The other day I found myself reading this study about overpopulation.  Well, the study was supposedly about overpopulation, at least.  I’m talking about Calhoun’s study on rats in a cage, rats who were supplied with every possible resource and yet, supposedly, when the population went above a certain density, found themselves exhibiting various pathologies, some of which will sound eerily familiar: a period of oversexuality leads rapidly to a period where the rats can’t connect with each other for sex or anything else.  There’s cannibalism, violence, apathy and a general falling apart of rat society.  Population falls precipitously.  Those rats that are left behind are too… socially inept to rebuild.

I can’t remember how I got to the study.  I was sure it was through Instapundit, but a quick search doesn’t show me the link.  Perhaps I’m missing it?  At any rate, the link I followed and the article I landed on said that the author of the study was upset about how his study was used, to create the idea of finite resources and the horrors of overpopulation.  I read the article first with that idea – the idea that the man somehow got clobbered by the anti-human-wave, those who think that any humans are too many.

But as I read it I became aware of something that seemed to have got lost in both the interpretations of the people who took this as the model for an overpopulated human society and even in the interpretation of the researcher himself (unless I missed something.) *

He talks about the point at which population outstrips the roles available to rats.  When rats don’t have a role in society, they disconnect from it.

This made me pause and sit back, because – as you guys probably know – I’m convinced we’re nowhere close to overpopulated, even as we’re displaying many of the rats’ symptoms.  Of course it could be a matter of our brain thinking we’re overpopulated (there is the perception we know more people than we know, due to TV and other media) or even of our being too densely packed together in some areas…

It could be a matter of that, except that another explanation is much, much more likely.

I’ve been talking about the falling apart – no, the tearing apart, the deconstruction – of Western Society since WWI.  And what hit me was this – human society doesn’t depend on population or even on population density to create roles.  Humans can create – or destroy – roles for themselves more or less at random.

The whole talk of the anomy and purposelessness of modern life has been with us since at least WWI and possibly before.  It is in a way a risk of affluent societies – when you no longer have to fight for every meal, you, being human, have time to sit back and ask yourself stuff like “Why am I alive?  What does it all mean?”

But the other part of it has nothing to do with affluence, but with the deliberate ripping down of roles.

No?  Ask yourself: if you’d asked pretty much anyone on the street in the 1910s what it meant to be a mother, or to be married, or to be an employee, you were likely to meet with a set of beliefs that, in them, comprised those roles.

No, I’m not saying that everyone in those days lived according to those roles, or even that uniformity in roles is desirable.  I’m just saying that there was a certain unanimity in the culture about what those roles were supposed to be.  People would then define themselves within the role, within the role but with a twist, or against the role.  (Perhaps the number was smaller, but I’m fairly sure there were any number of CONSCIOUSLY bad mothers, even back then.)

Now imagine going out on the street and asking anyone what those roles mean.  You’re not likely to come up with even a coherent minority view of any significance on what those roles mean.  The roles have, in fact, disintegrated.  Fallen apart.

Which means, humans being social animals, that people simply don’t know who they’re SUPPOSED to be.  They don’t even know what they’re rebelling against, because there’s nothing concrete there to push against.

This solved for me, at a glance, various things that had puzzled me for a long time: such as why people who consider themselves rebels are rebelling against a norm that hasn’t been a “norm” for almost a hundred years.  They don’t seem to realize it’s not there, because they need a role, even if it’s the role of rebel against something.  Finding themselves adrift is far more terrifying that trying to fit a model.

Or why the first thing I noticed about American was how much happier they were than Europeans, because, at least back in the early eighties, Americans were involved on a volunteer level with organizations in their communities, at a much higher level than Europeans.  (I wonder to what extent the fact that we now all have to work way to much and that local volunteer communities are falling apart is responsible for the Europeanization of our society.)

Or why science fiction people – particularly those involved in the field as either small gods of fandom, con goers, participants in some science fiction book club, or “just” costumers – are in general less prone to the pathologies of the time.  Yes, yes, we are weird, but we are not a “falling apart” kind of weird.  It’s because, by gum, your role might be secretary of the local SF readers’ club, but you care passionately about it, discuss meetings, prepare food for parties, and are in fact someone fulfilling a role.

Yes, I know, several of you are going to prescribe religion as giving meaning to life – and that is true as far as it goes for those who believe.  For those who don’t believe, unless all of you really want to create a club of passionate heretics and church-haters, it’s best if we don’t consider that route.

However, it also explained to me why people join cults and why educated Western women choose to convert to Islam.  It gives them a role, you see, and a fairly clear role, which is important if you are a person of not particularly passionate beliefs.

Human life must always – yes, even for me – be balanced between wanting freedom and fitting into a role, because that part of us that is animal is a social animal and needs to know where they fit in a hierarchy. Any hierarchy.

The good news is that, without binding prescriptive rules for roles, we can give people guidelines that allow them to find their own roles.  We can define “Adult human being” (the line between adult and child is now being blurred) as “someone who takes care of himself and those who depend on him.”  We can define “good” as a person who lives up to his obligations.  We can define “self-supporting” as a goal to aim for.  We can even define well informed and well adjusted as a minimum of things people should know.

The bad news is that to do it we’ll have to fight against people for whom there is no sin except “judging” – people so emotionally confused they fight against the idea of defining even things like “A common language of trade.”

People who are, in fact, engaged in tearing down the very idea of social roles, and who, then, can’t understand why they can’t engage with anything or why everyone is so lost and without purpose.

They, of course, blame capitalism.  This is handy as, taken to its extreme, it allows totalitarians to build a society in which roles – mostly master and serf – are once more tightly defined.  Perhaps they sense this.  Perhaps it is what drives them towards results they – objectively – claim to not want.

But we know better.  If we want to preserve freedom, prosperity and hope for the future – in a word, civilization — we need to start redefining society in terms not so prescriptive that those of us who are odds or very odds are pushed out of the polity, (I’m a libertarian chick.  I’m going to err on the side of freedom) but not so loose that no one knows what he’s supposed to be or where it matters.

Let’s start by affirming that humanity matters; that the future of humanity matters; that “overpopulation” (also known as “the danger of too many humans”) is a bogus fear.  Each human born brings with him uniqueness and the possibility of innovation.

Let’s start by saying the most important role for any adult, free individual is to support himself, to look after those who depend on him, to keep his promise and honor his contracts.

And that humanity, such as it is, neither ape nor angel, is yet worthwhile.  Let’s establish it is worth it to work so that the future is always better than the past – and to dream of new worlds, of new universes, and of wonders yet undiscovered.

We might not live to see it, but it is the duty of every human being to work so our descendants will.

Enough of this rat cage.  It’s time to own infinity.

* Some of these ideas came from a discussion with my friend Bill Reader, and at this point I don’t know which of us came up with what.  He has promised to write his own take on this as soon as work lets up a little.

*I have a post on Selling Your Soul In Installments, over at Mad Genius Club.*

No, this is not a post about Solyndra.  Nor is it a post about General Motors.  It’s not even, in fact, a post about federal monetary policy.

It is a post about something rather deeper than that.

I’m still working on Noah’s Boy – in the time it would take me to finish, I failed to reckon with a prickly young male in pain, who would need to be not just helped when he won’t ask for help, but cajoled so he doesn’t get too depressed.  Not complaining.  It’s not onerous duty.  It’s just taking time, which means I’m later than I expected.  (To be honest, and not to blame the boy for everything, I also am not up to expected strength and after what should be a mild amount of work, fall in these death-sleeps. ) But I’m not sick anymore, and the kid is recovering, and writing is actually going well, even if the book has taken some very odd turns, which I refuse to talk about.  You’ll see.

Anyway, as always when I’m deep in writing, I can’t stand to read anything new and therefore I read an awful lot of old stuff or stuff I’ve read a million times before.  This is convenient, because I leave books scattered all over, and can pick one up and randomly read three pages, without having to read the whole book at a sitting.  Right now, it’s Agatha Christie.

While cooking dinner yesterday, I was re-re-re-reading They Do It With Mirrors.

If you haven’t read the book, you should, because if you do read it, you’ll see why so many “liberals” hate Christie.  They do it with mirrors, by its very premise and several, matter of fact, old-grandmotherly, but completely accurate insights, pokes a thumb in the eye of a lot of the left’s premises.  It starts by telling us there are fashions in philanthropy and how, after World War II the whole fashion in philanthropy was the reforming of criminals, particularly young criminals.

Later on in the novel, Miss Marple delivers herself of a curious, open observation on the insanity of devoting vast resources to this endeavor.

Without giving away too much of the setup, the whole novel takes place in an old mansion which has been converted into a sort of institute to help young men who have had run ins with the law.  The place is full of psychologists, psychiatrists and educators.  It is also, in the way of the best Christie novels, full of an odd extended family, the result of the main female character’s (Miss Marple’s old friend Carrie Louise) four marriages.

One of the members of the family is a granddaughter, half Italian and temperamental (one of the delights of reading Christie is seeing how the British, mid-century, viewed several other people in the rest of Europe, and how different that is from the way I grew up viewing them as Portuguese.  The way British view Italians is more like the way Portuguese view Brazilians: uncontrolled, sexy, fiery.)  She has spent WWII in the states, and there married an American.  Now she and her American husband are living in this crazy mansion-institute, where the family is devoted to rehabilitating criminal juveniles.

Someone – I don’t remember who – tells Miss Marple that the young American can’t understand what they’re doing, because Americans worship success and can-do attitude.

Miss Marple then delivers herself of a little peroration about “Whether we worship failure” and goes on to note that while rehabilitating young criminals is in fact – probably – a noble cause, shouldn’t some resources be given to the people who do in fact make good?  She mentions men and women who come from bad backgrounds, overcome everything to live decent lives, and yet no one is rushing to give them an education or help them find work.  Or even, young men and women of good families, who didn’t do anything wrong, and who would love a little help and never get it, because all the help is going to those who have failed and fallen.

I just know someone in comments is going to bring in the parable of the prodigal son, and the whole thing about there being more rejoicing in heaven for a lost sheep recovered than for a hundred righteous ones.  We’ll get to that.  For now, let’s simply contemplate the fact, that nowadays America resembles more the England Christie was letting Miss Marple unload on “we are in love with failure.”

Part of this, as Beth noted in the comments yesterday, is that all of us have, at some point, experienced being an underdog.  But this is only a partial explanation.  Most of us have also experience doing everything right and only needing a little – a very little help – to get to our goals… and not getting it.  Because we were battling, we were on our own, and therefore it was believed we didn’t need help.

It is one thing when – in my opinion – resources are misallocated to make profoundly handicapped children SEEM to perform normally (don’t throw things at me, okay?  Mainstreaming has its pros, as it has its cons, and it varies with the degree of the handicap.  However, one of my best friends when the kids were in elementary school was the grandmother (and guardian) of a profoundly handicapped young man.  The system was failing her kid as badly as it was failing mine – the difference being it was spending a fortune to fail him.  They had two aids who went with him through the entire day and did the work for him.  No, I know that’s not what is supposed to happen, but the young man had an IQ of 48.  It might have been possible to teach him basic literacy – I really don’t know.  I know a profoundly handicapped girl in my elementary left 4^th grade literate and numerate – but not at the same pace as the other kids, not in the same classes, and not with the same materials.  Since the school insisted on “mainstreaming” him, it took two aids: One to keep him quiet and one to do the actual work he was supposed to do.  In third grade my friend got him transferred to a school where, instead, he had an “aid” or instructor, but she was TEACHING him, at his own pace.) while no resources are available for “above average” children because “they already have an advantage.”

There are several debatables in the case of children, giftedness and advantages, and we could argue all of them forever.

But it is something completely different when there is a degree of volition involved in the failure: when the people for whom resources are being diverted, for whom every door is being open, for whom every effort must be made are those who have, to use a Victorian phrase, blotted their copybook pretty badly. People who have chosen to do that which they knew to be wrong.  People who have demonstrated, at the very least, an ability to squander resources and opportunities.

And yet, it is these people we are taught to help.

We have turned the Victorian morality on its head.  Now the “deserving poor” are those who have been brought to their straits by addiction, by uncontrolled sexual behavior, by their own choice – in the end.  Yes, I know that a lot of the homeless on our streets are untreated mental patients, and that is our shame and our failure as a culture.  Yes, it is true a lot of those treat their problems with addictive substances.  But in the end, if you suggest giving them help conditional to their being treated, the same people who say we must help them will howl and say that no, help should be unconditional and only in the form of handouts – so that you are subsidizing both the addictions and the mental illness.

I think the mechanism that has brought us here is double.  Part of it is a genuine reluctance to “judge” – which can be in some ways admirable.  Most of us who have any empathy at all know that “there for the grace of G-d” and to an extent that’s a good thing.  We can see the factors that led someone astray: untreated mental illness, addition, horrible family background.  We can see, as it were, the whole person through the broken one.

This is admirable… to an extent.  And I’m not saying no efforts should be made to save the ones who fall and who genuinely want to be helped up again.

But the other mechanism is people’s wish to feel good.  If you’re doing good to feel good about yourself, then the more undeserving the subject, the better you feel about yourself.  Look, how little they did to deserve this.  Why, hot d*mn anyone else would demand at least a gesture on the part of the recipient of charity, some show that he’s ready to turn his life around, but not you.  Oh, no.  You’re so good that you will give all to the least deserving.  Now, that’s some treasure in heaven you’re accumulating, right?

Look, I’ll be entirely blunt.  If you are a celebrity with more money than brains and you want to squander your money that way, it’s your business.  It’s stupid, but it gets you what you feel you need: more reasons to admire yourself.  This type of charity might, in the end, be just another way to reinforce your narcissism.  And that’s fine.

In my charity I am almost painfully careful to make sure I “first do no harm” – but that’s something else, it’s my choice and besides, I don’t have millions to squander, so it makes no difference.

BUT – and this is a very important but – when it becomes a matter of public policy, THEN as a taxpayer  I’m being forced to support failure over success; I’m being forced to reward dysfunction over trying.  I’m being forced in fact to subsidize people doing wrong on purpose, in order to be “deserving poor” under the new rules.

And when an entire culture becomes this way, to the point I’ve had to explain to more than one beginning writer that no, just having a character abused doesn’t make that character VIRTUOUS, on the contrary, most people who are abused for no reason get pretty upset and can act out; when I have to explain that if they want to show the character is great and worth it, they have to show more than his being pummeled by fate (even Harry Potter has his magic.  And talks to snakes) we are on very dangerous and shaky ground.

The prodigal son repented and came back – and didn’t expect anything, but to be allowed to be a workman on his father’s farm (and did not get another share of the inheritance he’d squandered) and there might be rejoicing in heaven for a sinner who repents, but there is no rejoicing in heaven for a shepherd who spends his time feeding the one sheep who keeps running away, even while the other sheep get eaten by wolves.

And besides, those are sacred matters.  The parables are about one’s relationship with G-d, who – presumably – can see into human hearts.

We humans, on the other hand, can only look into records.

And while the theory that failures always happen because someone had factors leading to it; and the theory that criminals are more sinned against than sinning, are very reassuring – they lead us to believe our own failures are excusable – reality tends not to be as pliable.

All of us if we think for ten minutes can name friends who had EVERYTHING against them and yet made good.  All of us, if we think for ten minutes, can name friends who had every advantage and yet made nothing of them.

To say that poverty leads to crime is to insult every poor person in the world.  Our prisons are full of people who grew up with every material comfort, even if they might have been theoretically “underprivileged” (And how is that for a mealy mouthed term?  Is there a “right” amount of privileged?  And who decides?  Doesn’t it assume that wealth is privilege, handed to people by some authority and responding to some measurement, rather than something they earn themselves?)

So, where does this nonsense come from?  Other than bureaucrats wanting to feel really virtuous with taxpayers’ money?  And us having evolved a centralized system that gives them a lot of money to feel powerful with?

Well, it comes from bureaucrats wanting to feel really virtuous with taxpayers’ money.  Also from the fact that the … shall we say less deserving sectors of society know very well how to work that need for bureaucrats to feel powerful.  They’re much better at this than the poor but honest (or the rich but honest.  Or the middle class but honest.)  After all, pretending to be something or other is better than working.

Then there is the fact that if you give money to deserving poor, if you give them chances and a legup, they will make something of themselves, and they will no longer need the great and generous bureaucrat.

It comes from charity from a centralized source and not at the local level, where people are known and where it is known whether the money handed on is going to be squandered on drink or worse, instead of on baby formula.

How did we get here – to where it is considered a legitimate function of the federal government, or even the state government to determine who should get help?  And how much help they should get?

No human society that has any resources at all has ever chosen to let their weak drop through the cracks completely (no, look, even hominid bands were shown to care for the sick and weak.) It is true that families, villages, even states, can decide someone isn’t worthy of help for stupid reasons.  We’re all humans.  We all have blind spots.

But moving it one level above doesn’t get rid of the biases, or the blind spots.  All it does is make it bigger and less controllable.  In the end, faceless charity dispensed by people who don’t know the object of their kindness always turns into the same sort of charity performed by celebrities on the faceless “undeserving.”

The more underserving they are, the greater and more glorious the donor can feel.  And the state worker can think he’s overcoming local prejudice, and federal do-gooders assume only they can see impartially, like G-d.  They will help these supposed “undeserving” and show the greatness of their mercy.

But they are not G-d.  They are fallible humans, using all the resources of society to purchase failure in order to make themselves feel better.  Of course what you purchase, you get more of.

That which you ignore and punish — striving, behaving well, trying to be good — you get less of.

It’s a suicidal hobby for a civilization.

*I fell in love with reading history when I swiped my brother’s high school textbooks when I was five or six.  But by the time I was in college and reading for my American Culture class, I found myself giggling insanely at how stupid the book — and the stuff we had to read — was.  It was one vast slough of despond with group after group being exploited, dehumanized, etc.  The only way to be well thought of was to lose a war or be exterminated.  Southerners went from being villains to being heroes once they lost the civil war, for instance, to being villains again in the present day.  One couldn’t follow the thing with rationality — at all.  TX Red just explained why.  As with the slough of despond on “literary science fiction” shelves the answer is “because the elites are so childish they think depression makes them sound adult.” — Okay, so TX didn’t say that.  She says far more interesting stuff and better than I can.  We must prevail upon her to guest more often! — Sarah *

 

Human Wave History or Where have all the Stories Gone?

by TX Red

Hi. My name is Red, and I’m a historian. Today’s episode of “As the Pages Turn” is about the Human Wave approach to history.

 

Have you ever looked over the shelves of history books at your local bookstore and scratched you head, wondering why so many older works are still in print, while the most recent award winners vanish within weeks, if they are ever stocked at all? Why is it that a small collection of local stories sells steadily at the county history museum, but the Great Dr. So-and-so’s scholarly monograph about class, gender, and labor relations between Irish and Mexican workers on the local railroad gathers dust?  It’s because people want to read Human Wave history but the majority of current academic historians do not write it.

Barbara Tuchman, Will and Ariel Durant, William McNeil, Bruce Catton, Shelby Foote, V. G. Childe, Paul De Kruif, all wrote Human Wave history. David H. Fischer, David McCullough, Anne Applebaum, and Steven Ozment still write Human Wave, even if the Academic Ones sniff at some, if not all, of their work. Which leads to the questions 1) just what is Human Wave history and 2) what the heck happened in the Ivory Tower?

I’ll answer the questions in reverse order. By the late 19^th century in England and the United States, a loose consensus later called “the Whig School” of history had emerged as the dominant voice of the academic history field, so to speak. The Whig School held that history was a chronicle of improving life, more civil rights, economic prosperity, and that things were getting better and better, despite a few setbacks (the Thirty Years’ War, the Dark Ages). Then along came the First World War.

The Whig School staggered, but it was not until the 1950s and 1960s that academic history dove head first into the grey goo. Progressives, who had begun moving into the universities in the 1920s, became the leading voices in historical thinking in the 1950s and 1960s. The Marxist approach to history became more and more common and Marxist-derived philosophies from France and Germany and Italy became popular, “cutting-edge,” and trendy. Academia embraced theories that held that all of humanity’s past is nothing more than a struggle for power among groups, with Europeans being the worst oppressors.

At the same time, new subfields of history gained acceptance. Social history, looking at customs and cultures, became stronger in the 1940s and 1950s. Computers made population studies and statistical history (“Cliometrics”) possible. In the 1970s, the environmental movement encouraged the development of environmental history. Because young scholars had to either do original work in their field, or refute earlier work, they gravitated towards the new sub-fields. Those changes, plus the 1960s foments in the US and Europe, produced the modern Slough of Despond that is much of academic, post-modern history. At its worst, everyone is either a victim or an oppressor, the world is going to heck in a hand basket, and it’s all the fault of the DWHtEMs.* Instead of political and diplomatic history, the best fields to focus on are “Area Studies” (Women’s Studies, Subaltern Studies, Chicana/o Studies, LGBT or Queer Studies, world without end, amen) or the hybrid interdisciplinary studies. If you ever want to cure a chipper mood, go into a university bookstore and look at the books required for area studies classes. Then cruise over and glance at the books written by the university’s faculty, or browse the “new books” shelves at the college library or in the university press catalogue.

However, Human Wave history survived, in large part outside of academia’s inner circle. Barbara Tuchman never went to graduate school or taught at a university and her works are still read, referred to, and in print. It is a rare professor of US or European history who does not own a set of the Durant’s works, or at least know where he/she/it can find a copy. Academics still look askance at Shelby Foote, even though more people learned about the US Civil War from his books than from any of the thousands of monographs written about the topic. Stanley Vestal was an English professor who wrote history on the side and taught his students how to make money, for Pete’s sake! David McCullough is a popularizer, but he’s worked with Ken Burns so he usually gets a pass.

 

So, what is Human Wave history? In this historian’s view, Human Wave history is history that tells the stories of the past without dragging the reader into despair. A Human Wave historian uses humor, good writing, and a common-sense view of the world to show the reader what happened, then steps out of the way.

Human Wave does not make the past pretty, but it does show how people who got knocked down found ways to get back up. For example, a new book came out last fall about life in Eastern Europe between 1944-1954. The author points out that people found ways to cope with the imposition of Stalinism, carving out pockets of sanity, falling in love, having children, and being ready to regain their freedom when opportunity presented itself. The light kept burning despite WWII and Stalinism, and the historian shows the reader that. The author also did a lot of hard work in archives and conducting interviews, but she writes so well that you don’t see the effort.

Human Wave history can be adventure stories, even if the adventures do not always end well. Several new books about Robert Falcon Scott have recently hit the shelves. Not a happy tale, but still an inspiring one if told honestly. Norman Cantor’s and William H. McNeill’s books about the Black Death, another cheerful topic, draw the reader into the time and show how people endured, then clawed their way towards greater independence and prosperity.

Human Wave does not bore. If you are like me, you’ve tried reading about what sounded like a fascinating topic, only to doze off because the writing style sucked the life out of the past. Some historians maintain that lively writing trivializes the topic, to the extent that a major international university press is infamous for its dull works. No! There’s no excuse for writing grey, gooey history, or science, any more than there is for writing grey, gooey fiction. People can make even water law interesting to read about— not page-turner thrilling, but interesting enough to finish the book. Paul De Kruif’s The Microbe Hunters turned epidemiology and microbiology into a gripping tale for budding scientists.

Human Wave does not induce guilt for being human. Environmental history, my specialty, runs the risk of turning into “humans destroyed paradise” or “Western capitalism poisoned the water, made the soil blow away, and has doomed the planet. Woe, woe.” Human Wave history reminds us that no group of humans ever “lived in harmony with Nature.” What was done in ignorance can sometimes be reversed, or at least ameliorated, through knowledge once someone says, “oops. OK, what can we do to fix/undo/learn from this?”

Human Wave history does not blame the world’s ills on any one group. For example, yes, the Chinese invented a number of things before the West did. The Chinese, for their own reasons, did not take those things and run with them. This is not the fault of the West, nor is it an example of Western cultural imperialism.

Human Wave history does not preach and neither do Human Wave historians. They lets the story tell itself, with some interpretation where appropriate, but not at the expense of the story. Try reading Roll, Jordon, Roll: The World the Slaves Made and then guessing the author’s politics (no fair peeking). You can’t. Nor can you tell what color, sex, sexual preference, favorite food, or religion (if any) the author had. It’s just a Human Wave story.

So, how do you find Human Wave history? You might look at some of the authors listed above. Find out what is still in print and selling. Ask your librarian what she or he recommends. Find an Odd who reads history for fun and see what they like (or don’t like) and why. Skim the reviews on Amazon, GoodReads, and other sites. What have you got to loose?

 

*Dead White Heterosexual European Males.

 

 

*When I met Kate Paulk online — eight?  Ten? years ago, the last thing she (or I) could imagine her doing was writing humor.  Kate’s mind tends to take a turn for the dark, then go darker, which is somewhat weird because she has no interest whatsoever in writing horror.  She is, however, a true gateway writer — in fact, she came up with the term — one of those people for whom the stories arrive from some distant shore of the subconscious mind, and MUST be written.  So, some years ago, after she’d been exposed to enough cons, she sent me these (three?) chapters and asked me what I thought of it.  I put it off a little because I wasn’t in the mood for dark and gore, but then I read it, and was shocked.  Oh, there’s dark and gore.  I mean, the main character is a vampire for crying out loud.  But I found myself laughing too, because well…  Well…  It’s funny.  [And then you feel a little guilty at laughing.]  The novel poured out of her and my only contribution was a) pointing out to her the police would be involved unless there was a reason not to be — like magic or something that turned them away — and that she couldn’t have famous people as themselves.  She could have friends thinly disguised, with our permission — Dave Freer and I are rather obvious — but everyone else had to be a composite of at least three people UNLESS the depiction was wildly complementary.  So even though the novels often involve real incidents overheard/seen at cons, you can’t “decode” them like a roman a clef, because each person is three or four people.  The weird thing is how often some incident she described that HADN’t happened, happens afterwards, or someone not written into the books takes on the characteristics of one of the characters.  As she puts it “that universe leaks.”  Anyway, sometime ago she sent me this post about how she manages to make the ick funny, and since I’m working on Noah’s Boy (Might take an extra day.  Looking after a post-operative male takes TIME — dang creatures try not to ask for help and hurt themselves.) I thought this was a good day to put it up.  Our very own TXRed sent me a post which will go up tomorrow about Human Wave History, and then I have about five posts I have to write or burst…  But for now, enjoy Kate, and I go back to Noah’s Boy.  Kyrie just got kidnapped and I have NO idea where she is.  Grrrr.  Argh.*

Laughing Through the Icky Bits — by Kate Paulk

As an author I find one of the most challenging things I have to do (aside from marketing, but that’s because I suck at it) is to describe something truly horrifying in a way that won’t send my readers running for the bathroom or have them turning a delicate shade of green and putting the book down. I want them to KEEP reading, after all.

 

My preferred tool, as those who have read ConVent and ConSensual will know, is to use humor. The humor offsets the horrible just enough that the full gross impact never QUITE happens, at least until the reader has finished the book and stops to think about some of the things I described. That’s the intention, at any rate.

 

It’s not the easiest technique (the easiest is called “cheating” and involves not describing anything at all, just having the characters react), but it tends to be worth the effort. Besides, I can’t stop myself from going dark, but I can use a lighter tone to describe the horrible so I don’t end up with second-rate horror.

 

My first method is to use the POV character’s voice – which is one of the reasons Jim in the con vampire books is such a delight to work with. He’s sour, cynical, and practically defines snark. When he’s in a good mood. He’s also seen just about everything, so he’s not going to freak when he’s confronted by the aftermath of a gruesome sacrificial ritual.

 

Then I add in the very human tendency to notice and get distracted by all sorts of odd details. In reality these are usually irrelevant – the way that severed finger looks like an undersized raw ox-tail has nothing to do with the essentials of making sure the owner of said finger isn’t bleeding, packing the finger in ice so it can be reattached if you can get it and its owner to a hospital in time, and of course getting the owner and finger to the nearest hospital (in this case that endeavour didn’t result in reattached extremities – it was only a quarter inch or so of finger that got lopped and the 5-some hour wait in extreme heat for the Flying Doctor service to get to the camp plus flight time pretty much eliminated any viability for the operation anyway). In fiction of course, they can be relevant and used to offset the horror of whatever is being discussed.

 

That’s more or less how the Hello, Kitty bondage sacrifice scene in ConVent plays out. I gave enough detail for an imaginative reader to picture the scene, then had the Bosting spawn arguing that it couldn’t be real because it didn’t look enough like the video games, and Ricky Bosting complaining about things that shouldn’t fit where they obviously had been fitted (further detail omitted to spare the sensitive – if you want to read it you’ll need to buy the book). Rather than dwell on the extremely gruesome nature of the sacrifice, I focused on the characters doing what normal people faced with something horrific will do – they’ll blank the worst of it and focus on some small detail that avoids the worst implications.

 

I did something similar in ConSensual with one of the bodies, complete with a seriously bad joke ripped (I think) from one of the Achmed the Dead Terrorist routines (“They found him there, and there, and there…”). In that one, the character who cracks the joke is deliberately using it as a way to avoid freaking out. The fact that this character is a werewolf and presumably accustomed to gore makes the impact stronger.

 

When I read Pratchett, I see him using similar techniques (although he does a much better job than I do – but he’s not writing this post. I am. Nyah nyah) to soften the darkest edges of his stories and let the humor carry the point. Someone who laughs, even if it’s a laughing, “Oh, yuck!” is going to be more favorable towards you than someone who doesn’t. And a point that slides in ever so gently while you’re laughing your anatomy off is one that you didn’t see coming and you might actually get, where if it’s being belabored with a sledge, you’re going to try to avoid it.

 

(Yes! Go me. I’ll now have people reading ConVent and ConSensual trying to figure out what I’m trying to sell you.)

 

Sarah’s done this as well in her DarkShip books and the mysteries she’s written as Elise Hyatt, so go buy those as well and study them. It’s for a good cause.

*As everyone knows I don’t write aliens.  Okay, I’m not saying I never will, because the minute I do that, an entire alien civilization will start dancing in chorus line across my mind, and then I’ll have to write it.  But so far I’ve been too intensely interested by humans to write aliens.  Also, my concept of alien is really alien — things we can’t GET and therefore remain completely outside our perception or are perceived as random forces.  Alternately they’re things like in Puppet Masters, where they might be sentient or not, but the meeting is still disastrous.  That’s a personal thing.  Maybe I was bitten by an alien as a child. In the absence of my going on and on about aliens, Mike Weatherford has been thinking about them on his own, and he very kindly offered to do a post for me, while I’m pushing to finish Noah’s Boy.  (So if I’m relatively quiet in comments, I’m not dead, I’m writing.  The two conditions are eerily similar, actually.  The moving fingers on the keyboard are all that stops my husband holding a mirror to my lips, sometimes.)  Mike writes science fiction.  You should maybe check his work.  (Ignore James Michael Weatherford, he’s clearly an impostor trying to steal Mike’s thunder.)  It’s reasonably priced.  REALLY reasonably priced which means sometime soon I need to meet Mike and talk sternly at him.  He blogs at Old Patriot’s Blog.*

 

Science fiction is the fiction of the future — almost exclusively the future of humanity.  It almost always shows descendants of today’s human population in futuristic settings, doing things that few even consider possible today.  Much of it shows ONLY humans.  A few stories include non-humans, ranging from semi-intelligent to super-intelligent aliens, allied with, indifferent to, or in direct conflict with humanity.  Sometimes aliens are the bad guys, sometimes the good guys, and frequently mostly for scenery or a plot device.

 

How realistic are these depictions?  We’ll never know if/until we meet them.  The one thing that’s certain, however, is that IF you’re writing Science Fiction, and you use alien creatures in your work, how realistic are your characters to your readers?

 

Past depiction of aliens run from human or almost-human to so bizarre they’re almost impossible to relate to.  Some of them work, some of them don’t.  Let’s look at what a realistic alien needs to possess in order to “work” — to appear realistic to readers.

 

One of the major considerations for creating aliens is to construct a realistic social structure.  Individuals, regardless of the type of creature you create, cannot extend beyond its own ability, and no individual can do everything it takes to build civilizations.  To expand beyond the individual requires a social structure, whether it’s the family, tribe, nation-state, planet, or greater.  The more complex the alien civilization, the more complex the social structure needs to be.  This doesn’t mean you have to create that social structure in your book, but you MUST create it in your mind, and remember it when writing your words.  This is THE major blunder writers make when working with aliens.

 

Social structures need advances in individual capability to develop and mature.  That means language, probably art, and definitely science.  It doesn’t mean it has to be anything LIKE human language, art, and science, but that the alien society has developed something similar.

 

No alien is going to get beyond the early hunter/gatherer stage without the ability to create and use tools.  While a multiple-armed tentacled creature could develop the ability to use tools, its society would be definitely more constrained than something like humans with opposable thumbs (it takes a tremendously greater amount of mental activity to control twelve limbs than it does to control two limbs, two hands, and ten fingers.  Intelligence isn’t likely to expand beyond basic tool usage, because too much brain activity is being concentrated in manipulating appendages — or otherwise brains are so huge they don’t fit in confined spaces).

 

Our alien has to have sense organs in order to perceive its environment.  Another strike against our tentacled creature above would be the probable necessity of having a unique sense organ for each of its manipulative appendages.  Coordinating that much information would again require such a huge amount of brain space that there would be little room left for intellectual pursuits.

 

That doesn’t necessarily mean that our alien’s sense organs need to be the same ones we use.  There may be an alternative to the five senses we employ (sight, touch, hearing, taste, etc.).  There may be a telepathic sense that provides all the external evaluation sensors we employ, or an all-inclusive sense of touch that lets the individual interact with its world.  It isn’t as important what they are as that they exist, and have understandable parameters that establish what they can — and cannot — rely upon their sensors to provide.

 

Those sensors also have to relate directly to the world where they developed.  For instance, let’s say that our aliens developed on the planet around a red dwarf.  Red dwarfs don’t give off enough light for the human eye to function well.  The alien’s eye would have to compensate for that dimness in some way — by a better vision transfer means than our rods and cones, of larger eyes/vision organs, or by the ability to significantly manipulate the vision organ to provide a greater range of operating, such as down into extremely low frequencies.  At the same time, a creature that has developed around an F-type primary needs the ability to restrict the amount of light that enters the sense organ, or they’ll end up with eyestrain.

 

We need to back up just a minute, and inject a little hard science.  When we talk of red dwarfs and F-type stars, we’re talking about stars of different brightness — and also, of different evolutionary development rates.  The best source of information for this is the Hertzsprung-Russell (Hertzberg-Russell) diagram (do a Google search).  ANYONE who wants to write science fiction and wants to get out of the Earth’s solar system should know this information implicitly.

 

The Hertzsprung-Russell diagram plots stars according to their size/surface temperature.  There are three basic groups of stars:  the MAIN SEQUENCE, the WHITE DWARFS, and the GIANTS.  The main sequence stars are divided into CLASSES based on their surface temperature, from the hottest to the coolest.  These solar classes are O, B, A, F, G, K, and M, with a half-dozen other classes to classify the non-main-sequence stars.  An easy way to remember this is the mnemonic “Oh Be A Fine Girl, Kiss Me.”  Stellar main sequence evolution also relates to size/surface temperature, with the largest stars being the shortest-lived, while the coolest stars live the longest.  This is because of the star’s energy budget:  an O-class star must burn massively more hydrogen than an F-class star, and an F-class star burns significantly more hydrogen than an M-class dwarf.

 

All of this has meaning for your alien civilization.  An O-class super-giant would never exist long enough for a civilization to form before exploding into a supernova, destroying any planets that might exist around it, and any developing civilization that might have existed.  On the other hand, an M-class dwarf would probably not provide enough energy for something akin to plants to develop, much less a civilized society.

 

This doesn’t mean that M-class dwarfs don’t have planets — we’ve already discovered some that do.  They just aren’t a very good choice to find an advanced civilization.  The best, most logical choice would be around the suns that can provide enough energy for a civilization to come into existance, enough longevity for the long, slow evolutionary process to take place, and sufficient energy to keep the process moving.  This pretty much leaves with F-, G-, and K-class stars.  Luckily for us, these groups make up the second-largest number of stars in our galaxy (and any other, for that matter), behind M-class dwarfs.

 

All of this leads us to our next biggest area of consideration:  the environment in which your civilization develops.  That depends on two things:  the output of the source of energy, and the distance from that source where your planets are located — the so-called “inhabitable zone”.

 

What this actually defines is the zone where water can exist as a solid, liquid, and gas, at least during part of its stellar cycle.  This more or less defines the “inhabitable zone” for humans and aliens similar to them.  That DOESN’T mean that some weird form of life can’t exist in other areas, such as the clouds of Jupiter-type planets, the surface of Titan and similar environments, or other areas, just that it’s less likely.  The energy budget for such creatures would be so small their movements would have to be measured over decades, or the source of energy would have to come from other sources, such as gravitational forces that heat Jupiter’s upper atmosphere to temperatures similar to those found from central Europe to the tropics  (Robert L. Forward’s novel “Saturn Rukh” handles this very well, and very intelligibly).

 

So, our alien has to fit his environment, which has to fit his world, which has to fit his sun.  That means his development through stages to intelligence, then up the ladder to where he can at least contemplate life elsewhere, to where he can physically search for that life among the different stars.

 

One other thing needs to be discussed, then I’ll shut up:  sex.  How do you handle alien sex?  You cannot ignore it — just as it’s a main driver of human development, it will most likely be a main driver of alien development.  The drive to reproduce is what keeps the numbers climbing, and civilization being forced to come up with more and more ways to accommodate the higher numbers.  Civilizations that don’t have a population growth don’t have any other kind of growth, and soon die.

 

Alien sex can be anything from asexual (very unlikely, but possible, especially on a planet with surface conditions similar to Titan) to requiring up to a dozen individuals to succeed (very possible, especially on a planet around a very active sun, where multiple copies of the genetic record are needed to keep mutations from destroying the society).  Sex, like the other characteristics of your alien, are shaped by its environment, not our wishful thinking.

 

The following is just a personal evaluation of aliens, and only shows how I have developed and depicted the aliens I have used in my stories.

 

I believe that there are far more planets in our galaxy than most scientists are willing to admit.  I also think that much of the identification of large, close-in gas giants is actually the detection of multiple planets, instead of one.  I can’t see gas giants being viable around F-type and hotter suns.  The solar wind would strip any atmosphere they may have from them, leaving a rocky core which would be significantly smaller than what’s being measured.

 

I also believe life is far more pernicious than most people think.  Life is found everywhere on the planet Earth that it can exist, from the permanent snow line to the deepest depths of the oceans.  I would expect life to develop wherever there was the possibility for it, which would include an energy budget to allow it to exist, the raw materials for that type of life, and the time for it to have evolved.  (I also believe that when God created life, He created the OPPORTUNITY for life to develop – a viable energy budget, the raw materials, and a gentle nudge based upon the laws that govern the universe [created by God, so they’re God’s Laws].

 

With life, Intelligence should also have developed.  That does NOT mean it’s “our” kind of intelligence, or even something we can understand — just that intelligence will develop anywhere there’s the possibility for it.  All in all, I think we have a lot of friends – and enemies – awaiting us once we learn how to get to them.

First, and to get it out of the way, it’s possible I won’t do Witchfinder this week.  I really, really, really, am trying to finish Noah’s Boy by Sunday night, and when making that kind of effort, there is no space for another world in my head.  And if I do finish it by Sunday night, I’ll be sleeping Monday, so I might as well save it and do multiple chapters next weekend, because it’s time it was finished.

Second, in case it’s not been blindingly obvious, between Son of Death Flu, the Return and – well, the postponed surgery happened, and though I wasn’t the subject, it still involved my spending the best part of two days in the hospital – it’s been somewhat scattered around here.

It’s also been weird.  Son of Death Flu is on the way out.  Or at least my head cleared two days ago, and at the moment you wouldn’t know I was ill except for a certain occasional cough.  From the inside it’s somewhat different – including the feeling of tiredness and weakness and a certain “stoppage” chestwards.  Oh, yeah, and the dreams.  The bizarre fever dreams.  (Even though I don’t really have a fever – not that it means much, my fever-thing being broken.  I didn’t have a fever while in ICU with pneumonia.)

I actually have three guest posts waiting to go up, and wasn’t going to write anything but Noah’s boy today.  But last night as I was falling asleep, I had the world’s oddest dream.  To begin with it was an illustrated book.  Second, it was told in the form Chinese fables usually are told in children’s books.  Third it was germane to the general area of this blog.

I wish I were a good enough artist to do the illustrations, which were like a cross between Japanese prints and vivid hallucinations, with the beard of the mentor stretching out of the page, to become the fluffy clouds on the next page.

Despite resemblances to the USSR, the story – it’s really an allegory – is of course not set anywhere and… truly, it was just like a children’s book.

But anyway…  In case you don’t have weird enough dreams, I thought I’d share mine:

How to become an artist

How do I become an artist, asked the young man to his mentor.

Instead of answering, his mentor told this story:

In a land far far away (but becoming closer every day) a government that thought of itself as wise and just decreed that all art should serve the state.  That was the only way to avoid offending anyone, and also to serve the cause of progress to that ever brightening future towards which the state was driving the reluctant people.

As head of the state publishing company – the only company allowed to exist, after it was found that left to themselves individuals would give voice to the most scurrilous opinions, such as that the wise and kind men in power might wish to enrich themselves and control others – they chose a man who had written three well-received books supporting the same ideals the state proclaimed.

Everything went well for this man – we’ll call him Joe — until one day, having read a book someone in power liked, he dared write that it was a stupid book.  Real humans don’t act that way.  While in the past great drama has been found in not pursuing love for the sake of ideals or religion, no human being would give up on love for the sake of serving the sterile and bureaucratic state.

Police ransacked Joe’s papers and semiologists perused his writings and it was found he had for some time held deviationist beliefs that maintained that sometimes the kind, wise men of the state could be in it for the power and the riches.

So they sent Joe to a place of punishment – which in this country was an arctic land – where he was forced to work with his hands and was given very little food.  He was told he would be allowed out if he ever wrote a book – convincingly wrote a book – that supported the idea that everything, even true love, should be sacrificed to the state and its forward-looking ideals.

After years in the place of punishment, Joe started writing.  His guards were told to let him stay in the room, and give him wood for the fireplace, and Joe wrote furiously.

The book when it was finished was all the state wanted and approved of.  It was rushed to print and given wide distribution.

It took years for people in the state to realize that behind the story there was another story, and that with his use of words Joe showed that the great tragedy was the characters having to act in this way, against nature, against decency, against love, for the sake of a power-hungry, crushing state.

By then it was too late and everyone had read the book, and people had started thinking that perhaps there was something wrong with the state and that its forward-looking ideals and all the sacrifices for the utopia that never came were merely a way to keep people in subjection.

“And that,” the young man asked.  “Is how Joe became an artist?”

“No.  That is how Joe became an adult human.  It is the right and duty of adult humans to think things through and not bow to the pressure of those who say “this thought is forbidden.”  Art was merely his ability to hide it well enough that, like a seed, it went forth into the dark and made others think.”

***********************

And now you know I’m COMPLETELY insane.

 

To clarify yesterday’s post, I should confess right now that this backward dreaming started after 9/11 and was at first a VERY BAD reaction, though better than the immediate one.

The immediate one was truly weird.  Normally as I’m falling asleep, I tell myself stories.  These are usually in the world of my stories.  This is going to sound very weird, but I check in on how Kyrie and Tom are doing, or look into Eden, or…  They’re plotless little snippets that sort of go nowhere, though some of it later finds its way as an incident into the novels – like Tom’s obsession with the new fryer.  In a way that “daydreaming” about other people/places is the source of my writing, I think, insofar as it can be said to have a source.

You see, I was a very sickly child.  How sickly?  Well, I think I attended about three months of most of my elementary school grades, because the rest of the time I was sick in bed.  This lasted from as far back as I can remember till about age 13.  It wasn’t anything major – well except TB, but other than that – normally, but just whatever childhood ailments were going around amped up to eleven by the fact I had chronic asthma (fortunately it went away at puberty and – knock on wood — hasn’t come back) massive eczema, and a generally depleted immune system due to being born very premature.

There is only so much you can lay in bed – my room (actually for half of that time, my parents’ room.  Dad worked out of town during the week until I was seven, so during the week I slept in their room so mom could keep a closer eye on my breathing, etc.  On the weekend, I slept with my cousin, at grandma’s next door.) until I was 7 didn’t even have a window.  Other kids weren’t allowed to come visit, because much of what I had was at least possibly contagious.  I could read – sort of – but mom believed it was bad for me to strain my eyesight while I had a fever.  So I was often left to build vast lego cities and invent stories about the people living in them.  From that to daydreaming about these people as I was falling asleep was a small step, and the habit sort of stuck.

HOWEVER after 9/11, and no, I can’t explain WHY except that it was a weird shock to the system, those dreams shut down.  Just slammed shut.  For the worlds that share ours, I didn’t know how to deal with it.  I couldn’t go into those worlds, without finding them dealing with 9/11.  So I started having these weird day dreams where I was someone else altogether different.  I don’t know how to explain it.  My … consciousness was mine, but it belonged to someone completely different, someone younger, with a different background, for whom 9/11 didn’t matter as much.  These were never very coherent.  It was more going out somewhere, having dinner with friends, snatches and scenes.

From there on, and because I was worried about what came next (yes, I’ve been worried for many years) I started daydreaming backwards – projecting myself into the past “What if Dan and I had got married at eighteen.”  The only way to overcome the obstacles which kept us from getting married then (mostly being strongly young and stupid.  The stoopid was strong in the two of us) was to imagine a “by his bootstraps” scenario – from the Heinlein short story in which the man who has come to a dead end sends his mind back in time to his younger self…. And changes everything.  Of course, I ain’t going anywhere without Dan, so it meant two minds back… but… you know…

Those dreams were I think somewhat pathological.  Not really, because I didn’t allow them to take over, but a retreat from reality that was necessary at the time to… heal?  I think.

But then I realized I was bringing things back from those dreams.  Okay, the first was absolutely trivial.  These are pie-in-the-sky alternate timelines, of course, and if I were doing that, then for instance, I decided we’d live in Denver – near the museum – by now.  And that brought about a stray thought of “but busy street” and I was thinking the house would have half curtains – enough to let the light in, but not to let anyone look in.  This is when the lightbulb went on, since in our current house we’d sacrificed light for privacy.  I found the curtains I’d imagined as a solution – and they were affordable too… and voila.  I ported the dream into the present.

There are other things too.  If I could go back, I’d absolutely tell my younger self to stop ignoring art.  Start taking classes now, and working on that at the same time as writing because… multiple streams of income.  And then of course I thought “But why can’t I do it now?  Okay, I’m older, but I come from a long lived family… so why not?”

And now to the extent those day dreams exist, (and except for being sick, I haven’t been shell shocked enough to indulge in them MUCH) they are sort of porting devices.  I’ll envision my perfect life now if we’d done this or that… and then I think “but wait a minute.  We could do/have/be that now.”  Most of the time it’s not even anything that demands a lot of money, it’s just “how we spend our time/what we do.”

Then there is that corollary, too “What would I tell my younger self?”  Most of it is stupid stuff: Work harder.  Don’t get discouraged.  Persevere.  Those months of black depression because you think you’ll never get anywhere?  Forget them.  Things get better.  And enjoy your husband, you utter idiot, instead of worrying all the time about how he is working too much, or…

But you know, part of that advice is UNUSABLE.  I mean, there were reasons I didn’t work harder.  Partly time.  And the months of black depression thing is just as applicable now.

And then that turned into “what would I do differently now?”  “What would I do if myself from twenty years in the future came back and said…”

The advice would be the same: worker harder.  Diversify.  Enjoy the guys, while all four of you still live together.  Prepare for a future where things are different.

But that daydream is what has led me to take the plunge with indie with everything but Baen.  Because life is too short to have nervous breakdowns about the other companies.  And hey, I haven’t had the time to WRITE for indie right now, but I can bring shorts out, right?

It’s what has led me to actually come out of the political closet.  It’s what has led me to somehow find the time to work around the edges – even when I run out of spoons and everything stops, it has given me the courage to go on in these very bewildering times.  To make it “not scary” to be unagented.  To make it “okay” to go indie even if it involves a loss of “prestige”, to strategize on how to survive a possible crash.

That’s the power of the dream.  That it allows me to turn the same look I turn on the past when I think “How do I optimize this?” towards the future, towards now.  Sometimes your circumstances are so familiar you don’t see what’s right in front of your eyes, or how it could be made better.  Going away in your mind for a while brings you back with fresher eyes.

And you know, working hard, persevering and not getting discouraged seem to work in just about any circumstances and at any age.  As is diversifying and being creative.

If you dream, dream with your eyes open – dream knowing it’s a day dream, dream of the best and prepare for the worst.  But let the times never be so bad you can’t dream at all.

One of my favorite daydreams – which I would say comes from getting older, though frankly, I think it comes more directly from being a science fiction sort of chick – is what I would do if I could go back in time and give myself a message.

Let’s establish upfront this would have to be a short message.  I don’t know  what the rates are for trans-time communication, but it is probably prohibitive.  (The alternate to this dream is the By His Bootstraps scenario, and I suspect the one-way-mind-ticket back is yet more expensive, plus I’d have to factor in the boys and Dan too, because I ain’t going nowhere without the guyses.)

Yes, yes, “buy apple stock” is rather obvious, but let’s be frank here, okay?  Most of the time (with brief glorious exceptions when we had to catch up on all the deferred basics – forget luxuries) we were barely making it on the “we can keep roof over head, feed ourselves and keep cars running.”  We might have been able to pinch some money for stocks, but it was never going to be a bunchaton or even enough o make a difference.  Look, until about five years ago, I used to daydream IN THE CLEANNERS isle of the supermarket.  As in “oh, wow, I wish I could buy the more expensive/efficient scrubbing stuff instead of basic all purpose pinesol.”

As for “I’ll warn the authorities in advance of 9/11,” forget that too.  At best you’d get yourself on some FBI watch lists.  At worst, you’d get locked up as a loony.  It’s not like they didn’t have other warnings – the machineries of security work very slowly (and not very efficiently) and we all know what being the voice that cried in the desert got John the Baptist, right?

So, let’s just consider this – if you could – if you had the chance to just go back 20 years and tell yourself one thing… what would you say?

Needless to say my own favored thing would be to go back and tell Dan and I on the night  the car broke down – OMG, 32 years ago.  Where does time go? – by the side of that lone highway in Ohio “Just get married now.  Four extra years.”  It would have been tough, mind.  And we’d probably be about where we are… but… four extra years.

I used to daydream of this in reverse when I was a broke would-be writer, just starting seriously trying to aim for fiction writing as a job (before that my main goal was to find employment as a multilingual translator) because I had an infant and I didn’t want to put him in daycare.  So… exactly 20 years ago, give or take, when we first moved to Colorado.

I used to push the pram with Robert all over downtown, from bookstore to bookstore (we were so broke that most of my reading material came from the “rejected books” shelf outside stores, so I usually hit all three everyday to make sure I didn’t miss any good stuff) and daydream about myself-from-the-future coming back and just saying “you’ll make it.”  I thought it would save me so much heartache and stuff.

Well, you shouldn’t lie.  Not to the young.  And I was (relatively) young then.  If I could go back, could I really say “you made it?”  Oh, sure, from the perspective of Sarah-back-then who thought she’d be happy if she just published a few short stories (yeah, and the moment I did I started going “I want to sell a novel.”) yeah, probably.  But on the other hand, what about the years of heartache, the years I HAD to write six books, the years of throwing books into an endless abyss where nothing flourished?

If I told her, she might have chosen to do something less painful for money, like sell a kidney.  And yet, from a certain perspective, if you squint – and are thoroughly drunk – I wouldn’t give up on what I’ve done.  I think at least some of the books are very worth it.  (And probably not the ones I THINK are worth it.  Time and again writers misevaluate their work.  So I’m not going to try.)

So, if I could go back – or send back a note to my younger self, what would I say… exactly?

Well, at the time we moved to Colorado I was starting to get a hint that being attached to my first world would be me nowhere.  I’d jump on that and say “Diversify.”

What else?

These were the early days of online communities.  Dan wouldn’t let me get on AOL because it was stuff for non-techies.  (He’s always been in denial about the fact I’m a non-techy.)  I’d have insisted, and I’d have got on the early Baen bar and pursued my traditional publishing that way.  (Weirdly back then I was starting to write in the future history timeline, and DST wasn’t that far off.)

But more importantly?  You know the worst block I faced?  That was when I wanted to write something I knew had NO market.  Say, an extended romance/ghost story set in the future (Well, that was one of them) or the fantasy everyone kept thinking was YA despite rape and madness, because it started when character was 17 (for one chapter.)  Putting those stories “to bed” and continuing on the stuff that had a chance actually took more effort than just writing them.  It was kind of like trying not to push when I was giving birth to #2 son and the doctor had to drive in from his office [kid was delivered by a doctor in street clothes.]  It was much harder than actually giving birth.)

So I’d say “Just write it.  Whatever crazy idea, write it.  Don’t worry about shorts.  Don’t worry about submitting.  Don’t worry, really, about any publishers but Baen.  Overtime?  Not worth your effort.  Write for Baen and write for the drawer.  Write a lot for the drawer.  Trust me, the time will come when you can put it all up for sale, and if you have twenty novels finished, you’ll have a huge lead.”

And then when I get to that point in the daydream is when I realize, if I can JUST get over being sick, I CAN still do this.  I haven’t finished a lot of stuff, but I do have a lot of stuff almost finished.  (This is where I explain that 1/4^th written and fully plotted IS “almost finished”.  Trust me. Like Christie said “it’s all written in my head.)

I can diversify.  I can write faster.  I can finish stuff.

And then I get warm fuzzies.  Which is the happy part of the “talking to younger self” dream.  Because, let’s face it, even if I could talk to her, so much could go wrong.  First, without writing short stories for two years, would I ever have learned to start books?  And without the years of forced writing, would I have honed the craft?  And besides, even if I knew I could one day publish it all, would I have written much more?  I mean, it’s easy to forget, in retrospect, but you know, under life is what happens when you’re doing something else?  Same with writing.  There was children’s illnesses, our illnesses, money trouble, moving…  (Okay, so I’d have told self to avoid our first house in CO because ick.) There were weekends wasted in glorious walking around with the guys.  There were days spent cuddling and watching stupid movies because there was a blizzard out.  I wouldn’t trade any of those.  (Okay, maybe the sickness and money trouble.)  So, in the end, not much more would probably be done.

And now… Now I have a chance to do it, anyway.  So – this might be the flu talking.  Or the bourbon that I’ve drunk as ersatz cough syrup – let’s say I start today.  Pretend myself from the future just came back and told me – fifty is not that old! – “write now.  Write as much as you can.  Write for Baen, and write for indie.  Start putting things up now.  Go.  You have no idea how much better off you’ll be in twenty years.”

Well… why not?

It’s worth a try.

By my bootstraps.

 

Completely different post over at Mad Genius Club.

There is a part of being a writer that readers really have no clue about – can’t have, unless they walk in our shoes and are also writers.  I had no idea myself.

I’m excluding from that being-a-writer experience the literary darlings who are encouraged/pushed to write only when the mood strikes or when they are so inclined, and those writers who are already so established that nothing can dent their popularity.  J.K. Rowling could be filmed boiling kittens, and yet her next book relating to the Potter universe would still sell like crazy.  (It remains to be seen how her foray into adult mystery does.)

What I’m talking about is the intersection between the business and the art, the “I write because I’m inspired/want to” and “I write because I’m under contract.”

Writing involves a certain amount of artistic “flopping about.”  It can’t be avoided, even by people like me who hate the idea that there’s something about this process they can’t control.  There is what I call “negotiating with the subconscious” to get anything written.  (The problem being if you don’t comply with its often unvoiced demands, the subconscious takes your book hostage, and simply won’t let you write.  Possibly my worst block is sitting in front of the computer, in theory knowing what I should be writing, and unable to.)  I was very relieved to find that Heinlein himself would spend days moaning on the sofa that he would never be able to write again.  It makes my bouts of mad house cleaning, cat brushing and crying seem mild by comparison.

The problem of course is that the other end of the writing business has no leeway whatsoever for artistic flopping about.  If you are a publisher – and this applies too if you are your own publisher, btw – you need to keep up a certain schedule.  This is a lot more important for the traditional publishers, who have schedules published in advance, cover contracts, and distributors who need to know what’s coming.  In other words, there’s money invested in your delivering when expected.

Now, because publishers know that writers are creatures of inequity, they tend to pad your schedule by at least six months and sometimes a year.

Which is a problem if you find yourself doing what I’ve been doing lately.

By lately it’s a problem that’s been slowly creeping to “worse” over the last ten years.  I can tell you the exact date, actually.  Until we moved to this house, I’d never missed a deadline be it for short story or novel.  Since I moved to this house, I can’t seem to hit one, and the lag times have got downright bizarre.

Now, there are multiple explanations.

If you’re a believer in whoo hoo atmosphere and psychic influences, I can tell you this house seems to have a “pall” over it, a blanket of “do nothing.”  My family, which tends not to believe in such things, took a while to confess to the others what we were feeling.  We all found work arounds, mostly centered on working elsewhere.  Even a noisy coffee shop is better than in the house.

Of course, this might have a physical explanation, too.  We found out recently one of our filters has been growing mildew because no one told us we needed to change it.  But that explanation seems insufficient, since that filter has only been present for about seven years.

Perhaps there is some natural force, as yet unnamed that is responsible for this.  Perhaps it is a quality of the light, or the way the house sits.  Who knows?  I know getting creative work done here feels like walking uphill.

It’s perfectly fine for non-creative, sit-down-and-get-the-ducks-in-a-row work.  It’s just trying to write fiction that stops me.

But there are other factors.  One of them is very good.  Since I moved to this house I’ve published more.  This means that I often had six books due a year…

And that’s bad.  Because if you fall behind a deadline, it’s going to snowball larger and larger as it goes.

And the other factor is illnesses.  This honestly probably has nothing to do with the house, just with the fact I’m now over forty.  As someone born severely premature, who always had auto-immune issues, I knew it would catch up with me in later years.  I was hoping that meant “after sixty” but apparently mostly – for most people in the same situation – it means “after forty.”  This, combined with having kids in public school and/or attending cons has cost me about half of every year, which in turn compresses my writing time.

The problem is that the publisher still needs to keep its schedule, something I completely understand.  And that I’m having trouble keeping mine.

We won’t even go into the bizarre mind twist that had me write an extra space opera while Noah’s boy – under contract – waited doing. That falls under “art will have its day.”

No, my publisher isn’t threatening me.  But I also know I can’t continue doing this to them and continue working.  So, as I get floored by sickness for the third time while working on Noah’s Boy, I feel like I am letting the publisher down, which isn’t helping.

And no, this isn’t just a general purpose whining.  While I’ve found there are books and stories that are “cursed” and therefore take forever to finish, I’ve also found that if those get finished, they’re often the ones that do best.  Yes, it’s a writing superstition.  Deal.  We’re worse than actors for those.

So – even though the crud has re-crudesced and my head feels like it’s going to burst at the sinus, I’m sitting down and working on Noah’s Boy.

Because I have promises to keep – and pages to go before I sleep.

In the end, my readers probably won’t care if I wrote through a sinus headache (it’s amazing and a little deflating how that can be some of my best work.)  But they’ll mind if the books stop.

And so I work.

 

I’m going to do a blog post in a couple of hours (it was a very bad night, really.) but until then, read this — Amanda Green magnificently fisks a “ebooks are a dead end” article.

Yesterday, Sarah pointed out a link that had been posted on Facebook leading to a post on the Wall Street Journal site reassuring readers that print is here to stay. Since I happen to believe there will always be a market, albeit a niche market, for print books, I didn’t have any issues with the article — until I started to read it. So, for good or ill, I feel the need to discuss what the author of the article, Nicholas Carr, had to say as well as some of the responses and their implications for readers and writers.

Read the whole thing.