Category: Uncategorized

This is not – exactly – about Neil Armstrong.  The truth is that I knew very little about him as a man.  I did watch the moon landing.  I think I’ve told before – you have to remember I was a BAD girl – that there were two televisions in the village at the time, one in the coffee shop, where it wasn’t quite all right for little girls to go even with their ten-years older brothers, and the other in my aunt’s home.

I have no idea if this is the true story, or if I’m conflating it from some other event (look, I was six!) but the way I remember it, my aunt was on vacation and so we broke (without damage.  Most houses in the village were easy to break into.  Yes, I knew this.  No, I didn’t have a career as a cat burglar.  I had a career as the resourceful kid in a family who often forgot their kids inside.) into her house to watch the moon landing.  I know my memories are somewhat scrambled, because the room I remember us being in is her living room in the house she moved into a year and a half later (next door to my parents.)

HOWEVER the story fits well into my personal mythology and gives my fans warning that I was ALWAYS a bad girl, (now semi-reformed.  Well, I try to be.) So I’m sticking with it.  To paraphrase from Stranger in A Strange land, because I’m too lazy to go find the book and look up the passage (which I haven’t read in ten years, since it’s not one of my favorite books) “When I was six, my mom wouldn’t let me sleep with my junior space explorer’s helmet on.”  – that sort of personal mythology.

Now let’s move past me, a topic all too likely to focus my attention and make me go on for pages, and instead go to what the moon landing meant.  What we thought it meant at the time was new frontiers (it’s interesting that growing up in Portugal I devoured books about Daniel Boone, David Bowie   Crockett — Bowie knife got in the way and damn it, not enough coffee — and Little House On The Prairie.)  The chance to go where no man had gone before and to forge new ways of living among the stars.  As a kid, that’s what resonated with me, I think, and it resonated very deeply because there’s something instinctive about it.  Humans want to go forth.  Humans want to conquer.

Or we did, once.  We did.

As an (amateur) historian, as far as I can tell the cycle goes like this: the mainland spawns the colony.  The colony is originally populated by the odds – those who don’t fit in well in the motherland.  Not just the eccentric but also those with odd ideas of how society ought to be organized and those who just don’t conform well.  In the normal way of things these aren’t survival-enhancing for the individual, but they are for the species, because they cause the species to send forth (as it were) pods to colonize new lands.  Overtime the colony ossifies and it sends out its odds to colonize…  And this way we came from the savannah to everywhere in the world that our ingenuity and work can carve a way for us to live.  Well done.  Pat yourselves on the back.  And what now?

It was no coincidence it as the US that sent a lander to the moon.  It would have made sense to then have sent out a colony.  Instead…  Instead we sat on our hands and became Europe.

This is no disparagement of Europe which is, in general, a fine place and has very good food.  But Europe is what is known as a “mature” civilization.  In the way of nature, you really can’t mature before you start to become senescent.

We in the US turned that corner at a screeching pace from brash adolescent to seeming senescent in ten seconds flat, going from the sixties to the depressed seventies in no time.

The thing is – and the reason I use “seems” – that I don’t think it’s real.  It’s a cultural pose, an idea imposed from above that “Europe knows best, and we should be more like her.”  It might be a good enough pose to fool the elites who go abroad and meet with Europeans in controlled circumstances.  It wouldn’t fool for a moment anyone who has lived there and who knows Europeans in private life, when the pant crease comes undone.

Comparing nations and their development to individual development is a violation of taste and metaphor.  Guys, I write Space Opera.  The intellectuals would say I violate taste for a living.  What is more, I ENJOY it.  So, here it is, what the US is going through is not true senescence but that rather trying time in which a thirteen year old affects the world-weary pose of its elders and meditates on the crimes it imagines it has committed, inflating its pecadillos not only to the same level as its elders’ sins but to world-staggering violations.

The key to this is the “affects” and “immitates” (Thomas Bailey Aldrich in Tom Bailey, story of a bad boy – a book I recommend everyone who can find it read – refers to this time as “when I was an unfortunate being” – which is how we called it as each of our boys went through it in turn.)  Underneath the world-weary pose and the drooping airs (it’s worse for girls.  No, really.  We usually fancy ourselves in hopeless love.) lies all the vitality of a young person.  Either a crisis that forces them to drop that pose, or an interesting enough project, and they forget they’re unfortunate beings and turn joyfully to the new thing.

I think that’s what annoys most Europeans about us, and why they can’t articulate it.  They approve of our unfortunate being intellectual elites, but our vitality shocks them and confuses them.  They never had any time for our pulp fiction.  Our glorification of colonization and expansion has horrified them since about the time they stopped colonizing and expanding, too.  And our tastes are crass and brash, and we find way too much enjoyment in life.

The problem is that Europeans and European tastes rule “real literature.”  The bigger problem, too, is that our well-educated elites wanted to be accepted by them.  When they took over science fiction, they too were appalled at the brashness, the boldness, the polished tin spaceships, the men who were the best thing among the stars, the simple codes, the frontier values.

They recoiled.  Their recoil brought us mannered Science Fiction which “held a mirror” to today’s problems, as their college teachers had told them it should.  The college teachers said it was the only reason that people read it and that it was so popular, and the well educated young writers (most of the pulp writers were well educated too, after a fashion, but not in the literary arts) obeyed.  Enter the involuted novels, gazing at the present through the navel of a future that could never be unless everyone in it were on prozac.  (No, really, seriously.  Thought experiment.  Drop a Heinlein character into 1984.)  Enter the tooth sucking – and please, keep in mind I actually like some of these – novels where we go to the past and try to remake it, a pastime of old age, not of a young, vibrant colonizing civilization.  Novels of going out to space and starting colonies were right out, unless there was some feminist moral and all the men died at the end or another approved political just so tale.

Turns out, though, that the college literature professors were wrong.  (yes, I know.  Who would have believed it?) and that SF sales plummeted right along with the introduction of “relevant” themes.  People moved on to fantasy, which was, of course, just colonization novels under a new guise.

Unfortunately fantasy does not point in the right direction.  I firmly believe literature is how we dream, and science fiction is how we dream about the future.  It points us in a direction; it tells us “this is how we’re going to be when we grow up.”

We lost that.  There are other problems, that might or might not be related.  We lost our birth rate, which in turn lost the needed “expendable genetic investment.”  (No, I’m not being evil.  But when you only have one child, or even two you’re more careful of each of them than if you have six.)  Some of our elites seem to outright hate mankind.

This might be because Earth Species, such as we are, have only two modes.  Expand and die.  If you’re not expanding, you’re dying.

Our literature has been dying.  Our dreams of have been dying.  But there is no way in h*ll I’m going to say we should go quietly into that good night.  Nor would most Americans and for that matter a significant minority of Europeans.  There’s life here beneath the mock-seriousness and the die away airs.

It’s time we stop being unfortunate beings and learn how to expand again – how to get out there and colonize the stars.  And we should start, first, by stopping putting all our thoughts and dreams into how bad we are and how we should die.  Stop with rewriting the past (literally or by default.)  Stop sucking your teeth.  Stop sitting by the fire wrapped in a shawl.  You’re barely a teenager, and you’re not sick.  Get out there in the universe and discover some new places, invent new things, go forth…

Write awe, courage, risk, endurance, survival, strength.  Dream Human Wave.

And choose to live.  There is a future out there.  And it’s ours.

Look, I love my GPS.  I’m one of those people whose sense of direction is so “great” she can get lost in her own living room.  (oops, right, not left at the science fiction bookcase, then left, or is it right at the mystery bookcase and… why is there a sofa in my way.)  The guys don’t like it when I leave a trail of breadcrumbs and besides, Havelock cat eats them.

The GPS gives me the chance to TRY to go places I’ve never been.  I can now punch an address into the thingy, and it takes me there.

However, for the last year, I’ve been suspecting the GPS is trying to kill us.  There is this edge of malice to the voice, and besides… well… I leave it to your judgement:

10 – Despite the fact that there is a Hobby Lobby in town, and at least three others I’ve visited in the state, and which have been there as long as I’ve been in this state — 20 years — when I punched in Hobby Lobby on a snowy night (my kid needed balsa wood.  Which he remembered at 9 pm.  Of course) it tried to take me to Oklahoma and swore that was the nearest Hobby Lobby.  The inescapable conclusion is that knowing I was night blind, it thought taking me hundreds of miles in the night and the snow was the best way to kill me.  Fortunately I foiled it by remembering Wal-Mart was next to Hobby Lobby and searching that instead.

9 – It is absolutely obsessed with getting us to make a u-turn and often advises it in the middle of the highway.  You know those guys lost in the grassy median because they’re in compacts and hung up their car?  yeah, they followed the GPS.

8 – Drive to Highlighted Route.  No, seriously.  This is always the first instruction.  Look, if texting and driving is so dangerous how much safer is it to drive WHILE looking at the highlighted route?  Particularly since half the time the highlighted route is not remotely like any roads around there.

7 – in the same spirit is telling you to turn AT THE LAST POSSIBLE moment.  Either in GPS world there are absolutely no other cars on the road, or it expects you to press the hover button and go OVER the other cars.  Or, of course, it’s trying to kill you.

6 – Trying to get you to drive into the forest.  We still can’t understand this one.  Trees don’t grow that fast.  HOWEVER once, in South Carolina, our GPS ordered us to drive through a road that was cut halfway through by a massive pine forest.  Yes, it continued on the other side, but it was like a mile of forest…

5 – Trying to get you to drive off the road.  This only happened in Astoria, Oregon, but it would tell us to turn onto a road… that was 100 feet below ours.  We have no explanation for this, and we chose not to drop on someone’s house.  (Odd of us.)

4 – Takes you a different route every time.  This is a plot so even if you stumble onto its designs, you can’t dispense with it.  You can’t even go to the grocery store without it.  It took you a different way every time for the last ten years.
(And GPS, I’m on to you.  I KNOW I don’t need to drive to Denver to get to the grocery store a mile from my house.  I can go through Pueblo!)

3 – It tries to confuse you by “recalculating” while you’re following the route it mapped to the letter.  This is an attempt to enrage you and make you lose judgement while behind the wheel.  After a while that smug voice saying “recal-culating” makes you scream back “recalculate this” and give it the middle finger.  Then the car next to you thinks it was for them and then… well… it’s not good.

2 – when in a strange city and starving, no matter what restaurants it assures you are RIGHT THERE will have gone out.  It will drive you all over town (but not past ANY restaurants which is how you know it’s deliberate) to banks and real estate companies and decorating stores.  The idea is to make you starve OR eat a passerbye and get the chair.  Nefarious.

1 – The number one give away that your GPS is trying to kill you is that it tries to get you to make donuts in the middle of the city’s busiest intersection at rush hour.  Fortunately for us it tipped its hand too soon.  It said “Make a u-turn” and since we couldn’t figure out why we should we hesitated a moment, and then it said, waspishly “make a u-turn, then make a u-turn, then make a u-turn, then–”  at which point we turned right and, foiled, the GPS took it with bad grace.  “Re-CAL-culating” it said, in its most chiding voice.

But we know it’s already planning its next attempt.

This is not a post about Pink Floyd.  Sorry.  I know next to nothing about them, save that once in Ninth grade, and I don’t remember why, my entire (gifted and troubled) class got up and greeted our Portuguese and Language Arts teacher witha rousing (off key) rendition of The Wall.  I’m still not sure if the fact she sighed and told us to sit down was well handled or if we’d trod on her last nerve.

I’ll get my apologies out of the way now: this is also not a post about hitting the wall on Witchfinder, I haven’t – I just have a feeling of stuff being all up in the air and I’m trying to compose my mind on it – but I’m going to postpone/cancel the chapter for this week.  The reason for that double is that I don’t know which one it will be.  However, given travel – the travel curse struck again yesterday and we got in very late and very tired, and went straight to bed and now I have several administrivia details to deal with because of the week away – and the fact that as a result of this trip I now know what to do with the (GROSSLY) overdue Noah’s Boy makes it very likely that next week will be a double post, instead of this one.

The wall I want to talk about is internal.  I have mentioned it before but not by that name.  There is this point you can be at, where you have the entire story in your head, sometimes even words, but SOMEHOW it won’t make it to the fingers.  There’s a wall in the way.

There are several reasons for this wall.  It often – in my case at least – is just a lack of energy.  For a while, leading to the years of almost no income, it was sheer “mygiveadamnisbusted” – I had done my best and failed, and work was difficult because what was the point.  I was throwing my words out into the world and it seemed like nobody was reading, and “why bother” formed a solid wall around me, till it seemed the only words I wrote I had to pass out one by one through a cinch in that wall only large enough to admit a fortune cookie paper.

That was perhaps the most frustrating of times.  The words still come, and the stories, but you simply can’t get them out.  What freed myself from it was – weirdly – writing Sword And Blood on spec.  It was a book like nothing I’d ever written, so I had to step outside my mental comfort zone, and I felt like it had unlimited potential – I still think it does.  Less than happy with placement, but that’s something for a very different day.  And it wasn’t “mine” – ie. It was different – therefore it might not be doomed.

After that I reoriented to find my happiness in the writing itself – hence the indie and on spec books.  Weirdly this came at the same time something finally started moving, and it looks like I might have a career after all and readers – however the possibility of just writing on spec, with no agent or editor telling me “that will never sell” and of publishing indie if nothing else.  That freedom was the final knocking down of that wall.

But I still hit the wall now and then in anything.  And then the trick is to know WHY.

New writers tend to assume they hit the wall because they lost interest.  This accounts for the young writers I know with twenty started novels and not one finished.

Honestly, the only thing that saved me from that fate is that I’m the most stubborn person on the face of the Earth, except for #2 son.  This is no idle boast.  Until marshall was born, if they needed to distill stubornium the best way would have been to grind me down and concentrate me.  (And mind, the publishing industry might have done both.)

This type of obstinacy is ALSO not normally a survival trait.  I wonder HOW I ended up here at all, because I can well imagine an ancestress advancing on a mammoth and going “No, YOU move.”  I presume she’d had kids before that.

Anyway, being obstinate applies to my own stuff and to stuff I do and make.  I don’t like being defeated by a story.  So, when I was a young writer I learned how to get through, over or around the wall.

There’s a lot to be said for each method.  Sometimes you power through and afterwards you’re not sure what held you captive.  Over is where you skip the point that gave you trouble and move into two or three chapters ahead, to the next scene that catches fire for you.  What I find in those cases is that when I go back I find I’d made a huge logic misstep in the plot (or character misstep, for that matter) and that the section looks not at all like I’d outlined.  This happens mostly when I HAVE outlined.  It’s sometimes very hard to look past one’s clever contrivance and see it will not do.  Around is more complex.  This is when I find myself cleaning, cooking, rotating the cat, going for a walk, forgetting the novel, until in the middle of the night IT gets tired of being ignored, takes advantage of my being tired and weak, and assaults me, flowing past the wall and out the fingers at speed.

The problem is when you’re not sure what’s causing you to hit the wall – and that was the problem with Noah’s Boy.  Frankly, I thought my subconscious was just throwing a fit because it wanted to write science fiction.  Or perhaps it was JUST the fact that this Summer has been rather hellish, and I was doing too much.  Maybe I was just tired?

In these cases, going away helps.  Not that the wall broke till my last day there, but it did break.

It didn’t break in the sense of getting me great wordage.  I did produce some, slow as molasses and will mostly be discarded.

But that’s because I figured out there was a HUGE flaw in the novel.  Not in the point at which I first sensed the problem – oh, no – but in the concept of the novel.

How in holy h*ll can someone like you, you’ll say, with twenty three books under your belt, still hit the wall because of a fundamental flaw in conception of novel?

Oh, let me tell you.  First, to a certain extent each book is your first book.  I don’t care if you’ve written 100 books and have more experience than G-d, you will eventually come across a book you don’t know which end you should start on.  Worse, the method that worked for youf or 15 books – say, detailed, careful outlining, half the size of the book – will suddenly not work.  The writing thing – whatever that is – will rebel and throw a fit, and not allow you to write to that outline at all.  You find yourself killing your main character in the first chapter, grabbing goon #3 to whom you’d not even given a name, and taking off on an uncharted course through primeval subconscious which only allows you to see – if you’re lucky – a chapter ahead.  Sometimes it doesn’t allow you to see more than a page ahead and you feel like you’re writing straight from someone else’s head, until you emerge on the other side, with a full book that’s undeniably yours, might be the best thing you ever wrote, and you have NO clue how it happened.

Two – and partly because Noah’s Boy is the last of my “old model” books, sold on detailed outline… three? Years ago, after which intervened a year of deep depression, then years of writing space opera and vampires and heaven knows what, to leave me here, staring in bemusement at that outline and going “I am not this writer.”  This is very weird, because I am demonstrably still the same Sarah – my husband hasn’t noticed anyone slipping in a body double, nor have the kids complained of pods in the basmeent.  Also, Darkship Thieves was MUCH older and I could go back to it with no effort.

But the last three books I’ve written have been… scouring books.  If my writing were a gun, the last two projectiles fired, especially, changed the rifling of it.  It is … different.  And the way it is different is a way that directly hit Noah’s Boy.

That other writer could have done it, no problem.  This writer needs it to be something more.

I’d been making very slow progress on it for weeks, because I had “stuff that must be done” – stuff for the kids and the cats and the house.  In a hotel room, forced to face it, I suddenly realized that the plot was missing an essential element, one that sets the series up for not just unlimited sequels, but BIGGER sequels.  I’d say I kicked down one of the walls of the world, to let the light in.  HOWEVER in examining the other two books, the hints are there that the wall never existed, the characters just assumed it did.  And there are hints of the big-bad lurking just beyond it, things that make the Great Sky Dragon downright cuddly, and which also tie the universe together and give the shifters – all the shifters – a purpose.

So, now I know. And all I have to do is toss my outline and recast the whole thing, losing perhaps 3/4 of the book (groan.)

Which is where I am.  However, it is a relief that the writing-wall is no longer confining my work, and maybe I can stop rotating the cat.

And now I’m going to shower, go to bank and the grocery store, then sit down to work.

And before you wonder if I’ve hit a wall on the book — no, I actually know exactly what comes next, but I’m going over the printed chapters and — trust me on this — it will be richer, not to mention more coherent if I actually look it over today.

This is part of my process, and I find it funny to see it played off like this in a book that is being written as I’ve never written a book before.  Never? you say.  Never.  I’ve taken years to write a book, but that’s usually a week one year, a week the next, due to issues of time/place/pregnancy/poverty, etc.  I’ve never, in my working life, written a chapter a week.  In a way it’s fascinating to me how it’s working out.

Part of it increases my natural issues.  The reason I tend to write novels in a heated rush is not that I’m either not interested enough to take longer nor because I’m a super genius.  It’s because I have about a two week attention span — two weeks in which I can keep the story with all its nuances in my head.  (Yes, I can write outlines, but not with ALL the nuances.  Also, half the time the d*mn story hides in my subconscious and writing it is a series of “opening doors” each one revealing a bit more.

Even in two weeks to a month that it normally takes me to write a novel, the d*mn thing changes shapes on me.  I must be incredibly stupid, because I start out thinking I know what the story is about, but it takes being 2/3 in to see the theme behind the theme (for all stories — short stories, novels, series sometimes.)

Witchfinder is suffering from straying into the weeds a few times.  Not a big deal, nothing that can’t be cut and fixed, but at the same time I feel like the meaning of the novel should already be plain.  It usually doesn’t take this long for me to know for instance “why the title.”  (I think honestly the title is setup for the series, but we’ll see.)

What I do when I feel this way is go back, read and mark up, then finish.  This usually happens one and a half weeks in, but this needs it all the more for being slower.

Meanwhile, in the way of such things, after struggling for a week with Noah’s Boy, (I was offered a chance to go away for a week and isolate myself to write at very little cost for myself — and this from the writer who has been known to fly across the country and camp in a friend’s living room for the purpose.) I just figured out why it felt so out of kilter.  See, I’ve now finished the setup for the series, and the true meaning has unfolded.  I was trying to write this to outline, written four years ago, which made this book the last one of the setup — but instead it needs to be the first one of the unfolding.  Well…  It’s work for the plane today — in a couple of hours, actually.

Also I’ve figured out how to rewrite an OLD (rejected — for various reasons) fantasy work and file all the serial numbers that weren’t mine, so I can release it indie sometime in the next month.  That was part of what I wanted to achieve this week and it’s done.  (The figuring out is done, not yet the rewrite, of course.)

Now that the kids are in school and seem to be falling into their routine, if I can JUST avoid getting sick, I should be able to start feeding the fans again.  Which would be good as, with two kids in college, we’re what’s known as “dangerous levels of broke.”

Anyway, I’ll be back at the (command) desk in the normal Hoyt Writership this evening, and might even post a chapter then — or it might be tomorrow afternoon.

The one thing I have done this week is sleep A LOT.  And I mean industrial levels of sleeping.  Since I’m normally an insomniac and a broken-sleeper this is not exactly bad.  And even though it didn’t result in as much USABLE wordage as I expected, it seem in fact to  have broken through the MENTAL barrier behind which the words were hiding.  Part of it is that like my commenter Beth, who says she needs to read but the novels won’t let her, I too tend to come to a point where I block because I haven’t been reading any fiction, but feel guilty about reading fiction because then I’m not writing.  This time away gave me the chance to read some, if not a lot, and might have broken that particular logjam.  I REALLY should take a day a week to loll around and read.  The problem of course is that my pen names don’t have their own set of fingers and while I’m reading deadlines are passing.

Meanwhile, those of you interested in the field and epublishing and what the changes mean to us pixel-stained wretches, go read Kris Rusch.  For the record when reading that keep in mind that in contrast to the moaning and gasping of the big, big names, I’m set — this year — to match and perhaps surpass my highest net gross yet.  (Of course — waves hand — between college fees and the hole we’re still filling for the years of virtually no income, that gross is gross indeed.  Positively disgusting, in fact.  However, if payments for stuff not signed but hand-shaken on so far come through I’ll be making around 40k, which is not something to sneeze at or wouldn’t be if it weren’t for aforementioned hole.  The last time I came close to that was 35k — I THINK — 7 years ago.  Normally I hover between 20 and 30k but for the last two years have made 5 and 8k [hence the hole and the reason I will have a fundraiser, because we have to fix the house and sell it and move somewhere smaller and cheaper.  Because we can’t count on staying at this level.  But heck, I’m going to try.)

When I was seventeen I ran away from home in a complex way.  I became an exchange student to Ohio.

I did it for various reasons most of them “enlightened self interest.”  I thought the experience would be good and perhaps the only way to break out of my provincial upbringing as well as other issues which I do not intend to discuss here.  I thought, in the parlance of another generation, that if I went away from home, I’d find myself and could then come back and deal with things.  To an extent I was right.

Weirdly, I didn’t apply to come to the US.  I wanted to go to Japan.  The US was where I’d come – eventually, one way or another – but Japan was as different a culture as I could think of, and the idea was to sort of shock myself out of myself.

I got placed in Ohio, though, and that worked well enough.  For one, I met Dan.

But even at seventeen, I was made uneasy by the organizations objectives, which seemed to me to be a variant of wishful thinking I’d only found in science fiction novels before.

The objective of the organization – started by ambulance drivers in WWII – was to introduce young people of different cultures to each other so that they would learn to know and love each other and a war like this couldn’t occur again.

I didn’t know at the time – or until recently – but most ambulance drivers were conscience-objectors of a religious nature.  Maybe that explains the other-worldly beliefs?

Even at seventeen it seemed obvious to me some of the worst wars had been civil wars, brother against brother, friend against friend.  And then there’s the deadly hatred between Poles and Russians, French and Germans, Portuguese and Spaniards – a hatred that’s particularly strong in border areas, where mixing is also more frequent.

And thinking of this yesterday got me to thinking of that peculiar idea of mid-twentieth-century sf, the “one world administration.”

Yes, I know even Heinlein did that.  Heinlein also thought the UN was a force for peace.  Look, we’re all prisoners of our time, our place, our upbringing.  The middle of the twentieth century was the time when “progress” could solve everything and would erase cultural differences, and for that matter, the idea of a one-world governance, “scientifically” administered made sense.

Give Heinlein credit, though.  When writing the stories, one world became the place to escape from and the colonies where it was man or small group for himself the place to go to.  He was not writing a utopia.

My view of it is both more optimistic and more pessimistic.  I think a one world government would be one of those epic disasters that is almost impossible to describe.  The EEC writ large.  And the EEC is going to end in tears and will/might escape blood only because they’re out of young people to do the fighting.  Shortly and not exhausting all the reasons: humans are tribal.  A world where there’s only a huge government at the top, far away, is a world of little tribes, everyone’s hand against everyone.  Also the legitimate functions of government as they are are worse when performed from further away by a less connected ruling body.  Also a bureaucracy the bigger it is, the more it attracts bad actors.  A world-wide bureaucracy would make Chicago seem clean.

On the other side, though, I don’t think a world government can ever happen because it is one of those concepts that works well in fiction, but never in reality.  Nationalism/tribalism will never pass away.  It’s part of who we are.  And nations will fight to NOT be absorbed into the maw of such an entity.  Even if it were created, it would never work more than on paper.  Like the UN it would be a nuisance and a burr under our saddle but not “real” as a government.  And that’s a good thing.

Now the very idea is intensely American, as is the idea of the exchange students (I still think the program is worthy and I’m disappointed I can’t convince either of my kids to try it.  I just don’t think it brings about world peace) bringing about world unity.

The reason the idea is intensely American came to me yesterday as I sat in the restaurant, surrounded by people of all races and from the accents all upbringings.

It seems to us, as Americans, that there is no reason we shouldn’t all get along, no reason not to have the world a big kindergarten under the supervision of benevolent teacher.

I have no problem with all getting along, and mixing and matching is already happening.  It will happen more as travel becomes more widespread and cheaper.  Racism shall always be with us.  It’s built into the human gene.  It will just go odder than we’re used to it.  Some parts of the world maybe people with red hair will be frowned at.  Or you know, it’s those red-head-Asian fusions that are a problem.  But if this is from individual humans and not from above, it won’t be as bad.  (True racism needs government backing.)

But let’s lose the idea of one world government.  Cultures are important, if races aren’t.  Erasing cultures is ultimately erasing individuals.  I don’t mean by this the dopey “if it’s cultural, it’s fine” – I mean that people will die to defend their culture or subculture.  Stripping them out worldwide would just destroy humanity.

And of course, again, ruling people as if they were units is a problem.  Robert was talking to me about Soviet history and said “Lenin treated people as if they were things, but Stalin treated them as though they were numbers.  He didn’t seem to understand people existed outside numbers.”

A world government would treat groups of people – tribes, villages – as numbers.  We’d create a million Stalins.

There will never be a world government, because the world is not a vast America where people to an extent left behind their culture and willingly fell into the pot.  (More in other ages, and don’t get me started on that.)

But that surrender of individual culture and regional ideas has to be willing and voluntary and man on man and woman on woman.  If it’s pushed from above it’s worse than tyranny.  It’s a destruction of the individual and a lack of recognition of individual thought and reaction.  It is treating people like numbers — which always ends with destroying half of them and distorting the rest.

Let America be America.  And let the world be the world.

My younger son came to me and told me he wanted to write an article about how much the internet had improved life.  Before he explained what he meant, I formed a picture in my mind.  It wasn’t what he meant.  His article, if he writes it, I shall submit to one of the more political sites.  This article is the one that formed in my mind, and it touches on things that I have mentioned in passing in other blogs, but which – frankly – deserve a mention of their own.

When I was little – and when you were little, probably too, if you’re any older than thirty and perhaps if you’re any older than twenty – when I dreamed of the future it had a Jetsonish tinge.  Not that I ever thought the Jetsons were really science fiction – as with most TV science fiction none of us who read the stuff took it seriously, we just “liked” it because it at least introduced some of the ideas to “normal” people.  (Unfortunately it introduced some very odd ideas too.  One had to go around explaining to everyone that no, this stuff we read was not about discovering strange new worlds and seducing the aliens in them.  Oh and that, almost certainly, there would be more to aliens than a different forehead.)

On the other hand, and even though in a way we knew it wouldn’t be true (at least by my childhood it was obvious things weren’t moving in that direction where I lived.  I wasn’t sure about America.  I mean, everyone knows the future comes from America and maybe in America they had all this stuff) we tended to dream of flying cars, housekeeping robots, three hour work days and machines that did almost anything.

I suppose if my personal addiction had been to romances and I’d imagined true love coming the way I imagined the future coming, I wouldn’t have known it when I fell in love – or I would have found it very hard to navigate a relationship that would be different from the dream of love in books.  Fortunately I read stuff like Simak, who portrayed love in a rather realistic way.

But it meant I didn’t recognize the future when it came.  And I’m not alone in that.  In tons of panels, and even the man on the street, you find kind of a disconsolate, drippy grief that we don’t have flying cars, we don’t have trips to Mars, we don’t have any of that.  We’re in fact – we say – living in the twenty first century as though it were the twentieth.

Don’t get me wrong, I want all that and the tourism to the moon.  With extra robot-served ice cream at that.

But even before my kid came to me, I’d been thinking back at the things we do have, and how fast they’ve spread.  It is only that they spread in such an insidious way, in little, non-flashy things that allows us to say that we live just as people did in the twentieth century.

Take cell phones, possibly the only thing that was – more or less.  People tended to go more for the video phone. – anticipated.  Just a little thing, right?  Now you can take a phone with you wherever you go.  Big whoop.  And inconvenient to boot.  I mean, your boss can find you everywhere.

Only go read any of the mid twentieth century mysteries and you’ll understand how much our life has changed in the what – fifteen? – years since cell phones have been pocket-sized, affordable and reach everywhere in the nation.  Most of those mysteries would never work now.  Girl alone and car breaks down?  No problem.  Dial triple A.  Stumbled on a body?  Don’t spend hours walking around in circles looking for someone to report it to and make yourself the primary suspect.  Get that cell phone out of your pocket, you ninny and call the police already.

Other things make that last scenario of finding a body then spending hours walking or driving, looking for the law, even more unlikely.  What are you doing in an unknown area without a GPS?  Okay, so maybe you’re a hiker, but even most hiking trails are on GPS these days.

Then add in the internet.

When we first moved to the Denver area, when we took the kids to Denver for a weekend, we had a routine which we had used whenever we went to a new city.  First, get a map.  Then go to the phone book and look up stuff you want to do.  Museums.  Amusement parks.  Restaurants.  Map out the route.  Then you can go.  And of course you might get there and find the place is closed or that something that was called La Haute Cuisine is ironically named.

This got a little better by the end of the nineties for restaurants and most of the museums there were places you could call on your cell phone that would give you reviews right there by phone, and often directions too.

But even to people like us who always buy older technology (cheaper) it is much easier now.  While we use an el-cheapo cell phone that is so not smart it probably never passed elementary school, we always take at least one computer (or at least the tablet) on vacation.  And before we go I google those days in that place, to see if there are any festivals, museum free days or other special events we don’t want to miss.  I also do broad searches for the sort of place we like – like Greek diners.  Usually we have stuff mapped out before we leave the house, but if things fall through, we have a laptop to look up more, and a GPS to take us there.

Simple stuff?  Oh, sure.  But it also means when a genuine emergency happens, like when Robert was having an asymptomatic ear infection that went explosively symptomatic while we were in Denver, we wouldn’t have to drive around in circles and call the very few people we then knew trying to find an emergicare to take him to while he was in pain.  (Of course, now we know Denver as well as our neighborhood, but imagine any strange town.)

But again, the “convenience” of this dwarves the other changes the internet has brought about.

Guys, I spent two years not sending anything out because what I wrote was novels, they were too expensive to mail and I simply didn’t have the money.  To an extent, this influenced my decision to learn to write short stories, which are not natural to me, because I could that way maximize my investment in postage by maybe getting a story in front of someone who would read it.

Forget Indie exists for a while – hard to, right, and yet it’s newer than tomorrow – if I were now where I was twenty years ago, I could sent those novels electronic to at least three houses and most agents.  And given how fast I could write, I could keep sending them.

While on how fast I could/can write.  I don’t think any of you whippersnappers have any idea how isolated writers – and other odd people – were in the bad old days.  I do.  Being a writer was, by nature, an alienating thing.  People would be very puzzled by what you did.  The standard questions – still heard, no longer as resented – if you were a woman were always “do you write children’s books”?  And by that they meant picture books, or “Do you write romance?”  I wasn’t so lucky.  Nine times out of ten the first question of anyone so privileged as to have heard my accent was to go “What language do you write in?”

This might seem like I’m being picky and in a way I am, of course, but here’s the thing: it made you feel AWFULLY alone.  I remember how happy I was when I moved to Colorado and found out that there was a writers conference downtown and also the experience of attending that very first conference and being among other writers.  The first writers’ group I joined not only had people of different genres, but had fiction and non fiction writers thrown together, as if that were really helpful.  We, sf strangers, got weird comments on our stuff such as the immortal “Are you sure this is science fiction?  It’s not a thing like Star Trek.”

Just being able to get online and access friends, acquaintances and sometimes total strangers who also write, and ask how to do something, or how something works, or just being able to joke with friends.

Oh, it’s nothing, you’ll say, and besides it’s a distraction.  Sure.  Of course it is.  But I’ve always been the sort of person who has friends halfway across the world.  Being able to call them was something that happened once a month if that and cost a fortune.  Right now, my best writing buddies are halfway across the country or halfway across the world, and yet we can contact each other several times a day and if I write something I’m not sure of I can run it by them in seconds.  (Okay a little more for long stuff, since they have lives.)

I’ve also found that I can dispense with half of the “just in case” books.  You know the “just in cases” – a walking map of NYC; a guide to automobiles in the mid twentieth century; books on how to treat various odd ailments; books on the native plants and animals of various lands.  Half the books I picked up at library sales were “just in case I need to.”  Most never got used, of course.  Now?  Well, if I need it there’s a net for that.

And that’s just in writing, and I haven’t exhausted all improvements and everything that’s easier – I just want to move on to the rest of life.

Do you know how much I would have given, when I had small kids and couldn’t leave the house whenever I wanted to, to be able to get on the net and in seconds – not the half an hour or so it took to deal with catalogues and all – order stuff I needed which would be at my door in two days?  Yeah, I think I bought books from Amazon on the day it opened up for business, but I couldn’t order a mop, then, or bread, or…

Do you know how much I would have given when I was broke and depressed for the chance to read free books?  I did have them, sort of – the rejects in front of the local used bookstore – but they were mostly gothic romances or very, very odd college text books.
Just that takes the sting off what I found the worst of poverty.

And then there’s videos – which I grant you I get through Prime Amazon Membership, but even that it’s not very expensive when you consider.  I don’t watch TV very often and movies less than that, but if I want to they’re there.  What’s more, they’re there not in whatever is available in my area, but in whatever I WANT at that moment.  Do I want to watch a mystery?  There’s a mystery series.  Period drama? It’s there.  SF?  It’s there.  It’s like having a near infinite video library in your living room.  And if you are willing to pay, the library is very close to infinite.

These things seem small but they’re not – they’re creating a more connected, more informed and yes, more diverse world – diverse in the way that counts, where your news and entertainment aren’t being channeled through some gatekeeper’s preferences.

And we’re not using the half of it.  People who scream we need to move closer to our places of employment, or use trains to save gas are living in the early twentieth century.  First of all – please, read up – the new tech has revealed new deposits of obtainable oil, so that Colorado and Israel can rival Saudi Arabia as oil producers.  Second – why on Earth do most people have to go in to work, other than outmoded habit.  Most people in white collar jobs can easily work remote from home.  They can work from anywhere in the world.

No, of course this isn’t happening.  There is resistence to it, a suspicion that people won’t self-motivate or… something.  But then the same thing was true of ebooks for years, till the barrier broke.  By the time it broke, most people assumed it wouldn’t.  And if people were really serious about saving gas or cutting emissions or whatever that IS what they’d be pushing: telecommuting.  You known none of these politicians care about what they say they are trying to save, because if they did they would be cutting down on regulations against working from home and giving companies incentives to have a remote workforce.  Instead, they’re building trains and tightening regulations – which I grant you has better opportunity for graft.

In the same way as ebooks, I suspect when the barrier against working from home falls down it will move with catastrophic speed.  It will be a good thing and very fast.  The very fast will make life interesting.  No?  Well, where you live right now is predicated by where jobs are.  This in turn supports local infrastructure, house prices, etc.  Now imagine you can life in Podunk and work in NYC.  Think what that will do to house values, salaries, social life and the price of drapes.  Yeah – when that hits it will make what’s happening to publishing and will soon happen to education look like a storm in a teacup.

The future is now and, by and large, the future is better than the past.  But to take advantage of it we need to open our eyes and move past things like screaming about how we need more public transportation.  We need to stop applying old solutions to new problems.  In the seventies it seemed to me tons of people were nostalgic for the thirties.  The same people seem to still be nostalgic for the thirties, now with a tinge of the seventies.

But the way forward is forward, not towards some imagined misty-rosy past that never existed.

The future is now.  It’s time to grow up and enjoy it.

I’m about to say something my younger self would kill me for: work is essential to making a human capable of living in any form of democratic government.  (And no, no one here – inside my head.  We have a quorum, trust me – advocates for pure democracy.  Well maybe Good Man Simon St. Cyr who is, after all, a member in good standing of a secret organization called the Sans Coulottes.  Don’t fret.  His lesson is coming, and in spades.)

I was meditating on the subject of hotel maid service – in this case prompted by the fact that I think I understand our hotel maid worse than if I didn’t speak a Romance language or two.  Between her attempts at speaking English and my attempts at speaking Porto-Spanish we ended up grinning at each other like lunatics and nodding a lot and pointing.

This reminded me of when we hosted an exchange student, years ago, and shocked her by “talking to shop people like you’re trying to make friends.”

My smiling and bobbing like an idiot at the hotel maid would probably shock my mom, too, now that I think about it.  It is part of the reason she tells me things like that I don’t value myself and don’t give myself my own respect (It’s not only an untranslatable Portuguese phrase, it’s one I don’t get.  “Nao se da ao respeito.)

Of course the reason I don’t think I’m above the hotel maid is that I’ve done her work, when I spent a summer in Germany.  And I’ve worked retail, and as a field hand, and of course, I cook and clean all the time.

Which brought back the memory of buying our twenty fifth anniversary ring (part gold, part silver) and liking a very pretty one, and having my mom say “it will look like tin the first time you put your hands in dishwater.”  This shocked the shopkeeper who said “but, surely, the young lady” she has known me all my life “doesn’t put her hands in dishwater.  She has a maid!”

My mom delighted in telling her that not only did I put my hands in dishwater, but also in paint, solvent, garden dirt and just about everything because I delight in being contrary and not hiring help.  (My mom seems to think it’s much cheaper than it is, or my writing pays a lot more – for the record, I do hire help, usually on a task-basis.  I’m just lousy at it.  And my run of housekeepers has been dismal.  First they become friends, then I don’t want to fire them even when they’re bad, then…)

It occurred to me, though, that in the States no one assumes that just because you have a degree or your ancestors weren’t poor as dirt, you should have a maid.  Oh, sure, if you’re a millionaire, you probably have someone who does almost everything for you.  I’ve never been a millionaire, but I have very briefly been in a position where we made more money than strictly needed and I found it necessitated our spending more money, too, because just dealing with issues preceding from the money made it so we had less time – so we went out to eat more, got someone to clean… that sort of thing.  However, I wonder if even millionaires treat their servants as though they were a different caste.  Maybe hereditary ones – or ones brought up abroad.  But in the states, chances are even if you come from a wealthy family you worked summers scooping ice cream or walking dogs, or something.

Our kids haven’t, mostly due to the lousy economy, these last few years, but when they were very young, they used to hire out to our friends for yard work.

And it’s not even that I think you need to work “beneath yourself” as it would be considered in Europe, but just that you need to have worked at some point in your life, to know that other people work very hard also.  I know my hotel is cleaner is probably not writing novels in her spare time (and if she is I wouldn’t be able to read them) but I also know she works as hard as I do.  Harder, in many ways – a different kind of hard – if she has to do 100 rooms before ten, as I did.

I know this sounds goofy, but people abroad worry about losing face and keeping their “class” far more than Americans do, and they just don’t GET us – perhaps I’m attributing it all to the wrong cause – it wouldn’t be the first time – but I think it’s because most Americans have worked at real work, at some point.  By which I don’t mean just manual labor, but… work that produces things or does something needed.  What I mean here is most of us have had one or more jobs outside my bureaucracy (no, that is not normal in the other developed countries.)

We’ve cleaned, we’ve cooked, we’ve produced something, we’ve fixed, repaired or created.  In other countries, other than farming, which everyone regularly views as the lowest occupation, most people view their jobs as sinecures, as “posts” as something they do which confers status upon them.  (In fact in Portugal even retail clerks are now calling themselves “functionaries” – the title that used to be given people in the bureaucracy.  Because it is far more “important” than “employee.)

Again, I’m probably attributing it to the wrong things, but, for all our divisions there is among ourselves a brotherhood – a baseline understanding – that not only doesn’t exist between classes in other countries (Other colony-countries like Australia probably excepted) but that no one there wants to exist.  And it’s probably chauvinism, or jingoism or chauvinistic jingoism, but I think that improves our chances of survival.

America works.  Let’s not lose that, even when they make it d*mn difficult for us to.  It’s one of our more charming characteristics.

And it is why, though I think we’re in for a storm of cack and rotating objects, in the end, I think that we will do.  Or to quote poor Simon St. Cyr “Ca ira.”

The future will be better than the past.  Because we’re willing to work to make it so.

Update, unrelated: For sheer fun, head on over to Mad Genius club where my friend Amanda does fifty kinds of shredding on Fifty Shades of Gray.  Mind you, she’d read the sample and told me it wasn’t porn.  I’d read that from other places, too “not enough sex to be porn” — HOWEVER she has more… er… substantive issues with it.

There’s this very odd effect I’ve noted, the last ten years or so, that I wonder if it’s always been so, or just recently.

Feels like recent insanity, but it doesn’t mean it is. It’s entirely possible that this has been going on since the beginning of time.

What do I mean by insanity?

Well, from the Baen bar to conferences, I come across people who tell me they don’t read in the genre they write in, because they’re afraid it will taint their style.  Though the BAD insanity are the people who tell me they don’t read ANYTHING at all because they fear it will make their style “less fresh.”

Now, I suppose there might be some justification for the first one, if you’re one of those sort of people who gets entire phrases stuck in their heads, but have bad enough memories not to remember where they got them.  I could see where it would be safer not to read in the genre you’re working in (though it would also be very difficult for reasons I’ll explain.)

However, for those who don’t read at all for fear of not being fresh, I’d like to point out they should also plug their ears with corks, and try to speak a foreign language without having heard it.

You see, writing – stories on the page – aren’t the same thing as what really happens.  If what you’re trying to write is “real life” at best you’ll end up with formless goo.  At worst… At worst you’ll end up with the worst type of soap opera with all the more exciting bits of people having breakfast, reading the morning paper and maybe, just maybe, driving to work.

This is because fiction writing – any fiction writing, in any time, really – has a certain number of conventions and ways to go about telling a story.  Heck, even if you read a lot, if you put on your writer’s hat for the first time, you might find yourself trying to reinvent the wheel.  My own, rather specific bit of insanity was not realizing that stories were written in scenes.  So, say my character had a fight with his wife in the living room.  Instead of cutting off the chapter/scene and picking up in the bedroom, where he’s packing his clothes, no, I THOUGHT I had to show him walk up the stairs, step by step, then down the hallway…

Insanity?  Sure.  But I was in the critter’s head and he was doing this.  So… I had to, right?  And yes, I’d read books before.  And written books before.  It took me to book five to figure this one out.

But let’s say you’re not brain damaged in my unique way – most people who’ve read any novels would know better than to do what I did.

There’s other conventions.  There’s ways to convey emotions; there’s tricks of narrating a fight; there’s … things you can only pick up subconsciously from reading.

And this is why I said although I understand – for people with bad memory – not wanting to read in the genre you’re writing in – it can get really difficult.

Let me explain.  I read in multiple genres.  I write in multiple genres.  A certain amount of crossover is not a bad idea.  These days, to be honest Romance is to genre writing what Country is to music.  If you have a bit of crossover and can claim to be SF Romance, it’s as good as being Country-Rock – you just added a massive audience to your much smaller niche.

HOWEVER you don’t want to be writing mystery and using sf cues; or fantasy and using sf cues (guilty); or even SF with mystery cues.

I don’t fully know how to explain this, but there is a certain type of…  Well, Kris Rusch calls them “reader cookies” for each genre.  They’re not so much things that advance the plot or are extremely necessary.  They’re things that the reader of a certain genre or subgenre will devour and be all happy about.

As I said, I read everything.  But I’ve found that my early imprinting on science fiction means I understand science fiction readers better.  So I know I can put “cool stuff in” because it excites me, so it will excite them.  More importantly, my mind tends to think the way sf readers do, so when I give just an allusion to something, they usually follow along just fine.

Not so with fantasy.  I spent years writing fantasy, but the truth is, I don’t read as much of it as I do science fiction or mystery.  So, even though I read – and enjoy – Diana Wynne Jones and Pratchett, I keep giving my fantasy novels a “tone” of science fiction by being overly concerned with how and when things work, how and when they don’t, and how to explain them to people in a logical fashion.  This for some reason means I rub fantasy readers the wrong way – at least people who read exclusively fantasy.  I don’t even know how I do it, just like I don’t fully, consciously, try to hook the SF readers.  Or the mystery readers.

Every time I try to write a new genre, it’s like learning to walk all over again, and I virtually have a breakdown over the book.  You’re not quite a new writer all over again, but you’re also not fully an experienced veteran.

So, it seems to me it would be much easier to write a genre if you’ve read sufficiently in it to have an idea how things are done.

If you want an example of this, take a futuristic romance or a paranormal romance (if you read mostly sf or alternately fantasy) and read it.  It will drive you nuts.  I can’t explain it any other way than to say the writers not only reinvent the wheel, but they reinvent it in the wrong way.  For readers of sf/f, it feels like I imagine it feels to a cat getting their fur stroked the wrong way.

It’s not wrong, of course.  It’s not wrong for THEIR GENRE.  It just feels wrong for OUR genre.  These are not the same genres, but sideways steps.  OTOH they are as close as you’re going to get to “fantasy written by romance readers.”

You can make the same type of miscue writing in a genre you don’t read/have never read/don’t like.  (The ones I make tend to be more subtle, just because fantasy is where I’m least at home.)

Is it possible to do it?  I don’t know.  I was getting “accused” of writing romance before I’d read any, so I suppose it is?  I just don’t think you’re going to grow your audience to its maximum potential that way.  (Though, as the late Ric Locke was fond of pointing out, in the global market that e books open up, that might not mean anything.)

However, I guarantee that if you don’t read anything at all, your stuff will not be “fresh” – it will be virtually unreadable.  It would be like never looking at a painting and trying to achieve the effect with your fingers and bits of dirt.  Oh, sure, I can see someone painting a portrait that way (pastel is not much different) but not without ever having seen a painted portrait.  There are conventions of rendering three dimensions in two you’ll be sure to miss.

While not knowing the conventions can result in some good innovations, the chances of that are the same as of an accidental mutation being beneficial to an organism.  (No, I’m not disputing evolution.  I’m just saying that out of millions of mutations most will be harmful, a good number will be neutral, but the beneficial ones are few and far between.)

Yes, you might come up with a really cool way to individualize dialogue.  Unfortunately, we’ll never slog far enough in to find it, because your descriptions will be rendered in such a way we will not have the slightest notion whether your protagonists are mid-air or under the sea.  (Yes, it’s possible.)

I’d advise you to read widely.  I’d advise you to read the genre you aspire to writing, at least enough to know the conventions.  Of course, I’d also advise you to read outside the genre, back and forth in time, and different cultures – even if nothing but your own narrow genre truly appeals to you, it will give you an appreciation for what’s essential and what’s decoration in the current conventions.  (This is much like learning a foreign language will give you an understanding of your own.)

Yes – particularly when you’re a new author – you’ll borrow style without meaning to.  Not as much as you think, mind – that’s an illusion – but if you read a lot of Heyer, your space society might end up talking in high-regency style.  (Which might be a thing, who knows?)  So don’t read anything that’s so distinctive that the porting of manners and expressions will hurt your book.

On the other hand, if you read nothing at all, you will fall down the rabbit hole of your own mind, and at the end of it, the only reader you’ll be aiming to please will be yourself.  This is particularly a danger if you’re young and just beginning.

As Pratchett says of Edward D’Eath “he fell under his own influence.”  It can be a killer.

I’ve been sitting at this keyboard, staring at the blank screen and wondering what to blog about for over three hours.  Okay, not three hours straight.  I went to the kitchen, had breakfast and started a load of wash in the hopes of getting the mental cogs moving.

It’s not that I have nothing to say – of course I do.  I was born with my tongue attached to the bottom of my mouth by a thin tendril of skin.  It amuses me to think that in the US, at least today, there would have been a very concerned talk with my parents about my birth defect and a time would be set for surgery to free my tongue.

This was Portugal in 62, and I was born at home.  When the midwife realized I was crying funny, she investigated and, finding that my tongue couldn’t move freely, she slashed through it with her scissors.

Needless to say I have no memory of any of this.  I have freakishly early memories, but not that early.  However, my mom said – often – when I was little that G-d knew what he was doing when he stopped my tongue and they shouldn’t have meddled.

All this to say that while I had a lot to talk about some of it is not appropriate to this blog.  I have no intention of turning this into an outright political blog – though I do the occasional political post when things overflow – because my writing is not primarily political.  If it were – just as if it were primarily religious – I would not hesitate to make this my political blog.  However, except to the extent that beliefs bleed through to my writing, my writing is not political or religious, and this blog is – whether one likes it or not – my public face and therefore the face of my writing.

And while I also have a lot to talk about that’s not political, there too I find myself stymied because some of this involves other people and events in the business – things I am either not allowed to talk about; not sure of their veracity; or would embarrass someone who hasn’t driven me that crazy yet.

So, forgive me if I talk in general terms, please.

Lately it has been growing on me that the entire country (or at least the area around me, and I have a feeling about the more outlying regions) is headed for a crackup of epic proportions.  And lest you think I mean civil war or worse, no.  I mean psychological crackup.  I’d have titled this “here it comes your 99th nervous breakdown.”

Perhaps I’m imagining most of the signs – people driving in TRULY absurd ways, more than usual; people doing loony stuff like get in an argument with cashiers in supermarkets over issues known only to their psychiatrist; some true pieces of lunacy both on my business side in contacts with various literary-involved people (more on that later); stuff people say, and the like.  These things are not a matter of kind – things of this kind ALWAYS happen in a free society.  One of the things the rest of the world laughs at is how odd America is, without realizing it is a conjunction of freedom and wealth that causes the “oddness.”  What I’m complaining about is the frequency.  I can’t go two steps outside the house without running into some spectacularly bizarre behavior, which normally would be the talk of the next month, but now seems to be happening everywhere twice a month.

I might be imagining it, since the State of The Sarah is bound up with publishing which is obviously a nexus of insanity otherwise publishers wouldn’t be trying to dictate how OTHER PUBLISHERS treat books the publisher didn’t buy.  Other rumors that have reached one are of strange behavior and peevishness from both publishers and agents including some publishers demanding lead authors sign a clause to NEVER self-publish. (Which would be fine if the contract stipulated that you would get everything you write accepted by the publisher at minimum x payment.  Of course, that is just not on.)

Another state of the Sarah – as in things that impact me closely enough to matter – I had to stop using the little office I’d rented after two months (though I technically still have it for one more month) because the building was virtually empty, save for a direct marketing company up in the front of the building.  All the little businesses that were there when I rented disappeared one at a time.

I had expected it to an extent, but not that fast or that thoroughly.  And the emtpy building wasn’t secure against vagrants.  After an encounter with a feral one in the hallway, I couldn’t convince myself to go back there to work.  I kept telling myself I was imagining things and was crazy, but when I told Dan he said not to be stupid and to listen to my feelings – and the truth is, when I don’t, in those circumstances, I get in serious trouble.

So I’m stressed – though not about to have a nervous breakdown, mind – and could be imagining things.  Perhaps.  Maybe.

But I’m not imagining four shootings in a month.  I’m not imagining the fact most people I know are worried about jobs and/or money and that groceries are set to double again, and as the cold weather comes energy will get… funny.  We’ll just say that.

Other people have compared living in the US today to the Weimar republic.  There is that slightly frantic sense of pretending everything is normal or better than normal, while we all stand on the powder keg of a cacked economy.  But in this case it is perhaps worse, because it is not just our country’s economy that is er… unstable… but the whole world’s.  And we know it.  We’re all tapdancing at the edge of abyss and even those who are only mildly are of geo-economic realities feel the unease, if they don’t know why.

I’ve been in these situations before, and I’ve heard about them.  It has a feeling of holding your breath, a feeling of the calm before the storm.  In this case the many storms.

Look, we’re being driven by a tumult of technological change.  It’s going to make everything very unstable for a long time.  Most of you know my opinion of how politics and bureaucrats are making the whole thing worse, so I won’t talk about it except to say that it should by now be obvious to anyone that 20th century ideas of “progress” and of history having a direction that these people know and can get behind are in fact poppycock.  None of the political theorists in the world could have guessed where the internet would take us.  Even after the journey started, even five years ago, even those of us who have our heads in publishing, would find it hard to believe how it’s hit publishing and how fast.

They can’t guide us to the future.  They don’t know the future anymore than we do.  All they can do is protect our very basic liberties.  Trying to tailor anything more complex is like what the publishers are doing to publishing.  It won’t help, and it might hurt.

The fourteenth century is a byword for awfulness, but part of it was that things were getting better.  There was tech innovation and increased population and more food.  BUT all this was changing too fast, and human societies can’t change fast without fractures and war and confusion and psychological cracking.

It’s still better than no innovation.  And it’s usually better on the other side.

The storm is bearing down on us.

Things are going to get crazier before they settle, but they will settle.  Look to you, your friends, and those who can’t look after themselves.  Work.  Push in the direction you want things to go.  The only way out of the period of uncertainty and insanity is through the period of uncertainty and insanity.

All around us, people might be headed for their 99th nervous breakdown.  But we’ll be all right.  Writers and readers and story people have means of escape.  We’ll get through.

None of us asked to live in interesting times, but they are interesting, and we are part of them.

In publishing, in life, in work – let’s make them good.

From Sabrina Chase:  The second book in my *totally* human wave SF trilogy, Raven’s Children, came out last month. And my very first print version of my fantasy The Last Mage Guardian just went live this week. Linkages: http://amzn.to/OaCF8y http://amzn.to/QVTicy
From Tom Simon:

A week ago last Friday, I finally put my first novel out:

Lord Talon’s Revenge:
A Comedy of Greed, War, Hatred, Betrayal, and Other Desirable Things

(Sample chapter included at link.)

It’s an epic fantasy (not a goat-gagger, Mrs. Hoyt) and a satire, though not necessarily a satire on epic fantasy. I’ve labelled it as ‘Don Quixote tilts at The Princess Bride’.

Jonathan Moeller(whose own fantasy novels are well worth checking out) describes it as ‘a mix of P. G. Wodehouse, Lord Dunsany, and G. K. Chesterton’. If that sounds appealing to you, do please take a look

From Gina Marie Wiley:  I’ve been writing what I think is human wave fiction from before there was a human wave. I too have had health problems and those delayed my going indie for a year and a half, but I have two books out now Kinsella and Rescue Branch and four or five more to follow. The Amazon links to them are: Kinsella: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B008BV875K and Rescue Branch: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B008PDZPPY. I also have a website where I, and a number of authors, have been posting stories since 2005. I don’t know if you want to include the link; as some of the stories contain erotica and the site does require registration. It is beyondthefarhorizon.net. Some of the stories are professional grade and several of us publish on Amazon.

Hawking your own work in the comments will get you mention in the Saturday post about my commenters work.

From me — does any of you know someone qualified to translate into Portuguese my book Death of a Musketeer?  I’m willing to split the profits from the Portuguese edition (I don’t know if there would be any.)  I would just like to have my dad be able to read ONE of my books and that one is dedicated to him.

Now go write.

UPDATE from Celia Hayes:

And I still have the ebook versions of mine going on special until next Saturday at http://www.smashwords.com. Smashwords does e-book versions for just about every e-reader format on the market, including Kindle, Nook and iPad. Each of my books has a special discount code, as follows:
For the Trilogy –
Adelsverein: Book 1-The Gathering 25% Off Coupon Code FX65V
Adelsverein: Book 2-The Sowing 25% Off Coupon Code RZ73G
Adelsverein: Book 3- The Harvesting – 25% Off Coupon Code RC56A

For Daughter of Texas 20% Off Coupon Code AQ44Z
and the sequel, Deep in the Heart 20% Off Coupon Code KF75U
And finally for my old faithful of a book, To Truckee’s Trail 20% Off Coupon Code MN89H.
And if you are still dead-tree dedicated, they are all at Amazon.com and at Barnes & Noble.