOR in blogging.  No?  Why not?

The second rat is “diverse thinking.”  First of all there is the unexamined, cute, fluffy rat that says “diversity is strength.”  This is a shibboleth that’s never been proven, anywhere at all.  In fact, I can give you plenty of examples where diversity was the downfall or at least a serious handicap to a society.  But it is an almost adorable rat compared to the true repulsive idea that you can get more diversity of ideas by getting more PHYSICAL diversity.  This idea is something Hitler would have loved.  No, I’m not breaking Godwin.  I’m simply being factual.  The whole idea behind the eugenics movement that was all the rage when Hitler came to power (and not just the rage in Germany, btw.  If you think that, you have more than rats in your head) was that culture was inherited and inhered to your racial ancestry.  The white race was this and this and this, and the Black race was this and this and this.  And the pink race with polka dots was this and this and this.

THAT was the brilliant idea that filled the ovens with human beings.  The Marxists were so scared people would be repulsed by the results that for a while, they hid their “scientific governance, by the numbers” under The Worker Class and the Capitalist Class and the Intellectual Class – instead of calling them by race names (Both are constructs, in case you wonder.  Particularly in a blended society like the US.)

But it is impossible to run a society by the numbers without always coming back to the same primal sin of treating people as things.  Because if Bob over there is an exemplary person and Joe is a terrible person, there’s no way the government can equalize that.  But if Bob is rich and Joe is poor, the government can take money from Bob to give to Joe.  And if Bob is white and Joe is black, you just won the support of all the black people who aren’t doing very well monetarily (most white people aren’t either.  It is a characteristic of doing exceptionally well that few people do that.)  Not just because you might also give them money like you gave Joe, but because – by claiming that the reason Joe didn’t succeed was a social injustice and invisible racism – you gave them an excuse for failing (and most people, anywhere, under any regime, fail.)

It is perhaps no wonder, then, that this big stinky rat of an idea has got fixated on women, the minority that isn’t.  I mean, how much more virtuous can you get than by supporting the majority of people, while claiming you’re fighting discrimination?

So people take to the statistics and examine how many women are mega bestsellers, and how many women get reviews and how many women…

This shows that women are discriminated against and then the drumbeat starts for “how many female writers have you read today?”

Rats.  Or perhaps hamster.  I think if you lean close to those brains, you can hear the hamster wheel squeaking.

First, where are those statistics coming from, and exactly what is taken in account? The last three major popular successes, pushed under everyone’s noses and talked about on every blog, magazine and show that cares about culture and books are…  Harry Potter, Twilight and Fifty Shades, all of them in fact written by women.

Almost every romance published is written by women.  So is most of the fantasy.  Quite a few of the historicals, unless they’re military history, are written by women.  A good number of the Christian books (a huge part of the market) are written by women.

Now, almost every thriller, almost every hard sf, almost every adventure story and police procedure seems to be written by men.

So – how come most bestsellers/most reviewed, etc. are men?  Isn’t that unfair?

Lies, damn lies and statistics.  Writing (except for Romance) used to be a mostly male profession.  You could tell there was actual prejudice against women writing, in say SF, because women wrote under male pen names.  (In romance there is prejudice against males and most people still write under a female pen name.)

Writing was a male profession when you could make a living from it and back when women were not expected to make a living.  By the time I came into the field, unless you were willing to do what I did and engage in EXTREME writing, you made ON AVERAGE five thousand a year.  And the funny thing about social expectations is that they cut both ways.  Given that writing doesn’t make a living wage, most men could not engage in it.  They couldn’t engage in it long enough o even break in, let alone try to get big. A woman can stay home with the kids (or even just stay home) and though in our crazy society that incurs some societal censure it is nothing like the censure incurred by a man who stays home and is supported by his wife.  (Yes, I know some brave souls do it, but they’re rare.)

When I came into the field 90% of the new authors making it in fell in one of three categories: women, gay men, academics – i.e. people who could have other means of support while they pursued their art.  Of this, by and far the largest contingent was women.  (Who often overlapped with academics.)

This has been a fact of life for the last fifteen years.  However, there are still some remnants from the ancient regime back when it was mostly a male profession.  They’re old and having stayed in the field long, revered.  They’re mostly best sellers and widely reviewed.

There is another effect.  Think back on the first women that broke the gender barrier in science fiction.  They were almost instantly notable.  Why?  Because they had to make an extraordinary effort to break in.  This is going to select for driven individuals, who immediately will do better than the run of the mill “followed the usual path, had an easy time getting in.”

The males in my generation – particularly those supporting a family at the time, like Dave Freer – who broke in, were strong enough and driven enough to come home and work at their dream after pursuing a full time career elsewhere.  Do you wonder that they have more staying power than someone who was told “Just pursue your dream, dear, someone else will pay?”

Then add another layer.  New York Publishing by definition has got the rat of Marxism in their heads.  They always treated writers as widgets anyway.  Round the mid seventies, early eighties they realized that they had more widgets with outies than innies, and they decided to correct it the usual way.  “Buy more women” the cry went out.  And in came not only a barrage of women who had an easier time breaking in than men, but of women who were told what kept them out had been discrimination.  And who, therefore, hated the field they were getting into, because those meanies had kept them out.  Out came an outpouring of “poor me female” writing.  Which in the early nineties caused me to snarl at a Barnes & Noble, “I wish someone would pass a law forbidding women from writing.” After I’d walked up and down a fantasy shelf and found NOT ONE novel that wasn’t about some abused high-magic chick whose father was a monster.

Here we digress from writing in general to genre writing.  It will shock you to realize that different genres appeal to different people, right?  In general romance – by and far the blockbuster of genres – appeals to women.  I know this shocks you, since women are not at all by evolution designed for being fascinated with relationships.  This doesn’t mean men don’t read it.  I know several men who read Romance (and no, it has nothing to do with their orientation) but the proportions are so grossly skewed that if you see someone in public with a romance novel and can’t see what gender they are, you can take a safe bet it’s a woman.  At the other end of this, military fiction is read mostly by men.

I can tell you as a female reader and writer that from my teens I was upset by the assumption that whatever I was reading was OF COURSE a romance.  Ditto for what I was writing.  To this day total strangers assume I write romances or (I DO have an accent) children’s picture books.

The ridiculous equalizers of author genders ALWAYS concentrate on those that appeal least to women.  Say, thrillers, or science fiction.  (Why don’t they try to get more men in romance?  Why do they devalue a female way of seeing the world, which always centers on relationships?  Are they anti-woman?)

The problem with trying to equalize the innies and outies is that you get people who aren’t going to appeal to the genre’s majority readers.  For instance the attempt to bring in more “sf” writers of the right physical configuration gave us science fiction that rotates around someone’s belly button.  (There is a difference between novels about colonizing a world, even with strong character development, and novels about someone angsting over colonizing a world, so that the book could take place entirely in my laundry room and there would be no difference.)  This meant readers – male and female – who liked SF as it was left in droves.  The same for those who liked adventure fantasy but were tired of the female-revenge-fantasy woven in.

Of course these things shake out, they always do.  By the time I came in, NY publishing had got the idea that somehow their experiment had been less than successful.  Of course, since the rat was still spinning in their head, the only thing they could think – and which was told to me over and over – was “Women can’t write science fiction.”  Which is why Darkship Thieves was unpublished for thirteen years, while they pushed me to write fantasy.  Other gems I was told were that “you don’t write like a woman” – this was said derogatorily by the way – to which I probably shouldn’t have responded that no, that part of my anatomy was grossly unsuited for typing.  That my women were insufficiently “strong” (by which they meant that they fell in love with men.)  That I couldn’t write gay males because that was stealing victimhood and because gay men weren’t transparent to people who didn’t share the experience (to which one of my gay friends said he was glad he wasn’t transparent, he’d hate for me to be seeing what he ate for lunch.)

That is, the people who treat people like widgets, all in the name of equality, were telling me what I could or could not write, because my thought wasn’t conforming to their ideas.  I.e. it was too “diverse.”  That is, all of the above was “bad widget, bad.  Fall into your category.”

Again, the primary sin behind this entire meme is treating people as things.  The secondary sin is expecting physical characteristics to dictate the way I think.

Do my experiences have a lot to do with who I am as a writer (and a person)?  Sure they do.  How many of those are experiences only a woman can have?  I can think only of being pregnant and giving birth.  (And a man who is sufficiently connected to his wife, or who has asked a lot of friends could write those as convincingly as most women.  I mean a lot of them are physiological.)

But doesn’t my experience of going through life as a woman, of relating to men as a woman, etc. color how I write?  Sure they do.  But I have enough male friends and enough imagination to write men convincingly too.

So should you read my books because they give you an experience of what it’s like to be female?

Rat droppings!

I write science fiction, fantasy, mystery and historical.  You should read those for the joy of reading those.  And my books should be enough to hold you and get you to buy the next one whether the name on the cover is Sarah Hoyt or Joe Smith.  (How DO you know I don’t write as Joe Smith?  I could if I wanted to.)

If you’re picking my books because they have a female name on the cover, forcing yourself to read them to prove you’re not sexist, and hating every minute, that makes you LESS likely to pick up the next female author.

Writers are not their books.  There are men who write women better than women do.  And there are women who write men better than men do.

And the books should stand on their own.

Everything else is rat droppings.  Big stinky rats with blood on their teeth.

*This is the new free novel I’m posting here a chapter at a time.  For previous chapters, page back to previous weeks.  This is pre-first-draft, as it comes out.  It is a sequel to Witchfinder which will soon be taken down (once edited) and put for sale on Amazon.  Meanwhile, if you donate $6 or more, I’ll get you a copy of Rogue Magic, once finished and edited, in your favored ebook format.  Of course, if you’re already subscribing to the blog at a level at which you get whichever books come out that year, you don’t need to worry.   Until I give this a tab, you can find older chapters by paging back to Friday (or the first, I think Sat/Sun or simply searching Rogue Magic.*

 

Twisted Magic

 

Jonathan Blythe, The Earl Of Savage:

 

The door to my study opened, and one of the upstairs maids came pelting in.  The sight was more startling than if she had flown in, or perhaps came in doing a perfect ballet step, because the thing is, no way to hide it, maids don’t pelter.  At least maids who have been trained under papa’s aegis and mama’s watching eye don’t.

I half rose from my chair, not quite sure what I meant to do, but ready to either ward off an attack, or catch the girl should she be under the impulse of a magical compulsion.  Not that either was likely, but both have happened, if one is to believe history books and newspaper accounts.  Not that I ever do, because every time I’ve been present at either of these–  But that’s a story for another time.

At that time, what I was faced with was this young woman running straight for me, and she was wearing the uniform of an upstairs maid, all starched black frills and white lace.

Fortunately for me, the chair in which Merritt sat was square in her path.  This made her stop, and I could confirm that besides the uniform, her face was familiar too, a peaked little face with straggles of blond hair escaping from the cap.  I’d be cursed if I had the slightest idea what her name was, but I had seen her go in and out of rooms with warmed bricks for the beds, and the like.

Two things were of concern, besides her running in.  First, she was very pale, and her eyes were red rimmed as though she’d been crying.  This meant you couldn’t trust her.  You never know what a woman will do when she’s been crying.  Why, once, when I tried to give one of my peculiars her conge she started crying and…  If my skull weren’t as thick as it is, you wouldn’t be reading this.

The other thing was that she was clutching a piece of paper in her hand.  I had the odd idea that mama had sacked her, and she was coming to argue the point with me, but that was of course stupid.  After all, why would mama tell her she was fired in writing.  For one, Mama don’t like putting pen to paper above half and used to get Honoria to write everything for her.

Before I could sort through all this and speak, the girl was bobbing up and down like a jack in box, in repeated curtseys and murmuring something like “Forgive me your lordship,” which was daft enough, but not as daft as Wolfe Merritt standing up and looking for all the world like he expected to ask her for a dance.  I mean, I realize she was a woman of his condition and all, but all the same—

“Stop with the bobbing, woman,” I heard myself say, somewhat shocked at how much my voice sounded curt and disdainful, just like Papa’s used to.  “You’re making me seasick.  What do you mean by pelting in here without knocking, and don’t tell me you weren’t pelting.  I know pelting when I see it, and that was pelting.”

The gone, probably more than the inane words stopped her.  After all, she had been trained in papa’s household.  She stopped bobbing and stood, turning even paler though I’d have sworn that was impossible, and swallowing convulsively. I thought she wouldn’t be able to speak, and I was reaching for the bell to call the butler to come and remove her or something, when Merritt gave me the slightest shake of the head, that signified I shouldn’t do that, and then crossed over to the tray with the brandy, poured a bare finger into my used glass, and took it to the girl.  And damme if he didn’t hold her head and put the glass to her lips, and make her drink the whole thing.

We were going to have a drunk housemaid on our hands, not that it wouldn’t perhaps be an improvement on a housemaid who had decided to imitate a jack in box, but all the same, it seemed like it would cause mama of accusing us of trying to debauch this chit and perhaps fire the girl anyway.

But she swallowed, and either because the taste of brandy was a shock or perhaps because it worked fast, she looked towards Merritt and said, “Thank you, sir, I—”

“That’s better,” I said.  “What is your name?”

“Annabelle,” she said. And then, catching the slightest of widening in my eyes, because I was sure no maid in the house could be called Annabelle, she smiled a little.  “Your mama told me I am to be addressed as Mary while I work here.”

I nodded.  Her speech was above her class, too, and I wondered if mama had ordered her to use a lower class of speech while working for us.  Thing is, I know mama.  Devil of a woman mama.  Quite likely to do that sort of thing, she was.

“Well then Mar–  Annabelle,” I said.  Might as well establish I was neither Mama nor under Mama’s thumb.  “What do you mean by coming running in here, without even knocking?”

She started to bend at the knees, but I quelled her with a look.  I had the oddest feeling that the corners of her mouth shook just a little at my look.  “Yes, sir,” she said.  “No bobbing,” she said, managing to convey the impression that under different circumstances, she would be laughing.  “But sir, we found this… we found this… in Miss Blythe’s room.”

The “this” she handed me was a sheet of paper, close written in my sister Helen’s sprawling handwriting.

It started very primly if highly improperly with “Dear Jon,” but it went down from there very fast.  Or at least I couldn’t in rational calm consider its contents anything but the sheerest lunacy.  I read it through three times before the first words stopped all my ability to relate the rest of the letter.

The very first words were, “I’ve decided to run away and become a Pirate Queen.”  I blinked at it, in utter horror, and read through the rest of the letter, seeing nothing but disjointed words, three times solid, then looked up at the maid, Annabel, “Is my sister–  That is—”

“Both your sister,” she said.  “And her maid, Betsy, are gone from the premises, and there were the remains of a transport spell upon her table.

I closed my eyes to make the room stop swaying, surely a side effect of all the bobbing the maid had done.  I took two deep breaths and read the letter again, this time making myself pay attention.  “I’ve bought a spell which should take us to Portsmouth, where I expect to seek employment aboard a ship and to advance to the post of captain by either my just deserts or, if absolutely needed, mutiny.”  Mutiny was underlined.  “You need not worry, since both Betsy and I have taken the precaution of cutting our hair and dressing as boys, so our honor shall never be threatened.”  I closed my eyes and breathed deep three times.  I should have shared with the impudent chit a thing or two I’d heard from my friends who were at sea.  “I know you will be very shocked by my taking this step, but once you think about it, I’m sure you’ll know it’s for the best.  I’ve been watching you, my dear, dear Jon.  Of all the family, you must know you’ve always been my favorite, well, at least since that time when I was very little and you helped me dress the cat as though she were a baby and then laughed with me when she tore through all the clothes and ran off into the bushes cursing.  And then you told me a story about some girl called Kitty, and I knew for sure you were not half as starched up as the rest of them, and you had a sense of humor and a heart, Jonathan.”  The fact that I had no memory whatsoever of the moment also meant I had had far more alcohol then I should have, but of course, she wouldn’t know it.  “And I’ve been watching you since Papa died, and how all of them – every one, from Mama to the prince consort expect you to do your duty, and how you stopped laughing and funning anymore.” Partly because I had cut drastically back on the consumption of alcohol, but what could a delicately reared young lady know of that? “And I know you’ve been in low spirits.”  Well, she could say that.  Low to none.  “And I know, too, that part of it is having to provide dowries for all of us, and having to find us a proper man to marry and all that.  I would like you to be sure that I do not intend to marry any man, proper or otherwise, because I saw what happened with poor Honoria, and it’s all very well for mama to say that the proper way for a woman to live is to have children, but if children make you die, I’d rather not.  So I hit upon this capital scheme.  I always wanted adventure, as you know, because I told you many times how much I wished to sail the ocean.”  I must – MUST – make sure when my sisters poured their unwise confidences upon my ears I was not more than three sheets to the wind.  “And so, this will do it.  Do not fear for me.  You know I’m resourceful and intelligent.”  And wholly uninformed about the world.  Even with all the snooping she did of my papers and all the listening behind doors.  I was aware of both of her abominable habits, and I’d kept her in the dark as much as possible, by making sure my important or shocking papers were kept at my club, and that I never spoke in terms she could plainly understand.  Now I wondered if perhaps I’d been unwise.  “I promise never to sack any ships that belong to you or the family.  And if I sack any very great treasure, I’ll be glad to let you have it for the other girls’ dowries, as I suppose they’ll want to marry and even risk having children.”  It finished with, “Your affectionate sister, Helen.”

I looked up at Annabel, “You read this?” I asked

Her face had become grave again.  “Yes, milord.  You see, she didn’t address it, and as it was upon her mantel…”

“I see.  Who else read it?  You said you and someone else had found it, at least you said “we” – who is we?”

“Oh, only Jane, the other maid, sir.  She was making the bed and she found a quantity of hair, both your sister’s and Betsy’s, by the look of it, shoved under the mattress, and sir, she called me in, because I have some knowledge of magic.  I saw this letter on the mantel and I read it.”

I might as well face it I couldn’t scotch the scandal.  “Jane read it too?”

Annabel gave me the oddest of looks.  “She doesn’t know how to read.  Just like she doesn’t know how to do magic.”

“I see,” I said.  “And you did magic?”

“Not really, sir, as that would have called too much attention, but I did set my hand on the pile of hair, and try to locate where they might be.”

“Apparently Portsmouth,” I said.  “I must go there right away and—”

“No, sir.”  Annabel looked at me.  “I looked at the remains of the transport spell and I could tell something had gone very wrong with it.  The magic had twisted, though how it’s beyond me to explain.  Putting my hand on the hair confirmed it.  Your sister is not as close as Portsmouth.  In fact—”  She paused, then sighed, as though resigning herself to the inevitable.  “In fact, I’d say she’s not in this world.”

Put down the shot gun.  Take a deep breath.  Consider the importance of those words and of their being used ritualistically to pass legislation.

Then consider something William Patterson used in Heinlein’s bio (first book.)  I will not quote him exactly.  I have the book on my shelves, but my shelves are a salad because of the boy-who-doesn’t-know-his-alphabet and who most assuredly does not read my non fiction books (rolls eyes.) so to find it might take me the rest of the morning and I have an appointment.  However, the phrase said something about “the broken children of mid-century” finding an ethical guiding hand in Heinlein.

I’ll confess I did find a guiding hand in Heinlein, even if I couldn’t be considered in any way to come from a broken family, not in the sense he meant.  My parents were married.  My brother lived with us until he got married at 26, and my entire extended family lived around us, all over the village.  (In fact, the amiable habit of the village was to call any adult over the age of having children “ti” short for tio or tia i.e. uncle or aunt.  We did this I suspect as a throw back to a time when everyone in an area was related, whether or nor you could trace it back.  We did it even to people we knew were new arrivals, I’m going to guess on the principle that eventually their genes would enter the pool and we therefore adopted them, retroactively.  Keep this in mind.  The assumption was wrong, and it’s been fifty years and this is important.)

On the other hand, in many ways, I was a broken child.  Well, I suspect mostly through being an Odd, but there were other things.  Mostly I rejected the simple morality of the tales told to me in childhood and I couldn’t find guidance that fit me, until I fell into that first Heinlein – Have Spacesuit will Travel.  What spoke of me out of it?  We’ll go into that.

I was “broken” in the sense that the instruction given me wouldn’t take.  It wouldn’t take partly because I was surrounded by skeptical voices all over: my brother, his friends, my cousins; and partly because the circumstances around me no longer fit the instructions I was being given; and partly because I was thrust into a world that didn’t figure into any of those tales, not even grandma’s inventive stories.  Which was part of the reason I liked science fiction.  It also wasn’t the world I lived in, but it was a world in constant change and it made more sense, internally.  (BTW this is why the idea that  kids today don’t read science fiction because the world has changed too much and “they’re living in science fiction” should be met with derision and contempt.  They don’t read science fiction because it has nothing to say.  It’s either vapid, human hating, or a continuation of the preaching they get in school, which they know is wrong.  [There are exceptions of course.  More fantasy than SF but I highly recommend Pratchett’s Johnny Maxwell trilogy for instance.])

I don’t mean to imply that the stories I was told were Bowdlerized.  A lot of them were, of course, but certainly not grandma’s.  (If grandma had spoken English and had access to a typewriter and a publisher, she’d be a more imaginative Stephen King.)  It was just that I couldn’t make those stories fit the world that had gone upside down and sideways forty years or so before I was born.

Most of the stories that were told to me assumed I would grow up, get married, have kids all within the relatively narrow confines of the village (or other villages.  Even the upper class “ton” of Regency England was about the same number of families as a largish village.)  It had to do with keeping relations with people you’d see every day for the rest of your life.  It had to do with raising the children to fit in in the same narrow environment.

By the time I was five, I knew they were wrong.  There was that gut feeling – even in an environment that was superficially static – of “this is wrong” kids get when they’re told fables (and why I think insisting that girls of ninety pounds can beat men of 200 will only create idiots and cynics.  Idiots are the girls who think they HAVE to believe it or be gender traitors.  Cynics are everyone else.  Even the all-pervasive propaganda of communist countries can’t do better than that.)

Anyway, if I – who was raised in a relative stable environment, in a religious family, in a traditional village – felt adrift in the world, how about all those other “broken children of the mid century”?  Those whose parents uprooted and left the ancestral village, or even the vicinity of family; those whose parents engaged in Marital Blanket Bingo; those whose parents lived for career or other considerations?  I.e., most of them?  And what about those even more broken kids who came after?  Those who are farmed out to total strangers because mom and dad MUST work?  (And I truly don’t want to argue this with people who think that mom and dad can choose not to work to stay home with the kids.  Some can.  Some purely can’t, not in their circumstances, which include taxes to pay and DEFINITELY include the social disapproval few people – even Odds – fully want to incur.) And whose parents, themselves, wouldn’t do a much better job of raising them because they have no clue WHY they should sacrifice that way – not unless they’ve arrived at some sort of morally coherent internal sense before having kids.

Because, the truth is, the reason our society screams so much about “It’s for the children” is that nothing is.  No, seriously.  We live in the least child-oriented society ever to exist.

And before you jump me and point out all the things that are forbidden to adults so as to keep them from the children; all the things that exist for children or people with children (like certain restaurants, or movies for kids, or…) and tell me that our predecessors had none of that, I’ll tell you “precisely.”

We are like the very wealthy of times past, shoving toys and gifts at the kiddies which we ignore the rest of the time, because we’re busy pursuing what we want to pursue.

A few years ago, I was talking to a friend who is single, childless and gay.  I would consider him a very moral person (in his dealings with others) though he’s by no means “moral” by what the left thinks the right’s morals are – if that makes sense.  He was outraged as I’ve seldom seen him.  You see, he rarely projects his morals onto other people and rarely condemns other people as doing wrong.  (Unless they’re celebrities, and that’s just fun.)  BUT he was rather incensed at an acquaintance of his who had “realized his true orientation” after he was married and had a three year old child.  Upon which he’d left wife and child to pursue love in all the wrong places (though my friend put it rather more graphically.)

My friend thought this was horrible, because what would the child think when he grew up.  My first reaction to his outrage shocked me, too.  I thought “yes, but would you want the poor man to live a lie all his life?”  I don’t think I said it, but I might have.  I sometimes have the self preservation instincts of a mouse teetering on the edge of a whiskey barrel.  I must have said something because what I got was the double barrel of “if you have assumed an obligation for a young and helpless life, particularly one you’ve brought to the world, one who depends on you for guidance, instruction and security, you LEARN to derive your happiness from fulfilling your obligation and doing your duty.”

I’d never heard it put that way, and most people would say it was an arid life.  But that’s what most of our ancestors would have done, and done unflinchingly.

It’s useless to project into the past the sort of uniform morality of a fairytale.  It wasn’t like that.  Every era had right and wrong.  Every era had reprobates who put themselves ahead of their obligations and those who depended on them.

However the idea that you owed others something was there stronger — as in the time of Romeo and Juliet, where you owed your family EVERYTHING — or weaker but it was there.  Those who didn’t were at the margins of society and justly reviled.

But now… now even I who was properly brought up, thought (at least until I was glared at, which is weird since we were talking over the net, but the man has a glare that can cross the miles) first “but you can’t expect the man to sacrifice his every hope of happiness because he made a mistake.”

Part of it is the definition of happiness.  I know people are going to come and pile on and say we lost that sense of obligation because we lost religion (my friend is an atheist, btw) but I don’t think that’s it.  I grew up in a place where it was noticed if and when and where you went to church and where most of the conversations ended in pious shibboleths of consolation or condemnation.  And yet even there, it had crept in, this feeling that “you can’t expect people to throw their lives away just because they made a mistake.”  (The concept of gayness was very odd indeed there – at least openly – but people still made mistakes aplenty, from babies conceived out of wedlock to “I thought he was nicer when I married him” to “She ain’t no fun anymore.)

There was this idea that it was right and just – the only right and just thing to do – to “pursue your happiness” regardless of whom it affected, whom it hurt, and whom it shocked.  Phrases like “you only pass this way once” and “you have to be yourself” had penetrated into the culture, particularly among the younger people.

I don’t think it was the breakdown of religious faith except insofar as it resulted from the same thing.  I think it was the end result of two wars, back to back, and so many men who died young, without in fact getting to be themselves and, more importantly, the women who stayed behind and regretted the fun they hadn’t had.  Though Portugal hadn’t really been part of the wars (technically of the first world war, but in miniscule numbers) the zeitgeist had percolated there and the idea was “don’t give your life to something not of your own choosing at that moment” and the idea that “life is short, eat dessert FIRST.”

The other part of it was, of course, mobility.  Starting after WWI but really after WWII people moved away from parents.  They moved to other places, they fragmented.  I know that this sounds like I’m hankering for the ancestral village.  I’m not.  Villages are terrible places.  If you’re an Odd, it takes a village to drive you totally insane.

But they do exert surveillance and enforce laws.  (Though by the time I came along, as is obvious from above they were a little uncertain about what laws and rules to enforce.  Was it “never be alone with a man you’re not married to?” or was it “To thine own self be true, even if thine own self has a tendency to fall on her back?”)

Humans are social animals.  We try to fit in – even outliers like us – and therefore not having a well defined community and clear rules that enforce the raising of the next generation will lead to… broken children.  Who don’t know what the rules are, and what to do.

Our mass media jumped on this too.  You may attribute bad intent to it, but I think they were mostly reflecting “life is short, eat dessert first” back at people.  The rules they proclaimed were the sort of anodyne rules of “love yourself” (There is only one you! Seemed to be a refrain on TV when I came here in 1980) and “be nice to people” (which is not the same as living up to your obligations to them.  Heck sometimes it’s the opposite.  And nice isn’t the same as good.  Not by a mile.) and “be polite and outwardly accepting of everyone” not to mention “if someone does wrong he’s a victim and society made him do it!” or the reverse “If someone is a victim, they’re automatically good.”

The broken children of mid century had my generation, who in turn had severely broken children, because by then things were completely upside down.

Understand, I’m not complaining of people being immoral or of people having odd sexual preferences (in the science fiction community these are often very odd) or even of people living a life of what they consider “fun and excitement” – I’m not the mother or father of other people, and they are what they are (or to quote grandma, we don’t “each make ourselves”.)  What I’m complaining about is where the focus is for society and where it remains, even after people have made choices that mean what they’ve done will affect people who depend on them.  What I’m complaining about is people shirking obligations – particularly an obligation to the next generation – for the sake of some undefined “don’t worry, be happy.”

I’m complaining of the fact that not  only do we not shun people who offload their responsibilities brought on by their own actions, but we enshrine them as a sort of heroes because they’re living the imperative of “pursuing their happiness” or in the words of the sixties “finding themselves.”  This ensures they’re free of “hangups” or “complexes” or “frustrations” or whatever the heck we’re calling it today, and makes them a sort of secular saint.

Yes, everyone makes mistakes – but it’s how you deal with the mistakes that makes the difference.

They don’t stay in that oh-hum marriage for the sake of the children (Yes, I do recognize reasons for divorce.  Among them are “he hit me” and “she was hurting the children” – morally or physically.  There are others.  We all know marriages where a partner and the kids would be far better off without the other but “it wasn’t fun anymore” is not one of them.)  They don’t pretend to be something they’re not for the sake of the children.  They don’t volunteer to fight for the sake of the children.  They never even consider doing something “for the children.”

They do instead insist that society be as a whole brought down to child level: that everyone be insulated from their choices and given everything they need as though we were all toddlers; and that everyone obey the rulers as though they were mommy and daddy.  And every time they want to force this on us they scream “do it for the children.”

This is because – and this is what Heinlein taught me and what my friend’s glare (it is a very nice glare, truly!) brought to mind – what makes us adults is not stomping our little feet and “expressing” ourselves.  Any kid can do that with finger paint and a free hour.  It is assuming our place in civilization and in the march of generations through time: it’s shouldering the burden and moving on and doing our best for the next ones in line; it’s assuming responsibility for those weaker or in peril and doing our best for them too.  Your obligation might be to a child of your blood, or to a sick friend.  It might be to the person you love with all your heart, or to some old relative wished on you because no one else would take him/her.

It is still your obligation.  Being human means having obligations to those around you.  We are social apes.

Government or impersonal bureaucrats ARE NOT the means to help our brothers and sisters.  We are.  In recognition of our common humanity; in recognition that there might be a life after in another world, but there will surely be one here, after we’re gone, we pay our dues to those who came before and build for those who come after.

Sometimes the best choice for others is not what you want to do.  Sometimes it’s not even close to nice.  Sometimes there is no good choice — but the way forward leads through a life of duty, not happiness.  And sometimes you find a sort of happiness in that.  (To quote the epitaph of a Heinlein character “He ate what was put before him.”)

We can shirk it.  We can pretend that there is nothing in the world bigger than ourselves – “There is only one YOU!” – and that we are all that matters – “I’m gonna live forever; I’m gonna learn how to fly!” – but in the end, the only one you’re lying to is YOU!  In the end there will be centuries and millennia after you, and the broken children of the broken children of the broken children will either die with their civilization or relearn.

Would you rather shoulder your responsibilities and make sure they relearn from our ancestors and those who made our civilization the most successful and comfortable and, yes, just, on Earth?  Or from the barbarians at the gate?

One or the other will teach those children and give them guidance.

Who’s it gonna be?

Discussion here last week turned to the blog that shall not be named, at which a bunch of us used to hang out, before the owner began looking for creationists under his bed and white supremacists in his closet and was so terrified that he whipped so far left that, when last seen, he was a point of light disappearing up Stalin’s butt.

At the same time er… events precipitated a discussion of teh crazy in our own field both in this blog and over at Mad Genius Club, where my friend, Dave Freer, called it teh stupid and wondered how it affected the remaining readership in Science Fiction and fantasy when the crazy is so … inane and so in evidence.

I have a friend who has belonged to a Tea Party group in his area since its inception.  This Tea Party group is teh crazy.  He often emails me to vent, but he hasn’t quit.  Keep this in mind, it’s important.   I suspect a group of angels could go teh crazy given certain circumstances.  This is important too.

My friend’s group is in the middle of a very leftist part of the country.  This has two effects – it both makes it isolated and it makes the people who are willing to join it true outliers and ones who are either brave or crazy.  (And the two characteristics aren’t mutually exclusive.

That is the start of the pre-conditions for the setting up of the slide to the crazy: the group is not only isolated, but is perceived as so “out there” by those around that you need to be crazy brave to join.

You guys can see how science fiction – but PARTICULARLY fantasy – went down teh crazy path based on that right?  My MIL who tries to be so “normal” in everything that if your mental road had a yellow line she would be it (Hey, that’s the response of some outliers to their outlierness) not only wasn’t aware of the concept of Fantasy when I was first published (“Dear, do you realize you have sex in a book with elves?  What audience are you aiming this at?”) but she still isn’t.  The last of her parties we attended, she told everyone I should write children’s books because they’re the only ones who have minds as beautifully open as mine.  (I invite you to stand back and experience awe at the concept of a) my mind being what she calls open, which I’m sure involves my believing everything I hear.  b) the idea of my writing what I’m sure she thinks of as picture books, given the themes and points of view I’m prone to.)

Now my MIL is a reliable barometer of middle of the road for her generation, not because she is anywhere near average, but because she TRIES to be and is smart enough to have a feel for how “middle of the road” reacts.  The operative part in that is of course “her generation” since she was sixty when I first got published.

It’s changed, of course.  Or at least some part of it has changed.  Even Nora Roberts (very middle of the road.  MIL likes her) now has elves and fairies in her books.  (Weirdly, MIL doesn’t think she should write for children.)  Between movies and romance books, at this point the tropes of science fiction and fantasy are becoming mainstream.  This hasn’t translated into higher print runs.  Neither has the Great Recession.  Keep that in mind, too.

The other thing that causes a group to go crazy is how unique it is.  By this principle, science fiction and particularly fantasy writers went WAY crazier than readers, way faster, because, well… think on it, there are fewer of us.  BUT – and this is also important – there is a group even smaller and more insular than us.  Science fiction and fantasy writers, after all, live anywhere in the country and by their very nature, mingle with people who aren’t science fiction and fantasy writers. Well, I hear some people even have them in their own families.  It doesn’t apply in the Hoyt household, of course.  But editors don’t.  Yes, they work in publishing houses that have other departments, but they are/were looked down upon by the other departments (I’ve heard stories) and so socialize mostly with their peers at other houses.  (The exception being Baen which moved out of NYC and mingles with real people TM – keep that in mind too.)

You see, the other factor for teh crazy moving in and the group losing all contact with reality is to have, at its core a sub group that is completely far removed from reality and that operates internally without any checks and balances. (I suppose numbers and figures SHOULD rationally have operated as checks and balances on publishers but a) the slow instauration of a completely push model made sure that the books they favored sold more than others, no matter how inane.  B) any book that failed was ALWAYS the writer’s fault  c) the steady creep down of ALL sales in the field was shrugged off as “people don’t read anymore” – the same way that when classical music went un-listenable (totally a word) the drop in sales meant that “listeners are getting dumber.”)

So the next most important factor in whether or how fast a group goes down the crazy road is… well, crazies and how much sway they’re given.

In science fiction and fantasy publishing the crazies were driving the bus (actually I think it was a supersonic plane) until indie came in.  Heck, they’re still driving it, insofar as the bus is the official part of the field, even though sane authors have jumped out of the window long ago (or been thrown, for not being crazy enough.)  [Baen has sort of a motor scooter and has taken a side road, headed away from the precipice.  For this act, they have earned the crazies hooting and hollering at them, and pointing and calling them extreme, even as the crazies head off to lala land.]

Until recently there simply wasn’t a way to tell the crazies in publishing, “hey, guys, you’ve gone too far, and you do realize normal people will be repulsed by this story/book/what the heck is this even?”  If you did it, you got defenestrated with force, and if you didn’t chance to grab the handlebar of the Baen scooter, you weren’t going to be heard from ever again.

In the same way, the blog that shall not be named started wielding the ban hammer against anyone who so much as made a dissenting peep.  (This is easy, but it’s also why I tend to be slow on the ban hammer and let things get heated.  It is also why I think commenters need to exert a little restraint before killing with extreme prejudice.  Yes, it gets us rid of some of the hothouse plants, but any group can go down the crazy road.)

And that brings us the next factor – the crazy road.  Once you’re on the crazy road – ie. You’re different from most people around you and from most voiced opinions around you (for instance the blog that shall not be named was fiscally conservative, hawks, pro-gay and for a while at least tolerant of religion.  They didn’t fit any of the boxes.  We don’t either here, btw) letting a small minority (in the blog’s case, of one) hold sway and say who stays and who goes WITH NO FEEDBACK ALLOWED will lead to that minority’s going ever stranger on whatever road they were already set on.

What I mean by this is, while that particular blog was private, and going strange only had the effect of sending us off to start other hangouts.  HOWEVER for science fiction and fantasy going strange, i.e. further and further away from the people who would potentially buy their product just meant that they were producing more and more thing that the public was unlikely to buy, and things that were further and further out from what might appeal to the mainstream of culture.

The thing is, because group mechanics dictate that the people responsible are deaf to feedback, and that group rewards are set for those who VOCALLY AND LOUDLY endorse the small and crazy group in control, once a group has gone some way down the crazy road, the ONLY thing you can do is leave and form another group.

The mechanics that drive a group ever-more extreme are self reinforcing both due to material rewards – if they exist – or due to the human instinct to fit in.

This is how it is perfectly acceptable – normal even – and definitely career-enhancing in science fiction to declare yourself to be a communist, to wear Che shirts, or to rant about how terrible America is, in front of American audiences.  This is why it’s so radical – nay, shocking –t o write a female villain and a male hero.  (And why such work is not likely to be published.)

It is also why it is wise of Baen to publish people all across the spectrum of politics.  And why I try not to be crazily political here.  (Except for a devoted hatred of Communism.  I fail to see what’s extreme about hating a regime responsible for the death of a hundred million humans, and possibly more.)

Of course, in science fiction, the publisher community drove the writer community which in turn drove the fan community – at least that visible part of the fan community which organizes conventions and is active in reviews and prizes.

Which is what Dave Freer was despairing about in his post.  “Is there anyone left who is not of this crazy/out of the mainstream tilt?”  I.e. is there anyone who would read us.

I think there is.  I think they simply jumped out of the window three decades ago when “All heroes must be female.” And “Capitalism bad” became the default mode.  (It’s gone much worse since.)

How many times do you run across people who go “Oh, I used to read fantasy/science fiction but then I just stopped.  I’m not sure why.”

I know why.  I write the stuff, and I spent years – years! – when, except for Baen, I’d be lucky to find three books a year I wanted to even sample.  Discovering a favorite author became a rare and cherished thing and – because of the push model – nine times out of ten they had already vanished by the time I heard of them/found their books.

The thing is, it takes EFFORT to drive your audience away and keep it driven away.  People with the bend of mind to read science fiction or mystery or whatever will actively look for material to read.  (Yes, literacy has gone down somewhat, but the number of people who read for pleasure has stayed remarkably constant.  And the internet is forcing kids to at least read easily.  Writing is something different.  The whole myth of “people don’t read anymore” is just that, a myth.)

Since indie and particularly Amazon have allowed people to put things up there, and sample what they might want to read, people have started reading fields they’d given up on.  My husband, for instance, assiduously reads free samples, then buys all the books of that author that he likes, often in genres he hasn’t touched for years.  (I’ve been a little slower, because the last couple of years I haven’t had much time for reading.  Reminds me of Barbara Hambly saying “Writing made me illiterate.”)

And only that explains the way indie mil sci fi sells on Amazon.  (Like crazy it sells.  Better than Romance.)  Because for years now, the people driving the crazy bus have marginalized the genre.  But the readers remain there, and Baen alone isn’t producing enough to feed them.  So they go looking, and they talk to each other.

This gives me hope that the other fandoms are still there too: driven out of conventions; driven out of the mainstream of fandom; for years unable to find anything they want to read on the shelves; starving for good books.

I believe this is true, or at least is worth trying.  The reason my friend stays in his local tea party group btw is that if all the “not insane” people leave, then the crazy just becomes crazier, faster.  He’s trying to act as a counterbalance.

That wasn’t an option for writers or readers of science fiction and fantasy while the crazies controlled what got into print.  They don’t now.  So, don’t give up.  If you do, then you will be driving the field where the crazies wanted and making them feel they were always justified.

Instead, I say we administer shock therapy.

UPDATE: I put up a different post at Mad Genius Club, entitled Doctor Strange Writing, or How I learned to Stop Worrying And Love Pantsing.

Thomas Jefferson said that every generation needs a new revolution.  Since he was not a sociopath like Robespierre, I very much doubt what he meant was that a sort of terror should go on forever, with the heads of non-conforming lopped off.

Yes, Robespierre thought that was the ideal way to live.  This is a good example of a man’s sadism overcoming his at least reasonable intellect.  (Probably actually a brilliant intellect.  It is not necessary to be dumb to be crazy.  On the contrary.  Genius might help grease the path to insanity.)  Where did he think the population would come from the feed the blood-fountaining maw of the guillotine is beyond my guess.  Probably beyond yours too.  (Yes, I can conceive of a society of people created and force grown in labs so la revolution can be sustained.  What a grim idea.  And anyone want to bet it would find a market?)

In either case, neither Thomas Jefferson nor Robespierre could be right.  Real revolutions, the ones that are paid for in blood and take their toll in material loss, never go on forever.  They can’t.

Despite Marx’s confident proclamation that the working class had nothing to lose but its chains – like everything else that came out of his pie hole or his scribbling hand, it was the work of a man who had never been close enough to the working class to have the slightest notion what they actually had to lose or gain – most people aren’t willing to throw away what they do have (really?  Well, even the poor can have an ordered existence, fat babies, a cat or two they’re fond of) for some abstract gain and some possible enrichment.  (This is btw why no fictional revolution but Heinlein’s ever made the slightest bit of sense to me, and why in A Few Good Men I put the character in a position where he had to act or die, as well as giving those around him the inducement of near-fanatical faith.  All those science fiction novels in which the character decides it’s time to take down the evil overlords are entertaining, but not real.)

The human race – thank heavens, I don’t think enough of us would have survived, otherwise – has a profound tendency to inertia.  Even when their way of life is threatened, the impulse to do nothing and go on sort of as we are, in a decaying orbit, overcomes the desire to take arms against a sea of troubles, And, by opposing, end them? (An attempt that nine out of ten times would be as suicidal as Hamlet was being.)

Even when nations or peoples would have done better to rise up against their wretched leadership, they usually prefer to go down with their wretched leadership.  Or, to quote a Portuguese proverb “A weak leader makes the whole nation feeble.”

This is because the fat babies win out, and the fat kittens with pink tummies, and the evenings by the fire, with spouse or friends.

So what kind of revolution goes on forever?  Oh, that is easy: a false one.  One that doesn’t exact its price in fighting or enact its cost in lives – at least not directly.

Revolution is a term often associated with the social changes of the last fifty years: sexual revolution, cultural revolution, a revolution in feeling.  Revolution, revolution, revolution.

So many revolutions, so many times the world turned upside down, we should all be getting quite dizzy and I for one am profoundly nauseous about now.

It was always a phony revolution.  The people who entrenched themselves in cultural institutions at home and proclaimed these various revolutions were the same people who called their brothers, fighting against the menace of communism “baby killers” – because what they actually meant was that they’d do anything, anything rather than fight for freedom.  “Better red than dead” was very much their motto.  (And why so many went red and never came back, not even when the craven lunacy of the move was made obvious.  Keep this in mind.  It will be important later.)

Had they met with the slightest physical resistance, they would have run home to hide under their blankie with the footprint of the American chicken.  In fact, that ridiculous symbol is the encapsulating of their modus operandi “We’re for peace, man.  Now let us shove you away and take over, or our tantrum will include physical attacks on you and yours.”

Why they didn’t meet with even token non-physical resistance is one of the puzzling things about the whole mess.  Or it should be.  Lately I’ve started suspecting it was a combination of at least three factors.

The first of them was that a lot of our intellectuals had some sympathy with Nazism which they sort of transferred to communism after WWII.  Heinlein thought – and he was a credible witness  – there were enough of these to take over the democratic party (or start the subterranean take over of the democratic party) in the thirties.  The intellectuals he writes for the time sound enough like ours – only less insane – too to make me wonder.  I wonder if the thought of the Frankfurt school had already rotted out intellectual establishment from the inside?

The second factor was that we had come off two world wars and a depression.  The “establishment” was tired.  They wanted their fat babies, now grown, to have a better life than theirs.  They surely didn’t want to start a war right here at home.  After all the kids were the best educated generation EVER in America at least.  For the first time, sons and daughters of farmers had gone to college.  Or at least they’d finished highschool.  They spoke so well. And there were so many of them.

That was the third factor: there were so many of them.  I got a hint of this in reading Heinlein’s juveniles, to which I came in my thirties.  (With rare exceptions, like Have Spacesuit and Between Planets, the juveniles were either not translated into Portuguese, or I didn’t find a copy – Portugal always having worked on print to the net.  Heck, I only knew some of the classics because a friend’s father gave me a box of old books.)  There is in his writing about the future, about children, about young people this suppressed panic that each generation will be larger than the last (silly Heinlein.  Depressing birth rate?  Why, we have socialism for that!) and therefore more powerful.  There is talk of young people in the future demanding stipends for existing (OWSers, he was playing your song!  And if your generation had been as larger as he thought it would be, you might have got it.) There is the certainty that the old ways and the old culture will pass because it will be submerged under an explosion of ever larger younger generations.  If you were middle aged or older, why fight them and end up losing?  Why not just give up your place quietly and be assured a quiet retirement?

So these revolutionaries who took over the commanding heights of culture, did so not just without firing a shot, but without any serious argument.  (Yes, I know, a few of you will bring up riots and rumpus – was it great and glorious fun, dears? – but from what I’ve seen even your police was fighting with hands tied behind their backs.  Shenanigans like Chicago in 68 in other nations in the world would have cost most of the “brave rioters” their lives.  Trust me on this.  I know.  The only real battle was civil rights and that, while taking place at that time was not exactly like the others, since it was a fight against government regulation, not INTRINSICALLY against the rules of culture or tradition, and since the seeds for it were already in our constitution.  Which makes it funny that it was the only one strenuously fought.)

To make things worse, they’ve built for themselves this entire mythology, where they fought bravely for their “progress.”  Scratch that myth and what you get is a few shout out matches with parents most of whom weren’t even exactly in disagreement, “but, dear, can you have your sexual revolution between classes and not flunk out so many courses.”

The mythology exists because they took over mass media and education, of course.  This is the same reason that feminists think they got their rights by marching arm in arm and not by technological improvement (had the pill not come about, the “women libbers” would have remained like the suffragettes a small and nutty minority, because biology militated against them.  They were, in fact, in a fight against reality.)  And because of this myth, they think they need to keep marching, arm in arm, or you know, suddenly, they won’t be allowed to have jobs and will be sent to the kitchen barefoot and pregnant.

Nuts.  And actually a good encapsulation of all the “permanent faux revolutions” of the sixties.  Because the myth tells the kiddies that came after them that all these things were done by brave marching and rioting and demonstrations against the old order, and because most kiddies believe them (except for a few terrible outliers who look at primary sources) the kids think that the shouting, the screaming and the finding of “injustices” must continue.

La revolution must go on, after all.

Which is why the feminists most prominently, but truly all the other movements, all out of things to fight – because this was always an easy battle – are now making up enemies.  You know, suggesting that most STEM courses having more women than men means the war is won is betrayal.  Or, as an email younger son got said “we now have 70% of female students in physics.  We’re almost at parity.”

It’s the same everywhere else.  These children are good children, see.  And they grew up with the myth that their parents’ generation won all these victories by being loud, rude and demanding and standing for the oppressed and stuff.  These good children want to make mommy and daddy happy and continue the permanent revolution.  (As opposed to my cohort, to whom both these posers and their far worthier contemporaries who did not get to shape the narrative, were older brothers and sisters.  To us Beardo the Weirdo always deserved an upraised middle finger.  It’s the ultimate irony that after years of calling us materialist and uncaring they’re now trying to co-opt us.)

So the poor good children, (squares, really, who want to impress mommy and daddy) stumble around trying to find injustices ALWAYS in our own society.  (For one, our society is the only thing they know, poor ignorant brats.  For another, well, mommy and daddy fought against injustice here, right?  Amerikkka and all that.)  Which is why they end up in such amazing acts of resistance as writing poems to muslim mass murderers, instead of the women mutilated by Islamists, or the young gay men hanged from cranes in Iran, or the very real horrible injustices that are not ours, but of those they wish to support and comfort.

They would be ridiculous – they are ridiculous – except that mommy and daddy still command the heights of culture.  (No fools they.  Having taken them, they were in no hurry to move off for the new generation.  Not until their indoctrinated ewe-lambs came of age.)  So these poor deluded idiots are speaking truth to the power of their grandparents and – maybe not so idiots, that’s their goal after all – earning an attaboy from aged-radical mommy and daddy.

Did I mention I’ve got quite nauseous lately?

The problem is that while the culture – the overculture – here protects them from ridicule, they still do harm.  Abroad their ranting and ravings are taken with dead seriousness.

I’m talking even of my relatives in Portugal, who look at the OWSers and think that misery in America must be terrible.  More and more they make me cackle in an unbecoming manner on the phone, as I tell them that armies of less than sane homeless and shiftless ne’er do wells were hired for this.  They think I’m the crazy one when I tell them the demonstration in our town was about half old CPA members with their hammers, sickles, walkers and oxygen tanks, and about half well-to-do rich kids being as nasty as they wanna be.

Now, if the Portuguese who ware (waggles hand) mostly Western and mostly at least second world, believe this stuff, imagine what it looks like amid the people in Egypt or Saudi Arabia, or Syria, seeing this on TV or reading these squares’ drooling efforts to please mom and daddy.

They will believe that our system is so bad our own kids hate it.  They will then believe only their crazy-crackers religion can make the world good (because hey, at least their kids don’t hate their system.  And if they did, they’d button their lip or be stoned.  And not the way our kids are.)  They must be right.  Look, even the children of the great Satan speak in their defense.  This must be a miracle…

I’ll confess I feel vaguely sorry for the babies of the permanent revolution (particularly those now nearing fifty, because after all, some of the echo boomers are older than I.)  I feel sick to my stomach at the people who, controlling information and news, business and politics, keep claiming they’re fighting against “the man.”

But the sad truth is both of these are endangering the rest of us.

A dose of reality must be administered, as well as a dose of hearty laughter.

All we have to do this is our keyboards, but fortunately we no longer need to get our words past the gatekeepers.

So, here’s your keyboard.  Forward, type.  It’s time to end the senseless permanent phony revolution.

And THAT will be a real revolution.

*First an unrelated bit of business.  The subscriber space has been updated with new content such as it is.*

Yesterday I lost control.  Those who read my rants in the past might think this is a common occurrence.  After all you’re visiting the blog of someone who wrote an entire book because she was furious.

Actually, though I can get very, very angry, I don’t normally lose control.  Like other people who berserk, I learned early it is easier to keep tight control and make yourself ill than to lose control and have to glue back everything you broke.

The precipitating incident was neither that unusual nor that unexpected – it was simply when it came, both in the sense that it came after the Card attempted crucifixion and that it hit me after a weekend when I had run myself exhausted.

What happened was this, and while I’m not naming names, the names are named in the comment section of “Being Normal” and also in my FB diner, if you read the comment thread (I’m not naming names because I’m mid novel and do not have time to deal with the mess on this blog for the next month): the wife of one of my colleagues – one of the most recognizable names in this field – and herself a performer, chose to write a poem honoring the surviving Boston bomber, or at least glorifying him as a poor victim.

Is the young man – only a year older than my younger son, heaven help us – a victim?  Undoubtedly.  But not our victim.  He’s a victim of his upbringing and his poisonous beliefs.  To the extent the US influenced those it was with the left-America-hate, against which immigrants have less defense than those born here, and which the writer of the poem would heartily endorse.

To the extent those terrorists were homegrown it was because their family didn’t come over at the bottom, with dreams of making it in America.  Those two kids were not working night shifts to pay for community college.  They were wealthy, well-heeled and attended the best colleges: where they were told they were Victims and America something to hate.

This woman clearly agrees that they’re long-suffering victims, more pitiable than the innocents they killed.

Right now you’re going “So?”

In fact two of my Baen colleagues told me just that – one giving me the (possibly justifiable, since by then I was too angry to explain myself) “What is this to us?” answer, and the other lecturing me on how the field is full of such leftists and she, herself, still being cloaked, has witnessed instances of writers being kept back/snubbed by leftist colleagues, because they failed to pass a loyalty test.  That she thought this was news to me, when I was cloaked for ten years and when I’m more sensitive to Marxism than a cat to the smell of poo was almost tear-inducing.

But both reactions helped me home in on why, having read that “poem”, I went from zero to my muscles knotted with fury instantly.

First, let me go over the thesis to my post last week about “Being normal.”  Humans are social animals.  Whether you believe we were created or “just growed” the basis upon which we are built is that of a social ape.  That means most individuals, confronted with a group, will strive mightily to be normal.

This is the power that drove the melting pot.  This is what made blended societies (America is not the only.  I come from a country colonized by Romans, Greeks, Celts, Swabians, Vandals (you knew that) and Visigoths (though those were further South) and the North of which was a target of French crusaders and later the place where Englishmen sent their ne’er do well sons, before they had an empire.) work.

People tend towards the perceived median of their society.  The process of dropping someone in a new society and watching them integrate has a name: Acculturation.  This is where you drop your former culture and adopt the new one.

As someone who has gone through this – and then ran screaming and adopted what my new one should be – let me assure you humans have exquisitely fine-tuned sensors for what models to adopt, what postures will be rewarded, what will be punished.

It’s not a moral judgment, though you CAN apply morals and thoughts to it, which is why I’m not an extreme-left Latino-victimhood college professor, though that would be the most highly rewarded.  (Most people don’t, though.  Because we’re CLEVER monkeys we go with what’s most highly rewarded.)

Weirdly I’m not talking about the bombers, themselves, though I’d warrant a similar process went on there.  I’m talking about us: about America and specifically about any “artistic field” including my own, though I get a little squeamish when people tell me we’re “artists.”  I aspire to craftswoman.

I’m not stupid, though I can play dumb on TV.

Even before I tried to be published; before I attended my first convention and became aware of the politics in the field and among writers, I was aware of the … ah… hierarchy.  The hierarchy, denoted by those who got the big push (ie were on every shelf, were talked about and got awards) was as in every intellectual profession “the more left the better.”

There was little room to be mistaken. The stories talked about at this time, in the waning years of the cold war, were always the ones where somehow the USSR was better than us and won.

I decided early on I couldn’t go all the way in acculturating to the field.  I had seen too much of communists gone wild, and I KNEW history and how much wilder they could go.  After all, one must be able to look at oneself in the mirror in the morning.

But most people didn’t have my experiences or my internal stops.  Most people acculturated, either to enter the field (or before – those who came from excellent colleges) or afterwards.

The problem is this: any isolated group – and writers of science fiction and fantasy are isolated in their own way and by their own peculiarities – will go more and more extreme, because the people who acculturate, want to show how they are “more authentic” than the people already there.

Since the field of competition in sf/f was “weird leftism” (and I mean that.  We’re not talking the leftism of Card or Robert A. Heinlein who, yes, was a leftist most of his life.) that’s what started going more and more extreme over the last thirty years, PARTICULARLY since the fall of the USSR.

No longer having a “great champion” to lionize, they invented causes: feminism, western imperialism, etc etc etc.  They convinced themselves America was the worst possible country ever.  (Mostly because they’re either spectacularly ignorant of the history of all other countries, or they choose to see only the good parts.) They postured as more sensitive, more feeling, more—

Which leads us to where we are today.

And the reason that poem drove me over the edge was the full realization of where we are today.

Orson Scott Card was near-crucified for expressing an opinion one would EXPECT from someone with his religious beliefs.  (I disagree with his opinion but while religious I’m very odd.  Also, my religion is not his.) HOWEVER it is not only permissible, it is ENCOURAGED to publish a poem empathizing with a mass murderer, who murdered in the name of a religion that HANGS gay people, mutilates women, and aims at world-wide dominance.

Wait, what?

But see, the second religion a) has been identified as “of little brown people” which is why we keep getting told being anti-Islam is “racist” – even though most of them look about as dark as I am.  b) it aims to destroy America, and so it must be good, right?

(And before you tell me the repulsive terrorist-glorifying poem was written by one of my colleague’s wife, not himself.  Yes.  Indeed.  However, DO rest assured that in this field we have to watch what our spouses do too – or we had to.  I frankly can go indie and my give-a-d*mn is broken. – Imagine as a thought experiment that my husband wrote a poem about the Koch brothers, sweet Libertarian bachelors who have not in fact ever killed anyone.  How long do you imagine it would take before ANYONE refused to talk to me at conventions?)

So this is the way things are.  Why would they upset me, if I’ve always known they’re that way?

Because I suddenly realized, with a swimming sense of nausea and shame that this is as much our fault as theirs.

ANY field that’s isolated will tend more and more extreme.  The attitudes rewarded will go further and further off kilter.

In our field, they’re not isolated, but those of us among them keep very, very quiet.  We don’t name and shame.  We certainly don’t SHAME.  We do what my colleagues did yesterday, and shrug and go “This is normal for them.”  We even admire the more talented of them, despite their moral aberrations.

This is because for most of us politics is not religion.  We don’t punish apostates.  Instead, we are willing to go “Oh, yes, that’s what he was taught.  But he’s still a superb artist.”

The reverse is not true.  On the other side politics is religion.  Have the wrong opinions and you’ll “never work in this town again.”

The end result is that “the right” in the field (in almost any entertainment field) and by “right” here I mean even squishy libertarians like myself, moderates itself.  I can’t picture in any way shape or form anyone writing a poem glorifying someone who took a gun to IRS agents, say.  I certainly can’t imagining them thinking it would further their career, or make them “hip.”

But the left has no such checks.  They’ve long ago passed the boundaries of what is normal outside the field.  The all-scoundrel-males, all-saintly-abused-females-all-the-time crashed print runs enough.  Now we’re subsisting on a tenth of what our precursors sold.

And yet, none of us stands up in front of the crazy train and screams “you’re going too far and the bridge is out ahead.”

So they try to tune to the group, and they don’t know that the group is now an inch from a yawning chasm.

Think about it: in my professional group, in MOST artistic professions, the “normal” reaction (and yes, I’ve seen it from colleagues who didn’t write posts) to a heinous attack that kills innocents is to feel sorry for the criminal.

We should have stood up and shouted “fire” in this theater long ago.  Because there is a fire and it is threatening not just to disconnect our field from the rest of the country, but to set the country against itself and, ultimately, cost us our lives.

But, you’ll say, if we so much as say “boo” to them, they start a storm of poo flinging.  They accuse us of horrible crimes.  Some of it will stick because people don’t investigate.

Do you think I don’t know that?  Note I’m not naming names IN THE POST because I have a job and don’t have time to deal with this.  And they would surely start a witch hunt.

I’ve watched demonize Heinlein with a constant shrieking of “Sexist, racist, homophobe” even though for his time and place, Heinlein was almost pathologically NONE of those.

We cut them slack, we admire them where they’re right, we do not withhold anything due to their opinions, we do not accuse them of preposterous crimes.

Even the poor woman who wrote the poor poem (well, it is) is PROBABLY not a bad person.  She is, however, a Liberal Arts graduate, and clearly she was a good student.  And there are no cries to tell her “Bridge out ahead” – not in her circles.  She actually can write this, with no one frowning at it, and THINK she’s “speaking truth to power.”  (Because the side that has no say in any artistic field is the power, doncha know?)

And since yesterday I’ve been afflicted by a sense of guilt.  Because we should have screamed long ago.  Our forebears in the field should have screamed before I was even out of elementary.  They didn’t.

Now what?  I’m no more willing to be a martyr than the rest of you.  Some of the poo will stick, and even indie, I have to sell to the public.

I don’t think any of us can in conscience do to them what they do to us.  Politics is not religion with us.  We see the good in them despite the loony beliefs.

So, what?  I don’t know.

This wouldn’t bother me as much if I weren’t religious and if I didn’t believe in a terrible day of judgment when my soul will be weighed against what I’ve done, and what I’ve failed to do.

Or maybe I would.  A friend commented about how eventually, the cold civil war will turn hot, because we can’t talk to them anymore.  And then I was reminded of this passage, from Starship Troopers on house breaking a puppy:

“Suppose you merely scolded your puppy, never punished him, let him go on making messes in the house… and occasionally locked him up in an outbuilding, but soon let him back in the house with a warning not to do it again.  Then one day you notice that he is now a grown dog and still not housebroken – whereupon you whip out a gun and shoot him dead….”

Our colleagues are not dogs.  But like dogs, they try to fit in the pack.  And in many ways we’ve been treating them as the stupid dog owner above treated his puppy.  “They’re just—“ this or that.  “It’s best to ignore their fits.”

Which means the group, as a whole is running around making a mess out of the culture.  Are vague threats to take up arms the right response?  Shouldn’t we try a rolled up newspaper first?

But, you say “poo flinging!”  Yep, indubitably.

And I – even I, even with indie – don’t have time for it.  But it might behoove us to start thinking of making time, and of making fun of the more ridiculous bits of their madness.

Because otherwise it will just get madder.   And because a culture that lionizes those who want to kill it is not long for this world.

UPDATE: BTW, when you’ve managed to get to both Dave Freer and I (given we’re the sort of bums who JUST want to tell fun stories and make a decent, non-spectacular living) you’re burning your good will with the general public.   And while this is not about the poem, it strikes close.

We had a friend from out of town visiting this weekend, which means we might as well have taken the weekend and flushed it whole.  Plus, I have page proofs for Noah’s boy which must get done today and tomorrow.

So I’ve been sitting here, squinting at the screen, trying to decide whether or not I have enough brain to write a coherent post and have realized I don’t.

Which means you’re getting brain sweepings…

First, I found a bunch of Nero Wolfe radio plays from the thirties in Audible, at three for one, and bought them out of curiosity.  If you guys remember I grew up without TV, you should also guess that I grew up with radio plays.  Radios were central in the Portuguese household at the time and, depending on what station you liked, at certain hours you could get everything from historical to great literature, to soap operas.  (One of my clearer memories is of being at the beach around lunch time.  You guys must understand that in Portugal the beach administration rents little tents (more like cabins with cloth sides) and because of the culture, moms lug hot meals to the beach and there’s these foldable tables that come with the tents.  Around lunch time all the kids got called in to come and eat a proper lunch.  (To be clear, we usually spent a month at the beach every summer.  It was considered the minimum necessary for proper health.  My dad didn’t have enough vacation, so he’d join us at lunch and then at the end of the afternoon, before we packed up and took the bus back home.  He and I usually took a long walk before that happened.) Anyway, walking in the little “alleys” between the backs of the tents, you’d hear all the different soaps, because women brought their transistor radios to the beach, and usually spent the hottest part of the day inside the tent, listening to the soaps and crocheting.)

Mom’s favorite channel ran to “boring guy lecturing on mythology or history” but it had some mystery radio plays and radio plays of “important books.”  I never told her this particular serial loosely based on the Crimean war was a soap opera in ALL but name.  She’d have been upset.

So, out of nostalgia, I thought “oh, that would be fun” and bought the Nero Wolfe radio plays.  Six of them.

I don’t think I’ll be listening to them again.  I have NO idea who wrote them.  I suspect Rex Stout did at least a first draft, but there’s a weird effect – perhaps something cultural I’m not quite getting? – in which Wolfe’s curmudgeon and sly attitude in the books becomes “Downright mean” in the radio plays.  He’s forever reminding Archie that he’s subordinate and gloating.  It’s disturbing.

On top of that, each little play ends with Wolfe laughing.  It’s the type of laughter we now associate with psychopaths.  We won’t go into the fact that the voice actor, named as if a good deal, sounds a few screws short of a full frame.

I do wonder how this played/was perceived at the time.  Could it have been well received if people perceived voice/mannerisms the way I do?  Or was it well received because “no alternative and it’s just those weirdos” as we put up with a lot of TV/movies in the nineties?

Also this week, had a discussion with a reviewer about why most Urban Fantasy leaves me cold, and I’ve come to the conclusion it’s not the excess sex in most of them (except in romance, sex qua written sex doesn’t bother me, and in romance it ONLY bothers me when it’s the ONLY plot.  You think I’m joking – a romance skimmed recently starts with guy and gal who just met, in bed after a night together.  It’s so wonderful they’re scared and go off and sleep with all sorts of other people, separately and severally, before in the end realizing they were always meant for each other.  It didn’t offend me, it just left me cold.  “Emotional development failed to materialize and I iz disappoint.”) It’s the fact that sex is used to substitute for other tension.  Since written sex is something I can take or leave, I usually get bored because the other tension isn’t there.  And now you know why I held out on Kyrie and Tom so long.  I wanted to make sure the relationship stood on other grounds, so the series had a good foundation.

Because of crazy weekend – see above – I have failed to actually do most of the stuff that DOES need done this weekend like hopefully publish Spinning.  I’m going to try to make up for it as soon as I’ve had enough caffeine.

And then I’ll update the subscriber space.  I’m still debating what to do for subscriber’s t-shirts.  I think either the Muir portrait or a choice of the others now being uploaded onto zazzle.  (Sometime along the line here I also need to find an afternoon to update/fix my web page.  Right now it’s like a plotted novel.  It’s all in my head, but none of it exists in physical space.)

The Muir portrait is below. The background is that the year before Robert drew a portrait of me as Super Writer.  Muir found it and my pictures, and drew a more lively one.  So, there is is.

And now I’m going in search of caffeinated beverage (not picky.  Tea, coffee or diet coke will do) and then I’m going to shower and go for a walk, so maybe I can work today ;)

I’ve written before on the state of racism in America saying that of course it exists – it will exist so long as America is populated by human beings – but it’s not racism as defined by law (or news, or entertainment) nor even some kind of thing that can be identified and mitigated by law and/or social processes.  It is also, at any level it can be defined, less than in practically any other country.  (At least any country I’ve lived in/visited/have friends from – which covers most of the world.)

“Racism” in the sense of “he who doesn’t look like us will be kept out/killed/denied” is part of the makeup of the human brain.  It just is.  It is part of the brains of our fellow great apes, too.  And most other mammals.

Experiments have been made with not only getting a mother (of whatever species) to accept offspring of another species, but also with changing one of her own cubs – scent or look – to see if it’s still recognized.  Most of these experiments end with the death of the cub.

It’s actually easier to take a cub of another species, rub the other cub’s scent on it and get the mother to adopt it (this produces some completely insane squirrels-raised-by-cats.  Look it up if you have an hour to spare) than to remove the identifying characteristics and get the mother’s own cub to be accepted.

It is of course a necessary mechanism.  Well, think about it.  Posit gradual enough evolution from our pre-human ancestors that the mothers didn’t kill the babies.  It still needs to be that our ancestors preferred each other (possibly their siblings) for a good long time, or speciation would never have happened.  And given our species proven ability to screw anything that moves, what is amazing is that we DID speciate.  The preference was marked enough for us to leave the old species behind.

The preference, of course, must have been for “more like us than not in a pinch” too, considering the humanoid species they keep finding in our ancestry.  (Actually my theory on the extinction of all these other human species is not one of the popular ones, like “we killed them” or “we ate them” [though doubtless there were instances of both.  There are instances of both within our own species and not that long ago.]  I think we genetically overwhelmed them.  I think for whatever reason we were more fertile [perhaps the having lost estrus or season] an idea immortalized in our legends, of other human species with trouble reproducing, and we just had more kiddies than they did, intermarried, had kids who looked more like us, and they sort of disappeared.  Only they’re still there in our  genetics.)  And of course at times and in certain places things like mountain ranges might have intervened to isolate our ancestors from the parent species.

But given how many human species emerged it can’t ALL have been great floods and sudden mountain range (!).  It MUST have been preference for “we like those like us more than those others.”

That seems to remain, by and large.  People pick companions who are more like them than not.  How many of us prefer to associate with other Odds on line, (even when we fight) than to hang out with our perfectly normal (and often polite) neighbors?

And that’s where the law and social correctives go wrong.  Because “racism” is both much “finer” than just skin-color, slicing a dozen different ways, and far less defined.  First, who do you think my kids have more in common with?  A geeky, black science fiction fan, or a white kid who was raised on a steady diet of TV and reality shows?  In that context “skin color” is the last thing on their minds and it counts for absolutely nothing.  (And btw, both of them of in circumstances where those were their choices not only formed lasting friendships with kids of other “races” but – and this is important – completely failed to see the race, to the extent of giving me descriptions of how to find this kid in a crowd to give them a message which included “He’s tall, and he’s wearing a red jacket.  I think his backpack is blue” but COMPLETELY ignored “this is one of the five black kids in the school.”  (No, it was not self-consciousness.  Not in family.  They just honestly completely forgot that part.  When I said “Oh, for the love of Bob, why didn’t you…” the answer was “Oh.  Duh.  I didn’t remember.”  — interestingly my husband pulled a similar one on me with someone who worked for him.  I was expecting a tall blond guy, because of his name.  Never mind.)

Second, the “racist” – let’s call it “exclusionary” impulse just means “if you stick out, we’ll exclude you.”  It could be you’re the only red head in a room full of brunettes.  But actually at least in America your exterior characteristics are likely to matter for far less than your internal characteristics or your behavior.  You’re far more likely to be shunned if you’re the guy who comes in for a baseball game wearing a tuxedo or who wears a t-shirt to a formal (though these days people will try to pretend they’re not shunning you in the latter case because you’re being “natural” and “unstudied” and those are supposed to be god things.  Never mind.  Talk for another time.)

In fairly uniform countries, if you stick out, you get it.  I’m not sure how much of my sense of discomfort in Portugal came from the fact I was 5’7” when I finished growing (I’m now 5’5” due mostly to issues during first pregnancy.  Long story) and that my hair was that shade of very dark red that lit up as flame in the sun, (now I’ll figure out what color it is if Clairol factories are ever shut down by government order.  I think it’s mostly white and has been since my twenties) but looked brown-black indoors.  People routinely assumed I was a tourist and addressed me in other languages, and though I was (till aforementioned first pregnancy and six months bed rest from which my figure never recovered) a size seven, I grew up with nicknames like “whale” and “mastodon”

Now, if you look at my school pictures, you’d think I look exactly (well, close enough that in the US it would be considered “family resemblance”) like my classmates, only in a bigger scale.  But to them I was definitely “weird” and “strange” enough in appearance for it to matter.  (My husband about choked when someone referred to me in public over there as “blondie” – I had to explain to him that “blond” is anything short of very dark brown or black.)

Does this account for my growing up weird?  Maybe.  I’ve looked at my ancestors, even the ones who presented physically normal and I’m not convinced.  A strong streak of “You may go to h*ll, I’m going Odd” seems to run through.  OTOH it certainly worked to convince me that I could never fit in, so why try?

This too is a form of racism that can neither be identified nor ameliorated by law.  I mean, okay, I can see our bureaucracy TRY “If someone is more than two inches above median and more than two shades lighter/darker than the group, he or she must…”  I can see them try because these are people who try to regulate how much salt you can eat.  I can also see them try because if we let them they would have paperclip inspectors, making sure the paperclips on every desk were properly stored.  Let’s face it – they don’t trust us to cross the street alone.

On the other hand it CAN’T be done.

And I’m not even going to say that there was never a racism problem in America – of course there is/was/would be.  “Racism” defined as the exclusionary impulse responds to “Shared background” as much as to “sufficiently big external characteristic” and when groups had been kept legally separate (first by slavery, then by legal separation laws) they wouldn’t have much in common and also the appearance would be a novelty.

So I can totally see where the government thought it had a reason to step in.  (Usually same reason as always – having caused the problem, they now claimed they had to step in to solve it.)  The problem was their assuming the problem would persist forever and ever and that they had to step in forever, because left to their own devices, people would care more about ONE characteristic – skin color – than about shared background or interests, or even proximity.

This is puzzling because at the same time they are creating quasi-racial groups out of cultures.  I don’t know who it was who said that if Irish and Italians had been treated as we’re treating those of Latin origin, not only would they never have assimilated but their criminality and other dysfunction would be through the roof.  They were, nonetheless, right.

I say this as someone who grew up thinking of herself as white (with whatever fell in the pot along the way) and who, upon entering this country found out she was “Latina” which some people seem to think is a separate race. (Or just confuse race with culture.  To the extent that Europeans used to talk of the French race or the Spanish Race, this has been going on a long time.)

Even before I was officially “Latina”, due to the fact that most people think that Portugal is somewhere in South America, I found myself being treated weirdly.  Complete strangers told me I’d come here to avoid starving (!  Mom would have been offended.  There were four in the family.  She always cooked for fifteen.  Honestly if I hadn’t made untoward efforts to slim, I’d have been 300 lbs by 12.)  Other complete strangers told me I came here so I could be liberated and not have to obey men in everything (I’d have liked to introduce these darlings to mom or grandma.)  Others told me my culture was of course more emotive/fun/colorful/just/interesting/diverse (!) in touch with nature (!!!!!) or rich (?????) than American culture.

I have said before that my first publishing house thought the interesting bit about me was not that I could write stories, but that I was born in Portugal and was “Latina” – hence the exhortation (yes, I spell extortion funny) to write my biography when I was less than forty (that it was assumed I was oppressed goes without saying, right?)

And that’s what you have to look at to figure out “white privilege” to the extent it exists.  If someone else named Sarah Hoyt (who didn’t go to cons, and get asked about how she got to have such a name/accent or) someone who grew up here, and possibly was born here, wrote science fiction, what would you care about?  How good the science fiction was, right?  Actually for this lot, that’s what you care about anyway.

BUT not to people who took the “we must always be inclusive” and “culture is race” thing to heart.  To them the most important thing about me is ALWAYS that I was born abroad/have an accent (yes, I know, but when I came through you HAD to go to cons.  It’s when I made most of my sales for anthologies, and some books, for the upcoming year.  Certainly where I made most of my “for hire” sales.)

It took me flat nothing to realize that because I was female, had a degree in literature, spoke with an accent and came from a Latin country not only were certain political and social views EXPECTED from me but I was supposed to have been oppressed…  And those expectations WERE oppression.  If I tried to be just myself, I’d get smacked in line or treated like that bird who leaves the flock.

Which brings us to the irony of white privilege in the US today.  The misnamed “White Privilege” which could simply be called “Normal Privilege” for whatever is normal for that area, is the ability to not have expectations and ideas pushed on you.  (The reason I say this is “normal privilege” is that you can be lily white, but if you’re a Southerner in NYC, you too will find that they’re trying very hard to put you in a specific box.)

No one who hasn’t experienced the attempt to make you be what other people THINK you are, can know how bothersome it is.  Of course the only people who’ve never experienced this are people in the least diverse (and culled to be that way) environment in the world: people who run in North Eastern intellectual circles.  The rest of you have probably at least experienced this briefly.

In the end you’re left with either living up (down) to the stereotype because it’s less trouble than fighting it and/or going completely against it, and having people resent it.  It takes a lot more effort, if you’ve been classed as a stereotyped category to be yourself, than it does if you’re not put in a category to begin with.

And again that’s the ironical part. The government’s definition of “protected race/culture” fixating on certain (largely irrelevant) characteristics and the armies of political correctness (like the armies of darkness, but more evil) led by the mass entertainment have created both classes of people who feel aggrieved and set aside (without realizing what aggrieves them and sets them aside is large the weird expression to being afraid of offending them or setting them aside) and an untold, never before found privilege: the ability to move through life with a minimum of stereotypes attached.

I sometimes envy those people greatly.  But then I realize that NO ONE is ever free of expectations.  (Most people just don’t have the honor of having them governmentally pre-defined.)  My small, youthful-looking husband, for instance, is not expected to have vast knowledge and experience in his field.

But I do resent the government’s attempt to solve a problem that no longer exists in the shape they think it does creating a bigger and odder problem.  I just hope they don’t try to solve this one too.  We all know how that would end up.