Category: Uncategorized

Every one of us knows exactly what trashy books are, don’t we?  Whatever it is we hate to read.  This is the flaw behind gatekeepers and the problem with letting someone act as arbiter of universal taste.

There are objective ways to judge things like academic writing.  (Yes, it’s been gamed and twisted, but there are still objective ways.)  Does the research have good foundation?  Does it accord with how the world in general behaves/what we know about the subject and time period?  Are the cites in place and are they valid?  Neutral gatekeepers who know the subject can be employed in those.

The problem is extending that to fiction and creative non fiction.  Why is that a problem?  Because fiction (and creative non fiction) writing is done to be enjoyed.  The ultimate judgment on whether it’s “good” or no, whether it succeeds or fails is “does it entertain people?  Do they want to spend time reading it?”

For that I’d be at a loss to come up with a universal measuring stick.  Look – I can’t imagine a worse punishment than being subjected to “The Voice” but my husband watches it for entertainment.  You’d have to put needles under my fingernails to get me to voluntarily sit still for Two And A Half Men – but people ENJOY it.

You probably would have to light a fire under my bottom and threaten not to put it out till I read the d*mn thing to get me to read Fifty Shades.  Even then, I guarantee I’d skim.

The last issue of a particular popular fiction magazine I read was 10 years ago.  I read it and realized I felt vaguely nauseated and needed to drink several bottles of wine to erase the experience from my mind.  After that I let my subscription drop.  They still exist and are at least treading water, so clearly my tastes are not universal.  (Who knew?)

I’m not picking on the commenter who picked on furries and slash – weirdly – truly.  Although I have friends who write both (and some furs among my friends too) I will admit the genres attract any number of the semi-literate.  This is because – I think – its writership (totally a word.  Trust me.) trends young, which means it serves as the training wheel grounds for a lot of folk who go on to write a lot of better stuff.  (Which among us would want our early efforts submitted to the cold light of day?)

OTOH though I don’t dedicatedly read either, I have read some now and then because a friend recommends something (not slash but for the longest time all younger boy read/wrote was Harry Potter fanfic, so I’d get recommends), and I have to tell you while the percentage of cr*p might be slightly higher than in other genres (say 95% as opposed to 90%) there are gems in the muck and some of it is very good and of very high quality.  And, trust me, as weird as some of it is, there are authors you – or at least me – can get hooked on, because the storytelling art is so GOOD.

However, my commenter’s perception is very common, because when people who are not “into” some genre or subgenre dip into, what they’re likely to meet with first is OMG awful.  Law of averages.

For instance, if you don’t read romance go to the store and pick up ten books at random – and these are gatekept (of course it’s a word.  Look, yes, I lie for a living, but you’re not paying me.  I don’t volunteer-lie)  – and you’re likely to walk away swearing off romance forever.  OTOH, get a recommendation from a friend who also reads whatever you like, and who likes the same sort of books you do, and you might find a new author.

The reason I’m writing this, though, is that there is another hurdle and one that could make you recoil from a new field of reading – or might mean it’s never your favorite anyway – but is no reason to judge the whole field as unworthy.

This came up – sideways and backwards – in a discussion with a friend about specifically romance (actually I don’t think he was discussing romance.  I think I just took off down that side path all by my lonesome self.  I do that.)  Let’s say we were discussing set pieces in mystery and the fact that stereotypes are used and it’s not very realistic came up.  And then I took off into “genre conventions” which led me into romance.  (I think I’ve been arguing with myself for the last six messages, because he has a day job and stuff.)

Romance came to my mind because it was the last genre I found.  Meaning, I grew up reading historical, mystery literary classics and literary (It’s a genre.  No, really.  It has conventions of writing like the other genres and it has to fit them to belong there.  It’s not a judgment of quality, just of “does it fit this?”  “Literary classics” are different because it’s have they stood the test of time or not? But the stuff written now and labeled “literary” is just a genre.) because of dad.  I grew up reading science fiction, popular science, popular history and mindboggling philosophical treatises because my brother did.  I read Westerns because my sister/cousin (she was raised with us) read them.

She also read romances but Portuguese Romances are different.  (Well, were in those days.)  They seemed to be patterned on the Fados, so that the perfect romance the guy died in a horrible manner and she mourned him her whole life.  Say, Romeo and Juliet if Juliet survived.  (Though their both dying was an acceptable HEA [happily ever after, for the non romance initiated].)

I read these, because I read EVERYTHING (though it took me till sixteen to discover children’s books, but that’s a long story) including the paper, any forms anyone brought home, the back of detergent bottles, and instructions for how to repair machines we didn’t own.  When my cousins and brother studied for their college entrance exams, I read everything they brought home leading to the conclusion that were it possible and had I known the math [so, beyond the general knowledge] I could have entered engineering at 10.)

But I found the Portuguese style romances very boring.  The hero was likely to be a bullfighter, which was weird, because bullfighting isn’t even that prevalent in Portugal except in the South.  And you knew he’d die in the end.

Moving here added another layer.  Whoa!  Romances where they survive?  What will they think of next?

So for the longest time, when I needed to make a joke about a genre, I used Romance.  (This works well at sf cons.  Yeah, I know.)

A brief attempt to dip into the field at the height of the time-traveling romance made things worse.  I mean, time-traveling involves sf, (or fantasy) so you know, they’re putting their toe in my field.   The sheer lack of logic drove me insane.  No, I’m sorry, the logical response to a 9^th century Viking appearing in my shower is for me to squirt shampoo in his eyes then run like hell (or steal his ax and behead him.)  It is not to get it on with him, hot and heavy.  And, I’m sorry, but just because you studied the linguistics of Scandinavian languages, you will NOT be able to converse fluently with this guy.  (And yes, that’s what they said, not that she spoke fluent Norwegian or whatever.  It’s possible she might have been able to cobble together a conversation in the second case.  I don’t know how evolved Scandinavian languages are – i.e. how much they changed.  It’s not my area of expertise.  If you spoke decent French and Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, you stood a chance of understanding a Portuguese or Spaniard of that era.  BUT probably not a Frenchman because they have a more ‘evolved’ language – and a ton now dead dialects.)  And no, for the love of Heinlein – I don’t care how smitten you are with your medieval knight, you really don’t want to go back and live with him there, and raise your babies in a place where infant mortality is 90%.  BUT if you absolutely MUST do it, why would you take back your tape player and your tapes.  WHAT do you plan to use for electricity?

So, I dipped my toe into time travel romance, and ran screaming in the other direction, waving my hands and screaming “bad, bad, bad, bad.”

I didn’t read romance again until Dave Freer – whom I owe a huge karmic debt – MADE me read Heyer.  In this, he beat my publisher, Toni Weisskopf by six months, though she made me read the ones I’d neglected, and then told me to diagram them.  (Do other people’s publishers give them homework?  Never mind.  I owe her a – huge – karmic debt, as well.)

Georgette Heyer gave me my “entry” into romance.  She was one of those writers so masterful and assured that you swallowed the most improbable things and kept on reading, and by the time you were done you were acquainted with the conventions of the field and could branch out into minor writers, and know when something was bad because the writer sucked or because it’s a “field convention.”

And it took me reading some of those minor writers to figure that some things WERE field conventions and you read around them, instead of taking them seriously.

So – four pages in I get to the meat of this: each field has conventions.  These are things – usually minor, sometimes huge – that wouldn’t work that way in real life, at any time.  Like… oh, you know the minute the guy kisses you that you’re going to love him forever.  Like, the suspect in the murder just happens to unwittingly give you the key thing you need at that moment; like, whatever the technology is that just made telepathy possible is not going to affect writing or reading or shopping or…  (Look guys, imagine someone writing the computer revolution.  Do you see them thinking of writing?  Education? News? As the fields first affected?  Nope.  It would be data or statistics or machine production or…)

These conventions come in to circumvent minor things that would otherwise get in the way of telling the main story – i.e. what the reader is there for.  In romance, for instance, the reader wants to know who the leads are so he can follow the progression of the romance.  So to have her know he’s the one the first time they kiss (or they look into each other’s eyes.  No, really.) saves time and gets the reader where he wants to be.

But a reader looking for a modicum of realism will go “Oh, that’s just wrong.”  And not everyone has the authorial voice and humor of a Georgette Heyer to slide it past the readers.

(This, btw, is why you should read in the field you write.  Chances are you readers read there too, and if you don’t know the conventions you’ll miscue.)

Does this mean that there isn’t real trash?  Well, define trash.

To me 90% of what’s out there is trash – in any field.  But I’m not only a power reader, but also a writer.  This means that I’m likely to have read the hackneyed plot twist before.  AND I’m likely to know how to fake that powerful ending too.  So…  It’s sort of like a busman’s holiday.  Things will annoy me that annoy no other person on Earth.  Which means I judge a lot of things harshly.  BUT I’ve learned not to share that judgment and not to condemn an entire genre.  (Not even mommy porn – NOT my cup of tea, but I’m not going to say someone won’t come along who’ll write it in a way I’ll read it.)

Normally all gatekeepers are doing is imposing their taste on what other people can/should see.  And they succeed about as well as I would.

So, don’t judge fields you don’t know anything about.  Read fields before you write in them.  And don’t judge your stuff too – this is why we have beta readers.  You are a writer and see the inside wiring of things.  Just because something seems to obvious and belabored to you, it doesn’t mean it won’t delight readers.  Get someone else’s opinion or, if that fails, put it out under a pen name.  Be prepared for that pen name to become a bestseller before you.

Strive to be the best according to your lights.  Let the chips fall where they may.

UPDATE: My — different — post is up on Mad Genius Club:  Some Advice to Avoid–  Squirrel!

The end-result of any powerful bureaucracy with tons of rules and regulations is a neo-feudal state.

But, Sarah, you say, what if the rules and regulations are designed to protect the little guy from the big guys?  What if they’re designed to keep free competition and make the individual competitive?

Well, then the bureaucrats have got better at disguising their intent, but for the result, refer to the first line.

Let me explain – regardless of what the supposed intent of the rules and regulations: clean air, clean water, competitiveness, honesty, what all rules and regulations imposed by a government do is a) create a bureaucracy.  b) add to the cost of doing business/existing the cost of filling paperwork/jumping through hoops.

The result of a) is that bureaucracy’s are self perpetuating and self enlarging.  I.e. suppose you create a bureaucracy to make sure people don’t sell tainted meat to the public.  It’s a relatively simple mission and with some inspections and certifications, it is accomplished, to where the bureaucracy is pretty much stable.  Only the only way the heads of the bureaucracy are going to be promoted/get paid more is to enlarge their mission/empire.  So, soon the pressure comes to make sure people also don’t sell tainted fish.  Then there are a lot more people working there, and they all want to advance.  So after a while you have people measuring the salt content of restaurant food according to rather dubious science.

The result of b) is that if you find yourself unemployed and decide to start a business going to various offices and selling your prize chocolate chip cookies from that recipe your mom made up…  you can’t do it.  Or rather, to do it, you have to have substantial savings which allow you to rent a place to cook in that will pass inspection (which means out of the house, away from cats/kids.) and you have to have the time to fill all the paper work.  And the money to buy enormous levels of insurance.  Easier, really to shrug, stay on the dole and collect unemployment.  But even say you want to start a business that has nothing to do with food – say computer repair, or software writing.

Do you know the sheer load of paper work required for me to operate my “I make up crap, put it on paper and people buy it” business?  My husband probably loses three months of his own potential writing to keep all our accounting straight.  Indie publishing, if you publish anyone else, becomes a mind boggling maze.  I have friends who are publishing other friends under their indie imprint and who are in a very shaky situation in regards to regulations/law.  All fine so long as no one complains or the IRS has no reason to look into it.  At which point it will be an eye-crossing mess.  (I advise that if you want to publish other people, even occasionally, and/or collaborations you consider an LLC or another “collective ownership model” for the press. One that limits your liability.)

But Sarah, you say, do you favor selling tainted meat/fish/cat hair cookies?

Well, first I’m here to tell you Upton Sinclair was full of it and greatly exaggerated what was going on in the unregulated food market place.  And second that the “solution” of greater government regulation of the food market place is a crazy solution to a vanishingly small problem.

I’m going to tell you right now that I have no clue to what extent food was regulated in Portugal when I was little.  In Portugal, at least when I was growing up, (perhaps not now) regulations ranging from traffic codes to work law happened to other people, but not to any one individual.  The general consensus was that there ought to be a law, but each individual thought he or she, personally, should be exempt.  So, even though Portugal was the first country in Europe to ban child labor, by the time I finish fourth grade 90% of my classmates went into the textile mills to work.  How?  Well, there was a loophole, if your child was mentally deficient and couldn’t learn.  So…  I think doctors printed this by the case load, and signed them for a small consideration.  Girls who finished fourth grade with As and reading perfectly were certified too dumb to learn and went into the textile mills.  And even though I’m sure there was some milk regulation – one of my aunts by marriage was a milkmaid in her youth and was cited for watering the milk twice… according to my mom (which might or might not be true.  They didn’t get along) – we bought ours across the street from the farmer, and so did most of the village, and the village policemen didn’t care.  And street vendors were often unlicensed.  They weren’t supposed to be, mind.  But they ran when the police came.  And I doubt anyone looked very closely at where the food that people sold on the street was cooked.

Chaos, right?  People must have died left and right from food poisoning.  What about all that meat with maggots?

Okay… guys – there is one thing all this ignores…  People aren’t stupid.  Individual people aren’t stupid.  Yes, in times when food is really, really, really scarce someone might get away with selling food with maggots.  But that’s a different matter.  Most of the time, people aren’t dumb.

We had fishmongers who took the bus every morning to the beach then came BY BUS from village to village selling.  They were outsiders, but people would look-see.  The best way to build a big business?  Take the bite and throw away (or eat) yesterday’s unsold fish.  The best way to destroy your business?  Slip up, even once, and wash and deodorize old fish (a bleach solution) and sell it in the middle of the fresh.  Because sooner or later someone would taste the “off” or get ill.  And the word would go out, slowly but surely.  (And people still get ill.  Look at all the contamination in the exquisitely regulated EEC.  Two years ago it was Belgian cantelopes.)

Even in the big city, this happened.  There is this Portuguese sweet called Honey Cakes.  It would probably be illegal here (grin.)  It is made from the ground up remains of stale cake and a lot of honey, formed into little patties and sold.

I was crazy for this stuff.  For one, it was usually cheap, and when you’re a still-growing student with limited money working twelve hour days between school and job, I needed the quick energy.  (I was also stick thin.  Sigh.)

There was this deli that was known for them.  My earliest memory of the honey cakes came from my mom taking me there and getting me honey cakes and lemonade when I was maybe three.

Well, in my second year of college, on a freezing cold day, I stopped there and grabbed two honey cakes and an espresso, between my college and my French class at the French institute.  There I was walking under the drizzle (Porto is known as little London for a reason) juggling espresso, cake and umbrella, and I feel something tickle my lip.  I pull back… the honey cake was literally crawling with worms.  I think it was the last time I bought honey cake anywhere.  It was the last time I bought one at that deli.  To this day I don’t know what happened, except it was after the holidays, and I think someone young and stupid – it was a family business – forgot to toss the honeycakes they’d left on the shelf over the break.  Or perhaps thought “Hey, it’s made form stale stuff, so who cares?”

I didn’t tell anyone, because at the time I didn’t have any friends who did that route or went there.  But anytime I saw the honey cakes in the window, I felt that tickle on my lip and saw the worms, and the appetite was QUITE gone.  Over the next six months, the store slowly went out of business.

(Of course, the way to handle, if they figured it out, was to put a big sign up front saying “We apologize for” and “we guarantee it won’t happen again” and “Come in and try it free.”  BUT that’s what an American business would do.  For cultural reasons it would be very difficult in Portugal.)

Mind you, yes, a lot of us still got bad food to begin with – though I’m sure I could have got a refund, if I hadn’t been so shocked/disgusted I didn’t even want to think of it.  But the problem self-corrected.

Over the years, btw, that I bought from street vendors at fairs, and from farmers and from that lady down the street who does wonderful roast lamb, I never once had another experience like that.

So – am I saying we should leave it entirely to the free market?

I’m saying we should be aware of the trade off.  It is not “regulate food, nothing bad happens” “don’t regulate food, you get horrible things”  it’s more “regulate food and create a massive bureaucracy that might or might not cut down on the really bad incidences of tainted food, but which will do things like break into a picnic and destroy all the food because it was grown in a co-op and not inspected.”  Or “Regulate food and prevent people from bringing food to homeless shelters because it might not conform.”  Or “regulate food and prevent people consuming raw milk if they so choose, knowing the hazards of it.”  OR “regulate food and prevent someone selling their prize cookies, which they cook in a spotless kitchen, but not one that conforms to regulations”  (BTW, a friend who did micro-brewing called his beer Cat Hair Beer, one cat hair guaranteed per bottle.  We all wanted it.)

And this is with food regulations which have a (sort of) objective point and verification to them.  I.e. food is either tainted, or it isn’t.  It either contains x of fat and calories or it doesn’t.  It either…  You know what I mean.

When you start getting into the airy fairy realm of regulations that are supposed to do things like “give the little guy a chance to compete” you’re inviting the small god of unintended consequences (he looks like an ugly doll and laughs when you touch him) into your house and giving him the best seat.

For instance, under the assumption that anyone who doesn’t work for the government is in fact a crook and looking to cheat someone else, there are minimum wage regulations.  Yes, yes, look at that.  The small god is giggling.

What minimum wage regulations do is not make sure that everyone makes what is “fair” – whatever that is.  I never understood “fair” past distributing cookies in Kindergarten – it is rather to price labor away from many small employers.

Why?

Well, because no two employees are alike and to be blunt, there are jobs a blindfolded monkey could perform.  To pay (I don’t remember how much it is now.  Is it $10?) x dollars an hour for it is to price it out of what employers can pay for it.  This means the job either goes undone (if it’s something optional, like sweeping in front of the store, say) or … well, you hire illegally to do it.

And there’s absolutely NO point saying “But that’s illegal.”  Yes, so it is.  But ask the farmers who hire illegals to pay minimum wage, and they go out of business.  They simply don’t have that margin.  As for the “little guy” – usually a high school kid and totally unskilled – who’d be doing the job otherwise, he goes unemployed, living in mom’s basement and never learns that there are far worse things than chem. finals.  (For the record here, I’d like to point out my very first job in the US, a retail job, which familiarized me with cultural quirks like “eight am doesn’t mean eight thirty to nine” – I learned fast, so I kept it a while – and gave me a work history in the US paid less than two dollars per hour.  Yes, this was in 87.  It still was not princely.)

Then there’s the paperwork.  I’d be perfectly willing (the years I make more money.  Not right now) to pay someone $10 an hour to do some work for me: say come in and do a quick clean, and start dinner, or perhaps (depending on the day) proofread something and put it up.  (Yes, I could hire a cleaning service, but that’s different.  A cleaning service mostly does what I can do myself faster – sorry, but true – for way too much money.  What I mean is someone who comes in three hours a day and does whatever is driving me nuts that day.

The problem is I would need to file all sorts of paperwork, pay social security and disability and all that – and that I can’t do.  Either the money OR the sheer amount of work to fill all the papers needed.  In the end, it would be hiring someone to do the work needed to hire someone.  Uh.  So I do for myself, which keeps my work capped at a certain point.  I can only grow so much.

Mind you, at this point given the unemployment among the young, I probably could hire an unpaid “intern” to come in and “assist with” my work as an author.  These people then have the experience to apply for jobs people can’t afford to hire them for, even with experience.  I’ve heard too much about internships that lead nowhere to wish to exploit the young myself.  BUT people are doing it.  So, our regulation to prevent exploitation… yeah…  That small god has a belly ache from giggling.

The healthcare law adds a hellish level to this, so even medium size companies will have trouble complying with either the costs or the mind boggling level of paperwork to document compliance.

This is why big corporations donate to the candidates favoring more regulations.  And then people ask for more regulations to protect them from the corporations.  And then…  You see where this is headed?

The final stage of this system is a place where only massive entities and bureaucrats have nay power, and the rest of us are serfs.  The sheer amount of paperwork, regulations and hoops to jump through to prevent the evil, evil individuals from doing the nasty stuff they’d do without government supervision, means no one can strike out on their own.

And every time anyone protests, you get told “Do you want meat with maggots?”

(The funny thing is that once the system is ossified and there is no alternative to the big guys, you’ll have meat with maggots and like it.  Ask China and the insecticide in infant formula or the slippers that will burn your skin.)

This doesn’t last – not unless it’s a very small country and it has a history of totalitarianism (and even then, who knows how long Cuba will last?) – the blackmarket flourishes all along (people have to live) and eventually the whole thing crashes.

But people who think they’ll come out on top think this time it will be different.  Their techno-feudalism will be perfect and efficient, with well-groomed, healthy serfs who sing happy songs at the state mandated —  Sorry.  I’m getting nauseated.

So – do we go quietly into that good night?  I say no.  I say now is the time to start admitting that if regulations aren’t good for you, then they’re probably not good/needed for other people either.  It’s the time to say “No, there ought not to be a law.”  It’s also time to start subverting, escaping, inventing new ways to do things.  Use the technology you must to do things in ways that avoid regulations.  Study the regulations and find the loopholes.  Go around, go through, do what you can without dealing with the government, but keep trying.  Don’t give up.  Find a way.

And don’t be afraid of tainted meat.  The maggots all have jobs as government bureaucrats.

And all of us pay our dues…

I was going to write on economics – yeah, there’s some stuff left unsaid – but I realized I do have something left to say – also – which should be said today about the life of a working writer, the role of luck in any life, and the assumption people who do better than you are “lucky.”  (This also ties in with economics.  There is a tendency to think the rich are “lucky” – but in fact I suspect their ascent is not much different than getting successful in writing.)

Heinlein said that luck was how morons explain the works of genius.  This is unkind, and to an extent inaccurate, and I’m sure it must be the result of his getting one too many of the non-fan-letters I also get.

The prototypical non-fan-letter goes something like this: I love your work, and I’m a great fan.  I too am a writer, but I didn’t get the lucky breaks you’ve had and my three magnificent opuses, written twenty years ago – Whiner, Whiner Returns and Whiner Unleashed – have yet to be picked up by a traditional press.  I am, of course, too good to sully myself with that nasty indie publishing, so I’ll hold out for that million advance that is due to my genius.  I just wish I was lucky like you.

The funny thing is that I – who have never got an advance of more than 12.5K (and I was ecstatic when I got that)  get about one of these a month, sometimes more.

I don’t answer them.  I don’t answer them because my answer would be “you’ve written three books, twenty years ago and you’re “unlucky” because you’re not published?  Good heavens.  If I’d stopped at my first three books I wouldn’t be published either.  It took eight of them finished (and several more started) and about 200 short stories written before I started selling.”

But that’s besides the point.  I’ve told the story of how I broke in before.  For those who are new here, I wrote 8 books before selling the first (which was a 9^th and I sold on proposal.)  Three of those books have now been published as has a half-finished one, which took eight years to sell on proposal.  The other six are probably unpublishable (unless I do it under deep cover and under another name) because, to be blunt, the entire world and premise are WEIRD.  As in, they make my kid’s book Cat’s Paw, look sane.  (And it’s probably telling that Robert and I came up with the premise of Cat’s Paw (sort of) together while building an upper deck on our former house one hot summer day.  He said, “Hey, I have this idea.”  I’m afraid I didn’t make it any more “normal.”)  It took me six books to realize it wasn’t a failure of craft, it was the fact that the world was WEIRD that was preventing publishers buying it.  (We’ll put it this way.  It was my answer to The Left Hand Of Darkness.  Imagine that world with a libertarian twist.  Yeah.  Unpublishable, possibly even in indie.  My husband called it the three fs world, two of them being feasting and fighting…)

As for short stories, they were a detour undertaken when a writing book convinced me that I MUST break in first in shorts.  Writing shorts ended up eating three years of my life, before I figured out it was actually easier to break in in novels.  Not wasted, mind.  Short stories focus your ability to start a story running and it helps focus the wording and characterization, too.  I’m a better writer for those years, and I continued writing a short story a week through the early years of my novel career.  But all the same, for the purpose of breaking in, utterly useless.

I sold a short story just before I sold my first novel.  Since then I’ve sold… around a hundred and twenty something (I haven’t counted lately) and have mumble (even less counted) in drawer (Or rather, drawer would be easy.  I have them in so many diskettes, old computers and scraps of paper that I’m forever shocking myself with discovering another one.)

Anyway… let’s say it wasn’t an easy path, and it didn’t get easier after “breaking in.”  For one, I seem to have, with unerring ability, broken in as the field had become the most dysfunctional it had ever been (and considering what I’ve read about the early days of publishing, that’s astonishing)  and my very first book came out a month after 9/11/01 and at least the figures I saw for sales were dismal.  Which meant that house didn’t buy my fantasy again (all my fault, yes.  Never mind.)  I wrote first historical mystery, then cozies for them for the next ten years, though.  By that point all my chances of being considered a hot property were gone, so I sometimes had four books due a year for them.  Meanwhile, I also wrote fantasy (and then SF) for Bantam and Baen and historical fiction for Berkley Jove.

I’m not going to pretend I was all right with the schedule that went between four and six books a year.  Look, I might end up – if I can stop getting sick, d*mn it – doing 4 books for Baen next year.  I’d like to, at least.  But those books would all be Space Opera and all connected and at least vaguely sequential.  Swinging from a book with the musketeers as protagonists, to one set in 19^th century India, to a space opera was enough to give even me the screaming megrims.

However I did it because I had to do it, because little though I was making, we needed it, and because in the end if I’d stopped and got off the treadmill, I’d never be published again.  (In the alternate universe in which I know indie is coming, I tell them to bugger off, and do some furniture refinishing while writing for the drawer.  But then some of those books/series might not exist, and some of you guys like them.)

Anyway, life should be somewhat more relaxed now, because I’m only working for one traditional publisher.  But of course, I’m trying to get indie off the ground and in that I’m manager, cook and chief bottle washer.  And some of you are waiting from books from that side, like Orphan Kittens Mysteries, another set in Goldport and interacting with the characters of the other series.  Also, I’d like to write more for that one traditional publisher.  Which means… oh, about the same level of work.

And I sometimes wonder about the fragile little flowers who wrote three books, sat on their hands and waited to be discovered. (Not the ones who said “not worth my time” and went on to have productive lives elsewhere.  That’s their prerogative.  And possibly sane.  But the ones who continue to put all hopes in that one, two or three books.)   I wonder how they’d handle the life of a published writer who is not (yet) a headliner.  Let’s see this morning I found out that I might or might not have spaced page proofs (if I got them at any point, I completely forgot to save them.  This is not impossible.  The last two months are a complete blur.)  Which is, of course, an emergency if I did space them.  I’m also trying to write a blurb for another book.  AND  I have to go back to blog invites, apologize massively and send in some very late guest blogs to promote DSR.  AND I’m literally two days from finishing Noah’s Boy.  IF I can have two days.  Shouldn’t take more than two weeks, right?

I’m not complaining.  I’m working at what I wanted to do, and I make (not astonishing quantities) of money, and there’s a possibility of making way more.

My problem comes with people who give up and hold a grudge against those who make it; with people assuming I was lucky to break in, and lucky to stay working, when in fact I’d say there was at least the average (if not above average) number of unlucky breaks, I just kept working past them.

Luck?  Sure.  I mean, with all I said, it still involved a certain amount of being in the right place at the right time to sell my first book (and massive thanks for bringing me there go to Kris Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith.)  But luck of that degree happens sooner or later, provided you’re working your behind off and keeping alert to all possibilities.

Or, to paraphrase Kevin J Anderson “The harder I work, the luckier I get.”

This is not to say some of you haven’t been unlucky.  But many  of you have kept working despite it.  (For instance I go in awe of commenter Cyn Bagley writing despite her fatal illness that would floor most of us.  And my friend Kate Paulk writes despite narcolepsy and, until recently, a more than full time job.  I’m not sure I’m “lucky” enough to manage either of those.  But they do it.)

All I’m saying is if you feel like destiny’s redheaded step child, you’re not alone.  Even the most successful professional I know suffered through a series of kicks in the teeth (and sometimes still does.)

Luck exists, and it might make a difference.  But if it’s not working for you, it is your job to ignore it and be successful DESPITE luck.  If you keep going, if you keep trying, if you refuse to cry “uncle” eventually luck gives up and lets you through.

If you’re too sane for that, and give up, then well…  it’s your choice and it’s not like any of us who made it (whatever you define as “made” — published/making a living/bestseller/Stephen King) didn’t contemplate THAT five times a day for years.  However, be aware it’s your choice and your decision and that those of us who broke didn’t necessarily have it easier.

But if you want it, if you really want it, don’t rely on “luck.”  Do it.

All it takes is insane work, alertness to changing conditions, and a bit of creativity.  If luck is not favorable ignore luck.

And may you have the fortitude to keep trying.

Among writers, particularly old hands, particularly old hands who have been stuck in mid list a long time, there’s this attitude towards Indie publishing that goes “We’ll never go hungry again.”

I have this attitude myself, of course, but I think it’s causing a lot of newbies, beginners and innocents to be confused.   (Which Is why I stole the spirit of the title from The Intransitive Vampire.)

I thought I had explained how it works, but I don’t think I ever did, not all in the same place.  I just assumed that people could sort of glean what was happening from my posts on things like covers and pricing and the sheer enormity of the market.

I did – I know – explain the compound-interest quality of indie publishing, but it wasn’t… uh… explicit and on the line, and so it might have been lost.  Then again, this blog’s readership grew (I think I added yeast) by about three times over the last month, so some of you might simply never have heard this.  (And we all know I’m so “good” at tagging posts.  Not.)

However, not only a reader’s assumptions in comments yesterday, but the fact that a friend of mine asked me practically the same question and the fact that another friend was discounting indie publishing as a means of getting out of her particular bind, made me decide to do a post on it.

Two years ago, at our local con, Kevin Anderson jokingly answered a fan who said she would like to publish her novel, and should she go indie or traditional with “Well, you can go traditional and make a few thousand three years from now, or you can go indie and make a few hundred a year.”

He said it in a tone that discounted indie.  At the time I didn’t know any better, and I don’t think he did either.  You see, he had almost no work out indie, as of yet.  Only a very few pieces, which means he was seeing a few hundred a year.    (Nothing to even come close to his traditional income.)

By last year his attitude had changed.  And so had mine.

Now, I’m going to be absolutely and painfully blunt: My indie experience on my own personal side is limited.  So far pretty much all I have out on my own are about 35 short stories.  On these I make about $200 a month from Amazon and $50 from Smashwords.  (Barnes and Noble is negligible.)  This is of course not enough income to replace my traditional money – OTOH hand note this is a little over ten percent of the short stories I have sitting around in drawers and hard drives.  And also that about half these stories were published and have already paid, and the other half were sitting around doing nothing.  There is labor involved.  Editing and putting them up takes an hour or so per story (including covers)  There is expense.  My most expensive cover art for these runs around $5 and it has to be spectacular to run that much – but it is still an expense and when you’re looking at slamming up 200 stories well… you pace yourself.

I do intend to bring out novels – to wit Witchfinder as well as a YA which I’m pulling out of a shared universe – but right now I simply don’t have any novels out except the odd collaboration on A Touch of Night aka Pride and Prejudice and Dragons.  But so far I haven’t.  Not on my own.

OTOH I have friends who have done so, and from what they tell me, it works sort of like short stories.

So, here’s the truism I’ve found:  You can make money from indie, but you need time and volume.

Okay, take a deep breath.  What I mean by this is that you can make money from indie and you can eventually make a living from it, but you have to allow yourself time.  (Particularly if no one knows you exist, though in indie the effects of “name” seem to be far smaller than in traditional.)

So, let’s say you’re unemployed and you have a novel written.  Can this get you through until you find a job?  Depends.  Have your benefits run out?  And how fast can you write?

Yes, yes, you can win the lottery.  You can get a novel up there, and it sells so much and so fast you never go hungry again.  I’m searching my brain for one example and not getting it.  (No, not Amanda Hocking.  We’ll get on that later.)  But at least theoretically it’s possible.

What you have to understand is that it’s possible as it’s possible to send a novel to the offices of one of the big six, have it picked up from slush the next day and have them call you with an offer of a million dollars at the end of the week.

If you don’t have some extraordinary circumstance (for traditional publishing, someone in the business, or a previous bestselling series, or the publisher has a crush on you.  For indie: a huge successful radio show, or a blog seen by millions, or…) I’d stick to the lottery.  Your chances are better.

For years the traditional lottery was all that writers had to pin their hopes on, and we did so.

Now there  is indie.  I remember when I lived in a mountain village infected by artists (Pipe down, art is my hobby, but… trust me) I used to envy my  neighbors.  Most of them were, in their avocation where I was in mine: producing pro-looking results, but not noticed by the establishment yet.  But while my stories went in the drawer, theirs could go up on sidewalk sales, on co-op stores, on street fairs.  They were making a living.

Indie publishing is our street fair.  (And like with artists, at this point, the best way to be picked up by and go big with the establishment.)

But if you think about the stories/novels you’re writing as the artists did about the pictures/sculptures they were making, you’ll understand it’s silly to imagine you can take a pot to a street fair, and shazam, someone comes along and pays you three million for it.  (Particularly if you have it marked at five dollars.)

In the street fair that is Amazon, you’re thrown in along other professionals and amateurs, and people stroll along and buy what catches their eye.

As a long-time buyer at sf and fantasy shows, I’ll tell you how that works.  The first time I buy an artist, it’s usually something that really catches my eye or – sometimes – something that is very cheap and shows promise (even though the rest of the artist’s stuff looks drab or ick.)  At this point, the artist isn’t on my to-look-for list.  However, at the next show, I’ll notice something that looks sort of similar to the picture I have hanging say over the piano.  Or something with a similar theme.  I buy it.  On bringing it home, I notice the artist is the same.  The artist is now on my “to look for list” and when going to a con art show I’ll find his/her panel first and see what I can afford.  Depending on what they’ve been doing (I don’t buy meaty skull art) and how much money I have, I can buy 2 or 10 pictures of what they have at one go.)

So… How does this apply?  Well, most people buying indie, are just strolling along, looking at wares.  They might be looking in sf/f, or they might be looking in historical, but if they’re browsing, they didn’t find something on their “must buy.”  So the first rule of attracting them is: have a big display.  Which in this case means mostly: have more than one story.  Your chance of pulling in someone just casually looking if all you have is one story is minimal.

This is not a reflection on your story, on you, on how you presented it (though more on that later) or even on the genre you’re working in.  It’s just, if you have one story only, you’re going to get lost.

Good covers help, because someone browsing up, fast, will arrest at a great cover.  But the best cover in the world will not help if your story doesn’t even appear in their listing.

One of the ways to game the system is to put the story free for some time.  But even then, if all you have is that one story… what do you expect to happen?

(Amanda Hocking made a big splash because she put up ten novels, one after the other.  If you have ten novels in your drawer, by all means do put them up and yeah, you can make real money quickly – though don’t count on a million.  There is an element of fairy-godmother in her luck, and also “indie was smaller then.”)

However, if you are like the rest of us (I only have the rights to four of my traditional published novels, and yes, I am working on getting them up) you don’t really have anything but a novel or a few short stories.

And with a novel or up to ten short stories, you will make a few tens of dollars a month, and that’s if people find you, which might take a few months if you don’t run free promos.

There is an inflection point where your money goes up dramatically at ten stories, then fourteen, then thirty – it might vary a little, but these inflections happen.  Novels, I understand are different from the beginning and make about 10 times more… once you’re found.

Look, if you only have ONE novel out and no one knows you, it might take you years to find that first batch of readers.  (Which is why I let people post their links here once in a while.)  And after the five or six or ten find you, it will take time to propagate under the “a friend tells a friend.”

The shortest I’ve heard, for up to three novels, for them to start selling steadily, is six months.  Even if they are utterly amazing novels and you’re capturing every reader.

At this point powerful friends can help, but the BEST way for them to help is to give you a link on a blog or an aggregator.  However, even the power of Insty is limited if you only have three novels out.  Let’s say you do unbelievably well and you sell 100 copies that day.  Um… that gives you $400 dollars in a month’s time.  You see how inadequate that is, to replace full time income?  And if you only have one novel/collection/ short out, you’re more likely to sell under a dozen. (You might get 1000 sample downloads, but most people don’t read it right away, some will forget it, and it’s more likely to be a slow trickle over months.)

If right now you’re saying “Stuff indie, I’m going traditional” you’re wrong.

You’re wrong because traditional will pay you up front – and as a new writer, with no connections, you max out at about 5k advance – but that’s likely to be all you ever seen.  And after about a year no one will buy your book in significant enough numbers to keep it making money for you.  (And we won’t get into why, or percentages, because I’m not writing a book here.)*

Meanwhile, if you’re writing indie, every story, every novel you put up there, earns you more money not just for that story, but for every other one already up.  People finding your novel/short are likely to come back and buy every single similar one… forever.

So, say you have ten novels and fifty short stories up and you get a friend who has a big blog to give you a link… It could translate to thousands of dollars, and it will grow your audience forever.

BUT first you have to have the novels and short stories up.

Which is why if you call me and say “I lost my job.  Can I live from indie publishing?”  My answer is “How much time do you have? How much have you sitting in the drawer?  How fast can you write?”

Some things to keep in mind is that “novels” are not as long as they used to be.  Depending on genre, of course, but we’re going back to “golden age” length in sf, so 40 to 50k words IS a novel.  You can serialize longer stories in a “novel series.”

Another thing is that series sell better, because people buying one will want them all.  So, if you can – aka if you’re not Sarah – do as much under one name/genre/story line as you can.  I don’t mean always — clearly I couldn’t, and I’m a great believer in experimenting in your craft – but if you’re strapped for money and need cash fast (i.e. six months to a year) do them all in a continuum or with a group of characters, even the between-novel shorts.  It will maximize your sales.

So, suppose you tell me “I need money this month” and you have less than ten novels.  I’ll tell you to try to get a second job (or a job) no matter how menial that pays the bare minimum, or look at making something you can sell at flea markets or… other measures of desperation.  It’s not that I want to discourage you or I think you’re a bad writer (particularly if I haven’t even read you) but that in indie it SIMPLY doesn’t happen that fast.  (And not in traditional, either, not if you start from submission.  Even with stuff that’s good enough to sell, it took me eight years for my first publishable short story to see print – collecting 80 rejections along the way – and Darkship Thieves was written 13 years before it was published.  No, it wasn’t in Baen’s slush pile the whole time.  Mostly various agents thought there was no point sending it out because SF doesn’t sell.)

OTOH suppose you’re someone I know can write a novel a month, and you’ve just lost your job, and call me and say “I need to be making 1k a month in a year.  More would be good, but 1k will see me through.  Is it doable?”  I’m going to tell you it’s more than doable and to sit your butt down and start writing.

Making $1k a month in a year is eminently doable, if by then you have ten novels, twenty short stories, and a book of essays on the heartbreak of unemployment up.

And if $1k a month is enough by then, you’re okay, because it will only grow the more you write.

And because — at least for now — the market is “flat” if you’re writing well enough, doing decent covers and blurbs (I’m taking a course on those.  Shuddup) and paying attention to pricing trends, your chances of doing that, if you can write that fast, are as good as anyone else’s chances, short of the mega mega bestsellers.

Which is why we old pros are excited about going indie.  Our success is in our hands and depends on how hard we’re willing to work.  We’ll never go hungry again!

* Given this, why am I bothering going traditional at all?  Well, there is a matter of reach.  I’m not a bestseller, I am not that widely known.  Going traditional gives me “reach” by placing me on shelves across the country where I can capture the majority who still read on paper but who will likely move electronic within the next couple of years.  That’s the practical side.  The other side is that Baen picked me up when no one else would, so they can have my stuff as long as they want me and they treat me decently.  (So far so good, and I don’t see it changing, unless everyone I deal with dies of a heart attack and is replaced by aliens tomorrow.  Which is, of course, possible… I mean, they make movies about chest-bursters.  In that case I reserve the right to give the middle finger to the new people and go off on my own because life is too short to work with people you don’t like.)

Like the extreme prep stuff, the idea of going Galt is one of those seductive ideas that a lot of libertarian-conservatives go for and which I can never embrace fully.

Part of it with the prep stuff is the vague discomfort of having seen this before in the seventies, when it turned out not to be needed.  Now, I realize things are much different and in many ways far more serious, and I’ll agree that there’s a much higher chance the sh*t hits the fan this time.  However, the body learns, the animal learns, and making it unlearn it is very difficult.  When the animal is sure that “it will turn out just like last time”… well… I’m fighting it.

And yet, I realize I sound as a friend said yesterday, like someone she talked to who said that “It’s not going to happen.  The country always is all right.  It’s always been.”

So I’m not stupid, and I’m doing the prep stuff I can afford to do.  This is limited, of course, because we’re not wealthy and well, we have real world NOW obligations.

Which brings us to going Galt.

Going Galt is a very seductive idea, of course, as is any resistance to force and theft.  But it is an idea only suited to certain people at certain times in life.   Perhaps the most obvious example of “going Galt” (written by a liberal) is the Rex Stout novels.  When Nero Wolfe hits the point at which his earnings will no longer accrue to him, he stops working.

He’s in the perfect circumstances to go Galt: he is self employed, that I know has no mortgage due, and of course, has no dependent children.  Also he makes enough that cessation of work doesn’t mean starvation or penury.

We… not so much.  Oh, sure, some years, when I see my money creep up to where, on top of Dan’s salary and with social security double contribution, I end up keeping less than a third, I call my editor (or in other days the agent) and say “Can you delay that check a couple of months?”  Something they’re never averse to doing.  Mind you, not near it this year but that – sigh – is something else again.

Most of the time I have to work as much as I can, because kids have tuition, and house needs repairs, and well… it is what it is.

As for the idea of buying a bug-out shelter, a place to go to and live off the grid, we might have managed it ten years ago, but now it is a pipe dream and likely to remain so, unless my current books hit really big.

And yet – as I described before – one wants to do something.  One wants to feel one is engaged in small acts of rebellion, something to both keep the spirit alive and make us feel like we’re preparing, to an extent, should the unthinkable happen and everything break down.

Well, partly out of necessity (have ya’ll seen the prices in the stores?) I’ve come up with a mini-galt strategy.

1 – spend as little as you can.  This doesn’t mean cutting out ALL discretionary spending.  Heinlein said one should always budget luxuries first, and to an extent he was right.  When we were really broke we used to still try to buy a book or go watch one of the (dollar, back then – second run) movies, just out of giving yourself a break now and then.

But

a)      we’ve cut out most eating out.  We still go to Pete’s when we visit Denver, though, because it cheers us up.

b)      I’m doing strategic shopping.  Buying whatever is on sale, chopping up, freezing.  This is a lot of work, but as expensive as meat is, it’s also worth it.  If you don’t have a deep freezer, consider one.  You probably can get a used one, cheap.

c)       Entertainment is going to be of two kinds.  First, we have Amazon Prime, which I honestly wish we’d had when we were young and stone cold broke.  It’s cheaper than cable, and we get free streaming videos.  You also get a ton of free books every week, some of them traditionally published.  (Though I just discovered an indie mystery series that way.  That is I loved the first which was free a few months ago, and I’ve just bought the second – just out – for 3.99.  If it holds up, I’ll blog on it.)  But even if I buy those books, they are relatively cheap and don’t add to the clutter.

d)      Second, if you can buy memberships (to museums, to zoos, etc.) that are tax deductible, you’re both buying entertainment for a year and reducing your tax bite.  Double plus.  (Of course, most of those institutions are leftist, though I’ll note Wings Over The Rockies, in Denver, isn’t.) (We might yet cultivate a taste for long walks in scenic surroundings… though not till spring.)

e)      On money making, as I said there isn’t much I can do, though I MIGHT shift some of it to the next years, should we come to a point when “I’ve made enough money.”  Or I might write for the drawer for a while – but this is REALLY hard for me, because writing is communication, and one writes to be read.  At any rate, for us, other than the wonderful AMT coming at us with both barrels in January, making too much money is not something we can even figure out yet.  Even with the AMT – adjusted for family, I assume?  I really don’t know – if adjusted for family, we’re still well under.

 

I will, of course, if opportunity offers, exchange services with friends.  No, not short story writing, kids.  I mean, if you guys want a story written for you and want to do something for me in return, I’ll entertain the offer, of course.  Some adults, for reasons known only to themselves like stories written about them (don’t get me wrong, redshirting and its milder twin tuckerizing are tons of fun, both to give and to receive.  I meant more, though, writing an entire story around them/their situation.  I’ve heard of writers writing short stories so a guy can propose to his girlfriend with it, for instance.  For hire, of course.)  And you know, other than hard core erotica, I could probably do that.  But this being a story, it’s all “copyright weird” and all.  I mean, the other stuff I can do: paint walls, refinish furniture, and yeah, draw people.  It might take me three runs up to it, but I’m not a terrible portrait artist.  And I’d totally trade for stuff like proofreading or other stuff I need.  This type of exchange is of course unofficial and hors-de-taxes.  (It occurs to me a listing for exchanges of services might not be a bad idea.  It would work well with an idea I’ve been mulling for some time, with getting an indie-exchange going.  “I scratch your manuscript/cover, you scratch mine” sort of thing for those of us (most of us?) in strapped circumstances.)

We’re calling this mini-galt, though it could as easily be called “Galt on the discount plan.”  I’m sure it’s not the last word in Galting it, and that some of you have more ingenious ideas.  This one just applies to our situation.  Does it apply to anyone else?  I don’t know.  And what else have any of you come up with – always staying on the sunny side of the law, of course.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yes, I do indeed realize I need to have Jonathan as a POV character before, but there’s a lot of that sort of cleanup to do in revision.  “I’ll fix it in post.”  For now, it is what it is.

*This is the Fantasy novel I’m posting here for free, one chapter every Friday.   If your conscience troubles you getting something for free, do hit the donate button on the right side.  Anyone donating more than $6 will get a non-drm electronic copy of Witchfinder in its final version, when it’s published.
There is a compilation of previous chapters here  all in one big lump, which makes it easier to read and I will compile each new chapter there, a week after I post.  When the novel is completed and about to be edited the compilation page will probably be deleted.

Oh, this is in pre-arc format, meaning you’ll find the occasional spelling mistake and sentence that makes no sense.  It’s not exactly first draft, but it’s not at the level I’d send to a publisher, yet. *

*An additional note — the last several chapters haven’t been compiled into the er… compilation.  The last couple of months have been odd.  So you might have to do some hunting for them as you go.*

An Irregular Man

The Honorable Jonathan Blythe had gone straight home.  He found the house dark and cold, which it had been much too much of late, partly, he judged, because of his Father’s great ploy.  The supposed princess having been raised with them, but exonerating them of all guilt in her kidnapping was in fact a great social boon for his family.  Mama and papa, and even some of the younger girls had been invited to parties every night.

What surprised him, though,was that there was no one waiting in the little room off the entrance hall, which usually had at least mama’s maid or papa’s valet sitting in wait for the Lord and Lady to come home.  He walked in and his steps seemed to resonate loudly in the empty house.  He frowned.  It couldn’t be empty, damme.  After all, the children would be in the nursery, perforce.  They didn’t go to parties.  Little James was all of three years old. And the servants and nurses would be here too, would they not?

He walked in, slowly, into the completely dark house.  Rays of moonlight that shone through the magnificently tall windows in the wall of the entrance hall gave him his light as he found the marble stairs and walked up.  Because his footsteps seemed lonely, he supplemented with the tap of his cane.

Up and up and up, on a whim, all the way up to the third floor, and there, in the nursery, all was empty, all calm – the beds made, the children’s toys neatly arranged.  But his sweeping of the wall hooks that normally held the children’s coats made him frown.  They were, every one of them empty.  He quirked his brow and moved down the stairs.

And down there it was obvious that this too was deserted.  More importantly, he couldn’t hear any noise, not even from the kitchen, and it wasn’t so late that the cook would have gone to bed.  She usually stayed up late preparing the baking for the next day.  Jonathan knew this, because he was known to go in via the kitchen entrance and get a tot of cooking brandy and a slice of day-old cake.  The cook had never lost her fondness for the little boy whom she used to give currants and biscuits to.  Now Jonathan thought about it, Mrs. Whimple, the cook, might be the only reason he bothered to come home most nights.  He frowned at this, but didn’t dwell on it, beyond being sure that if he stopped coming, the cook would worry.

He wondered if anyone else would.  But he thought – yes, he very much thought – that he was worried about them no.  Something had happened to render the town house this empty, and in the middle of the season.

He traced his steps back down the stairs, and felt at the door.  Someone had removed the knocker, as they did at the end of the season, to signal the whole family was from town.

They’d left without telling Jonathan?  Well, that was hardly surprising.  What was surprising was leaving so early, so… but now.  The house was not totally empty.  He could feel it wasn’t.

He went upstairs, step by step, all the way up to the floor where his parents rooms and offices were, and he stood there, and sensed.  He wanted to be sure, for one, that what he was seeing was not an illusion, that he was in the right house, at the right time.

From papa’s office came the sense of someone living, and Jonathan headed there, tapping his cane along with his steps.  He hesitated before the door, training and thought telling him he should knock or scratch, while everything else told him he should just open the door.  It was probably papa in there, or his secretary.  And in there were probably the papers, the magic, the trace of the conspiracy that Jonathan had been seeking.

Jonathan opened the door, and went in.

There was a magelight burning on the desk, and papa sat behind it, with a pile of papers.  A blazing fire in the fireplace was almost too warm.

Papa – who looked like an older and male version of Honoria – looked up, managing, perhaps for the first time since Jonathan had known him, to appear startled.  “Jon!” he said.

“Papa,” Jonathan said.  A narrow-eyed sweep of the fireplace with his mage sight showed him that a lot of paper was burning there, and that the paper on the desk, which papa was sorting, was overlaid with some sort of magic.  It wouldn’t show the wrong thing to the wrong eyes.  “I see you’re destroying evidence,” Jonathan said, amicably, and went over to the corner cabinet where his father kept the liquor.  He opened it, got a decanter, poured himself a glass.  He was aware of his father’s exclamation behind him, but didn’t turn around until he had a full glass of brandy and his cane and gloves firmly in one hand.  He sat on the chair across from his father’s desk and crossed his legs, resting gloves and cane on his lap.  “I beg your pardon,” he said.  “But after I had shot the cat in an alley downtown, I lost most of the alcohol I need to think clearly.  And all Darkwater and his friend would offer me was a damnable pot of tea.  What?”

The What was at papa’s look.

“Darkwater is in town?” Papa said.  “I thought he might be.  I could feel the situation turning and—”

“Suppose you tell me about the situation?” Jonathan said, equably, as he took a sip of the brandy.

His father raised his eyebrows.  He shot a quick look at the fireplace.  “How much… what do you think the situation is?”

“I think that you and Honoria are somehow in business with Sidell.  This is bad, Father, very bad.  Inexcusably foolish to let yourself be snared into the plots of dragons.”

“Ah.  So you know that, but do you know what the plot is?”

“I know that you’re doing business in other universes,” Jon said, and drank his brandy.

His father raised his eyebrows.  “So, you know that far.”

“And I know that Honoria isn’t the princess. Not half of it. There is no way the princess could look so much like you, papa.”

“Ah.  Well, I never expected you to swallow that rasper.  Though I trusted you to stay quiet.”

It occurred to Jonathan that his father was a very dangerous man.  Maybe as dangerous as Sidell.  But somehow, Jonathan didn’t feel at risk.  “I’ve known you were running a smokey rig, papa, for the last month.  Why do you think I’ve been drinking so much.”

“How should I know?  You’ve always drank—”

Jonathan waved his hand.  “How did it start.  And why, papa?”

“How did it start?”  His father gave a hollow chuckle.  “It started with your grandfather.  He ran through the fortune like —  Your mama says you resemble him, and I’ve often thought that was true, though now…”  He narrowed his eyes and shrugged.  “There might be a lot in of me in you Jonathan.  Though I’d never noticed it before.  But if there is, you’ll understand.

“When I inherited, the family was well-nigh destitute.  Oh, we had the business, and the magic, and I could have built it back in time.  But I was married and I…  I didn’t want to spend my entire life laboring just so my heir could have a fortune to waste.  So I started going to the forbidden worlds.  The ones without magic.  It’s so easy to make a fortune there, Jonathan.  It’s not that magic doesn’t work – though in one or two it won’t – it’s that they don’t have magic there.  Which means they can’t detect it.  Their financial markets are wide open.  Their politicians will pay extraordinary sums for simple persuasion spells…”

“And?”  Jonathan said.  He could see the basic dishonesty of what his father was done but not enough to trouble him.  “You made our fortune?”

“More than it had ever been, yes.”

“And then?”

“And then Sidell approached me.  He’d noticed what we were doing, and he gave me an ultimatum.  I could stop – at that point it was very hard to prove what I’d done – or I could ally myself with him.”

“And?”

“I couldn’t stop.”

“Why not?  You’d made your fortune.”

“But the power, Jonathan.  Then power.  You have no idea what it’s like to be able to dictate the fate of entire worlds when no one knows about what you’re doing.  It’s better than being king.”

Jonathan felt sick for the first time and for a moment was afraid the brandy would come back up.  He stared at his father, his eyes impassive.  Of all the things he’d never understood, the lust for power was the worse.  His sins were pleasing ones: sleeping with this or that person or creature, drinking, eating.  He could never understand the boys at school who enjoyed ordering others about.  He could see they did, and he could see his father did too, but it was incomprehensible to him and also vaguely nauseating.  He remembered all the times at school when a bully had tried to force him to behave in a manner he didn’t wish to.

“I see,” he said at last.  “So you dealt with the dragon.”

“He wanted to replace the king.  He wanted Avalon and fairyland.  I thought…  I thought his madness was just that, and I thought…”

“And m’sister?  How did she come into it?”

This got him a completely baffled look.  “Your mama says your sister and I are alike.  You know it is said the founder of our house was elfborne, and your mama says both your sister and I have ice in our veins.  I think… she’s wrong.  Your sister fell in love with Sidell.  After that…”  He shrugged.  “Not that I understand it. The man is my age, and if rumors are true, he’s never been interested in a woman, except the nymph he raped to get her imprisoned in the spell, years ago, the one who gave him his bastard.  I thought…  I’ve been used to thinking that like his son, his interests lay in another direction.  At least for a while it was said that he kept various young men…” He shrugged.  “I told your sister and she accused me of lying.  She fell in love with him head over heels, and… and he encouraged her.  I think what attracted her was his power.”

“His magical power?”

“That too, but his… power and his wish for power.”

Jonathan gave a click of his tongue.  “They do say girls fall in love with men who resemble their fathers.”

His father looked startled but said nothing.

“So,” Jonathan said.  “Right now, you should be getting ready to be the foster father of the new queen.  But you’re burning papers.  What happened that I don’t know about?”

His father’s eyes looked dull and odd.  “She called the land.”

“M’sister?  Has she gone mad?”

“No, not your sister.  How could she.  The real princess.”

“The re–  She’s in Avalon?”

“Yes.  She came back some while back.  A centaur brought her. Fortunately Sidell neutralized her and kept her where he could keep her power damped and she under his thumb.  He tried to involve her with Darkwater so both could be condemned at the same time, before anyone looked too closely at her, but then…”

“But then?”

“It all went wrong,” his father said flatly.  “And she’s called the land.”

“Which causes?”

“Well, it gives her power, if she survives the challenges, to destroy all our spells, all our obfuscations.  To prove who she is.  Even now, the king has felt the call and knows his daughter is near and that she’s not your sister.”

“So you…”

“I intended to say it was your sister’s plan, and Sidell’s, which is true, and try to brazen out.  If only evidence…”  He looked up at Jonathan.   “I intended to…  I had caught this afternoon, odd disturbances, and Sidell wouldn’t answer my questions, so I sent the whole family to the country seat, and I—”

“Too late papa.  Other people know.  And Darkwater is in the world, and he knows, and…”

“I see,” his father said.  “Yes, I think you are like me.  Underneath the bon vivant, you have ice in your veins.”

Jonathan laughed.  He set his empty glass on the side of the desk, and slipped his gloves on.  “Perhaps that’s why I drink so much.  It won’t fadge papa.  You know that even if there were no witnesses, dearest Honoria will talk.  Yes, we could kill her, but papa, I think there is another problem.  If you survive this, you’ll have to keep your nose clean, very clean.  And I’ll be watching, to make sure you don’t do this again.  Even if the thing with dealing in other worlds is lifted – since I think that was Sidell’s idea – yet the king will monitor it, and what you’ve been doing will not be permitted.  Would you be able to do that, papa?  To give up the power?”

He read the answer in his father’s eyes, even as his father said, “And you?  Would you be able to take a house with a shadow on it and do any better for your brothers and sisters?  And Jonathan, would you be able to resist exploiting those without magical power.  You are like me!”

“Not entirely, papa.  You see, my wish has never been to rule others but to be left alone.”  He got up.  “I’ll bid you farewell.  I trust you know what to do.  I believe you have the necessary in your second drawer.”

“Why don’t you do it yourself.”

“Tut tut papa.  Judicial magicians.”

Jonathan got up and walked out of his father’s study.  He presumed he’d have to sleep at his club, if all servants were gone.

He was on the second step of the stairs when the shot rang out from the studio and Jonathan was, suddenly, the only living person in the house.

Jonathan Blythe, Earl of Timfarr stood transfixed for a moment.  He’d like to say he felt nothing, but that was not strictly true.  He felt no grief for his father, who’d never given him reason to feel anything.

But he felt a sure, unreasoning fury.  If his father hadn’t wanted to get rich in a hurry.  If he’d not been addicted to power.  If–  Then Jonathan could have done what he planned since the age of twelve at least, and disappeared into a place where he was not known and had no responsibilities, and left his younger brother to inherit.

It wasn’t possible now, and Peter would not have to shoulder the responsibility.  Jonathan would spend the rest of his life living so impeccably, so above-board that he restored the family name.

He muttered a curse under his breath and left for his club.

But he’d gone no more than two steps outside, when he realized this night was not a normal night for anyone.

I’ve said before that I became an American by reading Heinlein books.  This is true at least to an extent, though I’d be at a loss to explain the process to you.  I mean, if you knew how to do that, book by book, chipping away, so someone starts out wondering what’s wrong with all those Americans who don’t like taxes (don’t they know taxes are civilization?  And have always existed) and ends up thinking getting a Don’t Tread On Me tattoo is a brilliant idea, even while immersed in a socialist, communitary system, we’d have no problems.  We’d just use “the process.”

Mind, you, it is likely that the er… Heinleinizing (totally a word.  Don’t worry your pretty head) of my opinions came from watching socialism up close and personal.  Heinlein had help.  But all the same, and even so, by the time I came to the States as an exchange student I had been, so to put it, primed to react to the US as “home.”

Even so, things about the US surprised me – things that Americans thought were completely logical.  For instance, the fact that classes are – objectively – a zoo.  No, we’re not talking about a war-zone type school.  Stow High School had good teachers, by and large, enthusiastic about teaching and their subjects.

I’m just talking about classroom behavior.  People just TALKED.  In Portugal, once the teacher entered, absolute silence reigned, unless he asked a question.  More conducive to learning?  Sure.  Maybe.  But in the US it just didn’t happen.  There wasn’t that built in respect for the “master” who got up front and spoke, and therefore all must fall silent.

There were other things – a distinct lack of respect based solely on someone’s age and position (respect for real accomplishments was granted, of course.) – a wicked sense of humor that showed up in signs on hallways and doors of classes, the fact that people could talk back or joke with teachers.

But possibly the most surprising thing in the US was … how people interacted.  You could have ornaments and decorated trees in your front yard and no one stole them.  This made my jaw drop, particularly since my host family’s house didn’t even have a nominal fence.  (This  might be gone in certain areas.  At least someone stole both a cement giraffe and – months later – a cheap composite fountain from our front yard.)

And when something went wrong, say a massive snowfall, people grabbed shovels and went to the street, to shovel not just their driveway, but as much of the sidewalk as they could, and to make their area as functional as possible, before official rescue/help arrived.

This would be unheard of most other places in the world.

This image/these ideas gelled for me as I read P.J. O’Rourke’s comment about a restaurant somewhere – the Soviet Union – and said “An American would grab a bottle of windex and solve most of the problem.”  Or something like that.

Every time I go back to Portugal, now, I find myself thinking about that type of thing or wanting to do that type of thing about ten times a day.  Most of the time I don’t, because there’s a crab bucket thing over there, you know, the crabs pull the others down, i.e. if I – say – grabbed a bottle of cleaner to save a sanitation problem, I’d get asked “Who do you think you are?”   And my parents live there.  (If they didn’t, and didn’t have to live with the consequences of my actions, I’d probably do it anyway.)

Yeah, Americans talk back, and make classrooms noisy, and can sometimes be counterproductive.  On the other hand, Americans, faced with a gadawful mess don’t look around and wait for “the proper person” to fix it.  They roll up their sleeves and each of them goes “Well, I’ll do this.”

It’s hard to explain how different that makes us.  To most Americans it seems logical behavior (it is) and I only get the difference because I remember being brand new here and how ALIEN it was.  And I remember living in Portugal without the constant “oh, for heavens’ sake, just do it” moments I have when I go back now.  (I should possibly point out that most Europeans find most middle aged American women bossy, interfering and a bit terrifying.)

Yes, I know some of you are going to tell me that spirit is now lost.

It’s not.  It is, of course, in certain areas – but certain areas always had issues – and for certain people.  And it is more muted than it used to be.

Part of the thing with Europe is the worship of the “experts.”  “We’ll take it to the expert” or “We’ll have the expert do it.”  There is now some do it yourself (and my mom was always one of nature’s do-it-yourselvers.  I think given time to acculture, and if she’d come here early enough mom would have made a great American) but it’s nothing like in the US and it would never have started without the US.

They’ve – by which I mean the cultural establishment – tried to bring the same here.  I’ve railed here before about how cozies were – in effect – blacklisted by the publishing establishment because “amateurs can’t be better than the professionals.”  And how my books couldn’t have funny policemen because “Policemen are professionals and must be respected.”  And I’ve talked about how shocked I was when a bunch of high school kids came to beat me on my blog because I’d criticized their teacher (I actually hadn’t.  I’d criticized the curriculum which is is not teacher set, but they lacked the semantic ability to distinguish these) and how dare I?  She’s a TEACHER.  I’m supposed to respect her.  (She also was considerably less educated than I, much younger and I have reason to believe she sent the kids over to harass me – the harassment stopped when I threatened to scan in some of her (outrageous) grading handiwork and post it. – which leaves me in doubt of her moral character.)

While these things annoy me and shock me, as does anyone preventing my questioning him by saying “I’m the expert” – it is still new here.

The people on top are trying to do it, but I wonder how much of it will stick.

No, listen.  We’re still… Us.  Still likely to roll up our sleeves and do it.

Look at blogs.  Sure, there are blogs abroad.  I hear Portugal is one of the most connected countries in the world.  But are there newsblogs?  Big enough to rival, say instapundit?  Drudge? (There might be something like DU or the others – because, well, they’re funded and organized by organizations.  But, you know, I have problems enough without tampering with my blood pressure.)

Oh, please.  News have to be reported by experts.  It’s not the individual’s job.  And besides, why undertake that mass of work if no one will pay you?

There are tons of interesting recipe blogs, etc, but I have yet to find something with the scope that Americans cheerfully undertake.

The same could be said for ebooks and indie publishing.  They have access to the same facilities we do (though more regulations in the way) but do you see a flood of books in foreign languages appearing?  Some, sure (there are displaced and unaware Americans everywhere, in the sense that being American is to an extent a place in the heart) there are some.  But nothing like you’d expect.

This is to an extent why  – to quote Bill Whittle – the future comes from America.  We are willing to go ahead and try it, and see how it plays.

The spirit is still there.  Diminished, perhaps, but still much stronger than in the rest of the world.

And this is why I say we also don’t know what the result of what the people on the top – publishing, politics, news, etc – are doing to us.  We know how it works in other countries, but I don’t think they realize how different we are.

When people’s lives are made impossible, they find ways to live.  This was true, even in Portugal in the seventies, with a  flourishing black market and most regulations ignored.  How much more true will it be here, at the first signs of true pinching?

And then there’s the fact that in the rest of the world, if things get unbearable, you can always go to America.  But we don’t have an America to go to.  Which will only make us more determined to “ignore the order, buck the directive, roll up our sleeves and do for ourselves.”

This is why statists of any stripe so often throw their hands up and call us ungovernable.  Not that this gives them the idea they shouldn’t try.  No.  Instead, they try to devise more cunning ways of governing us.  You have them to give credit for dreaming the impossible dream.  It’s the one proof we have that the sons of beetles are Americans.

So…  after sixty years of creeping statism, they’ve now “captured the flag” – they have actually got all of the important systems sewn up: news, entertainment, education, government.

They think – can you blame them? – that they won.

I won’t say they can’t hurt us.  They can.  The mechanisms they’ve seized hold of are important and they are – natch – misusing them.

I’m not saying that this will be easy.  It won’t.  Our economy is likely to be an incredible shambles, and I’ve said before I think we’ll lose at least one city.

But, listen, the problem with these sons of… Babel is that they might be American, but they’re not American ENOUGH.  If they were, they’d understand “ungovernable” and this willingness for each of us to go it alone (often for common benefit, but on own recognizance, nonetheless) is not a bug.  It’s a feature.  And that it’s baked in the cake of a people who came here to escape the top-down spirit of other places.  Some of the black sheep (or as one friend of mine calls it, the plaid sheep) attitude is genetic, hereditary, inborn.  And enough of us have it.

Push harder and we escape harder, through crevices they don’t even know are there.  Forbid us from making a living, and we’ll find a way to go around you.  Make it impossible to defend ourselves, and I shudder to think what some of my friends and neighbors will come up with.  Make the economy impossible, and we’ll create another one you can’t reach.  Make regulations too binding and we’ll either ignore them or – more likely – creatively subvert them.

They captured the flag, and they think they captured the nation.  It’s the type of mistake that the bureaucratic mind makes.

Poor rats.  Try not to laugh at them too hard, as you go about the business of undermining them.

We have them surrounded.

I was thinking this morning that there are other things that make this path we’re on uniquely dangerous in terms of preparing for bad stuff, because it’s simply impossible to guess what form the horrible stuff will take.

Here’s a grab bag at random – just off the top of my head.

We’re the largest country organized on non-authoritarian lines (yes, I know, but we’re not organized for it) … I was going to say “to risk collapse” but now that I think about it we’re just the largest country in history organized on non-authoritarian lines.  For those who will protest that, go look at the constitution of the European Union.  When we organize under a constitution that classifies the curvature of a banana, then we’ll be in the running.  (Yes, there are a series of abuses, and we’ve been trending authoritarian and centralized since the civil war – not arguing the rightness or justness of the war, just saying it centralized and strengthened los Federales and their power —  but I don’t think it’s got into the DNA of the nation, yet.  Having lived here and in Europe and traveled a bit all over, Americans are still likely to tell authority to take a hike.)

I have massive faith in the American spirit.  9/11 happening anywhere else in the world would have turned NYC into well, something out of the movie “Escape from New York”, instead of a place where people helped each other get through, which by and large it was.  Yeah, I know there are spots where this fails, but by and large Americans look at what needs done and go “I’ll do it” instead of waiting for the duly constituted authorities.

We are being treated to a very weird financial combination.  I think I know what the idiots in power are trying to do, but if it REALLY is what they’re trying to do, they are some sort of unique in the realm of dumb.

Look, I was thinking about this yesterday, in terms of what an economic collapse looks like.  Portugal sailed dangerously close to it in the mid-seventies, with inflation going insane and people panicking and buying supplies months in advance, and then hysteria about hoarders being drummed up when supplies failed to materialize.  (We also had price controls then.  An absolute boon for the black market.)

But no one starved and by the end of it several people were better off than they’d been, (though not those who owned real estate, due to rent freeze and not those who’d failed to acquire saleable skills – more on that later.)  People who owned gold or had money in the bank, for instance.  (Though how much the future prosperity came from America I don’t know.  I know in the eighties we joked our GDP was made in America.)

HOWEVER to my knowledge – and I’m not as exhaustively well read on it as I’d like to be, because for the last five or six years work/kid stuff has kept me from reading economics as much as I used to.  (Shut up.  It’s a hobby.)

I don’t know any other country where currency has been printed like ours, and yet the interest rates are held artificially low.  The combination is at best daft.  Inflation is already showing up, though they keep doing weird stuff to how it’s calculated.  (No, I’m not going to argue that.  If you buy food, you know inflation has shown up – but beyond that, because the price of fuel goes up [being paid for in devalued dollars] it pushes everything else up, because fuel is used to MAKE everything.)

A lot of the places that can, and where it’s direct, they are already raising prices/lowering sizes – restaurants; food packaging; services; prices for minor stuff like mini-golf courses.

But the lack of employment is holding salaries down.  And for those of us like me, who work at a job with irregular pay and who therefore of necessity have “savings” – i.e. a big paycheck goes in bank and is slowly drawn out to supplement my husband’s salary which is our main support – are seeing those savings eaten away.  By the time we need to use them, we need more of them, which we’re not getting because interest rates are low.

The idea of creating inflation to get out of a disastrous debt situation is neither unknown nor rare.  Countries like Greece and Portugal coasted on it for years (and we could go on about what losing that ability has done to them) partly because as “touristic countries” they thrived on being “cheap” by keeping their currency devalued.

You borrow high-value currency and pay the same nominal amount of low-value currency.  Fine.  That makes sense.  But if you don’t let the savings and assets people have appreciate at the same rate, via high interest rates, (which in turn pushes company assets and – usually – salaries up, even though not in real value) you’re going to have people who don’t make enough to eat or to buy… anything.  (Look, ALL intervention in economics is stupid, ultimately, because economics is not something someone can CONTROL.  It is instead a playground for the law of unintended consequences.  It’s as if we developed an ability to control the weather and were in shock when keeping it pleasant in Iowa buried NYC in ice or something.)

It seems to me we’re headed there.  Most of my friends are beyond pinched this Christmas, and that’s the ones who still have jobs.

If I had to guess I’d say this strategy was cooked up to get us out of the real estate collapse.  The inflation is supposed to catch up so that real estate assets never “devalue” in numbers, just in real value.  And the interest rates are kept forcibly low so that people will soak up the bad assets and so that those in marginal positions can refinance.  (We know how well that last part is working — not.)

Mind you, if that really is the idea, this gang is dumber than dirt.  First because if people’s money holdings and salary stay the same, buying a house is still difficult, no matter how low the interest rates.  Second, because they’re not taking in account that  those of us working as contractors and getting paid on contracts made years ago, will end up destitute and not be able to afford … not just houses, but anything.  I don’t know how many of us there are, but the fact salaries aren’t going up means salaried employees, of which there are  a lot, will end up in the same fix.

In Portugal there was an enormous “soak up” of completely paid off real-estate, a lot of it inherited over generations.  In fact, it might have been the norm.  Having a mortgage back then was odd.  This meant that your property appreciated massively and if you got in real trouble, you could sell it and move on.  (Various restrictions on selling rented out places, and rent control made this more difficult than it sounds, but…  still.  You weren’t talking about people having to meet mortgage payments, house repairs, food, fuel, etc, with salaries that remain static and depreciating currency reserves while a lot of the rest goes up.  On the food side, too, most people back then had at least some gardens and some “creation” — chickens, goats, etc.)

OTOH it’s entirely possible I’m attributing to stupidity that which is more easily explained by malice: they want to turn us into beggars, because beggars are easy to please.  No, wait, that still means stupidity, because what can’t go on, won’t and like with price fixing, when you make it impossible for people to live, people find extra-legal means.

Okay – another way in which we’re different: we’re the world’s charity.  We still give financial aid to most of the world, and have for close on to a century.  (We might that way have enabled tyranny, but that’s something else.)  We’re the world’s grantor of peace.

If we withdraw, even well short of a total collapse, will the world finally grow up?  Or will it go back to the long wars of the 18^th and 19^th century everywhere, to the point commerce can’t take place?

Make no mistake, whatever bad things happen in the US will be ten times worse in the rest of the world.  And don’t say “Who cares?” some – if not most — of those people are much better at WMDs than at feeding their people and will consider knocking the “old champ off” a much greater priority than actually taking care of their starving population.

(A friend of mine said “Whatever happens now, we’re going to lose at least one major city.”  I’d like to say he was wrong, but I have the same feeling.)

Other ways we’re different: we have more guns per capita than anywhere except those places that encourage/enforce gun ownership, like Switzerland.  This is not a bad thing because:

Even in the milder of the “things go wrong” scenario, where things go bad first are the people who are marginal now, living at the edge of both society and often legality.  Where you see any crackup first in society is higher crime rates – we’re seeing that – and lack of safety on the streets.  The fact that a lot of people have guns will probably hold some of that (at least) down.

We have a military that is more in the tradition of service than of machismo.  We’re probably the last of the Western powers with a military tradition and our military tradition is … odd, built on winning hearts and souls, more than on “shoot them all and let G-d sort them out.” Yes, I know, sometimes the ROEs are stupid (Okay the ROEs are mostly stupid) but still, it has a built in “you don’t kill unless you need to.”  This makes us different from, say, the various Latin American countries that have had crack ups.

Will the US military fire on the populace if things get bad enough?  Some places.  Some populace.  As someone said, behavior means a lot.

BUT the US military are also generally a force for good and order, and given a central collapse, might hold things together long enough for things to coalesce in another form.  Might.  One can hope.  (Of course, I keep thinking of Starship Troopers “And then the veterans had had enough.”)

All of these together, particularly the economic thing, added to the chaotic force of changing technology and the decentralization that tech has been forcing on industry and commerce even as our politics and education and other… non-commercial enterprises have got more centralized, has the effect of making us a particularly unpredictable juggernaut.

It won’t be like movies or books, because those move on logic.  Real people aren’t logical.  They’re cranky, emotional and ornery.  A group of one or the other some place can send things spinning out of control.

In the best of all possible worlds, you’re going to hit a point where the answer to “Are things getting better or worse?” will have to be “Yes.”  And then things start smoothing off, if we’re lucky in 25 or so years, so that I can still see it.  (Or maybe faster.  We’re Americans.  We go fast.  Hey, look, I’m Heinlein’s kid.  The glass is not half full. It’s brimming over.)

On the other hand, it’s unpredictable, and I don’t think the people in charge know that, just like the people in charge of publishing don’t seem to be aware that ebooks aren’t just a “novelty fad.”  There is a certain type of credentialed-not-brilliant (but thinks he/she is, because… credentialed)  individual for whom knowledge is what exists in books and what your professors passed to you.  If reality disagrees, then you deny reality as hard as you can.

Most of the people in charge most places are busy denying reality.  Which makes the rest of us real nervous.

Hope for the best.  Prepare for the worst.  Stay informed.  Keep moving.  Keep working.

UPDATE: The writing blog is now up at Mad Genius Club.

As many of you know, I’m watching Foyle’s War, kind of the way I watch things these days: when I need to iron, or do something else that occupies the hands but not the eyes (much) or the mind (at all) I turn on a couple of episodes (thank heavens for Amazon prime.  I remember being very much broke and not having cable – as we don’t now – and not being able to watch anything.  With Amazon prime and the stuff free for kindle, I’d have had a much easier time of it.)

I’ve before talked about sudden insights, things I’ve known all along, but which suddenly seem fresh and new.  Like “they didn’t know they were going to win.”  It also started me reading about the World Wars again, which means eventually there will be some blogs related to that, but I need to be more “with it.”

Today is the first day I don’t feel I’m at least partly dead or about to fall asleep in… over a month.  OTOH I forgot to bring my computer to the office, which is why this post is so late.  (Don’t even ask.)

The most amazing thing of all, though, is that despite all the restrictions they lived under, the rationing, the coupon books, the collecting of every piece of scrap, most people lived as though the war weren’t happening.   (I’ve often considered, too, that while the idea of rationing was completely wrong-headed economically and might have FED scarcity, it might have been the right thing to do PSYCHOLOGICALLY creating that sense of unity of purpose.  I’ve also wondered if the problem was that after 9/11 we weren’t asked to plant victory gardens or buy war bonds, but simply to “go shopping.”  Yes, I know it was sound in many ways, but it might have made a difference psychologically if people felt they were contributing.  Or perhaps not.)

Of course the series is a mystery series, and there is usually something involving the war – because that’s how they sold it to the producers – but you sort of catch glimpses of people around, and you get the feeling most people were… what was it people were doing while Noah built the ark?  They were marrying and being given in marriage, having babies, worrying about where to live.  Even when the war affected all of those, it wasn’t the main concern.  The main concern was everything else: who loved whom, who hated whom, what the crop was going to be, and why the kid was acting weird.  All this without knowing if they’d win or lose, or what the next year (or month) would bring.

Right now, sometimes I feel as though this is what the whole world is doing around me.  They’re making plans, getting comfy, settling down, fixing what’s wrong with their lives – or perhaps trying to survive unemployment, illness, other life stuff.

And then periodically I get together with a friend, or sit down with an old acquaintance and I hear how much more seriously they’re preparing.  It’s all guns and canned food, and why am I still living in an urban area, have I gone nuts?  And don’t I realize it’s time to set aside the writing/publishing thing and worry about preparing to survive the collapse.

And then I feel like it’s me who is going about every day life, unaware that there’s something big coming down the pike.

I am aware there is something big coming down the pike.  I think even those who “aren’t” or who deny it, know it at some level.  There is a … tense feeling in the air, and everyone is sitting on the edge of their chairs.  There is a suspended-breath feel – waiting for the next shoe to drop.

The thing is that no one knows what the next shoe will be.  A light sneaker?  An army boot?  A baby bootie?

Each of us has a mental image of disaster, mine formed by experiences (and books, and movies) and other people’s by THEIR experiences and books and movies.

The problem is no one knows.  This has never happened before.

And before you start screaming at me, that of course it has happened before, that even recently the USSR folded like a pack of cards, that we know exactly what collapse looks like… sigh.  No we don’t.

Oh, sure, we can look back to say the French revolution and see what happened when the leading power of the day got buried in deficit and went mad.  We can look at the collapses in Argentina, and… everywhere else in the 20^th century.  But the parallels aren’t right.

If you go back far enough – the French revolution – you’re dealing with a completely different state of affairs, not just mentally but also at the economic/material level.

You see, America has changed the game, both ways.  I remember hearing it mentioned that the USSR still commanded loyalty because peasants STILL lived better than under the Tzars.  A similar thing was said here about Scandinavia and socialism.  Their life improved.  And the same could be said about Portugal under its strong-man regime.  People can point to how poor Portugal was, but we thought we were rich.  As a child, I always wore shoes, for instance, even if the summer “sandals” were the shoes that had stopped fitting in winter strategically cut.  I had winter coats.  We had coal delivered.  I didn’t have to do what mom did and go, barefoot, along the train line, gleaning coal dropped by the trains.  I got Christmas gifts, usually a variety of plastic stuff.  It wasn’t just “we’ll have some fruit for desert and that’s how we know it’s a holiday.”

This was because things that started in America – including the improvements in agriculture, the new processes and new materials – allowed a level of prosperity that was still better than anything the world had known before.  Even in countries doing their best to slit their own throats, the easier ways of producing things and the abundance of food made a difference.  Things got better.  (And everyone got used to thinking that was the way of the world.  BTW I’m aware this process didn’t start with America.  It started with Great Britain and the Industrial Revolution.  But then the torch got passed and things accelerated.)

The other part of this – influencing all collapses in the 20^th century – is that America tends to support other countries in trouble.  This is a double edged blessing, btw.  There is reason to wonder if the USSR would have survived nearly as long, with its dysfunctional regime, without the grain we were willing to provide at bargain basement prices… because we had it.

We don’t have an America to bail us out, and we don’t have an America to keep innovating as we collapse.  We ARE America, and there is no one to pass the torch to.

Please, please, please, don’t tell me that Brazil or China stand ready…  Brazil is in a pretty good place now, partly bolstered by our petro dollars, but let’s not kid ourselves.  Until they fix their political culture, they’ll continue going through the boom and bust cycle in a way we can’t even imagine.  As for China…  China will not survive our collapse, and as it cracks it will show us what a crack up really means.  All of those who are my age and were astonished that the USSR didn’t fight like a wounded bear as it died, might yet get to see this process.

By the time Great Britain started its self-inflicted decline, the US was already well on its way to moving into the lead industrially and agriculturally.  There is no country in that position.  There are countries that can pretend to be in that position, but not when you look at internals.

So, what will the collapse look like?

I don’t know.  And you don’t either.  All we know, because we can feel it, like sand grains shifting on a dune in the first movements of something that is not even fully visible, but which will suddenly remake the landscape, is that we’re already in the process of collapsing.  For a definition of collapsing.

What I’m betting on, of course, is a collapse that collides full-on with the catastrophic innovation of tech.  What this will look like is like an accelerated version of what we have right now, and, to an extent of what Portugal had in the seventies.  The old ways and those in control of them at all levels – from education to production; from politics to news – will be collapsing but at the same time they’ll be each day less relevant, as they get replaced.

This is sort of – if you need a visual – like making a train into an airplane while it is running.  It’s chaotic, very scary and not painless.  Some people will get crushed as gears get moved, and some people will fall out by the wayside and die as the shell is changed.  And some others will fall from great height, even, as the plane takes off.

Or, to leave the overstretched metaphor behind:

It won’t be pretty, and I advise to have prep stuff on hand – you know, guns and canned, and such.   Whether to move to the city or rural is something else.  Yes, I know what you guys hear – and the instinct to “go and hide.”  But I’ve read accounts of Argentina’s collapse, and the worst stuff happened in the countryside, where isolated farmhouses were raided.  If you were in the city, for the most part, you were all right. (Which I’d say was more likely if your city has military presence.)

But again, there is no way of KNOWING.  All you can do is sort of guess and sort of prepare, and of course, ideally you’d have a town residence with a rural getaway, or vice versa, but not if you’re as broke as I am.

HOWEVER because you expect the new to emerge from the old, with preparing for the collapse of the old, for interruptions of supplies, for disruptions in electricity, etc, if you believe this is the sort of collapse that’s coming, you’ll be doing what you can to prepare your profession for the new order.  In my case, this means getting as much as I can up electronic, so I might have at least some income should paper distribution collapse.  I don’t know what it would be for your profession, but if I were a computer-person, I’d be trying to establish the ability to have different contracts on the side.  (If your current employment contract allows it.)  As we’ve spoken of before, what you should be trying for is as many and as varied streams of income as you can.  If you’re a writer not making much, yet, married to someone in a traditional industry that’s going to get whacked, I urge you to do what I’m doing, and write like mad and put it up as much as you can, in as many genres as you can.  (Though I’ll note, for me at least, bubblegum seems to sell best.)

I’m doing this because I don’t believe we’ll collapse totally.  Can we?  Well, sure.  Again, as I said, we’ve never seen anything QUITE like what we’re starting on.

But here’s the thing – if we collapse totally… well… I can’t afford to buy a farm.  I can’t afford to store enough food for the next fifty years.  The best I can do is buy books on building log cabins and trapping animals, and supplying the kids with bows and arrows.  Then if the unthinkable happens, we shall go and colonize the national forest.  (No?  Why not?)  As long as I have some food to survive till a crop can be got in, well, it’s much like preparing for the catastrophic change – except that we never get to be civilized again and therefore all the ebooks count for nothing.  Worth trying, anyway because you never know.  And what else are you going to do if you’re not massively wealthy and able to prepare for the fall of civilization?  Sit around knitting your total collapse blankie?

There is a third option, and for all I know it might be the most likely.  It would be the most likely if we had an America to save us.  It’s called the “modified hangout.”  You slide and slide and slide, and there’s no ending to the slide.  Africa has gone through this and Europe is heading into it (though we’re helping it by propping it up – yes, we’re still giving foreign aid to most of the world.)  This is a world in which services become worse and worse starting with those the government provides, from supplemental income to mail to (where it does so) electricity.  All of it becomes unreliable, untrustworthy, subject to the whims of bureaucrats and how much baksheesh you’re willing to pay. Every year is a little worse than the last.  And you just… hang on.

At the end of this is the world of Heinlein’s Friday, with everyone in armored cars and people in guarded compounds, and the rest of it resembling what a total collapse would do, but crossed with the world of Mad Max.

I wouldn’t bet on this last one.  It is unlikely.  To get there, you need someone subsidizing you, because your society stops functioning long before this to the point where it keeps food and clothing available, much less keeping someone very wealthy.  I don’t think America can keep itself on this path without outside help and – get this very carefully – there is no outside help.

At the same time, even if it happens, how do you prepare for it?  Well, the best thing is to have some stuff laid by so you can protect yourself and yours and provide in case of shortages.

BUT most of all, the best thing is to be very wealthy and able to afford a private enclave.

My plan – though it’s unlikely it will bring me enough wealth – is to do exactly the same I would do in the first instances.  Because if there’s any chance of my being wealthy it is to have a book (or more) hit.

So, right now, I’m very busy – which has the advantage of keeping me from fretting too much.  (You should see me when I fret too much.)

The best thing to do when the rain starts falling and you don’t know if it’s just a severe shower or forty days and forty nights is build your ark.

Even if it’s just made of words and electrons.

Do go on with life — it might be important and your “peacetime activities” might yet be the most important thing in making the collapse non-permanent — but keep an eye on that rain.  And prepare for any eventuality.

Yesterday I ran across another mention of our birthrate plummeting.  This seems to be a predictable side effect of more government control, one that neither side has ever adequately explained.

Oh, sure, when you look at terminal-stage communism, like the late unlamented USSR (well, unlamented by us, of course) or the mess that is North Korea, you can wrinkle your brow and go “Well, really, honestly, who wants to bring a child into that?”  (Which is why late-stage communism tends to have restrictions on contraception and abortion – because at some point the people who prefer to reign in hell than to serve in heaven realize they’re going to be left with nothing to reign over.)

But any country that installs enough of “socialism” – a controlled economy from above – past a certain point experiences significant birth rate loss.

When I was a kid in the seventies people used to puzzle about the problems Scandinavian countries had having children, even though they are the “showcase of socialism” – the place where it supposedly all works.  Of course no one associated birthrate and socialism, then, and all sorts of stuff like “the close genetic relation of Scandinavians” was mooted to explain it.

Now we know better.  Country after country, after it crosses an invisible line, enters a place where people just won’t have enough babies.  Look, socialism has managed to give Italy and Portugal a birthrate that’s falling so dramatically that if continued the countries will be extinct in 50 years.  (Which might not be reflected statistically, since both countries are magnets of immigration from countries with even less functional economies.  Portugal has received a large number of … Russians?)

The question is why?  We’re not talking late-stage hell-holes.  We’re talking countries that, by historic standards, (i.e. no one starving to death) are still pretty good (in Portugal the big argument was whether those on government support should get 13^th month – ie Holiday bonus – paychecks) and in Scandinavia arguably cleaner, safer and more prosperous than mankind has been for most of its existence.  (Though the worm is there – and we’ll go into it.)

So why this sudden collapse of faith in the future and – usually, possibly tellingly – of all creative endeavor?  The USSR had military might.  It could field athletes that dwarfed those of the free world in achievement.  But creative endeavor, scientific (or even artistic) was always short.  I understand Scandinavia before socialism had a vibrant scientific industry (for the time.  And I’ll admit this is based on a book on the history of science read years ago.)

What is it about socialism that curbs endeavors that amount to betting on the future: having kids or creating anything that requires a lot of work up front on the chance of a big pay off.

Conservatives are fond of saying the birth rate collapses because “The government substitutes for the family, so you don’t need children to take care of you in your old age.”  Respectfully, I’d like to say that’s bunk.  No sane person, even in medieval times when children would be your only insurance, would choose to have kids because of economic considerations.  (Note I said no sane person.  I’m not saying some people didn’t do just that, but no one sane.)  It’s too risky an activity.  You’re raising someone who might or might not turn out to be someone who can support you/someone who’ll live to adulthood/someone who might or might not be a burden on you your whole life.

Having kids, like writing books, like creating something new in science, is a process that can’t be explained by purely rational considerations.  NO one sits down to write a book and expects to make millions, unless they’re young, naïve and deluded.  No one has kids to ensure that they’re looked after.  No one spends years in scientific discovery because “it will pay off big.”

Most of us who do any of those things do them because we’re driven to them.  We feel we have to.  But also, because, at some level, all three of those are acts of faith: faith in ourselves; faith in humanity and ultimately faith in the future.

Regardless of religious considerations – which I’d like to leave out of this, because they’re another order of mental process – anyone having a kid is saying “I believe the future is worth it my investing time raising this person and sending my genes forward to live in what I think will be better.”  Anyone writing a book – particularly book after book to no marked (or no) success – is saying “I believe in the future my art will be appreciated.”  Anyone creating a new scientific process/a new machine/a new medical treatment is saying “I believe in the future there will be a use for this and it’s worth it.”

And that’s when we get to socialism’s flaw.  Marja (who is in Finnland) has said many times something along the lines of “Life is pretty good under socialism, but—“  The but is that (Marx’s misguided and even in his time blinkered obsession with early-industrial-revolution conditions caused this) socialism’s division of humanity into owners of means of production and proletariat and decision to punish one and elevate the other as means to paradise never fit anything very well.  (Factory owners were NOT all crooked and heartless and in fact Marx had to lie and use 50 year old reports to give the impression all capitalists were naturally exploitative and the system itself was bad.  They were even less aliens, dropped down from the stars.)  But it fits our age worst of all.

In our age, when literally knowledge (or an innovative mind) is power and all someone needs in the ways of “means of production” to create something that can be sold to millions is a few laptop computers and one or more willing minds, the engine of creation is – still – the business founder.  This can be just a guy with a computer in his garage.  But at some point he’ll need to hire manpower.

Under most socialist regimes, at that point he becomes an evil villain who must be forced by his government to NOT work his employees to death in smoke and link filled rooms from sun up to sun down.  (Most of you in computers will identify with sun up to sun down, but hey, that’s big companies already established who give big to political campaigns and can get away with everything.)

At that point, the government does everything possible to prevent the formation of a company.  (Either that or it subsidizes it which can be JUST as bad.  Look up perverse incentives, sometime.)

Every socialist society seems to generate a mass of disengaged young people.  They either can’t find work, or they don’t know why they should.

In essence what socialism promises people is “A future just like this, only smaller and more controlled.”

Socialism, even when it works, as arguably (very arguably) Scandinavian countries do to an extent, is sacrificing the future on the altar of the present.  Because the whole idea is to eliminate uncertainty and create society in the image of a 19^th century machine, where every piece is where it should be, forever.

Look, when you buy a lottery ticket for a dollar, you know you’re almost certainly throwing that dollar away.  But if the jackpot is big enough, you do it, anyway.  Why?  Because for two or three days you can dream of all you’d do with 200 million dollars.  Would you do it if the prize were a 30k salary for life?  Don’t be ridiculous.  While that would ease our crunch, it’s not enough to dream on, and if I can’t dream, I don’t throw away money.

Same thing.  We have kids, we create, we try in the face of often overwhelming odds, because we can dream of the big jackpot.  “My kid will be the first man on Mars.”  “My book will show people a whole other way of looking at things.”  “My invention will push back old age and death fifty years.”

We know chances are we’ll fail and we’ll throw our lives away on it, but it gives us something to reach for: the dream.  It makes everyday struggles and mountains of diapers worth it.

Change that.  “My kid will have a secure existence as a mid-range functionary.”  “My book will be one of many echoing received wisdom.”  “My invention is too expensive to push back old age and death for everyone, and besides old people are a drain on the state.  But people will have fewer colds in their seventy some years of life.”

Exciting?  Worth giving up your present comfort to obtain?  Don’t be ridiculous.  Most people choose instead to sleep later, have more fun, live a stress free existence, even if devoid of future.

Not me, of course.  I’m in the business of believing in the future.  I’m in the business of selling dreams.

And I think betting on the future despite all odds is the way we defeat the futureless blight of socialism.  The way we win the future for humans.  The way we bet on us and our children, and everyone world without end.  Because if you bet enough, eventually some thing will win.  Someone will get to Mars, someone will come up with cheap anti aging treatments, someone will bust society wide open and too big for the petty souls of bureaucrats who would control us all.

So, have another kid.  Write another book.  Go mind those test tubes.

And dream the impossible dream.