Category: Uncategorized

One line from the letter of ideas Heinlein sent to Sturgeon when Sturgeon was blocked keeps coming to me.  In discussing the ability to send someone into the past to live in the brain of a citizen of the time he says something about the future being so horrible that “even a time such as this” would be better.

The horrible time Heinlein was referring to was 1962, largely before our institutions fell apart, and (off the top of my head, you guys know I don’t have time to research this every day, and the year is in fact the year I was born) not during any recession or severe economic downturn.  The moon program was going on, Europe was recovering from WWII and even in tiny and (to be fair) repressively governed Portugal, things were getting better.  They were certainly massively better than when mom was born in 1934, or when dad was born in 1931.

It brought to my mind something someone – was it RES? – said in the comments, yesterday: that even were our “experts” not maliciously misseducated in their time, and pumped with the wrong “theory of everything” their learning would now be out of date.

This is something that even the authors of the golden age, when there were benevolent governments running everything in their futures, never took into account.  It is all the more extraordinary they didn’t, because they, themselves, had grown up in a time of massive change (as did I.)

As a kid it was quite normal for me to ask my parents who to do something and be told “I have no idea.  We didn’t have that in my day.”  These were things like what type of bus pass to buy to go to school downtown.  Dad had walked to school.  Mom had to make decisions her mom had never made, too, like “At what age will my daughter be allowed to cook on the gas stove?”  Her family had only a wooden open fire and it had been different.  So I suppose my childhood was closest to those of authors here growing up in the thirties and forties.  SURELY they knew that people’s knowledge became outdated fast.

But I don’t think they did.  Even as they were positing moon colonies by the seventies, they were underestimating what that rate of change would do to society.  There was also this assumption that “at some point society has changed enough.”  Even in the Heinlein juveniles, you got this feeling that despite all the rate of change, etc. society was fundamentally stable.  The kids didn’t run up against things the parents had no clue of, etc.

There was sort of an underlying assumption we’d find the “right” theory: of energy, of society, of manufacturing, of moon rockets.  And then everything would run on rails, provided you learned the “right” way to do it.

Perhaps this was because so many of them were engineers and there are “right techniques” to assemble things.

Anyway, I’m not pounding on golden age writers.  Wish we had many more of them today.  What came after was the equal and opposite assumption – that everything would fall apart and we’d never put society-dumpty together again.

What I meant to say, though, is that, ultimately, that is the problem with planned societies.  Even in a relatively low-change society, it changes too much for anyone to be able to learn something and still be the same way 40 years later.  Culturally Portugal was in slow change mode when I was little, but to ask mom how to write a business letter was stupid – she used archaic language and forms no one used anymore.

We get this impression that there was a time when there was no change – the dark ages, or whatever – but it is not true.  It seems like that from above, but if you zero in on a decade or a century you see change almost as fast as ours, just in different areas.

Meanwhile, even supposing there WAS no change, it would be almost impossible for statesmen to handle situations in the full knowledge of how it compares to the past and what to do about it.

Look, our president has elicited giggles on the right (perhaps on the left too – but possibly not.  They don’t laugh much) because he keeps claiming no president EVAH has faced as serious a situation as he faces now.

I don’t care how much you devalue a Harvard degree, it is impossible the man doesn’t know about presidents during the Great Wars.  It’s physically impossible too he doesn’t realize what Lincoln faced.

No, what is at work here is a human thing – yes, I know.  I keep hoping they find the birth certificate for Xerpes too – in that past perils seem in retrospect mild and almost ridiculous.

This is because humans perceive the past as a story.  No matter how exciting the story, if you know the ending, it seems less riveting/extreme/dangerous.  (Show of hands here – how many people reading a thriller get to the point the tension is unbearable and break its back by looking at the ending?)  And we know the ending of the past.

It’s like when we were moving from North to South Carolina and both cars broke down by the side of the road, in the middle of the night, filled with our possessions.  At the time, this was an awful situation (and it tells you something I don’t remember how we got out of it) but a month later we could tell it to friends as a joke.

Both Heinlein’s comment, and the fact I’m reading a lot of Nero Wolfe short stories (I don’t have time to get immersed in something longer) and keep coming across things about how “it’s the worst times, ever” and “will we ever survive this?” are giving me that sense.

While people are living things they look really scary, but in the history books they become forgone conclusions.

It’s easier for politicians now to discount World War II as something of course we were going to win, but it looked scary enough at the time (particularly the time before WWII when things were closing in and looking darker “the lights are going out all over Europe”) for people to put off or give up on having kids, and for many people to think it was the most horrible time ever.

It’s also easy in retrospect to say “of course I’d have been on the right side.” But I’ll note a lot of the young people saying “of course I’d have opposed the Nazis” are falling for a new version of the old lie.  They just got out of the stories of the past that they should oppose people who goosestep and are racist.  So, as long as the new evil avoids those tells, they’ll get them like they got their great grandparents.  It’s all about youth and the bright new future and the men who’ll be in charge of everything: the best and the brightest.

It can’t be said often enough that even the best and the brightest get old, and their knowledge becomes outdated.  Even the best and the brightest have psychological quirks.  I don’t care if you were raised inside a cotton ball, you don’t get to be an adult without psychological bruises.  And we all have ways of hiding or pouring balm on those bruises.  And even the best and the brightest are human, which means – barring time travel, and even then – that for them the past is a story, and what they’re facing is “completely different” because they’re in it.

Which is why, government being a necessary evil (and I’m not going to argue this, not even if Josh K. should come back.  If the entire world were the US it would be debatable.  The entire world is not and it isn’t) we  should keep it as decentralized as possible, and in the hands of as many people as possible.  We should also rediscover that whole checks and balances thing.  Because humans are fallible, become outdated, and are… well… human.

It is also why we shouldn’t look at our present difficulties and imagine it’s the end of the world or that freedom and prosperity won’t win the day.  There have been worse pinches: the black plague comes to mind, but I’m fairly sure things looked as black or blacker at various points in the cold war.

Yeah, we’re in a pinch.  Don’t assume we’ll win and stop fighting.  But I doubt very much our predicament is the worst ever.  It’s just that we don’t know the book has a happy ending.  But it might have.  And we can work to make it so.

Be not afraid!

Surprisingly, this post is not about detergent. *  It is also not about marital fidelity of lack thereof.

It is about what I believe the Chinese would call “the will of heaven,” though I confess I’m out of my specialty and going on what I’ve heard from more knowledgeable people.

From what I understand the Chinese have sort of a belief in the tides of history or what is “intended” – sort of a cosmic fate pulling All Under Heaven in one direction or another.  When a regime ceases working, they discern it in current events.  This is sort of like reading the future in animal entrails only, in China’s case, the entrails are more likely to be human and far more bloody.  If the regime in power (whatever that is) is deemed to have lost the will of heaven, they set about replacing it.

To an extent this makes them more flexible, I think, and might have allowed their monstrous communist regime to turn into a monstrous fascist regime, which for all its horrors (and it is horrible) provides a better life for its citizens than the hot mess that Mao left them ever could and also manages to be less murderous (which in this case is sort of like being less evil than Satan – you can still be Stalin and be less evil than Satan — but never mind.)  None of the other communist regimes has managed it, and the reason China did it might have been because Communism was viewed as the will of heaven and now it isn’t.

All communist systems morph – usually into  a sort of Marx-right (as opposed to divine right) monarchy where a family inherits in succession and has all the privileges of aristocrats, but communism is paid lip service.  But China is the only one that has morphed into a – marginally.  I’m not defending it – more functional regime.

On the other hand, I’m so far out of my depth about China that if this were a matter of water, I’d be floating in the Atlantic holding on to a rubber ducky.

However, I’m fairly sure I’m right on the Will of Heaven and the way their concept of what is proper and just changes – not relating to some overarching philosophy, but to what they think is “intended” for that time and place.

Don’t laugh.  We’re much the same.

As we start engaging into war against the currently prevalent culture – speaking truth to pow’ah that’s right, what’s up? – it helps to know how it got there.

Part of it is that the Chinese are right, of course.  Or at least they’re right in the way their traditions tend to be right – there is a core of something there, but it’s been distorted by centuries of being treated as a shibboleth rather than a conclusion arrived at after observation.

When we look around an wonder how “progressives” who want to take us back to the 30s gained all ascendance in every position of influence, from news to government, we must remember what it was like when this climb started, and how much of it was viewed as “the will of heaven.”

Part of it is that the truth buried at the back it: the system of government, the system of picking the “elite” in any position of influence is subjugated to the spirit of the time – that is to the way people live and how technology shapes those lives.

One of the funnier beliefs of feminists is that when humans were nomadic, before evil agriculture and civilization, we were both matriarchal and sort of “fluffy anarchist” where everything was owned in common and there was no real “government” – the matriarchy being religious and “inspirational leader” in nature.

The reason this is hilarious is that from what we can tell not just from archeology but from living populations of hunter-gatherers, the nomadic tribes were the epitome of strong man government.  You had to be strong, because nomadic cultures raid more or less constantly.  Like street gangs, not only do they have autocratic leaders, but autocratic leaders with no limits on their power.  (The origin of the confusion by feminists, is that you can find women buried with all the attributes of a chieftain – hint one of them is a war mace, so much for your peaceful utopia – but you can find that under settled monarchies too.  Sometimes the king dies and his daughter inherits.  How long she reigns depends on her wits, of course.)

Agriculture brought about actual monarchy because the king and the land were a unit (though the land might expand and contract.)  The whole notion of being born somewhere meaning you belonged under the rule of so and so would have seemed odd to nomads (being born from someone meant you belonged to the tribe/family.  Different thing.)  But under monarchy as we came to know it, it was inevitable.

The industrial age devalued land and also made rule by one person incredibly inefficient.  No, wait, it was always inefficient.  It actually made it more efficient, by creating a bookkeeping bureaucracy that allowed government to track individuals and for the rule by one person to intrude into the everyday lives of everyone.

While kings were distant, inefficient, and news reporting sporadic, it was possible for the people to hold on to the idea this man ruled because he was meant to, because G-d had set him there.  But it was impossible for that idea to survive exposure to the king’s blunders, pettiness or ignorance.

And so the modern age brought about the end of the rule of kings.  Those kings who remained no longer ruled.

That age started with the belief in the educated individual, with the limitless possibilities of the individual – education was going to make us all like onto the gods.  Unfortunately between that age and ours, a new technology evolution came about, and therefore a new belief about just and proper government.

This was the age I call “science, yay” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.  Science fueled so many practical improvements in human life that surely the ultimate society run by “scientists” was just around the corner.

The problem is that the average person had absolutely clue zero of what was science and what wasn’t.  So we got sold Marxism as “scientific government.”

But because the industry of the time was centralizing, and so was the media, people got the idea the government was way more efficient than it really was.  (How many people still think FDR got us out of the Depression?  Can we have a show of hands?)  People believed in rule by the “best” educated, the most efficient.  And technology encouraged that.  Everything from manufacturing to the dissemination of knowledge was, by virtue of technology, central.

While centralized government wasn’t any better at running everything than it’s ever been, it was possible to create the image of efficiency and constant progress.  (See FDR myth.)  It might not be doing very well, but people didn’t know that, and enough technological innovation drove the improvement of everyday life that government’s idiocy was less important.

Well, neither our communication nor, coming soon, our manufacture, is centralized.  The shrill tones you hear in the voices of “progressives” who are trying to take us back to the early twentieth century is that they know it as well as you do.

They can’t create an appearance of success, anymore.  And it’s not even here, alone, it’s all over the world.  News leak out.  Even in totalitarian China, cell phones show the difference between truth and Pravda.

All over the world – because this is a global thing, driven by the changing tech – “progressives” are trying for ever more centralized control in everything, including their attempts to legislate new inventions (green technology!) into existence.  And the more they try for control the more it falls apart.

In the era of decentralized everything and a fragmented market, it’s hard for media or entertainment to hold the bully pulpit and truly convince everyone that the men in charge are doing it “scientifically” and “know better.”

The cracks can’t be plastered over.

They’ve lost the will of heaven.

The  change might – will – be rough, and the waters will be mighty tempestuous, but in the end, we win, they lose.

Be not afraid.

*(As one of those side excursions you guys love – or at least I can’t avoid going into this early in the morning and uncaffeinated – we were a Tide family when I was growing up.  Detergents were the hot new tech in household management – most people still boiled their own soap – had door to door salesmen who did demonstrations.  Detergent companies put prizes in their boxes, the sort of thing we associate with cereal here.  Tell a Portuguese person of my generation “Collect them all” and we’ll say “detergent.”  Anyway, I don’t remember any other US company – I remember Umo [pronounced ‘omo] , which was Italian and Extra which might have been Portuguese, but Tide was the only American one, the one my mom glommed onto and defended it with the fervor of the newly converted.  Of course we didn’t know it was American.  We pronounced it Teed.  It says something about the first impressions of childhood lingering that it took me till I was in my third year of English and my mom sent me to get the “teed” to stare at the box and go “TIDE!  It’s English.”)

UPDATE: Now it can be said — Darkship Renegades a Prometheus finalist.  Will lightning strike twice? Competition being stiff, I’m going to be underhanded right here, and promise an even more interesting award ceremony dress, should I win ;)

Years ago, while I was extremely tight on money (how tight?  Tight enough I didn’t know where the mortgage payment was coming from.  Two mortgage payments, since we’d moved [for good and sufficient reasons, among them, because it’s impossible to sell/stage a house infested by cats – but there were others.] and not yet sold the other house.  For those sitting at the edge of your seat, two months worth of mortgages and a little extra materialized in the mail from Jim Baen, and in those two months the other house sold) a friend who is known to sign contracts and then wonder how to fulfill them, called and offered me half of his advance if I wrote a grossly overdue novel for him.

I know a lot of you are going “What?” but this has a long tradition in the field, and at least, unlike Leslie Charteris, this man was known to pay on time.  (He’s also no big name, but about at my level, so chances you’ve heard of him are low.)  I’ve done this type of work for hire (though normally more private, as in “write my mom’s biography for a small printing just the family”) before, when extremely pinched, though thank heavens (I hate it.  What if this is what sells and does so extremely well that I’m forced to watch my work go out into the world and become famous, while I starve) not in the last few years.

So I sighed and asked my friend when, how long and what.  The when was a month, so doable, for something that would never have my name on it and therefore didn’t engage my personal vanity.  The how long was 80k words which was more than doable.  Then we got on the what.  He’d told me it was a thriller, and it turned out it was one of those “in the corridors of power” thrillers, where a Senator is doing something that will “change everything” and another is trying to stop him and…  I no longer remember if organized crime was involved, but you know what I mean.

I stared in bafflement at his outline and then told him that as much as I needed the money, as much as I wanted to help him (he’s a generally nice guy,) I just couldn’t DO it.  Not with the best will in the world.

Explaining why took longer.  See, he knew I could research enough about DC and lobbyists and stuff to see how things worked and make that part convincing (part of the reason he’d come to me.) and the book was non-political (not that he had an inkling of my real politics.  I think.  Who knows.  Re-reading my old stuff it’s amazing how my beliefs came through when I thought I was being vewy vewy quiet.  In some ways I suspect I was like those gay people who come out at thanksgiving, after thirty years of agonizing in the closet and the family goes “oh, we’ve always known.  Pass the potatoes.”) which sounds odd for this type of book, but truly was – the whole thing being legislation for or against some non-existent shadowy threat.  (Non existent in our world.) Or perhaps it was just something wholly uncontroversial (it’s been a long time.  I don’t remember) like legislation that won’t cost any more money, but will make every child better able to learn.  (Funny, I don’t remember its being fantasy.)

At any rate, the problem wasn’t the plot.  I’ve written more unlikely ones, particularly for hire, where people insist on stuff like that.  The problem for me was that I couldn’t believe in what made the novel exciting, for people who read this sort of novel: I couldn’t believe that one legislator really can “change the world” or that one piece of legislation can be that vitally important, long term.  Oh, it can khak things – look at the health care bill and what it will do to unemployment – but make the world better at the stroke of a pen?  Not a chance.  Not immediately, not without resistance and certainly not without unintended consequences.

(Take civil rights legislation, possibly the least controversial legislation in retrospect, which rather than anything it was supposed to do/be seems to be the “law for making our schools work mostly for the benefit of white females – who aren’t even a minority by ANY stretch and who might or might not be – still are, some places – historically repressed, depending on time and place, and due mostly to biology, but none of whose numbers alive today and born and raised in the US – unless very old – have been held in a position of unwilling subjugation EVER [at least not by legislation.  Private relationships are a whole other ballgame].)

So the whole god-like legislator and the opponents who were unredeemably evil and the piece of legislation that was so consarned important left me mehish.  And if I was mehish, then it would come across in the book.  (I don’t know whom he got to do it, or if he did it himself, but I’ve never to my knowledge come across the book anywhere, so maybe he just gave up on it.)

It wasn’t until yesterday, while the guys were arguing computers in the car (it’s almost impossible for me not to tune out after a while) that I found myself touching the “Why.”

The why goes like this – the world is composed of two types of people.  Those who believe there are two types of people, and those who don’t.  No.  Though that’s true, too.  The world is full of an infinite variety of individuals.  BUT when it comes to their attitude to government or even – and this is what I realized yesterday – large, faceless entities like any large-enough company, sect or association, there are two kinds of people: those who believe most individuals, given half a chance, will do what’s best not just for themselves, but morally.  Or at least that most individuals won’t go out of their way to hurt, crush or thwart other human beings to no purpose.  (This might or might not be true, but we’ll go into this later.)  Then there are those who believe that humans, in a group, particularly when given some magical attribute – divine right of kings, election, ivy league degrees – are necessary to watch over normal individuals to make sure they don’t all kill, rend and maim each other on the streets.

If I understood what Older Son told me yesterday, which might or might not be what he actually said, there is a movie coming out whose trailer, at least, implies that if all government services stopped for a day (forget that this isn’t one government in the US but at least three levels and sometimes more) and there were no police, etc, people would be killing each other on the streets and there would be mass mayhem.

If I understood Older Son properly, Hollywood should stick to superhero movies.  It’s clear they have somehow got the very bizarre idea that the only grantor of decent and civilized behavior is the government.  I’ll go into the giant, gaping flaw in this mind set later – but first let me point out if that were the case, if government at whatever level were the only thing keeping any normal average Joe from pulling out a gun and mowing down passerbyes from his car window during his morning commute, we’d already all be dead.

There is no government large and powerful enough – not even China, not even North Korea, where you need a permit to breathe out and they tell you when to breathe in – to keep that sort of mayhem at bay.  There is no police force large enough.  One per citizen wouldn’t be enough, because policemen have to use the bathroom sometimes.  And, as has been mentioned in book after book, if someone is absolutely determined to kill you, you WILL die, no matter how many bodyguards you hire, or whether you immure yourself in a walled compound.

Also – and this is the gaping flaw – if human beings are that inherently out of control and ill-intentioned, then surely either the police and other government services are from Mars (or heaven) or how come there aren’t police to watch over them TOO?  How come they don’t kill everyone in THEIR path?  It can’t be the magical power of groups, because in the end, it’s the individual officer, out there, on the street.

The truth is that most individuals don’t want to go on a rampage.  Most individuals don’t even particularly want to defraud their fellow man.  Morals aside, there is the danger of shredded reputation and/or the problem of having to live with oneself.  My friend Dave Freer assures me that morals – the basis of universal human morals, insofar as those exist “do onto others” if you prefer – are observable and enforced in ape groups.  This makes sense since that sort of give and take is essential to keeping a band functioning and, again, (if it needs saying) humans are social animals, who therefore tend to favor those individuals who work towards group cohesion, and those groups who are most successful at it.  (The reason that Robert and I joke that the gene for “Odds” is not just recessive but possibly anti-survival.  As I said, a tribe of us would starve to death because the moment the chief said “Today we hunt mammoth” half of us would stomp off to look for berries and the other half go set traps for lizards, or become absorbed in learning basket weaving just to “not give him the satisfaction.”)

Most humans don’t want to kill and eat their neighbors (libertarian scenarios of government collapse, always seem to default to this too.)  In fact, most humans if all government were removed tomorrow would go on more or less in the same manner.

Does this mean that government is unnecessary?  Well, no.  There are aberrant, criminal or – if you’re of the soft and fuzzy school – emotionally maimed and hurt individuals out there who will do the worst unless someone watches over them every minute.  They create problems all out of proportion with their number.  The police (and laws, and governments in general) exist on the calculus that if we make it unpleasant/difficult enough for these individuals, they’ll behave, rather than do what they please and hurt others.  (The fact this allows them to stealth and pass on their genes is something else.  I’m not going into Minority Report territory.)  Also, government official or not is necessary to deal with other governments, official or not. The tendency of an hominid group to bash another hominid group on the head to get their territory/dinner/mates remains unabated and ICBMs haven’t made it any less difficult to deal with.

However, the duality remains.  I’m more likely to believe in the lone genius coming up with some way to improve society (say a dramatic new power source) and government trying to thwart him (not out of malice, even, but out of its breaking all regulations) than in a piece of legislation that makes it possible for someone to invent a new power source, by funding his research (removing regulatory burdens is something else.)

I believe government is necessary, but that the balance of power should rest with the individual.  In the end, the individual is the ONLY arbiter of what is best for him.  And even the “necessary and just” functions of government, where say a police officer exists to make sure one of the rare, aberrant individuals doesn’t kill a bunch of others, can be corrupted by giving it too much power.  Because part of what keeps individuals in check is belonging to the group and being afraid of like treatment by their peers, if they go overboard.  When you give someone the power of a faceless group and make them immune from prosecution, you get… well, you get no knock raids to the wrong house that kill a veteran who thought he was defending home and family.

There’s a lot of room there for a lot of play on where the needle goes between “group and government” but the needle is never all on the side of the government – not in a sane society – and removing government will never mean murder, mayhem, cats and dogs sleeping together, the end of the world!

In other words, not only did you build that, you build that every day, day by day, a little at a time.  If the majority of us decided to say “forget that” and give up on civilized behavior, not even the best equipped enforcement in the world could keep us in check.

The weird thing – and I think because of the people attracted to this sort of profession – is that right now both sides of the isle probably believe that stupid movie.  They’re both somehow convinced that government must interfere at a very minute level, to keep individuals from being savages – not the rare individual, not the aberrant, but all of us.  Their areas of focus are different, but both sides seem to believe daddy knows best, and they MUST watch over all of us unruly children every moment.

And that, unfortunately, is what I fear will eventually lead to “there is no police force large enough to hold us in check.”  Because they’ve proven over and over that they do not know best.  Because the very mechanics of politics leads those who believe in the relevance of political power over the fundamentals of economy and every day individuals to rise to power.

Which tilts “daddy government” more and more out of kilter.  “If you kids back there don’t shut up, I’ll come back there and give you whatfor” doesn’t work very well, when daddy is driving full speed towards the abyss.

UPDATE: Because I’m a very great dits (I know that shocks you, right?) I forgot to remove my stories from the last quarter of last year from Amazon exclusive.  That is, I forgot to uncheck the little box that says “remove automatically at expiration”  You can’t do it when you setup the book, and with the holidays and all things went nuts.  They’re mostly expiring late April/May now.  There’s nothing I can do about that, and frankly it only matters because I hope to establish a Kobo account this month.  BUT anyway because I got another five days of “free promo” I’m cycling those stories through free again, before the period ends.  So, if you missed it the first go round, An Answer From The North and Superlamb Bananaare free right now.  I’ll be cycling a free short story every five days, for the next month or so, so if you look for my name on Amazon and sort by price, you should get it, if I forget to tell you.

One of the commenters mentioned on my post on the convention that I might be imagining being shunned.  Well… kind of but no.

Because I am depressive and I know I’m depressive, meaning, I’m likely to view things through the darkest possible prism at any given time.  That means that I consciously compensate for it.  This means that people wishing to offend me or pick a fight with me – you are forwarned – must go to ridiculous lengths for me to get past the certainty that “it was just an accident’ or “they’re joking.”  (Mind you, most of the time it was an accident or they were joking.)

With conventions, it’s localized, it’s, yes, related fandoms, and it’s pervasive.  And it’s wearing down on me.  But that’s besides the point and after all there is a reason that my “home” con (by choice) is Chattanooga TN.

However, part of being naturally depressive is knowing that periodically, for reasons that are hard to pin down, I will go through times of being down in the dumps for no reason anyone can figure, not even I, myself.

For the last week, I’ve been lying awake between three and five in the morning, “waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

This could be sheer mental illness, of course, but…  But premonitions run in the family, and I’m sort of a natural mega-aggregator, in that I read a lot of news from science to politics, and sometimes I get an itch at the subconscious level, something I can’t QUITE pin down.

The number of times that turns out to be something disastrous at the local/personal/national level is rather high.  That said, I don’t believe in ghosts (or premonitions) I just hope they don’t believe in me.  It doesn’t help this is accompanied by the signs of the cats being anxious too – manifested in an endless amount of peeing in odd places, the new and creative location being heating vents.  Next house?  NO VENTS ON THE FLOOR, d*mn it.

Of course the cats could be feeling my/our mood.  In fact, the whole family could be feeling my mood, and that’s probably all it is.

I’m kind of getting tired of the middle of the night horrors, though.

And just like my mom’s bipolar swings found excuses in the surrounding world, my mind has decided to have a fit of anxiety over A Few Good Men and how it’s doing.  Part is justified.  By this time with DST I had more emails/fan mail, and there was more presence in local stores.  But how much of this is real, and how much the result of the ever imploding printed book scene?  And how much of it is the fact that almost everyone I know has lurched between being sick and very sick for about five months?  My friend Rebecca Lickiss who is a genius in some ways, had a short story about a time traveler going back and altering history by disseminating the flu.  I mean… we always think killing one’s grandpa, but of course, if everyone is out of sorts, work won’t get done and the defense forces won’t be as on the mark and…

But I am anxious about it.  Part of this is that this is the only book in – ever – that I haven’t sent bookmarks or t-shirts to baen for.  I asked for the address to send it to (I lose everything) and never got it, and then I got sick…  Do the bookmarks do any good?  Who knows?  If you’re going to a con in the next two months, let me know and I’ll send you bookmarks and a t-shirt (AFGM or DST if you’re bashful) to wear.  (The t-shirt, not the bookmarks.  Though if you’re comely and wear the bookmarks it could be very good for everyone ;) )

There are books that leave trails in your heart and this one is one of those.  No, I can’t tell you why.  I love every book I write – okay, okay, maybe not Plain Jane, which is why I wrote it in three days J  But I love most books I write.  Some I just “feel” more than others.  I know it’s a complex book and that my usual luck applies making the whole thing far more insanely controversial than it should be (AND getting me hit on NOT embracing the controversy, too, on reviews) but part of me still wants to believe that if you write a good book, it will do well.  It worked for DST which, when written, was my best book to date.  Maybe it was a fluke, but I want to believe.

And even as I worry about the book I KNOW most of my issues and probably what’s causing the depression is just not having fully recovered from the weekend.  You see, I AM used to compensating and to monitoring the other things in the environment that might be causing the issue.

Yes, it is probable that uncertainty over Dan’s job – and uncertainty over what kind of employment the kids will find when they graduate.  I mean, we’re doing the best we can, but – is wearing on me.  Also, I’ve been ill – nothing lethal but an annoying succession of “bugs” and am barely recovered from the last one.  Then the con twisted my sleeping schedule to bits…

 

And I’m worried about the crazy book business…

 

Which means this depression is probably more organic than anything else.  But all the same, if you liked AFGM mention it to ten friends you think will like it, if you get a chance.  I’m putting my webpage up with excerpts (why is it I can’t find a theme that I can put columns of pictures on the side?  Never mind.) and I’ll probably buy some ads on Project Wonderful (they’re very cheap, they did wonders for DST, and I suspect would be even better for AFGM.)

 

Meanwhile, the Shakespeare Trilogy – while breaking no records – made me more money in the last week than it made me from Ace after the first year.  And it promises to be a steady seller.  This is good.  And I’m going to bed with some research on Titans for the framework for the YA fantasy I must finish editing this week.

 

Tomorrow we’re going to Denver on son-business (yeah, yeah, robotics) and also to figure out some stuff on incorporating and which type to do and all.

 

So, I hope you’ll forgive me the scattered post.  More rational posting (possibly.  Well, I’ll try) tomorrow.

*This is the new free novel I’m posting here a chapter at a time.  For previous chapters, page back to two weeks ago.  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.   This book will acquire at least a temporary cover soon, I swear.  BUT not this week, because today I’m going to post this, then do a quick fly-by cleaning, then redesign my website and rearrange stuff here too.*

A Wolfe At The Door

 

Jonathan Blythe, Earl of Savage,

 

The problem, of course, was that I had moved out of Papa’s study.  Not that it was a problem, exactly that I’d moved out of his study.  What I mean to say was, after all, Papa had blown out his brains while sitting at the desk, and while the servants had done an impressive job of cleaning and I was sure I wasn’t likely to run across forgotten brain matter on the key to the accounts due drawer, yet I didn’t feel comfortable working there.

Truth be told, Papa and I had had no love lost between us.  He didn’t understand me and deplored my unsteadiness and I—

I used to think, when I was very young, that my father, unlike the other people around us, wasn’t quite real.  Oh, I knew there was elf blood in his line.  At least, from the time I was seven or so, I’d heard people mutter about it.  Usually, I’d heard people mutter about it while hiding under the drapery of occasional tables in mama’s sitting room during her at homes.  I don’t know if mama knew they muttered.  But anyway, I knew that Papa had elf blood, and also that this was supposed to make on distant, cold, and – somehow – unreliable.

But papa didn’t strike me as an elf, at least not like any elves I’d read about in the stories in the nursery.  Instead, he struck me as… glass.  I used to have dreams in which my father was a statue made of glass that had, inexplicably, come to life.  Not that I saw Papa very often.  In later years I’d wondered at how many children my parents had produced since, even when they were in the same house, they seemed to dislike intensely being in the same room.  And yet, from the look of my siblings, and also the fact that she is the most proper of scolds, I was almost sure Mama hadn’t improved the bloodline.

In any case, there was no love lost between Papa and I.  When I’d reached the age of reason, or at least the age to leave school and be able to set up my own establishment, he’d paid my bills without protest, and he’d furnished me whatever I needed or wanted, from decent horses to enough money to keep a couple of round heels happy and devoted to me.

But if you added up all the time we’d spent together in our lives, when we didn’t just happen to both be at the same party or dinner, I’d wager – and high too – that it wouldn’t come to more than ten hours, altogether.

Which just goes to show you.  There was no love lost, and no reason I should mourn him.  And certainly, while I had not held the pistol that blew out his  brains, I’d told him that I knew about his malfeasance, and given him reason to blow out his brains.

All the same, I’d found I couldn’t concentrate, attempting to work in the room where he’d breathed his last. Not that I believe in ghosts.  Or at least, I don’t believe I would see ghosts.  Mostly because I never have, and if I were going to start, it would probably be Freddie, who was like a brother to me and who died on that curricle race. But on the other hand, what a start it would be to have Papa’s sour tones call me from the perusal of estate documents with “Jonathan!”

So I’d moved my study, and I’d moved it to the only room I could think of, which would take all the bureaus and secretaries needed for the task to run the magic business, the manufacturies and the farms: the little receiving hall by the front hall.

And that was the problem.  As I came down the main stairs, at a clip, Ginevra’s letter clutched in my head, and trying to decide what spell to use on that writing, to discover my fair unknown, I found our butler arguing with someone.

“Milord will see you at a proper time,” the Butler was saying.  His name was Harving and he had been in our service since I was very young.  Hearing him talk of Milord always made me expect Papa to show up.  “Surely you don’t expect to be admitted without an appointment.”

I stopped, halfway down the marble stairs, hesitating.  It was still in time, I thought, to escape back up those stairs.  For one, should it become known around town that I am up at shortly after cock’s crow, my reputation will be quite in shreds.  People will start referring to me as old somber sides, and probably demanding I live up to my station in life.  Worse, they might decide I need to get married and raise up a whole generation of Savages to my title.  Which, heaven forfend.

So I froze.  The person talking to Harving couldn’t possibly know me.  He looked like a rustic, with coarse dark hair which appeared to have been cut by the method of upending a bowl on one’s head and cutting anything that strayed beneath.  And he hadn’t shaved that day, if indeed the day before.

But he didn’t dress like a rustic.  His suit, though dark brown was of good cut and material and would not have disgraced a respectable merchant.

Still, he could not know me.  He did not look in the least like the sort of man to join the groups in which I ran.  And I was sure I’d never met him by himself.

I started to turn around, trying to make the movement natural.  The man was talking in a low rumble to Harving, and I could feel Harving’s stony rejection of him behind me.

But just as I turned, the man’s voice called out, “Milord!  Lord Savage.”

It took me about a second to realize that running like crazy up the stairs was not something an Earl could do.  It probably wasn’t something I should even have done as an Earl’s heir.  But this didn’t mean I had to like it.  I turned around and descended the rest of the stairs, in the most stony manner possible, folding Ginevra’s letter and putting it in my breast pocket.

The rustic was holding his hat and looking up at me as though I were his hope for salvation, and Harving was stonily disapproving, if of me or of the rustic didn’t bear thinking.  Being stonily disapproving was his default mode towards me, anyway.

“Yes,” I said, as I reached the bottom step and stood on it, to maintain the advantage of position over the two of them.  “And you are?  I don’t have the pleasure—”

“No, milor’” the rustic said, and his voice was cultivated, while bearing a trace of the North country.  “I’ve been traveling and there would not have been any occasion to have met you, though I have corresponded with you often since–  Since the unfortunate demise of your esteemed parent.  In fact I only recognized you from your resemblance to your grandfather, which is marked.”

“And you are?” I said, again, coldly.  If he’d corresponded with me often and often, he was likely one of our suppliers or managers, but which one?  There were a good fifty of the creatures.

“My name is Wolfe Merritt, Milor’”

I made a sound, because of course, Wolfe was our main manager, the man responsible for Blythe blessings.  I should in fact have met him, if I’d either given any attention to the business before Papa’s death, or if Merritt hadn’t been on some trip of inspection since papa died.

Which meant this was important business indeed, and Harving should have been standing on position.  I dismissed him with, “That will do, Harving,” and feeling Ginevra’s letter like a weight over my heart, I realized it would have to wait.  I turned to Merritt, “Come with me,” I said.  “Into my study.”

I’d had the study furnished in all new furniture, and it was all light and airy figured walnut.  The chairs were comfortable, too, because if someone was important enough to be admitted to my study, he wasn’t an adversary and, unlike Papa, I didn’t view everyone I dealt with as an enemy to be conquered.

“What will you have,” I said, sitting behind my desk and ringing for service.

“Nothin–  Nothing milor’.”

“Teetotaler?” I asked.

Something like a shadow went across his face, and his lip tried to lift in a smile.  “No, Milor’.  But your father didn’t like–  That is—”

“Forget my father,” I said.  “I’m doing my best to.  Now, what will you have?”

“Brandy, Milor’.  If it’s not too much trouble.”

“No trouble at all.”  I approved of a man not afraid to drink brandy this early in the morning, and I relayed the order to the serving man who appeared.  Then I turned back to Wolfe, “You were on a visit of inspection to manufactories that were having some trouble, and I do not know why, nor what you found.  So perhaps you’d care to enlighten me?”

Wolfe drew in breath, puffed out his cheeks, then let it out with an explosive “Pah” sound.  “Well, milor’  That is the problem.  In fact, I don’t know…  That is, it started as something so uncertain that we couldn’t be sure, but then…  But it didn’t seem right, and your father was busy with… with other matters, and this left me to look into it.  I thought it was something to do with the spells we’d used last year not being quite right.  Sometimes you get flighty head magicians and—” He shrugged.

“Understood,” I said, though I actually understood very close to nothing.  Harving himself came in, gave me a disapproving look, and set two glasses and a decanter of brandy on a tray on my desk.  I dismissed him with a nod, and poured brandy for myself and Merritt.

As Harving closed the door behind him, Wolfe grabbed for the glass of brandy I extended him, tossed it back in a single gulp, looked at me with woebegone expression and said, “It’s gone rotten milord.”

“What?  What has?” I asked, wondering if there was a reason, after all, that Papa didn’t let Merritt drink.

“The Magic, milor’”

“What magic?  The spells we sent to the manufactories, or—”

“All of it,” he said.  He sighed.  “All of it.  All the spells sold by Blythe blessings, but the industrial magic sent to our manufactories too.  It’s all gone rotten.  Mostly it does what you expect, just oddly or weakly, but then there are times when a spell or powering magic will go… disastrously wrong.  There was that child in the factory in Liverpool who–  never mind.  It doesn’t bear describing.  But it can’t go on.”

I tossed my brandy down my throat, thinking of all of papa’s ill gotten gains going up the spout and leaving us destitute after all.  “I…”  I cleared my throat.  “What can have caused it?”

“A strain of rogue magic,” he said.  “Come from elsewhere.”

“Elsewhere?  You mean, one of our rivals?”  Despite everything my house had done to Seraphim Ainsling, I couldn’t see him taking revenge.  He was one of nature’s noblemen, was Seraphim.  Besides, he’d come out well enough, so why would he?

“No, milor’.  I mean another world.”

I had a great idea for a blog post last night, but of course I spaced it, and so I’m going to write about impossible things, like organizing writers, squaring the circle, training cats.

BTW if this post is criminally late, it’s because I’m waiting for washer repairman to replace washer motor, which means I’m trying to get the kids out of bed on a day when they don’t have classes till the afternoon (speaking of impossible things.)

The first paragraph is only half a joke, as of course I’m not going to talk of squaring the circle or training cats (Mostly because my cats would kill me in my sleep, if they had to do it by cutting across my throat with a sharpened whisker.)

However, I’d like to talk about organizing writers.  Part of this because the main writer organizations right now are running around like chickens with their heads cutoff, even RWA of whom I used have a higher opinion, partly because it touches on what organized labor is good for, what it is not good for, what it is detrimental for, and what it can do in the circumstances we’re going towards.  Because in the future we’re all ducks… er… I mean, we’re all contractors (must not talk to younger son.  It’s a thing for poultry that boy has) or at least a significant portion of us are, the bind that writers are in today is something that’s likely to come to your living room in the next five years, for either your job, your spouse’s job or your children’s job.  So taking a look at the situation writers are in and why it resembles where (more or less) the entire labor market is headed (unless civilization collapses to an unimaginably low level) is important.  As is taking a look at what organizing can do, what it can do, and “the best we can hope for.”

To begin with, I started on this wild hare because of Rex Stout.  (It occurs to me, btw, Rex Stout would have loved the present anno domini.  Well, not really, since even mega bestsellers sell fewer copies than he did, but what I mean is he’d have loved ebooks.  Indie is made for the type of thing he wrote: novellas, mostly, often sold as packets.)  I’ve been reading him a lot because I’m very busy, which means I read only short pieces that I have read before (meaning I can set them down and not worry.)  At one point, Archie is extolling unions, and Rex Stout, of course, like Heinlein, was a great supporter of unions.  (I doubt of public employee unions, but that’s something else.)  Only Heinlein saw the end game quite clearly, in Starman Jones, where the world is so tied up by unions that true genius can’t get in to where it would be best.

That sort of started me thinking.  Unionism is based on the belief that your co-workers want to screw you for their benefit less than your boss wants to screw you for his benefit.

There are circumstances in which this is absolutely true.  I’m thinking of an homogeneous and relatively powerless workforce, say the immigrant-clogged NYC of the early twentieth century.  I understand that entire blocks in NYC were, in all, entire villages from Sicily or, depending on the decade, Ireland.  I grew up in a village.  You track cousinship to the sixth generation, and when it gets too far for that, you’re “connected.”  That chain of blood relations is a chain of loyalty and there’s nothing worse than being shunned by your group, your family, your peers.

In that type of naturally collectivist environment, you can trust your peers (to an extent.  If you read biographies from back then, you still read of slick union operators screwing people up – but that’s human.  Unless you deal with angels, you’re going to see that.)  And when you’re working in a low skill level position, for a boss who thinks you’re a widget (man, do I feel their pain.  On the second, at least, though I gather a lot of publishers think “anyone can write” and considering what they’ve pushed down the throats of the reading public the last twenty years, they might still think it.) it’s pretty hard for your co-workers to screw you over worse than your boss will do given the chance.

So, unions became a logical way to deal with this.  You had group loyalty against the tendency of grasping management to take more.

The problem is for unions to work you need to be able to do SOMETHING to the owner/manager to stop the abuses.  Again, the situation in which the unions worked best, you could surround the factory (or farm, though there’s problems with that one, and Gionvanni Guareschi illustrated it beautifully in one of the Don Camilo short stories.  I think in The Little World Of Don Camilo.  I.e. farm labor can’t be stopped and then picked up again, and you’re doing active and permanent damage each day the strike goes on.) and stop scabs from going in to do your work.  That meant that the boss had something to lose (also) by not coming to the table.  And in those days also the union people were actual works (not operatives who don’t care if the company dies – see, twinkie.) so people could agree on a mutually agreeable compromise.  Or at least mutually workable.

When the wheels come off… well, we see that all over the country these days, from public sector unions, where the “negotiating” is in fact a branch of government telling the other that really they need mo’e government cheese – which amounts to self-dealing – to the auto unions where they’ve lost track of the fact that a) there must be a product people want to buy and b) they are competing with non unionized workers, and some of those are doing better than the unionized ones because… it’s not a low skill industry anymore.

Next comes the fact that the basic premise, that your co-workers want what’s best for you too more than your boss does is pretty dang faulty.  The reason that unions devolved into bullying, tug tactics (against CO WORKERS) and worse is that since WWII our country has become less and less that “small village” where there’s bonds of blood and culture and shunning works.  (Though that had the bad effect of living anyone not in the clan out.  But you could at least trust the clan.)

And of course, as we go more and more remote, the “shop’s” ability to be shut off or controlled physically has gone away too.  Yes, a lot of the battle of unions and other labor advocates right now is to try to prevent outsourcing and telecommuting, precisely because those tactics make it easier for workers to come in from elsewhere and undercut organized labor.

I tell you, it won’t work.  When you’re trying to create by law artificial conditions that replicate those of a hundred years ago (Which btw, compared to now weren’t good for ANYONE) you’ve already lost. The best you can do is make the area covered by your laws unappealing to those who would provide work.  At which point, you either clamp down like North Korea and nobody has jobs or your people start telecommuting for companies in other countries.  And then all your laws are moot, unless you’re willing to go to war.  And they’re still moot because, after the war, your people will still need jobs.

Our politicians haven’t realized this yet, because they are exceedingly well educated people, taught in the best labor theory which doesn’t take in account that we’re not all factory workers in the Bronx circa 1920.

I first realized this when we tried to go on strike as students (for good and sufficient reason) and the teachers laughed and would have failed us if we’d continued.  Then I realized the reason that US student “strikes” worked was because they were willing to use and threaten violence.  (Something a small group of mostly female students of German weren’t willing to do.)

There needs to be some sort of power balance and counter-strike ability for organized labor to work.

And that’s always been the problem with writing.  Perhaps when SFWA was started, and most of the magazines were in one place and a lot of the writers too, we could have acted as a union.  I don’t know.  Perhaps enough wild-eyed sf writers in front of Amazing would have caught the attention of newspapers.  Who knows?

But even then there were writers elsewhere, and even then, publishers could always bring in new talent to replace the striking ones.  There was no way to stop scabs, unless you were willing to stop the US mail.

By the time I came in writers needed a union more than ever.  In one respect we were like that transplanted community in the Bronx in the early 20^th century: there was only one employer, or such a small number of them as to make no difference, they all talked to each other and had a level of collusion that would be illegal anywhere else.  (Heck, I’m fairly sure it’s illegal in publishing too.  It’s just no one dared say anything, because if you were blacklisted by one, you were blacklisted by all.)  And we couldn’t have one.  Why?  Because even our organization leaders, working writers, had to stay on the good side of the employers who could replace them or blacklist them at the snap of a finger (more so since they had control of what went on shelves.  Complete control.)  Worse, if the leaders dared upset the publishing houses, the members would complain, because, well, it was their career on the line, too.  And houses were known to black list all members of an organization who challenged them.

At the same time – see where publishers had total shelf control – there was nothing that writers organizations could threaten publishers with.  Nothing material, at least.  Yeah, we could trash-talk them.  This did not hurt them, because most of the country never even heard about them.

So, what did our organizations do?  They ran with the other function of professional organizations: certification.

When I came in very few magazines required SFWA membership to buy you and those kept it a secret.  (It was a slush pile culling strategy.)  And none of the book publishers did.  Because there was no point.  And the strategy they moved to, for culling slush, was agents, which is different from organization membership (and possibly stupider.)  I’m not talking about MWA and RWA here, simply because I don’t know as much.  I came to those organizations late.  I will mention later how RWA is/was different (but not enough.)

So, most people joined SFWA for two reasons: a directory of other working professionals and validation of status.  (More and more needed as “professional” rates hadn’t changed since the fifties, and making 5k a book wouldn’t allow anyone to live from this.)  Which meant that most people in SFWA were in it to be exclusionary.  “We’re real writers, and they aren’t.”  MWA was the same when I joined.  RWA was different in that they let you join a cadet branch and learn from the pros.  This was a valuable service, when everyone had to go through the narrow gate to get in.

The problem RWA is having now, is the problem all the other writers’ organizations have: “Who is a pro?”  Having lowered the rates (or rather not raised them) to the level that allowed most of their members to stay in (the average working writer makes somewhat less than 5k a year from writing) they just keep insisting that people who make that much from indie can’t get in.  Because they’re not “really” published.  (Though it’s possible RWA has slightly saner rules on that.  I’m not sure.  I quit when they went after Amazon – which relates to: )

And because they’ve become status organizations ONLY, it is very important for them to roll the clock back and have things be as they were “you have to go through this narrow gate to publish.”  Which means that they’re going after Amazon on behalf of tiny distributors for tiny presses, because that’s where the status is.

The rest of us out here, trying to make a living, roll our eyes and decide the directory of our peers is not worth it – particularly when we’re trying to learn about self publishing and network with indie and people bringing out their backlist, and let’s face it, half of the people doing really well at that have never heard of writers’ organizations, or are actively giving them the bird, even if the organizations should want them.

Which is a pity because… if writers’ organizations had realized they’re not and cannot be unions, and that being a club of the “in kids” is just stupid and, in an increasingly more distributed world might give you a warm glow but won’t give you anything else, they could have done some good.

You see, there is a great need for a fraternal order of writers.  One of the mailing lists I belong to – one of those things that circulates in place of the organizations that don’t work – was discussing long term disability, and how difficult it is to replace your writing income if you can’t write for a year or two or… the last ten or twenty years of your life.  (Which we’ve all heard about, from authors of the golden age.)

The backlist publishing in indie might keep you in a trickle of income, for a while, but…

This is something we’re looking at very closely as we look at – hopefully, hopefully ten or so years from now, and in a better position – we look at having to live from my writing and maybe free lance work (programming and writing) by Dan.  What do you do if you’re living from that, have a pretty good lifestyle, and one of you is in an accident, has a stroke, or gets cancer?  In my case, having been a freelancer most of my life, and trying to avoid paying both sides of social security (sometimes it’s inevitable, in case you wondered where that 8k bill from the IRS comes from.  That’s taxes, plus all the stuff that an employer normally contributes half to.  It runs to about half a writers’ income, more or less depending on the state.  It’s the reason so many of us get in tax trouble the first time we get decent income.) I wouldn’t even get that.  Not this year.  Inevitably I will, but because of the years of ramp-up probably at very low level.  How do you maintain your lifestyle when you can no longer work?  Colleagues in that position are telling me that most states take “disability” in the physical sense.  So, if you’re out of your mind on chemo… well, you can still type, right?

The insurance issue is the same, though every organization that tried to offer that ran up against the “not between states” and how distributed we are.  That might need some legal lobbying.  But right now, we’re looking at – should Dan become unemployed – paying the penalty and going without.

This is made worse by the fact that as a group we are aging (at least those considered “professional” under the old rules.  This will change, probably) and therefore are more prone to the maladies of age.

We desperately need a fraternal order.  With people coming in from every walk of life and through every possible gateway, trying to control the employers is a forlorn hope.  Yeah, a fraternal order would still need some form of entry thing, possibly “For x years has derived 30% of income from writing.”  But it wouldn’t need to concern itself with status or with publishers or with vendors of writing.  Just with making writers’ lives saner and safer.  Contributions, sure, and possibly charity anthologies.

Will it happen?  I hope so.  I don’t have the ability to start it (time.  Money.  Time IS money) and I bet that’s the issue for most working writers.

But I hope someone somewhere does this for writers or free lance programmers or most of the other professions going free lance – almost all of them – because in the future we’re heading towards trying to control who hires whom is a forlorn hope.  Trying to control employers is too.

The best we can do is look after our own, pick up our fallen comrades and move on.  It’s not fair, but it is what it is and moreso what it will be.

Trying to set the clock back will only make the future even more painful (and possibly lethal for everyone.)  One of the things we might need to get rid of is this notion of “fair” — it works great in kindergarten, but in the real world it tends to crumble.  And the shards can cut things that work — fair or not.

And so, you see, organizing writers remains impossible.  All the same, it might be imperative.

(And now I’m going to have breakfast.  Repairman has been.  I tried to have tea and poured it down my front, which means I need more caffeine before lower lip works.  I’m going to drink tea over the sink.)

 

Yesterday I whined, and today I’m going to do something worse, and break one of the taboos I was raised with.
You see, I was raised not to talk of politics (we had a lot), religion (ours tended to have weird shadings) or money (we didn’t have any.)
Unfortunately I need to talk about money. Kind of.
First – I think it was Sabrina Chase, but it might have been someone else – said something about the problem about indie is that none of us knows how to make money from it.
This is not necessarily true. My dipping of toe into the pool of indie has been skittish and a bit odd, but it has also, to an extent, been rewarding. I mean, until this last weekend, I had nothing up but short stories and – between all outlets – they were bringing me between $100 and $200 a month. This is of course peanuts, but when you consider the work I’ve done so far has been light editing and a few weekends putting short stories up; when you consider further that my covers suck raw eggs (I need to redo them, but there hasn’t been time) it is not bad income for stuff that has already been published and/or was in the drawer doing nothing.
This weekend I added three very old novels that, furthermore, do not fit with the direction my career took. (And thank heavens. I meant what I said in the afterword for those books. If they sell really well, I’ll finish the series to the point the aged Shakespeare walks into fairyland to live. However, they’d have to sell VERY well. To get in the frame of mind to write those books, I need to mainline Shakespearean plays and read a lot of Elizabethan speech. It will help you understand how weird those books are FOR ME if you know that I wrote the first draft of DST before I wrote that. No, it wasn’t as good as the published version, but it was closer to that than to this. By miles. And after those books came out, EVERYONE in the field wanted me to do more “literary fantasy.” I can do it, yes, but it’s not natural and it strains my mood. Thank heavens Baen saved my life.) They are selling more than the short stories, just by themselves. This is good. It gives me hope as I finish editing the indie novels (and the old published ones) I can make a decent living off indie.
Unfortunately the novel that is my life is very badly plotted. Or maybe not. Maybe Himself is making it exciting. After all, what fun is there in letting me set up this form of income, then take over, and then having Dan quit and do his own stuff? No drama, no angst.
So it’s looking like, with both boys in college and our savings down to nothing, Dan’s job has gone precarious. Mind you, it might recover and keep on trucking. But if not, we’re in a world of pain.
Right now my income is about 1/3 of his, and with his income and mine we’re barely making it.
The funny thing is that we didn’t even buy close to the “best” house we could afford. They qualified us for double the loan we took. (And man, did we like that house. But we’re not stupid.) And that was when I had virtually NO income. But the raises stopped too, and our expenses kept going up – part the inflation that doesn’t exist, part the boys growing up (you never expect them to cost more.) Part is that we spent a lot of money fixing stuff in the house – because we didn’t know it had been flipped twice before – yes, yes, now we have fixed almost everything and will probably finish before it can go up for sale, but now with cutting down paper books and the prospect of the kids moving off in the next five years, it’s rather a lot of house for us (and I don’t have the time to clean like I used to, as the career is also showing signs of life.)
The truly sad thing is the main reasons we bought a house this size and where it is was a) the paper books. No, seriously. You have no idea how many we still have, not counting the ones boxed for sale. b) the schools – which ended up not being a good fit at all.
But anyway, we have this huge mortgage, and we have grocery bills that swallowed the universe, and we have cars that are fixing to die. And we have almost dead cars (the ones Dan and I drive, if sold together, might net us 8k.) And last year, between car and house repairs ate into our bank account to such an extent that the check to the IRS might wipe it out.
Now, none of these is the end of the world. If Dan keeps his job, there is money coming in from Baen. And while we should still fix this house and sell it and move (for one get our money out of it, which at this point should allow us to buy a house outright elsewhere) we might even be able to manage that as indie picks up.
If nothing else goes wrong. If Dan keeps his job. If my stuff keeps selling. If…
I was reading an article somewhere, a while back, that the new kids couldn’t expect job security and might have to change careers two or three times and adapt, in their working lives. The article was written by someone my age, which led me to wonder what kind of special snow-flake he was. Because for Dan and I that has already been the reality. This is why we NORMALLY like to keep six months salary in the bank (but that hasn’t been true since 08.) Because suddenly he’d find himself unemployed and whatever I was doing would tank and – inevitably – we’d both get ill for months, and next thing you knew we were considering the soup kitchen. (Okay, only happened twice, but trust me, once is enough. I was hungry for two years growing up and THAT was enough too. It’s not the sort of thing you want to revisit.)
Anyway – the issue is that when I start panicking (and I panic easily) I can’t write, which blocks the one way I can make money to keep us afloat, right? It’s stupid. It’s also fairly normal, from what I hear from my colleagues.
All this to say, our situation is nowhere near dire yet. I’ve heard of people taking out their retirement accounts to pay for groceries. We’re not there yet. We’re not even at the point of postponing buying underwear. Clearly since I bought some this weekend. (And yes, we’ve been at that point before.)
But we are at the point of postponing buying new glasses and extending the time to take cats for their shots.
In a way we’re blessed, with Dan still working, and my income picking up, considering the times we live in.
This is to say – I’m NOT begging. Yes, I’m worried about money, but show me ONE person who isn’t just now.
On the other hand, at Liberty Con, Jerry Pournelle told me that a blog the size of mine should have a subscribe button – that you should be able to support it, because I put in an hour to two hours work on this EVERY day, including Sunday and holidays, and he says writing for nothing is immoral.
He is right. Of course he’s right. There’s a man I don’t argue with. BUT I know a lot of my regulars and a lot of my fans are hurting, and I hate to ask for money for stuff they’re getting for free, anyway.
On the other hand, the joking this week led me to see a way to provide value added to those who do subscribe: i.e. access to my unedited work.
Now, to clarify, I’m not giving you access to ALL my unedited work. Some of those will be under contract, and some publishers get shirty about such. Also, Baen sells earcs and I’m not getting in competition with them.
This means there will be weeks that the subscribers will get clear, cold nothing – though I’ll make a little newsletter, if you wish, and tell you what is going on and why there is/isn’t material – And sometimes I’ll jump around between things. Like, right now I’m editing two books, one of which is posted unedited, so you wouldn’t get that, and you might or might not get new snippets I put in. But I’m also writing Jane Austen fantasy, and you could get that. And I’m completely rewriting shadow gods, and you’ll likely get that in chunks over the next few weeks.
There’s also short stories being fixed to go up, and you might get the unedited version, and musings on future history.
As I said, you won’t get stuff every week, but you’ll probably get two or three novels, and ten or twenty shorts in aggregate through the year.
What subscription isn’t: it’s not a substitute for donations for the novels. That is separate. Unless you’re donating at the Medici level, I’m not sending you edited copies of every novel, in ebook format. (If you’re donating at the insane level, I’ll also send you copies of my Baen books. I’ll buy them, sign them and send them to you. And book t-shirts, too. But I don’t expect anyone to do that, hence, Insane. And I only expect you to do Medici if you win the lottery.)
Anyway, the subscription button is there. Maybe Jerry is right and it will generate considerable income. Maybe it won’t, in which case it comes down. My price for the additional work of compiling the work of the week and putting it in a way you guys can access it, is $100 a week – because that’s what I get for my PJM work(which, btw, is up today) which takes what I estimate about the same time. Yes, we know what I am. We’re just haggling over the price. If the subscriptions build to at least that, I’ll continue. If not, I’ll refund people and stop the program.
Meanwhile don’t feel obligated. Yes, things might get dire at Casa Hoyt but I know they’re already dire for a lot of you.
(The whole idea of people giving money for my unedited stuff baffles me, btw. I’d give money for Heinlein’s grocery list… but he was HEINLEIN. I’m just little Sarah Hoyt, telling her little stories.)
Everyone I know – and their cousins – told me to have a subscription program, and it is up, but I don’t want anyone alarmed and thinking I’m starving in the dark. I’m not. And even if things get really dire, the worst that will happen is that we lose the money in the house and be left with the cats, the books and the kids. It would be a pain in the butt, but not the end of the world. The living things would still be okay. A lot of people are worse off.
On the other hand, if you choose to support this blog and this writer, I am, needless to say, very thankful, and it will help.

I have a different article up at Mad Genius Club and my How to Write a Novel in 13 weeks up at PJM.

UPDATE: For some reason it’s not letting me do this.  We might move where the blog is hosted soon, because of this nonsense,  (i.e. I’m not the only one having trouble and the net is full of people complaining)  So, if you want to bookmark this — Tazwriters Zazzle Shop Other stuff will go up over the next week, including (up soon) the infamous t-shirt with the drawing of me by Chris Muir.

I hate doing blog posts about publishing, except at MGC, because most of my readers are not writers (I think.  At least most of you mugs posting comments aren’t) and therefore it starts feeling a bit like inside baseball.

But sometimes it bites me in weird ways.  And this post is weird (and confused, and undigested.  Bear with me.)

And I’ve been nooddling a post on where publishing is right now – it’s not as straight forward as it seems – under the dual impact of the con and its panels and the rather interesting post Dave Freer put up at MGC for April’s Fools.

So… the con this weekend.  I did enjoy it, though the scheduling was… odd, to put it mildly.  For instance, I was put on a panel on writing your first novel.  Yes, there was a best selling author on that panel too, but she wrote her first novel in 2009.  For me “How to write your first novel” is sort of like “how to suvive your first year as a newly wed.”  Given that I’ve been married 30 years and it was a different world… uh… I don’t know.

I mean, however you look at it, I either wrote my first novel on a typewriter with a broken rewind ribbon mechanism (so when it was all on one side, I needed to pause and wind it by hand.  Which was hard, since it was made of chipped flint.) circa 1985 (if we go with the first novel I wrote for publication.) or I wrote it in 1998 after selling it to a traditional publisher on proposal (which might still happen, but I very much doubt) if you go with my first published novel.  (I reject a priori the notion that the first novel I wrote at six, before I had any clue what publishing was or how it worked was that first “novel.”  For one, I suspect it was all of 20k words.)

In either case, one, granted, more than the other, they are like things from a lost world in terms of what needed to be in that novel to actually make it to the shelves someday.  Because the first one, though it was never published for other reasons, if we still lived as we did in 85, we’d be talking about how to make your corrections clean, how to work with a carbon so you had a copy, etc. etc.

For the one in 1998, by the time I sold selling your first novel on proposal was already a rarity so in terms of “what to do to sell” I got nothing and in terms of “how to write your first novel for publication” I could only say “write what the publisher wants.”  Which I did with the Shakespeare series – which brings up the question “should you do it for love or money” which I’m not prepared to go into.  (I do like those books, mind you, but for a while there it looked like I was going to be shoved into writing JUST that kind of overwrought literary fantasy, and I don’t think I could do JUST that, forever.) It also brings up the question of “What’s your first novel that sold?” because Darkship Thieves was written and revised to close to the form that sold before I wrote Ill Met By Moonlight.  It’s just that none of my agents would send it out.

Which brings us to how odd it felt to be on a panel on writing your first novel and the gentleman next to me saying he’s not sold his novel, but he’s got it with an agent, so of course…

I had this wild desire to say “So, of course, if you sell you’ll pay 15% and give away your copyright, unless you’re very, very lucky.”

I didn’t.  You don’t want to lie to the young (And though he was probably my age, he was young in the profession) but if they want to lie to themselves, it’s their problem.

I wasn’t on any how-to-write workshops (which might have been just as well, since these seemed to be mostly empty) and I didn’t have a reading or a signing (though a lot of beginning, self-published authors did.)  This is not a complaint, as such, but an observation.

The observation is this: every local con I participate in, I need to fight for reading/signing and if I get one scheduled it is, inevitably, either against the bestselling author OR during dinner hour.  Even during Worldcon, in 08, when it was local, I had no reading, though readings were given to people who hadn’t published a book in years/weren’t writing a book/had no intention of writing a book.

A certain confusion is normal, in this sort of thing, of course, but the way I get shunted to the “Oh, who could possibly want to listen to a reading from her” position started grating a good five years ago.  Particularly since when I can afford to go to cons in the South like ConStellation or Liberty con, or even in other parts of the country (Lunacon) and get given a reading at a normal time, not against major events, I usually have a packed room.

Again, I’m not complaining about this con specifically.  My only complaint of this con, specifically, is that they don’t realize authors aren’t college students and therefore schedule us really heavily.  (Though part of this might be the problem of the constantly breaking down body which is not their fault, and which I’ve lived with all my life, courtesy of being really premature.)

I suspect locally – because a lot of it depends on how involved you get with fandom, how much you publicize, and – frankly – how much you give yourself airs, and also on the local fandom’s PERCEPTION of your career, (including any rumors going around) the fault is at least as much mine as theirs.

I started realizing there was something wrong with how fandom perceived me, when, circa 2006, with the Shakespeare series VERY firmly dead, an urban fantasy (Draw One In The Dark) and the musketeer mysteries coming out, I still got put ALMOST EXCLUSIVELY on “Shakespeare in modern literature” panels or “How to write literary fantasy” panels or – and by that time it was already mind boggling – “how to sell your first novel” panels.

In fact, in 2008 worldcon, the ONLY panels I was on (I crashed a bunch of others because, so there) were on Shakespeare and Fantasy.  2008.  Any Man So Daring, the second of that series, had been out of print since 2004.  Since then I had written urban fantasy, historical fantasy (the Magical British Empire) historical mystery, fictionalized biography, had a contract for Darkship Thieves and…

I think it was in 2008 that, at my signing, a local big time fan stopped by the table, looked down at a spread that included bookmarks for the Magical British Empire and Gentleman Takes A Chance and said “So, you’re just writing mystery now?  You’ve given up on sf/f?”

It was in 2007 that, as I was describing how I’d started art classes to rest from books, a local fan/book vendor told me “So, you failed at writing and you’re trying another career?”  Given that I was under contract for six books, which was the impetus for doing art so I could rest my mind, I was mind-boggled at the idea this meant “failing.”  (Also, if I intended to be an artist, I’d need to LEAVE writing behind.  I can do it at “good amateur” level, and next year I can probably enter some shows — but pro I’m not.  To make a living as a cover artist, I’d need to spend two years practicing.  At least.  Look at the cover of The Muse’s Darling, on Amazon.  That’s my art work.)

No, I wasn’t a bestseller.  We could go into how at the time the push model of book marketing had become such that you couldn’t be a bestseller unless the house had put you in that slot.  (It wasn’t QUITE true for all series and all houses, but the house had to at least allow it to happen.  For instance, when the first musketeer book sold out of the print run, it wasn’t shipped for six months – even while the second was.  Which, of course, meant that tons of people didn’t buy the second, because they hadn’t read the first.  When the first shipped again, the second had been returned.) I could also discuss how “bestseller” is not the be all, end all of a career.  It measures velocity (and lay down) so that you can have a huge fandom and still not be able to hit the bestseller list, because your books are “slow, steady sellers.”  This usually – eventually – makes you a bestseller, but it takes time, and also a certain amount of fanfare and distribution to get the fast sales up front which right now doesn’t work unless you’re one of the two people a (big) publisher will spend a ton of money on.  Or you’re a naturally good promoter (which as we’re seeing I’m not.)

However, given that by 2008, already, most people’s “career” consisted of two books (if you were lucky) the fact that I’ve been constantly under contract since 2001, except for three months in 2003 and that I’ve been making not a spectacular amount of money, but enough to support myself if I were single – PARTICULARLY when you take in account that one of the houses kept making me change name and genre – can’t be considered “since you failed.”  BUT that’s clearly the general fandom perception locally.

So… what is at the back of what seems to be a pretty well rooted mis-perception of what I’m doing and how it’s going, among local fandom?  Well, it could be political.  At least to an extent, it almost certainly is.  The fact that I work for Baen is not a plus.  I remember how shocked they were that a lot of fans wanted them to have David Drake as a guest.  And at least in Denver most of the guests of honor tend to be among the “reds in sf.”  (Except Eric Flint, since he works for Baen, of course.)

But since this has been going on from before I worked for Baen, I think it’s more than that.

Part of it is, undeniably the accent.  Yeah, yeah, I know, and I’m not claiming “discrimination” but we all judge each other that way, and I sometimes feel no matter what I say after I open my mouth, people hear “foreign born, self published.” (In fact, even though the Shakespeare series got a ton of good reviews, even back then, I read a lot of people disparaging me — it was embarrassing then, remember — as “self published.”)

Part of it is my presentation of myself.

I come from a class-intensive society, more reminiscent of Japan than of even Great Britain, at least when I was growing up.  The way you dressed and behaved in public was dictated by rules of where you fit (and going too high was as bad as going too low.  The later was “not giving yourself respect” and the first was deception.)  Your level of language informed people where you fit in the social ladder and…

And I was always very bad at it.  It’s not that I didn’t understand it.  I’m not stupid.  It’s that I live too much in my own skull to think about “how am I appearing” and also that frankly I like people, and I don’t care what “class” they are.  So I would follow handymen around and be very respectful (they can do things I can’t) while asking questions about what they were doing.  I would pause on the street to chat with the fishwoman, if she went to elementary school with me.  I generally divide the world into “interesting and not interesting” and couldn’t care less what impression that gives tot hose that divide it by money or status.  Also, the way I dress is usually “what I like” not what people perceive as cool.

This is stupid, of course, and I don’t need you to tell me that.

What I didn’t realize, at least for a long time, is that publishing is (or was) more like Portugal than like the US.  It was top down, there were classes, and fandom is very good at tuning to those classes and reacting to PERCEIVED class of an author.  Part of it, of course, is that fandom are odds, and they want it to look like they’re excluded because they’re above the rabble.  This is why push marketing worked much better for, say, sf/f than for say, romance, where it never took completely and where they always had both surprise bestsellers and pushed authors that flopped.  If publishers push a writer and give signs this writer is “valued” or “special” the “vocal” fandom tends to follow.  (This is also why, with the exception of Bujold, Baen gets no awards despite their books selling quite well.  You see, Baen has been branded as a pariah and to associate with it is to share its status.  [In fact two agents in a row tried to prevent me from working for Baen for just this reason.])

So, it wasn’t just that I work for Baen or the politics…  It’s that I don’t act as a big shot author.  (In fact, I’m not absolutely sure how a big shot author is supposed to act.)  When asked about some effect on a panel, I don’t start the answer with “in my book.”  And I don’t list ALL my books at the beginning of a panel.  (Partly because it’s tiresome.  Partly because, given most people on the panel have one or two books published, when I list them they either shut up or become passive aggressive.)  Also, because I’m working really hard most of the time, I tend to do things like leave for a con without bookmarks or promo materials.  (Hey, guys, this weekend I left without UNDERWEAR and we had to drop by the store on the way to the hotel. I also left without makeup and decided to do without.  This might have been a mistake, as I think I looked very ill.)

I tend to assume that people read the bio in the program – at least when they’re scheduling programming.  This, I suppose, means I’m insane.

Anyway – the irritation at the panels that made me go “uh?” including the one on the “age barrier in publishing” that had my entire family and, because we had no clue what they meant (Uh?  Age barrier?  Which way?  Up until fifteen years ago, they were saying you needed to be 45 to be mature enough to write.  Ten years ago they started publishing twenty year olds.  Yes, that means they skipped my age group.  What else is new?  I still got in.) and which ended up turning into “Why would you go traditional right now?” has morphed, on reading Dave Freer’s post, into a “Yes, that’s sensible and would never, ever, ever happen” frustration and then on reading Amanda’s post today, into “So they want to publish people who are already good at doing everything they supposedly do?” and also “What the heck do they mean ebook sales are flattening?  I think what they mean is that the rate of growth is flattening.  And who in h*ll is reporting this?  The big six?  They’ve reported the same 100 some ebook sales for each of my books for years.  And heck, I sell more than that, in SHORT STORIES indie.”  I mean, seriously, most people I know are now at least reading paper-and-e.  And the younger ones tend to e-only.  And judging by the number of emails I got when Baen wasn’t on kindle, any number of them read ebook only.

Will ebooks ever replace the paper books?  Yes, I think so.  It’s generational.  My kids live with kindle and kindle fire growing off the ends of their fingers.  I think eventually – in twenty or so years – paper books will be like leather-bound, collector’s editions today.  They’ll be what you buy for the two or three authors you love and want to keep clean and untouched, and signed.  Heck, mine became that way a while ago.  At least for hardcover.

The sign of this – like the sign that TVs are going either massively big or watched on computer, which is craigslist being full of “free entertainment center” offers from people upgrading/changing over – is starting to show in “free bookshelves” all over craigslist.  It’s also visible in planes, where people more and more are reading on electronic devices.  (I wonder how airport bookstores are doing?)

Are indie bookstores doing better?  Well, it would be pretty hard for them to do worse than they’ve done the last twenty years.  And with the implosion of the chains, with their top-down and “tri state” shelf stocking, it was inevitable that bookstores that actually bring in authors for signings, have knowledgeable staff, etc, will do better.

Is it a long term growth thing?  Who knows?  I think eventually there will be a place for bookstore-like hangouts – perhaps bookstore cafes – where you can meet other local booklovers in the flesh and where, if you hit an ebookstore from there they get a cut – kind of like the referral links for people to put on their website but space based.

But I do think most bulk reading will be in ebook.  From what I hear from my colleagues – not in Baen.  Baen is different.  Read Dave Freer’s post yesterday to find out why. – the printrun numbers and sell throughs are in free fall.  The ebooks through traditional publishers (at least reported) aren’t picking up, and most authors I know (except Baen) are at least contemplating an escape.  Even in Baen those who write other stuff — me — have an indie side.

Now this is where it worries me.  Because if I need to somehow give the impression I’m a big shot author before I become one, I’m OBVIOUSLY in deep trouble.  I can write.  I can write okay.  Though my opinion of how well I write now is guaranteed to be very low five years from now, I think I write well enough to be enjoyed.

But I clearly can’t give the impression I’m a pro, much less an old pro, at least not locally.  Perhaps mom was right and the “giving yourself respect” gene was left out.  Perhaps it’s the fact I forget to go to the hairdressers because I’m writing a novel.  Perhaps it’s that I treat starting out newbies, if they’re good, with the same respect I give bestsellers.

Or perhaps local fandom is right, and I’m a failure, for a certain definition of failure.  Who knows?

Local cons always leave me a little maudlin, a little depressed, wondering if something is wrong with me that can’t be fixed.

And the way the field is falling apart so that, as with the state of the country, nobody knows not’ing isn’t helping.

So you will forgive me for this very scattered and vaguely self-pitying (though more self-reproaching) post.  At least I hope you will.  Part of it, I know, is tiredness from the con (I finally feel like I’ve slept enough today.)

If you wish to support my so called “failing” career, hit up the side links and buy Darkship Thieves, or Darkship Renegades, or A Few Good Men, which is a book I didn’t mean to write, and is a complex book but is also, in my opinion, the best thing I’ve ever written.  I’ll be bringing out the rest of the backlist and a few things (Fantasy, mostly, though some mystery and a couple of horror.  Yes, there’s SF too, but I probably should (?) run that by Baen first) from the trunk (not as bad as it sounds.  Most were “agent rejected” because they’re “too weird” and “no one is doing anything like this!”  Like, you know, Witchfinder.)  I just need time to actually, you know, edit stuff.  Because a lot of it more than five years old, and needs editing.

And – as bad at promoting as I am, and as bad as giving a good image of my career – the one thing I can promise you is: Read all you want.  I’ll write more.

UPDATE:Subscribe button installed (you have NO idea what it involved.) For those not using paypal, I’ll eventually get a po box (it tells you how I’m functioning that I spelled that pox and couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong) and post the addy. Meanwhile two things: first, I don’t expect anyone to donate at the insane (or even the next down level, which now escapes me) but my mentors in these things assure me some people might be crazy enough to. So, it’s there. Next thing — if you subscribe and don’t get an aknowledgement over the next week or so, ping me in comments. It should notify me, but it’s new (of course) and it might not.

April Fool’s Day – post two

 

Here I admit to the “joke” I mean to make – not a practical joke as such, but a fun chance at cross promotion.

I got the idea from the Austen fandom.  On April fool’s people would take the most delayed long-running stories, and ask the author permission to “finish” them.  Sofie and I granted such permission one year, and the person had Darcy-the-dragon accidentally burn Lizzy.  The end.

I wasn’t very happy with THAT format, because it came out under our names, which means it was confusing, and people were going “What?” when we continued, even though it had been explained it was a prank.

So, what I’d planned to do was exchange with four friends and do an episode in their world.  I was going to take Tom and Kyrie to a convention… and of course indicate I had Kate’s permission, etc.

What went wrong was mostly me, but also my friends.  We all seem to be doing ten thousand things at once.  If we get a chance, we might still do it in future as a fun thing.

This is my favorite sort of April Fool’s joke – kind of like that documentary below – because while played perfectly straight, it doesn’t expect to FOOL anyone.  (The documentary didn’t, according to its history.  It wouldn’t, back then.  I wonder if it would now, because so few people are around farms?)  So it was funny to everyone (pretty much) how well it was done, without being mean.

My problem with most April Fool’s joke is what I call “humiliation humor.”  More and more comedies, even romantic comedies seem to rely on it.  My husband and kids get confused when I leave halfway through a movie because I can’t stand it, and it’s a romantic comedy.  But you  know, the sort of thing where say the nerd is convinced the prom queen is in love with him, and it’s all set up to have his face rubbed in it that she’s laughing at him, makes me sick to my stomach.

Perhaps it is an overdeveloped sense of empathy, but I see nothing whatsoever funny about that sort of thing.  Perhaps it is because I was not only the much younger cousin, but the much younger playfellow in all the groups I belonged to, which meant that I was often the butt of such jokes, often unintentionally.  (How?  Well – “go lick soap” is a Portuguese expression, like “go soak your head.”  At around two I didn’t know this, so when my cousin Natalia told me to go lick soap, I went and reported back it tasted awful and did I have to do it again, which made all her friends crack up.)

But in a way, the basis of ALL my ethics, defective as they are, is a horror of unwarranted cruelty.  Or unexpected cruelty.

What I mean is, say your ten year old did something awful.  He knows it, you know it.  When he comes back, he expects to be punished.  But say your two year old did something awful and has no clue it’s awful.  You call and he comes to you, all smiles, because normally you’re nice to him, and you yell at him and punish him.  The last one makes me physically ill.  (Which means my kids got at least one and often two “free bites” where I just told them why it was awful.  After they were cognizant this worked pretty well.  Third time they got justice of hand on rump quickly, and that stopped it.  Mind you, I made it VERY clear before I was displeased, enough to discourage the behavior.  I just didn’t snap out with yelling and punishment.

Now say your kid did something for which he expects to be REWARDED (it’s amazing the stuff kids misunderstand) and you spring anger on him.  THAT just makes me want to hide and cry, even just watching it.  (For instance, once Robert decided to clean the kids’ bathroom for me, when he was four.  There were things he didn’t process, such as “you don’t mop carpet.”  He expected praise.  I did praise the WISH to help, then explained what he’d done wrong, and pointed out this was why it was better – even though I knew he’d wanted to surprise me – if he asked me how to do it, until he was a little older and knew how things worked.  Carpet in a kids bathroom was a stupid idea anyway, and got replaced shortly after.)

The reason I dislike MOST April fool’s jokes is that they set up that sort of situation. The situation where the prankster feels ‘better’ than the pranked, by fooling the victim.

(Most comedies these days are the same thing.  They’re trying to make the viewer feel superior to the character.  I wonder if this is because most of the Hollywood writers lack all empathy?  Of because they have such insecure egos they must be bolstered this way. Not that I don’t love the “Big Lie” type of joke, I do – but there are ways to do it.  Look at “While you were sleeping” – thank you to Rebecca and Alan Lickiss for introducing me to it – it is one of those, and you’re sort of leaning back and going “whoa, that’s gonna be a mess.”  BUT no one is made the “stupid” part for falling for it.)

I do enjoy and used to look forward April Fool’s jokes you sort of know are coming, sort of are looking for, and can admire for ingenuity.  Say, the Scientific American April article.  (My favorite was the wooden Roman computer.  I can’t now remember whether it was fed on punched wax tablets.)  There are others.  A fellow writer announces he’s quitting EVERY year, and tries to come up with different reasons.  (Some hilarious, some very plausible.)  Those, like the spaghetti below, are more of a shared joke.

My big issue with those in this day and age is that it gets reported on the net at a remove, and the indication that it’s a joke, AND the date get lost.  For instance, my son, last year announced he was selling Ninja Nun to a Japanese company whose name translated to “April’s Fool”.  It was clear from the drawing style, etc, that it was a joke, let alone the improbability of any company wanting to buy a tiny webcomic.  BUT months later, he was still getting notes from people asking what he was paid and how he made contact.

My husband announced he was selling his first novel, under conditions NO ONE WOULD TAKE, including selling his copyright clear and forever, and having to store unsold books, and having to sell all books himself.  And putting up $4000 of his own money to get traditionally “published.”

We thought he made it as outrageous as possible.  And yet… yeah.  Some people still find that post and send him congratulations.

So… I decided not to announce that, after seeing the light, I’d joined the communist party and/or was giving up writing forever.  Because it probably WOULD lose me readers and be brought up years from now as “Sarah Hoyt is a secret communist” or “she said she wasn’t writing another word and she went on writing, and I lost all respect for her.”

Hence what I was planning, more of a joke on the characters, because let’s face it, having Kate’s Jim faced with a shape shifting DRAGON at a con, and having people trying to pretend it was a costume would be hilarious.

Ah well.  Maybe one of these days the individualists will organize.  For now, though, I’m going to do some work – and that’s no joke.

I had planned something elaborate for April’s Fool, but for various reasons it’s not going to come off.  No, it wasn’t EXACTLY a prank, and I’ll explain why later in a more serious (ah!) post.  But I just woke up — that’s how much the conference took stuffing out of me, though it’s probably fact I was editing in evenings that didn’t help — and for now, I’ll just share my favorite April’s Fool day video.  Later I’ll explain why it’s my favorite…