Category: Uncategorized

Today was the first day I woke up not feeling the weakness beneath the “I’m okay.”  I’m not okay, as such, if by okay you define being well enough to roll up my sleeves and start scrubbing the house which looks like the Augean stables, only more so.  I still feel tired and sort of out of it, but not like I’m walking a thin layer of seeming normalcy and will at any minute fall through into sickness.

I wish I could explain that feeling better than that.  I don’t even know if other people have it.  I didn’t use to.  Sickness used to land on me without warning, then vanish just as quickly, but about ten years ago, I started waking up the night or two before I got sick, with that feeling of walking on a thin layer of health that will give out at any minute.  There are no symptoms as yet, at that point, just the feeling “All is not sound.”

For the last two days, I’ve woken up feeling that but in reverse.  There was this hole of “not well” but a thin layer of “almost well” on top.  And I felt grateful for it.

Today, for the first time, I feel like I’m sound through.  I will not push.  And I don’t feel strong.  But it’s more like… like I just had a really tiring weekend and today I’m recovering.  Like a lot was taken out of me, so I can baby myself.

Which is why I’m so late posting.  

The feeling/sense that I’m going to get sick, before I have any symptoms fascinates me.  There’s the temptation to say “Well, you got sick because you expected it” but actually I’m almost sure that’s not it.  More like I sense weakness that’s not visible yet.  At any rate, the type of illness it heralds can be anything and I never know what to expect.  If we’re in flu season and I rest THEN and push enough vitamin c and stuff, I might not really get ill, just have this shallow “not quite well” two or three day period.

But sometimes I’m wrong.  Vitamin C doesn’t do much for stomach flu, for instance.  And this time, I didn’t know what to expect, and then Dan got sick which limits my ability to sit back and baby myself.  (Not that he’s a demanding patient, but it means that he can’t do much, and his cat becomes hysterical, and… well… I worry.)

What I’m trying to get at is that it might be well nigh impossible for us to ever figure out what part of how we experience our bodies is real and what part is psychosomatic. We all know about hypochondriacs who display real symptoms.  There are people who can make wounds appear on themselves, as well as people who can heal themselves.  There are faith healers.

And, unrelated to illness, there is the fact that if you imagine exercise in great detail, you’ll develop muscles.  This study didn’t even surprise me because way back, when I was writing Mirrorplay, there were these five chapters where they were cutting cross-country, ten people surviving from a battle and with a plan to cut at the heart of the enemy citadel, before the enemy could expect a counter attack.  Their march involved not just a hard slog of walking, but swimming and rock climbing and crossing ravines hand over hand from a suspended rope.  I don’t think I EVER ate as much as I did that week.  I was always hungry.  And I lost ten pounds.  The cue seems to be “Imagining in detail” which for most of us and most exercise would be boring, right?  Unless you’re paraplegic or something.

It’s one of those things that bedevils me – what is real, and what is our mind playing tricks on me?  One of my writing acquaintances, who used to do Star Trek novels, which I understand are intensive bursts of work, said she used to have Star Trek Flu.  Whenever she delivered a novel, she’d come down with something flu-like where all she could do was sit in front of the TV for three days.

I’ve experienced this, particularly when it’s a novel that’s contracted, that I don’t want to write, and I have to MAKE myself write.  When I’m done, I have “flu like” stuff last a week or two.  I never know whether that is because I’ve been pushing the sickness till I can “afford to get ill” or if it’s my mind taking it out on my body.

I do know that the one time we had the money – after I finished Plain Jane – instead of launching into my normal clean up operations of the house that has waited till the book was done, I DEMANDED Dan take me to Denver for two nights.  (Had to go away, or had to clean.)  And when I came back, I did not get ill.  Mind you, all I did those two and a half days was sleep, read books and go for walks with Dan.  It was, apparently, enough.  And if the Indie thing starts making me real money, (Which of course, presupposes my feeding it!) I’ll plan that every time I finish something.  

Not this year.

This year, I need to find a balance between working hard and resting that doesn’t crash me everytime a project is done.

Not yet, I haven’t.

But I’m working on it.  And as for today, I’m going back to bed for an hour or two.  I still feel as though I can’t sleep ENOUGH.  It’s just that I’m on the way up.

It is enough for now.

I’d travel earlier this morning and write this post.

(Did anyone else wonder, hearing “If I had a hammer” what peculiarly deprived land the singer came from?  I mean, even in my childhood when things like scissors could be considered “expensive” hammers were all over the place.  Heck, hammers were probably the first weapon of mankind, and even I can make one from a rock, a stick and some rope.)

On the serious side…  I was asked recently, either here or elsewhere, what would I do if I could go back and tell my struggling beginner self that I would one day be published.

Twenty years ago, when I was pushing the baby carriage all over downtown Colorado Springs, because it was the only way to make Robert sleep so I could have two hours to write, what would I have done if I’d come from the future to tell me “You’ll be published.  Many times.  Everything will be all right.” what would have happened?

Well, beyond the fact that I’d have known I’d gotten hold of some really funny veggies at the farmers market?  I mean, supposing there was a way to travel back, or to have me see myself, or to send a note – would I do it?

For years and years, even five years ago, the answer would have been “oh, yes.”  Knowing for sure I was going to be published one day would change things for the better.  Gone would be the long, long silences of doubt, the times I spent chipping at block as though it were a big stone wall, and writing as though I were passing words out through a small hole in it.  Because I would know I wasn’t writing in vain, right?  I’d know I’d make it.

Let’s leave aside the effect this might have had on my fledgling talent.  I know for at least four years I worked backwards, working away from publishable and towards “literary” not because I wanted to, but because I thought it was the best way to break in.  (At that it might have been, just not for me.)  And I know that for three years my entire writers group worked away from “publishable” because the one published writer who’d joined thought there was ONLY one way to write a book “action adventure” and despised romance even as a plot element.  She dispensed her opinions not as opinions but as holy writ and we of course followed, even though she’d published ONE book, ten years before.  We didn’t know any better.

A little bit of self-confidence might have helped there.  Almost certainly would have helped there.  And I might have developed a voice and the confidence to have a voice earlier.

But the truth is, if I had a chance to go back, if I had the ability to speak to my younger self, I couldn’t really tell her “Everything will turn out all right.”  To paraphrase Leonard Cohen, you don’t want to lie.  Not to the young.

Would I tell her about the books written that never saw the shelves of a bookstore – let alone in sufficient numbers to find an audience?  Would I tell her about the years when I had to write six books a year because somehow the houses who were doing me a favor by publishing my trash wanted to do me a favor many times a year?  (Because that makes so much economic sense.)  Would I tell her about the contracts that I signed while knowing they’d put my own books out of my hands for my lifetime and maybe even my kids’?  Would I tell her about the contracts I signed thinking they were perfectly safe which aren’t now, because things have changed so fast?  Would I tell her about the houses holding on to books that BY CONTRACT and LAW have reverted, where it would be too expensive to litigate and they know I don’t have the money because they never paid that much?  Would I tell her about being considered seminal by younger writers and bumping into fans every other place I go, while at the same time seeing numbers on my statements that mean I should be known to my close family and only on a good day?

Back then, when I was trying to break in, would I even have believed any of that?  I’d have told myself that business was past all that.  We weren’t in the days when some company paid pennies to the maker of Monopoly then went on to make billions off his invention.  We had a conscience now, even businesses – particularly those businesses that dealt with intellectual property.  People know it’s wrong to take people’s unique work and pay them a pittance.  People wouldn’t buy Manhattan from some tribe for beads and trinkets.  Business has by and large become more moral, if nothing else because public opinion could be bad for them.

No, I probably wouldn’t risk being told that stuff.  I mean, people can die from laughing too much.  Particularly when it’s not a happy laughter.  Also, I don’t think I could have explained to my young self that while that might be true of companies that make gadgets and hammers (ah!) It’s not true of what we’ll call the “saintly industries” where people are forming people’s opinion for people’s own good.  After all, they’re doing everyone a favor by influencing what sells, and by using you – yes, you – to promote people more worthy of being seen by the public.

Also, they controlled the press for so long, and were so used to being described in glowing terms, that they still don’t get that public opinion can turn on them.  And their captive writers are fostering their illusion, and making sure they land real hard.  (Sometimes I wonder if that’s on purpose.)

So… what would I say?

I guess I would say “Yes, you’ll get published, but don’t sweat the low times, and be careful.  In the future, oh, seventeen, eighteen years in the future, there will be this time when you can put up your own stuff.  So, pick and choose what you let the traditional houses get, and don’t sign stupid contracts.

It might be worth it to you, for a while at least, to let the traditionals have a few books.  Whether your statements reflect that or not, and even taking in account you only get a few pennies per book sold – even if all is reported perfectly correctly and above board – you’re seeding an audience.  This will make your indie efforts start up faster and bigger.

But round about 2010 start disengaging from the traditional industry.  The Titanic is going down, and the lifeboats are going to be a scramble for survival until eventually you reach other ships that might make it to shore.  Just step off onto the grand piano. It will float and let you bide your time till things shake out and you know where to go.

Or to drop that over extended metaphor: at about 2010 start working on the side to launch your own indie career, so you can stop writing six books a year, and start making money.”

How much difference would that have made?  Well… I might not have signed some of the dumber contracts.  But in at least three of those cases, I also wouldn’t then have written those books, which HAVE got me some fans.  The books might be captive in enemy hands, but I wouldn’t wish them unwritten, any more than a mother whose kids fail wishes them unborn.

I might – would in fact – have kept aside some of the books I did write that I more or less gave away.  I might – would in fact – have written a few books I really wanted to write that my agents refused to send out or told me there was no market for.  I might – would in fact – have reached this point with a stash of ten or so books in the drawer and ready to go up.

And I might have written fewer short stories, which, in the long run, weren’t as useful to my particular career as I thought they should be.

But the shorts were useful as learning tools, and other than the fact that it’s a pain to put up that many short pieces, they’re little more-or-less-continuous cash cows and once I get them all up, they’ll make me the equivalent of a novel sale a year, or a little more.

And a year and ten books?  That would be the difference, otherwise?  Ah, come on.  Would it be worth going back in time for a year advantage?  And ten books?  – shrug – I could do that in less than two years even while working for Baen too.

So… if I had a time machine?  I’d tell myself what I tell beginner writers (because with the indie stuff I am in a way beginning all over again):

Don’t give away your inheritance for a mess of pottage. (Or a pot of message.) Traditional publishing in the end costs more than it’s worth – unless you find the one or two houses who will deal fairly with you.  And even then, be aware you’re tying yourself long term to getting a tiny percentage of your book’s sales.  (Not saying it’s not worth it for reaching a larger audience.  I do it.  BUT it’s not by default something you should do.)

Don’t not write something because no traditional house will take it or your agent refuses to send it out (It might be a good idea to work without an agent if you can, btw.  I know some houses won’t, and you might not be ready to drop them, but the net gain FOR YOU of an agent is a round zero.)  Write it and (eventually) put it out yourself.

Write for the public.  Forget all those how to write blockbusters books.  Those are written for how to impress the publishers, who in turn are trying to impress the distributors.  Go back before the publishing industry discovered how to pleasure itself and bent into a circle.  Read the older bestsellers and figure out how to make people who read – not the same as people who publish or distribute – happy.  Cultivate THOSE techniques.

Can you make a living from indie?  Well, I can’t tell you for sure “yes” yet, but from what I’ve seen there’s a better chance it will than that traditional ever would.

And you are free to create what you want – a freedom you only appreciate when you’ve been deprived of it from so long.

That’s about it.  If I had a time machine, it might cut two years off my attempt to go indie and make a living…  Helpful, but hardly worth it.

So, I’ll start today trying to make up that little gap.  And whistle while I work.

(Though before the portal closed, I WOULD have yelled at my past self “Homeschool those kids.  Trust me.” … but that’s a different matter.)

Unrelated: I’m almost over the killer flu, only I feel like I need to sleep rather a lot.  But it’s sleep on the way to recovery, not the ‘I’m too exhausted because I stood up sleep.”  And maybe it’s not as unrelated as that.  Perhaps that applies to my career too.  In either case, right now, I’m going back to bed for a few hours.  The future will wait that long.

I’d say Galaxy Quest was a guilt pleasure except that I don’t feel the slightest bit guilty.  If you haven’t watched the movie, it is about the crew of a show that’s a clear echo of Star Trek, many years after the show has been cancelled.  This is not a spoiler, so much as a setup: the characters, while doing the con circuit, get recruited by real aliens to help save their world.  The entire story is a send up on people confusing fiction with reality.

One of the “crew members” kidnaped was one of the “one episode” extras, the type that normally die, and so as things get dangerous, first he, and then the rest of the crew, become afraid he will die, because it would have happened in the fictional episode.  Their anxiety is heightened by the fact no one knows his last name, which was the mark of a character who would die. That this has nothing to do with the reality they’re facing is, of course, the source of the humor.

It is, of course, all the funnier, because it is a persistent human failing, and one we writers are particularly prone to.

When I ran a small press magazine I continuously got letters from people protesting a rejection.  “You can’t be rejecting me,” they said.  “I wrote the story exactly to your guidelines.”  (Of course most of the time I was rejecting the story because it was in fact VERY badly written, but sometimes I had to wonder what guidelines they’d read.)

This is why every writer in the world howls like an hyena at the cartoon of snoopy on top of his dog house, typing “Gentlemen, regarding the recent rejection slip you sent me. I think there might have been misunderstanding. What I really wanted was for you to publish my story, and send me fifty thousand dollars. Don’t you realize that?”

Because we know that in our hearts it SHOULD be that way.  It’s the way stories are.

We’re not alone in this view – if we were the US would not now be full of young people with useless college degrees (or ones that just aren’t useful in this economy) crying “I did what I should have done, I followed the rules.  I went to college.  Where is my high-paying job?”

People listen to stories.  You work hard, you follow the rules, you get your reward.

It is even true, to an extent.

If you work hard, if you follow the – sane – rules, if you look ahead to your future, you will be successful in some measure.  You might not be successful in the field you wish.  You might not be successful to the measure you wish, but you will (probably) keep body and soul together.  You will (probably) not end up in the gutter.  You will (probably) accomplish some part of what you want to do.

Why “probably”?  Because if massive civil unrest breaks out in 2 years, all bets are off.  It all depends on your skills at scavenging, not at whatever you studied in college.
Because if you tried to enter the field of buggy-whip-maker just after the advent of the automobile, nothing can save you from a fall.

Because stories are ordered, but life is a chaotic system.  You are the main character of your story, but there are millions of other main characters.  And there are chaotic, macro systems that spin things out of control.

While following the story – staying out of the forest, not talking to strange wolves – will keep you from the very worst outcomes, but it doesn’t guarantee the best.

Nothing guarantees the best outcome.

This is not a post saying “abandon all hope” – it’s just a reality check.  There are no guarantees in writing, but there are no guarantees in life, particularly not in the time of catastrophic change we live in.  (And no, the genii can’t be put back in the bottle there.  Tech has reached a certain level.  Human actors wants certain things.  Even chaos has mechanics.  The only way to stop the juggernaut is a civilizational collapse of such far-reaching horror that we are knocked back to the middle ages or before.  And trust me, you wouldn’t like that.  Well, I wouldn’t like that.  So, do try not to do that, okay.  Dude, don’t break my civ.)

Given the times we live in, almost any job you train for, almost anything you attempt is going to get upended before you get much further.  Ten years?  Twenty?  The chances are that you will have three or four “careers” before you are done with your working years.

So, no matter who you are and what you’re doing, you have to remember that the story isn’t pre-scripted.  This means there are no guarantees.  But it also means that you’re not written to fail.

You’re not the red shirt.  You’re not the disposable character.  And if you are the plucky comic relief, it’s because you want to be.

There are no guaranteed strategies to get to the top, but that means you can take the rules as a guideline and experiment.  And in publishing, right now – and in other work too – there are new ways of doing things that might give you results you couldn’t have hoped for under the old one.

I can’t say “you’ll fail for sure, because your characters are too wimpy.”  I can’t say “You’ll succeed for sure because you’re so determined.”

Publishers believed these stories, you see.  They believed if you had failed once you’d continue failing.  In fact, they more or less made sure you failed, though that’s not (of course) how they saw it.  They just believed in the stories: those who were destined to win.  Those who were destined to lose.

But the stories were never true, not unless/until they could rig the system.  They’re even less true now.

So, go ahead.  Boldly go wherever you’re going.  Work hard, study, keep your nose clean, apply persistence and…

You’re not guaranteed to succeed.  But you’re not guaranteed to fail too.

Your future is yet unborn and yours to create to the limits of your ability and the system.

Maybe they won’t kill Guy.  Maybe it’s some other character they have it in for.  After all, you have a last name.  And maybe you’ll be the plucky comic relief.

On my mother’s side.  Unfortunately it’s not one of those characteristics that breeds true.

More seriously I wonder how many people were raised with the myth of genius, whether that’s normal, whether it’s something that only happens to those of us in artistic families where the members gave up on it.

I was raised with the genius myth and in retrospect, my parents cannot possibly have meant what I thought they meant – or perhaps they could.  Perhaps they were raised with the myth too – but I thought what they were telling me was if you were a genius you wouldn’t need to learn, you’d never do anything mediocre, you’d just start working in your chosen field and it would be perfect and marketable, and success would be instant.

From what I understood – and I swear that’s what my mom told me, probably because she watched a movie that gave her that idea – Mozart was a genius because the first time he saw a piano, at five, he could play it perfectly.  It took me till I was an adult to find out how wrong that myth was, and how much Mozart’s precociousness reflected a crazy family.  (Even if he was – also – a genius.)

In retrospect I do wonder if, given all the creative talent in the family, of which I am a very minor spark, the fact that I am the only one with a career in the “arts” (even if an odd art) comes from my having left home, gone to another country and changed language and culture to such an extent that I had to reexamine most of the wisdom received so early that some of it is pre-verbal.  And I wonder how many other people have it.

I run up against the “talent” myth now and then and I wonder how far deep in the genius myth other people are.

It took a while for the myth to die.  When I first sent a story out, I didn’t bother seeing if the magazine published stuff like what I wanted to sell them because, well, if it was good enough they would publish it regardless.  And when I got back what can only be classified as an enthusiastic rejection, where the publisher – from ENGLAND – sent me a copy of their (pro) magazine so I could see what they published and submit targeted stories, I was UPSET because they didn’t accept my story…  Clearly this meant I wasn’t a genius, and so the story – and any attempts at submitting – went in a drawer while I tried to write a novel, to see if I was a genius in that.

For those of you who have tried to sell writing, or who even have spouses, friends, neighbors, acquaintances who’ve tried and who are readying the pitchforks and torches to come to my house, please, please, please remember I’m sick.  Also, I’ve been punished enough.  By my estimation my belief in the “genius” myth cost me about ten years on the way to publication.

Because, you see, even after I stopped believing that a genius could just produce a masterpiece without trying, I still believed the… ah… penumbraas and emanations of the genius myth.  I believed you had to have a certain amount of inborn talent to start (kind of like the ‘you must be this tall to ride’ bar at the amusement park); I believed language was the most important part of writing (guys, I was born to a family of poets); I believed you couldn’t learn; I believed other people could tell on site that I didn’t have enough native talent.

What this meant was that I’d try for a year, get discouraged, get a job for a year or two, then try again – rinse, repeat…  Until I HAD to stay home as a combination of being very ill for a year after giving birth and, frankly, not having spent six years in infertility treatments to give my kid to hired hands to raise.

Since I was home, I might as well write and… the process itself and joining my first writers’ group and hearing others’ stories, I eventually figured out while “talent” exists it is not a necessity, beyond a certain minimum.

Talent exists?  Yep, it does.  And you don’t want it.

Talent in writing, genius level talent, is producing a readable, cogent, fully functional novel the first time you try WITHOUT having consciously studied techniques or thought about how to do it at all.  (Novel because a short you might be able to fake.  And without studying, because some people just learn differently.  My husband is like that.  He can learn passively, by STUDYING books without needing to practice for years.  For the record I can’t, but these are just different types of minds.)

But I want it Sarah!  I DO.

Okay, maybe you do, but you shouldn’t.  Why not?  Because if you do it by genius you won’t know how to do it again.

I grant you the geniuses I’ve known might have done fine with Indie – the woman whose first novel got published, and who couldn’t then write anything approaching a publishable second; the woman whose first novel was brilliant but when it failed to get published outright, got stuck in an endless cycle of rewrites that each time made the thing worse; the friend whose career was stuck at a certain level and who had no idea how to improve it, because she doesn’t write her easy, breazy brilliant prose CONSCIOUSLY.

In indie all of them – probably – could have made a living.  But one day, sooner or later, they’d get sick, or tired, or out of it.  And they don’t know how to whistle by ear or paint by numbers.

The years you spend creeping to competency leave behind the ability to perform when you’re less than optimal.

And now, because I’m sick and think this is less than coherent, I’m just going to do a series of bullet points, contrasting the myth and the reality:

The myth: You must have a certain level of talent to even try to write.
The truth: or speak.  Or walk.  You must be homo sapiens of normal intelligence.  That’s the talent needed.

The myth: everyone who makes it, can write effortlessly

The truth: after years and years and years of practice, sometimes.  Provided they’re not sick, tired, worried about other stuff.

The myth: if your stuff is good everyone knows it immediately

The truth: do you even like exactly the same books/movies as your best friends?  I don’t.  Oh, sure, there’s overlap, but a lot of the things these people think are brilliant get thrown against the wall on page two.

The myth: if your stuff is bad everyone knows it immediately

The truth: one of my books because a – very discerning – friend’s favorite (one of top four or five books ever in his estimation) the first time he read it.  This same book earned a review saying the characters are too stupid to live.  One man’s meat is another’s poison.

The myth: if your stuff is good you’ll be an instant success

The truth: Poppycock.  Even in indie, it takes time, effort and a certain amount of luck.  Sure, you might win the lottery and become Amanda Hocking (or in traditional J. K. Rowling) but chances are you’ll have to write a few books (Amanda wrote ten?) and work assiduously before you see results.  That’s one of those ‘human condition’ things.

The myth: good writing can’t be learned or taught

The truth: don’t make me show you my juvenilia which, even beyond the fact it’s in Portuguese and possibly only Mr. Oyster (the commenter) could read it, sucked so badly it might start a black hole.  Not only did I learn, you can trace the progress and what I was learning at the time.

The myth: there are people so untalented they’ll never be published

The truth: Care to place a small bet?  Also, the ones who can’t or won’t are not failures of talent, they’re failures of learning, possibly because they believe the genius myths.

The truth is this, and let’s pretend I just came down from the mountain and have secured the ultimate advice for your career:

If you are willing to work hard; if you treat it like any other craft and study the masters and the instruction books; if you put in your time and write enough to practice it – you can succeed at writing.

And if you don’t have any natural talent, no one will EVER know.

*I meant to do a real post, but I came down with something that appears to be upper respiratory.  I’m only about 1/3 as sick as Dan is — of course our doctor is on vacation — but bad enough that reading is an effort and for the first time in many years I spent an entire day watching old mystery series, without even the benefit of hand work to keep me awake.  I’m in that uncomfortable space where I’m too sick to work and too well to sleep.  So I’m leaving you with the opening to Noah’s Boy and going back to bed and seeing if I can sleep a bit more before sleep won’t come.*

Noah’s Boy

Sarah A. Hoyt

Riverside Park, at the edge of Goldport, was a thrill whose time had passed.  Competing with the various flags, gardens and other franchised, national attractions which specialized in rides based on the latest technology, its main advantage and being cheap and therefore it appealed mostly to the young, the recent immigrants and the impecunious.

Slumbering quietly at the edge of a small lake – the River in the name being one of those mysteries no one could explain – its entrance tower dated back from the orientalist period of the nineteenth century when pseudo arabesques had been in vogue.  It looked quite nice at night, when no one could see its flaking paint and bright little lights outlined its contours making it look like something out of a fairytale.

Its vast central pavilion, which once had hosted shows by all the big bands and dancing by all the fashionable local couples, now housed bumper cars.  The hippodrome that had seen horse races back in the middle of the twentieth century had long since closed and its sun-bleached carcass, encircled in a tall wall as incongruous and desicated as the bones of a long-dead dinosaur, was posted all over with signs warning visitors off.

Not that many visitors were interested.  Most came for the corny spider rides, the colorful dragon roller coaster, and the not very horrible house of horrors.  A few afficionados and romantic souls came for the wooden roller coaster or the turn of the – twentieth – century merry- go-round.

But right then, early May, the only people in the park were there to work.  Teams of men fanned out up slope and down path, cutting down the knee high grass and calling to each other in Spanish.

Jason Cordova straightened up, as the mower he’d been pushing choked on the weeds.  Man, the least they could do is get some riding mowers.  Rent them or something.  And if not, then with grass like this, we should be using scythes.

Despite the relatively mild weather, sweat glued his t-shirt to his body and his jeans felt like they had insects climbing up inside them.  He knew it was probably his imagination, but he still had to supress an urge to scratch and an even stronger urge to take off his jeans and shake them.

He listened to the chatter around him and frowned.  It’s like they went to the day labor office and picked everyone with a Spanish name.  Which was probably exactly what they’d done.  And it wasn’t that Jason didn’t speak Spanish.  He did.  He’d studied it in college.  For all the good it was doing him in the current economy.

A shout that he couldn’t quite understand but that seemed to mean he should be getting back to work made him say, “Yeah, yeah,” as he started pulling the cord to restart the mower.  But the motor only sputtered, and then he realized the shout hadn’t been at him.

Instead, his coworkers were shouting to each other and running towards an area where  tall grass remained.  Oh, what the hell, Jason thought, as he ambled in that direction, wondering exactly what they’d found there.  A credit card?  Someone’s illegal weed patch?  Or, judging by the trend of the conversations he’d heard before, and what seemed to really interest all his co-workers, perhaps there was a girl there who’d somehow lost all her clothes?

Before he got to the place, he saw two of the guys running away, their face more green than olive, and another one throwing up into a recently mowed patch.

Jason jogged forward the next few steps.  And froze.  Laying on the trampled tall grass was one of the men he’d come here with this morning.  He was small, probably Mexican.  What remained of his white t-shirt was torn and covered in red-black blood.  The lower half of his body was unrecognizable – his stomach torn open, the guts spilling.  It looked like something had eaten a good portion of the guts.

He’d never know quite how it happened, but he found himself throwing up, too, right beside the tall grass.  But as he straightened, wiping his mouth to the back of his leather gloves, he realized there were a lot fewer men around.  Like… none.  Though he could see one or two in the distance, jumping the fence, and another desperately swimming across the lake.

Oh, good God, he thought, as he called aloud, “Stay, don’t go.  We must report this to the police.”  Which he realized was exactly the wrong thing to say, as they ran even faster.

A trail of moving grass near at hand called his attention, and he rushed there, determined not to face the police alone.  “Stop,” he said.  But then realized it wasn’t one of his co-workers he was looking at.  It wasn’t any human.  It had to be the largest feral dog he’d ever seen.  Well… feral something.  Immense, beastly, its maw stained with blood, it looked like what happens to big bad wolves who die and don’t go to heaven.

Jason felt his body clench and twist.  His mouth contorting, he managed to pull off his jeans and t-shirt before they got shredded.  “Nice doggie,” he said.

***

Rafiel felt like he was going stark, raving mad.

Okay, so no murder investigation – or in this case, what seemed to be the investigation of death by misadventure – was ever a good thing.  Ever.

Goldport wasn’t exactly a crime capital, but as one of four senior investigators in its serious crimes unit, Rafiel saw his share of seamy underside: thefts, break ins, the occasional drunken Saturday night mutual shoot out, and the share of drug traffic that couldn’t be avoided anywhere in these days. They even had murders – quite a few recently.

But on this particular Friday afternoon, he’d been finishing his paperwork, and giving some thought to the girl his parents had arranged for him to go out with that night.  His parents – heck, almost anyone – were anxious to see him matched up.  Nearing thirty and living in your parents’ house was not how the story should go.  Particularly not when you were a successful police officer.  But Rafiel’s parents should know better.

They knew that their son shifted into a lion at the drop of a hat, or sometimes even without any hats dropping.  They knew he lived in fear of hurting someone while shifted, and also that normal people, who didn’t change shapes, wouldn’t understand that he remained throughout more than half human: that in either form he tried to do the best he could and serve justice.

What did they think would happen if a woman came home to find her husband – or fiancé – had changed into a giant jungle cat?  Did they think she would take it as an inconvenient but endearing thing.  Oh, well, he’s a lion shifter, but at least he makes good coffee?

He could only imagine his parents’ desire for grandchildren had overwhelmed their common sense.  Leaving him with the task of taking this “daughter of old friends” on a first date, being polite and nice but cold, so she wouldn’t feel too disappointed when he never called again.

Some days he wished he didn’t know there were female shifters in the world, and that he were unaware that Kyrie Smith, one of his two best friends, shifted into a panther.  Some days he wished he could help thinking that he and Kyrie could have made a go of it, if the other one of his best friends hadn’t been around.  But Tom Ormson had been around.  And though he was quite unsuitable for Kyrie as a shifter – shifting into dragon – he was very compatible with Kyrie as a human.

Rafiel had had doubts about that, in the beginning, but once those two had got together, they’d stopped being individuals and become a whole that was bigger than the sums of its parts: they’d become Tomandkyrie, a composite creature more competent than either of them separate, and so assured that they were one, that he might as well try to separate siamese twins.

What made things worse, was that Rafiel wasn’t even sure he would have a chance with Kyrie if something happened to Tom.  He had a feeling that a Rafielandkyrie creature would not be nearly as good as Tomandkyrie, and might in fact fail to gel at all.  And besides, he liked Tom, the scruffy, scaly bastard that he was.

No.  What Rafiel really needed to do was find a girl he could love and who wouldn’t mind his shifting.  And the last requirement cut down the population of eligibles to a negligible number, most of whom would live too far away for him to ever meet.

He’d been contemplating that when his afternoon had got worse, with the phone call.  Riverside Amusement park, the place where, even at the height of the season, if one dropped a virus that selected for non-native-Spanish speakers, no one would catch it, had had some sort of death and the police was called to investigate.

It had been hard to understand what the heck was going on, because the person calling it in kept lapsing into something that Rafiel suspected was Greek.  But Rafiel had caught stuff about a mountain lion and Mexicans and  – this was emphatic – definitely not the owner’s fault.

Now he stood in the middle of Riverside, while a medic, who’d accompanied the police, patched up one of the workers: the only one remaining.  Not far from them, in the long grass, a forensic team went over the victim: hispanic, late twenties and dead.  Very dead.   According to the forensic team several feet of intestine – and various other things – were missing.

They hadn’t found the mountain lion, yet.  But that wasn’t the worst news.  The guy who’d been mauled and was being patched up, said it wasn’t a mountain lion but more like a dog, but even that he wasn’t sure of.  He said it was a weird animal.

And Rafiel could smell shifter.  It was a smell he’d decided only shifters could smell, metallic, with a salty tang, and unmistakable once you first smelled it.  And it was all over the place.

“So, it was a dog?” he asked the guy who sat on the chipped cement bench by the closed spider ride – the big black apparatus with its cup like seats frozen and vaguely threatening in the afternoon light.

The guy’s name was Jason Cordova, not withstanding which, he spoke English perfectly and without the slightest hint of an accent.  His only Spanish words came flying out as as the emergency medic bandaged his arm and shoulder, which seemed to have been mauled by something.  Something with sharp teeth.    His white t-shirt, smeared in blood, lay on the bench by his side.

Jason was dark enough to be some variety of Hispanic, though most of it, Rafiel thought, would be due to his working outside in the sun.  He wore his hair short, with the tips dyed white-blond, and he looked at Rafiel and shook his head then tried to shrug, which brought about another outbreak of Spanish, in which the word Madre featured prominently.  “It looked like a dog,” he said, at last, looking at Rafiel out of narrowed eyes, though they seemed to be narrowed more in pain than in suspicion.  “But it didn’t fight like any dog.  And it didn’t bite like any dog.”  He shook his head.  “I was lucky I had my hunting knife, because the day labor office is in a bad area and– Anyway, I must have cut it halfway to pieces before it let me go.  And its jaws were like… steel clamps.”

“I’ve never seen a bite like this,” the medic who’d come with the ambulance Rafiel had called, and who was probably a male nurse said.  He blinked grey eyes behind coke-bottle glasses.  “And I’ve treated all sorts of injuries, even people mauled by mountain lions.”  He looked at Jason.  “You’re very lucky to be alive.”

“Yeah, I feel lucky,” he said, in the tone that implied he didn’t.  “I’m unemployed, divorced, crashing on a friend’s sofa, and, on good months, making enough to pay for my own food and fuel, and now I’m going to have to pay for the ambulance someone called.  It’s not like the park– ”

The medic grinned, and started to put his stuff away in a little bag.  “Nah, the park will pay.  It’s not like they want you to go to hospital and have to show papers.  I’ve sent the ambulance back anyway, so it’s just my time.”  He stopped.  “I suppose you do have papers, anyway.”

“Sure I have them,” Jason said, sounding vaguely amused.  “I suspect I was the only one.  But I didn’t tell the owners.  They can’t pay minimum wage or do all the paperwork stuff, and if I’d told them I wanted that, they’d never have hired me.”

“Yeah, I won’t tell them.  You keep a watch on that.  I disinfected as much as I could, but there might be something left in there.  It’s a deep wound.  If you notice a ring of red form and start to expand, get yourself to emergency and fast.  Oh, and…”

But Rafiel was no longer listening.  Instead, he was smelling the air around him.  It didn’t much matter to him – or not exactly – whether the creature was a dog or a mountain lion, or some mutant, undefined creature.

What mattered – and this was very important – was that he could smell shifter in the area, all around.  There was a sweet-metallic tangy scent that he knew all too well.  He smelled it everyday in his own clothes, and rising from his own body.  And he smelled it from Kyrie and Tom and the dozen or so shifters who frequented the George – the diner Kyrie and Tom owned together.

The thing was that the scent lingered in areas where shifters had been.  Sometimes for hours.  It had been so strong around the dead man, that Rafiel was sure he’d been a shifter himself.  But was the killer a shifter or not?

It made all the difference.  As Rafiel stood here, away from the scene, he could hear the forensic team discussing their findings in the blood-spattered area with long grass, where the body had lain.

If the killer was just a wild animal on the loose, then Rafiel could let them figure it out in their own way.  There would be the routine of a police investigation, the normal adding up of evidence till you could take the case to trial and corner whoever was responsible for the animal being lose: police, park or perhaps the owner of the animal.  Then whoever was responsible would be fined or given community service, or something.

In that case, throughout all of it, Rafiel would be just be Officer Trall, a professional and well trained police officer.

But if the killer had been a shifter in his shifted form, it all changed.  Because a shifter who killed once, rarely stopped killing unless he were caught.  And it wasn’t as though Rafiel could bring the apparatus of the law to bear on him.  You couldn’t really tell a judge “this isn’t a dog, it’s a werewolf.”

Well, you could.  But then they put in a nice resting place, medicated to the eyeballs.  And, given that Rafiel himself was a shifter lion, heaven only knew what the meds would do to his shifting.  He might become a lion and eat a few nurses not-in-a-good-way.  He took a long whiff of the air.  There was the smell from the dead body, the smell around it, and another smell.

“Hey, something wrong?  You allergic to something?” the medic asked.

And Rafiel became aware that he’d been sniffing for al he was worth, as though he expected to find his way with his nose.  Which he probably could.  In fact, he would swear the smell came from back there, from the path to the parking lot, past the closed up hippodrome.

“Ragweed,” he said, automatically.  It had the advantage of being true, not that it mattered.  “So, could you write me just an informal report on the wounds?  In case I have to take this to trial.”

“You can’t take an animal to trial,” the medic said.  Then grinned sheepishly.  “Though I suppose you could take his owner.  And maybe should. But I bet you it doesn’t have one.  I bet you it’s one of those wild animals that seem to show up further and further into town every year.   Like that Komodo dragon that went around eating people, what was it?  Two years ago?  And did you hear about the bear who went through the trash dumpster behind the alcohol and tobacco kiosk on Fifteenth?  He then ran through bar row, looking dumpsters.  When they tried to catch im, he ran through ten backyards and across five streets, before being struck by a car as he ambled across the road in front of Conifer Park.  And I bet you that they treated him and freed him, too, probably not too far from town.  Ready to do the same again next year.  A miracle he didn’t kill someone.”

Rafiel made a perfunctory nod and said, “Nothing we can do, eh?  It’s the way it is.  But I still need that report.”

“Right.  I’ll write up something.  It won’t be Shakespeare.”

“No problem.  Shakespeare didn’t really report on medical conditions and it wouldn’t do us any good to be told the wound is not as wide as a church door.”  Rafiel said.  The intensity of the smell was driving him insane.  It was separating itself into strands, too: the dead body, or the area around it, and a trail leading to the hypodrome and another…

He should – to follow proper procedure – go over to where the forensic team was working and see if there was anything else they needed.  Instead, frowned as Jason put on his blood spattered but intact t-shirt over his badly mauled body. The shifter smell hit Rafielfull in the face, and he stared, his mouth half open.

The medic was walking away, far enough along the path that he wouldn’t hear anything that Rafiel or Jason said.  And Jason had just turned a puzzled and slightly weary face to Rafiel.

“Hunting knife, uh?” Rafiel said.  “I don’t suppose you want to show it to me?”

Jason blinked.  A dark tide of red flooded behind his tanned skin.  “I must have dropped it,” he said.  “Somewhere in the grass, I guess,” and with a shrug.  “Maybe your team will find it.”

Rafiel sighed.  He dropped to sitting in the space of bench open beside Jason.  “I’d think you were the killer, you know, and that those wounds were received from whatever that poor bastard,” a head inclination towards the crime scene, “turned into, except that they say he’s been dead since probably really early morning, before you came to work.  They think he was one of he guys they hired yesterday, and he decided to bunk here for the night.  And your wounds are fresh.  So it’s clear there’s yet a third shifter around – or maybe a second, if that’s his smell around the corpse – and that you got those wounds in a fight with him.  But don’t go telling me about a hunting knife.  You might have cut the shifter up pretty bad but it was all teeth and claws, wasn’t it?”

Silence went on so long, that if Rafiel couldn’t smell the scent of shifter coming from Cordova, made stronger by exertion, and mixed with his blood, he would have thought he was imagining it.

But then Cordova spoke, his voice very tired.  “I see.  The police know.”

“Eh.  This policeman knows,” Rafiel said, smelling for all he was worth, intent to the shift in adrenaline that would signal that the man was about to attack.  Or shift and attack.  It never came.  There weren’t even any great movements.  Rafiel extended his legs in front of him, doing his best to appear at ease

Turning, he found that Cordova was staring at him, studying him.  “What… do you change in to?” the man asked at last.

“Lion, you?”

“Bear.”  And to what must have been sudden comprehension in Rafiel’s face, “Hey, I’m broke, and I guess I like liquor?  I don’t know.  I don’t remember much when I’m already tipsy and then become… you know…  That hike from the forest reserve about killed me too.  Just happy we heal fast.  And that the person who found me thought I’d got drunk and undressed while drunk, and got me clothes and food.”

“I have a cell phone,” Rafiel said.  “Strapped to my thigh with one of those plastic coil things.  Stays in place even when I shift.  That way, if I end up too far from where my clothes are, I can always call friends.”

“Smart that,” Cordova said, and looked down at his feet.  “Only you have to have friends who know, and I don’t have those.  Even my wife didn’t know.  She thought I kept disappearing and was having an affair, and when I didn’t want to talk to her about it, she said I was emotionally unavailable.”  He shrugged.

They sat side by side a little while, then Cordova said, “But that guy, the dead one, I don’t think he was shifter.  I think the shifter smell is from the killer.  It’s really strong around all that area, and it goes that way.”  He pointed the same way Rafiel had been smelling it.

“Could it be one of the other workers?” Rafiel asked.  “Were did they go?”

A grin answered him.  “It’s as I told you before,” he said.  “They ran so fast, they’re probably halfway to Mexico by now.”

“Yeah, but what path did they take out of the park, do you remember?”

This got him a very odd look, as it should have, because Jason was not stupid.  Clearly, from his diction, his vocabulary, the man was smart and well educated.  He stood up on visibly shaky legs.  “Three of them went that way.  And a bunch ran that way.  And then a few ran that way.”

He pointed in three directions, in which the park ended in a fence, bordering a little used road.  Which made sense if you were an illegal worker trying to run away.

“Not that way?” Rafiel asked, pointing in the direction of the path to the parking lot.

Jason shook his head.  “Nah.  None of them had cars, you know?  The owners picked us up in a truck.”  He hesitated a moment.  “Say, you’re not going to try to catch them or…?”

“I’m not INS,” he said.  “And if I caught them, there would only be a mess and they’d end up on the streets again.”

“It’s just,” Jason said, gesturing with his head towards the ticket house where a motley group of people who looked Greek and who seemed to be the extended family of the owner of the park.  They were arguing – or perhaps just talking – in very loud voices.  “That I don’t think they have much choice.”

“The workers?”

“Any of them.  The workers come because they’re hired, and these people hire them because they couldn’t afford minimum wage much less all the deductions and things.”  He frowned.  “This minimum wage law and the benefits and things, it’s all very pretty on paper, but it’s like legislating the weather, man, it does no good.  All it does is make you think everything is fine until reality bites you some place or other.”

Rafiel nodded thinking that Jason was definitely over-educated, but just said, “So none of them went where the smell goes,” he said.  “Which means…  Shit.  There is another shifter at bay.”

Cordova hesitated.  He lifted his hand, then let it fall.  He looked over his shoulder and all around, to make sure he was suitably isolated and that no one could hear him.  Then he sighed.  “Man, I don’t want to tell you this.  You look like you have troubles enough.”

“What?”

“After… in the fight, you know…  I had a pretty good grip on this dude, and I was biting and then…”

“And then?”

“He shifted and slipped out of my grasp,” Jason said.  “He just became this skinny, young dude, maybe fourteen or fifteen…”  He hesitated while Rafiel gave vent to a string of profanity, from which – his having grown up in Colorado and having Spanish-speaking friends, the word “Madre” was not entirely absent.

Jason Cordova just nodded at it, as though Rafiel had made an observation worth noting, then said, “Yeah, but… that’s not the worst of it.  I grant you I was shifted myself, and I don’t remember what happened really clearly, but from the way he looked and how… well… I don’t think he’s all there.  And I’m almost sure he’s not, you know… normal.  His eyes, you know. They were more feral as human than in animal form.”

Update:  The previous books in this series Draw One In The Dark and Gentleman take a chance are available in electronic, non DRM format from Baen Webscriptions

I should have said that earlier, but thinking hurts.  Turns out “feel much better” lasted … two hours, and then a truck ran over me, which is weird, since there’s no highway through the bedroom.

When you wish upon a star, makes no difference who you are….

Given a little talent at astrophysics, a lot of study, some native talent and having been born in a society with sufficiently advanced science and tech, you might eventually help launch a probe that will bring us fractionally closer to colonizing that star.
            
But no, you say.  No, no, no, no, no, no.  That’s not how that story is supposed to be.  It’s supposed to be “your dream comes true.”

Yes, it is, isn’t it.  Everyone knows that story.  But here’s the thing about stories, even ones that become immensely popular, so popular that they live rent free in our heads: stories (trust me, I make them up) aren’t true.

You know, we humans are weird beasts.  Even those of us who don’t write for a living live and die by story.  Story is the way that the human mind makes sense of the chaotic input of reality.  This is why story is so important for culture – each culture has its own peculiar stories, which entwine in the subconscious of the members of it, and, in most cases, help keep them safe in the environment the culture inhabits (or inhabited at the time of it’s formation) or keeps them within cultural boundaries.  “Don’t go traipsing into the woods alone because a bad wolf will try to eat you” is a great moral.  As is “Be a good girl, work hard, and a prince will marry you, even though your sisters have prettier dresses and go to balls.”

Mind you, these morals are not necessarily good for every member of the culture in every situation, but if you follow the story moral – and most of us do, they really do live rent free in our heads – you’ll be all right more than not.  So the mechanism, by and large, works in favor fo the culture.  It might be bad for 20 members out of 100 (who need to go into the woods to gather mushrooms; or who never marry a prince because he rarely comes to the kitchen.) It is still better for the culture, though.

Even more unfortunately, though, some of the stories are soothing syrup.  They’re not really designed to enforce behavior or to help members of the culture.  They’re designed to keep the crazies in line, or to let us sleep soundly at night.

Keep the crazies in line?  Well… yes.  Or allow them to try things that are so fraught with peril, so completely insane – for the individual, but which might, in the long run, bring benefit to society – that otherwise no one would do it.

One of those is the “If you wish upon a star” or “If you want it badly enough” or the other endless “the wish is the action” things.  “You know you’ve got to stay hungry” or “Fire in the belly” or…

There is a certain amount of desire needed to accomplish anything.  Of course.  And success at crazy things like writing are – ALWAYS – a matter of perseverance.  (Crazy?  By definition.  It’s done by a minority for no visible EXTERNAL necessity.  It’s crazy.)  At least they are unless you get the lucky break that’s the equivalent of winning the jackpot five times in a row.

Because we’re all aware the chances of major success from a writing career are minimal – unless we’re two, live in a well or have never heard a writer’s story of success.  (Even J. K. Rowling – Fortune’s Favorite Daughter – was rejected 21 times.  A risible amount for most of us, but still adversity from the POV of any other profession.) – writing has accrued all these myths, like incrustations.

One of them is “true genius will tell” – particularly present in the Rowling mythos, but to an extent in others, as well – which I’ll deal with sometime next week.

The other one is “If you can be talked out of it, you should be.”  

I hate this myth.  I hate it with a burning, blazing passion.  It’s usually said by mentors and people in power over you, so you have to button your lip and nod.

It is also pure bullshit.  If I could get a gram of it, my garden would be perfectly fertilized.

Look up at the first paragraph.  Yeah, someone who thinks that by wishing he should be able to reach a star needs to be talked out of it.  That’s because it’s completely insane to think you can do that, at our current tech development levels.

In the same way, if someone is chiseling his words onto the skin of armadillos and thinks he’s going to be a bestseller by all means talk him out of it.  It might take a straight jacket, though.

For everyone else – WHY?  Why if you could be talked out of it you SHOULD?  What sense does it make.

Someone in my group on FB said “Because it’s a difficult road and it’s likely reward would be minimal.”

Oh, I see.  So you’re talking people out of it for their own good?  How kind and compassionate of you.  And you think they don’t know it’s a hard road and reward would likely be minimal?  You meet many authors who are two?  Or who have lived their whole lives under a rock with ear plugs on?

Do you see how nonsensical this is?  It’s marginally less nonsensical if it comes from someone who had a hard slog to get up there, and if they’re using that odious statement as a way to start telling their story.  And if they’re aware they’re being pricks and abrogating to themselves the right to decide who should and shouldn’t follow in their footsteps.

But it’s also said by peers.  And it’s used to justify things like: cut down critiques; judging your motives for trying this; and sheer sadism.

Ms. Breslin said she did her “Why You Shouldn’t Be A Writer” because if you push back then you have what it takes to make it.  (Rolls eyes.)  There will be a whole article on that particular fallacy.  (There is absolutely no indication self-confidence has a direct connection to ability to make it as a writer.)

At the bottom of that is “if you can be talked out of it you ‘should’ be.”  And at the bottom of that is ‘if the dream/wish is strong enough, you’ll make it.’

Apply this to other risky, hard to make it there professions that provide things we absolutely need: medicine.  Right now in the US there are artificial barriers to entry into medschool.  You can be a straight A student, do well on the M-cats and you still need luck to make it in.  So, if someone is willing to try to slog it through, should we try to talk them out of it?  For their own good?  And then what happens if we don’t have any doctors?  Or any doctors who aren’t freaking delusional ego-monsters?

Engineering: it’s hard to get jobs in engineering in the US, the way to the end is hard.  So, if you can be talked about it, you should be, and it’s a good thing I have that horse carriage in my barn.  (No, I don’t really.)

Plumbing: you have to work really hard, and there are all these regulations that will make your life difficult, and if you can be talked out of it, you probably should be.  Good thing I know how to dig a latrine.

Look – I’ll be blunt.  Whether you can be talked out of it or not, has NOTHING to do with your talent (to the extent talent exists), your willingness to work hard, or even weirdly your passion.  It has to do with a bunch of things, including your natural altruism (one way to get me to drop out that almost worked was “you’re making your family suffer for nothing.” Fortunately my family kicked me back into play, forcefully.) your self-confidence and even the type of stubborn you are.  (I’m very good at absorbing rejection.  However, give me a good nasty cut-down by someone I admire and it can stop me for years.  I’m still recovering from one I got from one of my mentors – I think accidentally? – five years ago.  It’s still putting traces of diffidence in my voice.)

I daresay if you try long enough and target it JUST right, everyone can be talked out of it.  I probably have the writing bug in extremis, but I could, once upon a time, have been convinced to spend the rest of my life writing Austen fan fic in my spare time and putting it up for free.  Frankly, at that time, it wouldn’t have taken much.

It doesn’t mean they “should” be.  Not for their own good, not for others.  Saying that if they can be talked out they should be is an excuse for insecure dwarves with souls ten sizes too small to try to clear what they perceive as competition.  (Competition in this field is not like that.  Writing doesn’t work on the Marxist model. We don’t have a finite number of books we will read in a lifetime.  It’s actually to some extent true that the more you read the more you want to read.  But Marx has always appealed to people with small souls.)  It’s an excuse for casual writers’ group sadists to have fun while pretending it’s for other’s good.  It’s an excuse for editors not to do their job but to try to be cutting and malicious instead, for the “wannabes own good.”

This is a myth that’s ripe to die.  It’s time we bury it deep.  Yes, the way is arduous.  Yes, the chances of great reward are small.  BUT the way itself will dissuade those who don’t have enough fortitude to make it. (And in some cases we’ll lose great writers, because as with medicine, the way has been made unnecessarily hard in traditional publishing.  Thank G-d for Indie.)  And if THAT doesn’t do it, who are YOU to tell them they should quit?

I say we need all storytellers willing to work hard enough to – metaphorically – get us fractionally closer to the stars.  

It’s obvious this culture is desperately in need of better myths.

*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. *

The Ties

“Wait,” Marlon said, as Gabriel headed out the door, after Seraphim and Nell.

Gabriel wanted nothing more than to continue heading out the door, to continue out and away, but he turned.  “Yes?”

“I can’t go upstairs,” Marlon said.

“No.  I shall ask her Highness if we can procure you a blanket and maybe soap and… other necessities you might wish for the night.  Anything else?”

“Stay.”

“Pardon me?”

Marlon’s face animated with something near to a manic rictus.  “Stay.  It can’t be any more comfortable upstairs for you than it is for me.  You too are half-elf.”

Gabriel frowned.  It wasn’t comfortable…  Not exactly.  But he hadn’t felt like his entire power was disintegrating, dissolving in Earth’s odd anti-magic field.  “I wonder why,” he said, then to Marlon’s look.  “It is not comfortable, exactly, Marlon, but it is not – either – the lethal effect it seems to have on you.  I can go upstairs, and I can sleep, and I intend to do so.”

Marlon opened his mouth, closed it.  “I had hoped–” he started, though something, perhaps his preservation instinct, prevented his finishing that sentence.  “That is, I though you still had feelings for me and I–” He took a deep breath.  “We’re in a strange world, one that is hostile to what both of s are, and I thought both of us could… that we could find solace or… or help each other.”

And then something in Gabriel snapped.  He would never be able to explain quite what it was, or quite what did it.  He’d been a very young fool when he’d gone to Cambridge.  Despite his early, rough life at mama’s hands, he’d been almost indecently sheltered when living with the Darkwaters, and accorded all the comforts of nobility with none of the responsibilities or liabilities.  The position, as a child, somewhere between a servant and a member of the family, had been easier to support, since he’d really not been expected to do more work than Seraphim – and it had been the same kind of work, as they’d shared a tutor and learned the same lessons.  But no one cared if Gabriel failed them, while Seraphim had been expected to excel.  Not that Gabriel had failed them, but he’d felt no pressure to do well.

And servants had treated him with deference, but not the distance that isolated Seraphim.  And…  And he’d been an altogether pampered little fool when he’d come to Cambridge.

The matter of what the cook at their house called “luvering” had never come up.  Unlike the footmen and maids, and the anxiously fretting stable boys, no one seemed very sure for what sphere of life Gabriel should aim, when it came to a wife.  He, himself, had thought – when he thought about it at all – that he would study for the law, and once he’d established himself he’d find a suitable daughter of a lawyer or solicitor or merchant.

He knew that wouldn’t be easy.  After all, no sane family would want to ally their name to someone who was half-elf.  On the other hand, he was also half-noble, and the connection, semi-acknowledged as it was, linked him indelibly to one of the oldest, noblest, and certainly most magical houses in Avalon.  So the search for a wife would also not be impossible.  Enough merchants would be willing to give a daughter to a man who the byblow of Satan himself for the chance to say “My son in law’s brother, the Duke of Darkwater.”

When Gabriel had thought of the future, before Cambridge, if he thought of it at all, it was into a vague vista of a comfortable home, a tidy wife, and maybe a couple of children.  An ordered existence, quite different from what he’d endured while in mama’s custody.

The reason that, even though many servants his age were thinking of future marriage, his isolation didn’t bother him was that after what he’d done to survive as a child, the idea of being touched, the idea of coupling with anyone at all – the idea of nakedness and intimate embraces – repulsed him with near physical nausea.

And then there had been Marlon.  It had been– Gabriel could still not explain it.  It had been partly the friendship and the matter of like calling to like, so that when Gabriel had become aware that what he felt was more than friendship and that his interest had a physical edge, it was too late to draw back.

Then had come the horror of their parting, and for a long while Gabriel had thought that it was just Marlon – that Gabriel’s wishes might otherwise be perfectly normal, or perhaps non-existent.  But, through the years of separation he’d come to know better.  Not that he’d risked such involvements again, but he knew what he thought about and where his eyes were drawn.

So much for that.  On the other hand, he also knew that as far as the heart went he still loved Marlon Elfborn.  And that to involve himself with anyone else, of either gender, would be duplicitous, as well as – he felt instinctively – not far above his connections for pay in his very young days.

From his mythical picture of his future, he’d erased the comely wife who kept a tidy house, and, perforce, the two children.  But that was just as well since, having failed at studying for the law, Gabriel was unlikely to ever leave the employ of the Darkwaters.  At best, he could look forward to a future in which he became land manager, or, if Seraphim wanted him closer, butler.  No position he wished to offer a wife.  And thank all the fates, he did not need to have children.  If ever the Darkwater family became desperate enough to count on his progeny, it wasn’t a future in which he wanted to have children, in any way.

And thus things had been, until he’d gone back to ask Marlon’s help.  Only since then, since that moment, things had been shifting with him – slowly.  Almost imperceptibly.  First there had been Marlon putting of a bind on him – as good as enslaving him body and soul and magic.  And then there had been an accretion of thoughts, of actions.

Suddenly, looking at Marlon, he felt as if something had changed irrevocably.  The long, slow slide of a few grains of snow on a slope had become an avalanche that had changed the landscape completely, leaving in its awake nothing but scoured land and flattened buildings.

He drew himself up straighter, and he heard the frost in his voice, when he said, “Marlon Elfborn, are you suggesting I spend the night here?”

Marlon looked surprised, surely not at the words but at the tone of them.  “I thought,” he said.  “Since I could not come upstairs…  I thought you and I…  We have a lot to talk about, a lot to … to understand about each other.”

Gabriel took a deep breath.  Even yesterday, if Marlon had received him that way…  “We have nothing to talk about, sir,” he said, very calmly.

“But– But you said– And when you…  I mean, you said our very first… I mean, you put a compulsion on me!”

“Are you going to bring charges?”

“How can I?  I am proscribed in Avalon.”

“Very well then.”

“But…”  Marlon frowned, and as Gabriel turned to leave, surged out of his seat and grabbed at Gabriel’s sleeve.  “At least tell me why.”

Gabriel pulled his arm out of Marlon’s grasp.  “I think you know why.  Keeping Gypson in the attics and never letting me know what you’d done, regardless of your guilt over it, created your own situation.  And mine too.”

“But how could I known you wouldn’t be repulsed and run screaming?”

“As opposed to what happened.  You couldn’t have known.  But we were friends before we were anything else, and you should have suspected.  You should have respected me as an adult and your friend.  But you didn’t.  You still don’t.”

“How can you say–”

“You put a compulsion on me, when I came to ask your help.  You set one of the most infernal conditions you can set on a human on me.  If you demand it, I have to obey you.  How is that a relationship of equals or anything approaching friendship, let alone love?”

Marlon’s eyes were oddly small, contracted with something that was fear and perhaps pain too.  “But– I had to,” the last was a wail, emerging with the force of a two year old’s self-justification.  “Otherwise you’d have run!  I couldn’t stand to have you run again.”

“Oh?  I’d have run when I came to you of my own free will?  Hunted and cornered I was, but I could have gone to any other world, anywhere else.  I came to you.  I trusted you.  And what did you do?  You put a compulsion bind on me.   And you never even told me that you knew where the princess was, or… anything!”

Marlon’s eyes now looked dark.  He looked like…  In the gallery at Darkwater there was a painting of a duelist, taken on the eve of a duel – or at least the eyes had been done then.  The man, a very young seventeen year old, was one of the past heirs of the Darkwater title.  Only he’d never inherited because he was killed in the duel.  Family legend said that he’d known that would happen – and the portrait confirmed it, with those bleak eyes that seemed to gaze out at never ending darkness.

The same look was in Marlon’s eyes.  “How could I have known?” he asked.

“You couldn’t.  Human beings – and even creatures like us who are just somewhat human-like – can’t know how others will react.”  And now Gabriel felt he had hit the crux of his anger, the center of what he’d come to realize.  “People realize that other people too have the right to think and act of their own accord and that, should others not do what they wish them to do it is something they have to accept.  People aren’t puppets or toys.”  He narrowed his eyes at Marlon.  “I was too young, I didn’t realize it, but there’s too much of them in you – to much of fairyland.  They are the ones who cast illusions and spells to force mortals to dance to their tune.”  He opened his hands in front of him.  “Well, Elfborn.  You have a spell on me, and you can call it, and make me your mindless slave if you wish – but that is all you’re going to get.  Do you wish to call the spell?”  He waited.  Marlon opened and closed his mouth.  Gabriel crossed his arms.  “Well?”

Marlon shook his head.  His expression had gone unreadable, blank, like a statue or a wax figure.

“Is that no?  Am I to assume you won’t call the compulsion, then?”

Marlon took a deep breath.  His mouth was raspy and grinding as it came out.  “No,” he said.  And then, pulling on the threads of his own magic, which he’d set on Gabriel and snapping them with a broad gesture of his right hand.  “You are free.”

Gabriel took a deep breath and felt oddly cold, but also collected and perhaps more himself than he’d ever felt.  “Very well then,” he said.  “Is there something I may bring you for your present comfort?  Beyond a blanket and some soap and sundries?”

“No,” Still the raspy voice.  “No.  Not…  I don’t need a blanket.  I’ll do well.”

Gabriel felt disposed to argue, but the truth was he didn’t want to come back anyway.  Some tectonic shift had taken place within himself, and he wanted time and solitude to think about it before he talked to anyone, even Marlon.

“Very well,” he said, and opened the door and closed it behind him.  Outside, he took a deep breath of cool, clean night air.

Which was when the explosion hit, the force of it catching him and flinging him forward, away from the house, bodily, like a child flinging a lead soldier full force into soft soil.

I read Susannah Breslin’s blog posts at Forbes religiously and most of the time I agree with her.  Occasionally I agree with her but “I’ll be cursed if I know what to do about it” such as her article on selling yourself.  (Yeah, I know I should, but for my circumstances and the circumstances of the field, the good question is “how?” beyond this blog which I enjoy.)

However, having read her article on why you should not be a writer, I was seized with a need to write… not quite a counterpoint.  This is more of the flip side.

In most circumstances, and for most people, she’s probably right.  She might be particularly right for non-fiction.  (Though I do wonder if it has occurred to her the only people who’ll heed her are the deeply diffident born-writers who will delay a couple years in their struggle.  People who don’t know that they don’t know the craft will just go “oh, yes I should.”)

Despite her mention of “a novel and self-publish” ninety percent of the people she’s talking to aspire to be non-fiction writers.  Now, my non-fiction writing friends tell me it’s a bug as bad as fiction, but I don’t know that of my own accord.  I do know the fiction bug.

I know an article like Ms. Breslin’s would have stopped me on point one, when I was a newby – and while that might have been a great deliverance for the world (and perhaps for me) – I do have twenty one books and an award to my credit.  Also, knowing me, it would only have stopped me for a year, which means in the long run it would only have cost me a year of practice and submission.

If you’re as I was then, here is why you SHOULD be a writer.

My rebuttal starts with conditions: this writing thing is not a harebrained idea you just had because you’re unemployed and living in your friend’s spare room.  You don’t think you’re going to be a millionaire within a year.  You’re not doing this based on the fact that you wrote cool essays in first grade.  And you don’t think that writing is way easier than your day job.

None of those disqualifies you from “perhaps you SHOULD be a writer.”  However, if those are the only reasons, and that’s the first time the idea of writing for a living has occurred to you, let it sit.  Turn it over in your mind.  Consider Ms. Breslin’s post.  She’s probably right.

In fact she’s probably right if you’re past thirty and this is the first time it has occurred to you that maybe what you want to do is write.  She’s not NECESSARILY right.  All of us can point out exceptions.  If you think you’re an exception, read on.  But consider that she might be right and think it over a bit.

For everyone else — for those to whom writing is something that has to be done, consider the following:

1 – Perhaps you’re good enough.

Look, I fully take Ms. Breslin’s point one, that most people who think they’re good at it really aren’t and that few people can make words sing.

Do you words need to sing?

Oh, h*ll.  I’ve had to learn to tone down the word singing thing.  In the Shakespeare series, the biggest complaint is that the beautiful language distracted from the story.  Which wouldn’t annoy me nearly as much if it weren’t true.

Some books – some very rare books – you can get words that sing and meld beautifully with the story.  But Giovanni Guareschi said he wrote his Don Camilo books using a vocabulary of 200 words (I think.)  Sounds about right.  The world still comes to life and moves readers to tears or laughter and sometimes both.

And besides, it’s a skill.  It can be learned.  If you write long enough, if you try hard enough, you will learn it.  Look at me.  I’m an English-as-a-second-language speaker.  My first book (unpublished) read like it was written for a classroom.  I’ve been approaching the colloquial more with every book.  In fact, books from four years ago, where no one complained about the language, feel stiff and contrived to me.

Language use is a skill.  Do you want to write badly enough?  Then write and learn.

Yeah, but what if you can’t do that?  What if you can’t bring worlds to life?  What if your worlds aren’t new enough?  What if you have nothing to say?  What if no one wants to read your stuff?

My brother, an enormously gifted poet has always dreamed of writing a book.  He’s never done it, and likely he never will do it, partly because his poetry is sporadic and often written to the occasion.  But he is also a good writer in other ways.  He was talking to me about this research he did for fun on Sixties one-hit bands and “where are they now” and I told him “you know, there’s probably a market for this.  Why don’t you write it?”  And he said “Because I’m too afraid.  Because if I wrote it, maybe it would sell only a copy, and I’d spend my remaining years searching for that one buyer to thank him, and then I’d find out he’d only bought it to prop up a shaky table.”  Kids, if it’s not obvious, the man should be writing.  Anyone who can come up with that plot at the drop of a hat was born to be a writer – even if not a Human Wave one.

What if you can’t bring worlds to life?  Well, there’s only one way to find out and that’s to write and put it out there, and see the results.  Oh, yeah, and continue writing.  That worlds to life thing?  I couldn’t either.  Not with my first book.  I had characters moving in grey goo.  By my twelfth, though, I was starting to get the hang of it.

Am I there, yet?  Oh, h*ll no.  But I want it badly enough.  So I’ll keep trying.

And kids, all you need is one strong talent to make it in this field.  As much as I despise the word thing – perhaps because it was the one thing I first “got” – there are writers who have NOTHING but pretty language.  There are writers who have nothing but interesting worlds.  There are even writers who have nothing but pacing, or nothing but violence- and- sex porn (Update: for the purposes of writing critique groups I’m also used to talking about other type of things, non sex, that have the shock-and-attention effect as porn: violence, gore, etc.  And yep, you can succeed on those too.)  One of those – ONE – is enough to get you a huge audience.

2- It’s Hard

Yep.  Ms. Breslin is right.  It’s hard as h*ll.  She knows that and I know that, because both of us have made a living from this.  Making a living from this is hard, because – traditional or indie – you have to keep on keeping on.

This is not a matter of getting up in the morning and feeling inspired.  I think I figured around the third book that if I only wrote when inspired, I’d write a book every five years, and it wouldn’t be very good.  Sure, this is an art, but it’s a craft too.  You study the craft.

Too tired?  Too sick?  Your kid is sick? Your husband is sick?  Your car just broke down?  Stove not working?  Creditors at the door?

Too bad.  If you’re under contract, you got to write and deliver.  And if you’re not under contract, and just throwing things up for sale, you won’t make much if you spend a year moaning over your fate.  You drag yourself up, you put on your big kid pants, and you go work.

Running on empty?  Burned out?  Beset on all sides?  Too bad.  You do it.  The alternative is you give up, and then you’ve proven you shouldn’t be a writer.

But how do you do that when on empty?  Well, you use craft and you paint by numbers.  You learn craft by studying how other people do it.  It’s part of being a professional, not an amateur who does this for fun.

As for “you’ll never know if you’re any good” – this is true.  Most writers will always believe the worst about their own writing.

You might think once you’re making a living from it, you’ll know you’re good enough.  Ah!  Most of the time you feel you’re a fraud they’ve just not caught up with yet.

But if you want it badly enough, you’ll keep running on the never-ending treadmill and reaching for the brass ring.

3 – It’s Hard To Monetize

Well… now, that’s getting easier.  At least if you figure out when you’re minimally competent, it’s not that hard.  You put it up, you start selling it.  Will it sell much?  Probably not.

But here’s some thing I found from both my and my friends’ experiences with self-publishing>  Some things work:

a) Write something a large group of people likes to read.  Make it something easily identifiable: romance, mystery, fantasy.  Yeah, you can write your one offs your difficult stuff, your “can’t place it” just be prepared for it to take longer to find a public.

b) Give it away free for a little while, to goose it towards finding an audience.

c) Write ten sequels.

At some point money will start coming in and keep coming in and there’s a good chance it will be enough to live on, at least if you’re minimally competent.  J. K. Rowling level, I don’t promise you.  I don’t even PROMISE enough to live on.  But there’s a good chance you’ll make enough for that doing what you want to do and for most of life, that’s as good as it gets.

But… ten sequels! You say.

Go look at point 2.  Did I promise you “easy”?  No, I didn’t.

But if you want it badly enough you’ll keep trying.

And that’s the unspoken point in the whole thing.  You should be a writer, regardless of Ms. Breslin’s points if:

You had the idea early, and it just won’t go away.  Through the years it keeps coming up.

Perhaps you really aren’t that good.  Perhaps you really would starve, but if it keeps coming back, shouldn’t you at least try?

My dad, who was an artist, but set it aside to feed the family says “eventually the urge goes away.”  The way he said it was the saddest thing ever.  He’s eighty.  Do you want to say that when you’re eighty and know you never tried?  I’m not saying let your family starve, but don’t you want to dip your toe in?  Can’t you take an hour in evening?

If it’s something you feel you want desperately, give it a try.  If you don’t want it hard enough to overcome your natural weaknesses in talent or learning, you’ll find out.

Someone told me when I started out that a writing career mostly resembled a series of kicks in the teeth.  He was wrong.  What it resembles is Andersen’s little Mermaid who, having traded her tail for two human legs, can only proceed in tiny steps each one feeling like a knife-stab.  But she wanted it badly enough, and she thought the reward worth it.

If you don’t want it badly enough, TRUST me, you’ll find out.

At least you’ll have tried.

And if you want it badly enough, who knows?  There might be money in it.  And though you can’t judge yourself, maybe the future will judge your pain worth it.

Lately the publishing (and movie) world has been overtaken by what seems to be a plague of series.  It seems that I can’t go to the bookstore without finding the “tenth book of the claw of honor” series.  The Fifth book of the Immensely Overblown Epic Fantasy series.  And in theaters, well…

I’m glad I went to see Avengers.  I liked it.  I’m glad we decided to buy all the prequels.  But – mama, don’t let your daughters grow up to marry mathematicians – must we watch them all in order?  Even The Incredible Hulk.  (Okay, miles better than The Hulk, but can’t they tweak that story to give the poor critter a happy ending, or at least a semi-happy-ending?  And if they can’t, then why do the movie at all.  he’s okay as a secondary character, but… main?  The emotional arc is all wrong.)

Actually the Avengers is a good example of what I’m talking about with series.  I was a super-hero movie virgin when I went to see it.  At least, I hadn’t seen any since the Amazing Spider man what… eight? Years ago?

The closest thing I watched to a superhero movie before the avengers was The Incredibles.  Oh, and I haven’t read comics since Portugal in the sixties, except for Disney comics, which are different.  (Very, very different at times.)

But I walked into that theater and sat down, and GOT everything.  The story worked.  There was no need for my husband to lean over – as he’s done with other movie series – and whisper, “he and she had this thing.  That’s why she’s upset.”  No, there was full context right there on he screen for me to get the emotional and plot impact of everything.  Yes, even the Hulk, who IS a very powerful secondary character.  You get the feeling of a man watching himself ALL the time, and afraid of what’s within him.  That’s one of my favorite things to write, read and watch.  (For reasons I’ll figure out, should I ever be able to afford a psychiatrist.  Meanwhile, deal.)

Look, I love Dave Weber.  But I came to Honor Harrington late.  And I find I have to read the series in small increments because otherwise I tire out.  (This is true with all series, for me.)  The problem is that six months later, when I resume on book eight, I can’t remember the details that went before, and keep getting the feeling I’m missing something.  He’s not alone.  There are more series I’ve abandoned mid-read than those I’ve followed to the bitter end.  No, I can’t tell you why.  I just get to the point I feel I’m missing too much info to stay with it.  Heck, I have that problem with my own writing, too.  After a while I need a “bible” just to figure out if this character likes black or yellow.

Part of this is the story that follows one character throughout.  In the old days when you got out a book a year, tops, this meant that you were requiring readers to remember to buy that book.  Miss it, and, two years later, get it out of order, and the reader is screwed.  Or more likely, you are, as they toss the book aside and go in search of something else.  If you EVER get to the point people need a glossary, list of characters AND past history in the middle… you’re really screwed.

There is an escape from this – the episodic series.  What I call “bring your characters to their upright and locked position” series.  In the end of each book, we’re back to the beginning, sort of.  The world and the characters change but very slowly, and you can enjoy each book on its own without a reference on how things work in this world and what she did to him in the second book.

Most mystery series are like that, thereby skimming the best of the series – people come back for the group of characters and the feel for the world – but avoiding the worst: the necessity to know what happened in every other book, which becomes onerous as the series goes on.

I figured out early on that I can’t write series that aren’t mystery series.  Once I’ve solved the character’s main emotional arc, I’m done, and I want to go and play with someone else.  The Shakespeare trilogy suffers from this.  The exception, I’d say is the Shifters series, and that’s because in some ways it IS a mystery series.

So faced with the need to make Heart of Light into a trilogy (no, it wasn’t, long story) I thought I invented something completely new: I did the series by moving the “main” character to a new head every time.  This made the series flow better, for me.  I thought I was a genius… It took me years to figure out this is how romance series are done.  (Because you don’t want to undo the happy ever after, but you still want to stay with that group of characters.)

Of course, Pratchett does the same.  His characters are different every book, and he might come back to one, but it’s a whole new problem/relationship, yet in each book we get to see the same group of characters.  And you can start at any point.

So…  Darkship Thieves, now has a second book, Darkship Renegades.  This was semi-difficult since the series is not only one character, but it is restricted to Thena’s head.  I think I can keep it going – and keep it interesting – by treating it more like a mystery series.  Yet it is – in structure – closer to romance.  So, not having sketched the third one yet, I make no promises.  It might very well move to her kids’ heads.  (In fact, I know it will eventually.)  And I suspect the next one of the Darkships will be in the head of a character you have never seen before.  (Evil grin.)  There might be ONE MORE from Thena’s perspective.  You can go three books without a map and a guidebook.  After that… well… things get complex.

Meanwhile, and because I needed to do the revolution on Earth and couldn’t do it from Thena’s perspective – she’s moved on.  Her “home” is now Eden – I started the Earth Revolution series.  You get to see some old friends – all the broomers – but each book has a new main character whose problems (well, the main ones) get more or less resolved at the end of his or her book.  And who come back as secondary characters in other books.  This also allows me a wide-angle perspective that covers the entire Earth and dips into the places of trouble with a fresh perspective.

The first of these is A Few Good Men, coming out this spring, and your returning character is Nat from the broomers in DST – though he’s not the main or voice character.  (Though Fuse is also there. He didn’t die at the end of DST.  Thena just thought so.)  The next book either involves Jan Rainer or Simon.  (Not sure which, yet.)  I know by book four or five (Blood of Heroes) we’ll be well into the second generation.  Unfortunately that’s the missy who is VERY loud in my head right now.  No, you don’t want to know.

And meanwhile I have a whole future history sketched to around 3500 and space colonization, and I reserve the right to dip and swoop wherever I feel like.

I hope thus to harness the best of series.  You get to see all your old friends.  You’ll just never believe the twists life takes on them!

Tighten your seatbelts and trust me.  It’s gonna be a wild ride.

Rule one: everybody lies about sex.  Rule two: one man/woman’s turn on is another human’s “ew.”  Rule three: the best way to go broke is to assume everyone thinks like you.  Rule four: be aware of your own wishful thinking.

This is the part of the blog in which we talk about sex – again.

I confess I have a conflicted relationship with sex.  Oh, not in my personal life.  Ever since I discovered I could make men incoherent by wearing a certain type of dress, I’ve been a big fan of sex, particularly how it affects the male brain.  You can get away with the most interesting stuff when you’re young, pretty and like interesting stockings. And sex just about kept the husband and me  sane while bringing up the two boys.  Raising kids induces terminal poverty, and often we couldn’t afford books or movies, but by gum we could make beautiful music at any time.  Sex, properly handled (eh eh eh eh eh) is one of those compensations for all the discomfort and problems of the human condition.

However, I have issues with sex in books.  I was thinking about that today – why that is.  I didn’t have any problems with sex in books growing up.  You could trace my awakening libido as a pre teen by how obsessed I became with mythology books…  Because they were the only place I could read about sex (though not in detail) without my parents descending on me like the wrath of parents.

And as a kid, curious about what people did behind closed doors, it’s all too easy to confuse sex and adulthood.  So when I could get my hands on slightly warmer material (weirdly, in Portugal at the time either really bad SF or historical) I did, because I wanted to know what people were hiding from me.  Only normal, right?  It seemed like something everyone else did and knew, and I was being kept purposely away from it.

I think my first intimation that reading about sex wasn’t vitally fascinating to everyone came at about 14, while going through the book fair with my brother and his (mostly male) group of friends.  One of them was picking up all these explicit sex books and my brother asked him “Is it really going to tell you something you don’t know already?” (Brother is close to ten years older than I, and his friend was a medical student.)

That moment remains engraved in my mind, because I went “So, there’s a limited amount of stuff to know about sex.”  Which was by the way of being a revelation, and got the crux of why I read it then.

Now, is that why most people read it?  Uh… no.  Does all sex in books leave me cold?  Uh… no.  Does perverse sex or sex I’ve never participated in, or sex I wouldn’t want to participate in, leave me cold?  Uh… no.  Does everyone get turned on by the same things in books?  Oh, heck no.

Another way to trace my physical maturation/interest in sex is that around about fourteen to eighteen, when I wrote, the solution to every story problem was ALWAYS sex.  People fell in love because they’d had sex.  People killed because they wanted to have sex.  People dug for gold because they wanted sex… etc.

Now, I’m the last one to go against Heinlein, and he claimed that the mating game is the only game in town and everything else we do, from poetry to astrophysics are variations on a theme.  Maybe they are.  A lot of us are brainsexuals – we get turned on by the mind as much as the body.  (Though in my case at least the body needs to be male and, frankly, my being excessively monogamous, it needs to be my husband.)

BUT the point is sex is sublimated into poetry and astrophysics, and most of the time sublimated to such an extent that it no longer acts like sex in people’s brain.  What I mean is, thinking it’s all and always about the sex – and writing that way – seems to be very much an adolescent thing, regardless of the age of the writer.  Kids think sex is more important than it is because it’s forbidden and they get a charge out of reading/writing/thinking about it, because it has the charge of the “I shouldn’t be doing this” (this part is important.  Keep it in mind, because to an extent it’s a human thing.)

To take my questions above in order: I have absolutely no idea what people get turned on reading about.  Well, no, I lie.  I do.  I can figure that out by talking to friends and by examining sales figures for books.  What I can’t tell you is “do people like to read explicit sex so detailed it would put most sex manuals to shame?”  And if so “why?”

The sex is most urban fantasies goes a little beyond where I want to go in detail, but the sexual tension is about right.  My problem with detail is that I start feeling “OMG, I know where he put it.  You don’t need to tell me that.  OR what it looked like.”  And also, I think, because I’m a writer, if a chunk of prose violates my feeling of “this doesn’t advance the plot” it offends the writer in me to such an extent that I couldn’t read it with an impartial mind.

Do most people like the level of detail of sex in romances (ranging from about ten pages to half the book on the positions, what went where, how it felt when it got there, rinse, repeat.)?  I don’t know.  I bet you romance publishers don’t either.  While they have it as an article of faith that books with more sex sell better, I know of people who have standing orders at used bookstores for romances published prior to oh, 75, when most romances had next to no explicit sex.  These books are being read till they fall apart.  (No explicit sex is not the same as no sex.  Most of Heyer’s couples smolder.  They just never do more than kiss on screen.  And Mr. Darcy and Lizzy smolder.  You can feel the sexual attraction.  You don’t need to read about it, because your imagination is probably much more attuned to what you like and if you need to imagine, you can imagine what you like.)

I also know that publishers are not discounting from the “sex sells” bits like “how much heat does the relationship have even without that” – something that’s peculiar to a writer – and “what other factors contribute to the book selling?”  I know they’re not doing those calculations, because they never do them.  About anything, including cover and distribution.

However, from what I’ve seen – and I grant you I’m not seeing figures.  I don’t know if anyone is – books that are MOSTLY sex aren’t the ones that sell best.  Or even books that have explicit sex titles like “taken by” or “the hot” whatever.  The ones that sell best are the ones that hint at a complicated emotional relationship, which might then include sex “The Marquis’s reluctant bride.”  That sort of thing.

This is for women, of course.  Which is why I’m concentrating on romances.

I have this theory guys don’t get turned on by story.  (Studies have been done for this, and some gay guys do.  Some straight guys do too, but fewer.  It’s just not the way the majority of guys seem to get turned on.)  One thing we do seem to actually know is that what guys like are pictures – visuals.  And story or words are secondary.  (Which explains a lot of pornos, and even a lot of the way, as guys get chased away from reading, movies and tv series are starting to be edited, with cut after cut of sex/violence, sometimes with very little explanation between [something that drives me nuts, since I seem to be mostly word-activated, for both enjoyment and sex.  Very girly of me.])

And then we come to the forbidden.   All humans seem to have a sexual response to the forbidden.  Maybe part of this is because deep inside we’re all kids, reading the naughty stuff under the covers – who knows?  Maybe it’s because it’s often “new” and we never saw it or read it before.

Now, we’re not all alike.  Some things might be new and forbidden, but they immediately go straight to – in my brain – EW.  One of those is anything at all involving children or animals.  It’s so intense that honestly the thing about the character in Witchfinder having been a child prostitute felt HORRIBLE to me, and if I weren’t writing it in public, I might have walked away for a few months.  (It wouldn’t let me change it.  I tried.)  It goes ways past “forbidden” to “EW.  Burn it.”  I know that ick factor is different in people, and not just to the level of “well, that’s illegal and immoral.”

For instance my reading Fifty Shades Of Grey would last until we got to the sex, when I’d go “ew” and throw it against the wall.  Something that translates from my real life sex drive to the page is “pain comes in, arousal goes out.  No.”  I remember trying to read Kushiel’s Arrow when it was all the talk of the town.  When I got to the page where an eight year old girl stabs herself for sexual pleasure, the book went against the wall.

Later on, while it was on the “donate” pile, a friend picked it up and asked to borrow it.  I said “please keep it” and that’s the last I saw of it.

Most of the sex in books, while it doesn’t press my “ew” buttons, doesn’t press any buttons.  I’ve confessed before to going over the pages going “this is sex, still sex, etc.”  The difference is if the sex is essential to the relationship/development of the characters, then I’ll read it and appreciate it.

Mind you, appreciate doesn’t mean it turns me on.  Most of the time it doesn’t.  A lot of it can’t.  Look, I can read lesbian relationships as well as anything else, it’s just that I’ll read the sex under the “and that’s how their relationship changes” but it doesn’t do a thing for me.  And if they get REALLY explicit, it will trigger the “ew.”  Explicit hetero sex might or might not.  As might explicit gay male sex.  Most of the time – 99.9% of the time it neither disgusts me nor turns me on.  If it is profoundly detailed, it can ick me, or if the author clearly is obsessed with some kink I don’t share (most of them.  I’m very much meat and potatoes when it comes to real life sex.)

Let’s face it, what Florence King said about a bidet being essential to civilized homosexuality, can apply to ALL sex.  If you’re writing something in a time with no indoor plumbing, please please, I BEG OF YOU, don’t get detailed on me.  And if you’re talking about anal sex in ANY COMBINATION, you’d better have dang impressive bathing facilities available.  Some of us have an hygiene squigg which is far stronger than our turn on squigg. (Possibly a mommy deformation.)

Now we come to “two girls squigg you more than two guys?  But why?  I’ve heard even straight girls don’t mind or are turned on by lesbian sex!”  Yes, what you just heard was my snort.  It probably made the ground shake under your feet.  You’re probably a guy.  And you think all girls are 2 drinks away from girl on girl sex?

Look, it is natural in women not to want to talk about what turns them on.  It is also natural in us to humor the guys in our lives.  So, you know, he’s all enthusiastic about the lesbian couple in Buffy, we don’t tell him “I will never, ever, ever, ever, ever, in a million years forgive Joss Whedon for making Willow lesbian.  As a girl who went through school under suspicion of being lesbian for being bookish and liking jeans, I think he indulged his guy thing at the expense of all the other girls like me who will now be considered even more likely to be lesbians because “Willow”” You just smile and nurture that hatred in your heart.

Same thing with female writers not telling male editors “Stop already with the peaceful all-girl planets which are your excuse for getting your jollies from girl on girl sex and not admit to it, but pretend to have a higher message.  If you really think girls are more peaceful, you should have attended my middle school.”  (And then follow up with “no, girls are NOT turned on by girl on girl, though a significant number of them get turned on by guy on guy” And then get in his face and scream “Isn’t your assumption a little sexist?”)  I do, but I’m not most women, or most writers, and I have no self-preservation instinct.  And of course, there’s the part where girls care more for the relationship, and as long as there’s no sex ON SCREEN, girls can enjoy the show.  (Or close their eyes for the sex on screen thing.)

So what I’m saying is that we girls lie to you a lot.  Often compulsively.  You guys on the other hand go all vocal and tell us “two guys is just ew.”

Which is why  for a long time it was almost obligatory to have a lesbian couple in sf/f or mystery, but m/m romances only came into their own with the internet — and are really coming into their own in e-format.

I first found out about “slash” when a friend asked me to proof/help verify her thesis which was that slash was feminist literature.  Ooookay.  So, I visited these sites and… uh… most of the stories involved characters from series and movies.  Usually male characters, though you could have two females (very rare) or hetero couples who never had a relationship – or an open one – on screen (about 25% of the stories.)  Now those who know me know I don’t know most characters from series and movies, so I couldn’t work up an interest.  (The Spock/Kirk slash just makes me giggle.  Sorry, but…  I just DON’T see it.)  But I read enough to know this: these sites were incredibly popular; they were girl-land, with the plots being all girl slanted and the characters most often acting like girls with penises; most of the people writing and reading there were married women; the writing ranged from the “OMG, ew.” to the sublime.  The explicitness, as in romance, ranged from maybe a kiss (and those stories were uniformly okay and might have been good if I had any idea who the heck they were talking about) to “and then he put it in twenty five times at a five degree angle” (and those were, mostly “why do I need to know this?”) The ones in between were okay or not depending on how needed it was to the plot.

Before you think I devoted my life to studying this, let me say most of the knowledge is from the friend who did the research.  My foray into the sites lasted maybe a month in my spare time and was “oh, um” because like most fanfic they don’t develop the characters.  They count on the “emotional impact” from the movie or tv.  Since I lacked that, it was a “whatever.”… unless the rare writer actually went to the trouble of giving you enough to care.  (Because I am a professional writer, I recognized the style of a few friends.  They were, of course, the best stories.  And never worry, your secret is safe with me.)

I’ll confess even I, being an idiot, and being busy with my own writing, gave no more thought to the whole idea of what turns women on and how this might translate into sales in the indie world.  Until I went to RWA four (?) years ago and in a panel a woman said something about “the romance category that’s doing best online – in ebook format – is guy on guy for girls.”

I’ll confess I didn’t go out and look for it – look, kids, my to read pile is so big one day it will fall and reduce me to dust.  While I don’t object to guy on guy romances (given advanced bathrooms and no excessive detail) it’s not something I’ll go looking for obsessively.  So I did nothing about it, but remembered it.

And then two? Years ago I came across a book called Somebody Killed His Editor by Josh Lanyon and, duh, with a title like that, I had to get it.  I’m not going to lie and claim I didn’t know it had sex in it.  I did, and it did.  Though to be honest the sex was no more explicit than in about a low-to-medium straight romance.  The book itself was good and because it skewered (no, there are NO safe words on this subject) the publishing industry and accorded with my experience, I enjoyed it immensely.  I have since read most of his stuff, with varying degrees of enjoyment.  (Futuristic romance is NOT SF but I can’t stop thinking of it as SF, and then it annoys me.)

I know this is starting to (er) bleed through to normal publishing because Diana Gabaldon has the Lord John series.  That’s an example of the level of sex that does NOT bother me, in any way shape or form – in either straight or gay books – and that’s because it’s a reference to “and he did this” but no real detail.  (And let’s be grateful since this is pre-regency and she periodically makes reference to picking and killing lice.  EW.)

Will it squigg most male readers?  Possibly, but Gabaldon is writing in romance, where male readers are fewer.  (Though I actually stumbled on the series through an historical mystery recommendation site.)  I don’t think girl on girl with that level of sex would squigg me, because it’s not that explicit, but I might find it tiresome, because the character is very obviously gay and (in this case) thinks of just about every guy he meets in beddable terms.  (Which I understand is part of the male brain.  Shrug.)  I would not write a gay character that way because I aim for a more general audience.

One thing I can tell you about the m/m books is that to an extent they allow me to relax – they are less distorted by political correctness, unless they’re current day and have nods at “gays as victims.”  Less distorted?  Well, yes.  Lacking a female character, she can’t act like the world’s *ss while trying to show she’s “empowered” (for info see the female character in Pirates of the Caribbean who is exhibit a.  Her feminine semblables and comrades [I use the word advisedly] tromp stomp and act irrationally across most het romances.)  You remove the woman, all you have is the relationship, and since these are not real gay males,  (with varying degrees.  Lanyon’s are, at least, males in thought.  I mean, it feels to me like I’m reading about men, not girls in men bodies and it is therefore better.  But he still is aware of writing for girls and puts the emphasis  on the relationship not the sex) the relationship is all pure “feelings” goodness of the “I would die for you” kind.  And it has the spice of the forbidden.  Okay then.

So… Perversion?  Taboo?  Sick?  Does it bother men?  Women?  Dragons?  Horses? Flying Porpoises?  Penguins?

Guy on guy but slanted definitely for girls – I think most of my gay friends would piss themselves laughing reading these – seems to sell the best in the bespoke, boutique world of indie romances.  After that are guy/girl of various “forbidden” flavors, including but not limited to b & d and s & m (most of it painfully badly written.  Sorry, but it’s true.)  After that comes girl on girl, some distance away, (I understand from friends who write these that you could starve) probably because guys prefer pictures and the girls who would genuinely read girl on girl (i.e. lesbians) are a small minority.  I.e. if you don’t hook the heterosexual majority of at least one gender, your sales are going to (argh, no safe word) suck.

I’m not the kind of person who disapproves of sex as sex.  I’m not even the kind of person who disapproves of reading for titillation.  As long as people aren’t enacting it on the street and scaring the horses, I couldn’t care less.

I just would prefer that you guys writing/reading girl on girl be aware that making it “a peaceful all woman planet” will bring me to your door with a metaphorical machine gun.  Screaming.  Not today, not tomorrow, but eventually.

It’s not the sex that bothers me.  It’s the wrong headed politics and psychology.  And that is a reverse turn-on for me.

For the rest…  Titillating is bringing a feather to bed.  Kinky is bringing a live chicken.  When writing, sort of remember that and adhere to the less is more.

I don’t know how or why other people read sex, but I can tell you I’m more likely to read your story if your couple smolders but doesn’t tell me in explicit detail who got the beak and who got the wing.