Category: Uncategorized

Years ago when I’d written only one (largely unpublishable) novel and had yet to submit any longer piece of writing to any house (and my total submission of short stories were under a dozen) I spotted a huge error in a best selling book.

I did what many of my fans do and sat down to pen a letter to the author explaining why this was wrong.  And then realized that while I might not be the only one of his readers to spot it, I would almost certainly be the only one to care.

You see, the error I’d spotted could only be spotted by a native Portuguese speaker.  At that, it could only be spotted by a native Portuguese speaker who’d lived to maturity in Portugal.  And it might not matter to anyone else, because the society was not our own, and was in the future, so nine out of (the minuscule number of) fans in my situation they’d go “Oh.  It’s a different world.”  Besides, with that self-saving instinct that sometimes, rarely, comes out of nowhere to prevent my making an ass out of myself, I realized that – after all – this man was a best selling author (and spoke Portuguese, albeit not natively) and probably wouldn’t enjoy a letter from newby telling him “that is wrong because the language doesn’t allow you to think that way.  That is NOT funny in Portuguese, it’s only funny to speakers of Portuguese as a second language.”

I still don’t know the gentleman, but we have mutual friends, and I suspect if I ever met him, I could tell him that story and he would chuckle, or – because he’s an intelligent and curious man – go “Oh, why not?  What is the thought process that makes that impossible?”  Which could lead to a fascinating discussion on culture.

But here’s the thing, okay: You can’t research enough.  You just can’t.  I don’t wish to revive the argument with the non-fiction writer that sent a tenacious troll to my blog, but SERIOUSLY, you can’t research enough.

That book that popped me out of the page on two incidental lines was EXQUISITELY researched.  The author had lived in a Portuguese culture.  He spoke Portuguese.  He still had made several minor boners, and one major one.  Should he have researched more?

Oh, heck no.  The question you have to ask yourself is: how many people does the error affect?  For that one book, if I wasn’t the only one, I must have been close, because think on it: readers of Portuguese birth AND upbringing, who learned English well enough as a second language to read the untranslated book, (I don’t know how it’s now, but in my day when reading a translated book, any non-sequitor was glossed over and assumed to be a translation error.  For years I was puzzled by the construction “So and so said, and he was hot.”  The “hot” used was temperature, not attractiveness, but it still puzzled heck out of me.  I’d look at it and go “uh.  What the heck does temperature have to do with this?” and sometimes “Aren’t they in the middle of a snow storm?”  Turned out what they were trying to translate was “heatedly” which has no immediate correspondence in Portuguese and which, I guess, some translation technique class somewhere decided was an American quirk, “And sometimes they talk about how hot they are.  Just translate it and go on with life.”  So the errors I noted in that book would have been glossed over in Portuguese with the usual mumble of “dumb*ss translator” which I said so often my parents thought it was some kind of incantation.)  That group then gets thinned further to “number of people raised in Portugal who speaks native Portuguese and who is reading in English, and who likes science fiction and fantasy.”  (Now, note that we readers of sf/f are supposedly a tiny minority.)  Then add to that the filter of “And studied linguistics, and know that Portuguese doesn’t BEND that way, and know it well enough to be bothered.”  I think by that point you’re down to myself and some other girl I never met or heard of.
Note too that other than that major issue and a dozen ones too tiny to mention, I still loved the book.

Should the author have spent his entire life researching for this book to please me and Maria something or other up in Maine?  Well, let me see, first, he would have disappointed the hundreds of readers whom it didn’t bother by never writing that book, or any other.  Second, his family would have starved.  Third…  Yeah, no he shouldn’t.

There is another problem, too – the more you research, the more errors you’re going to make.  No?  Yeah.  Look, the more you research after that 99% needed for reasonable accuracy (I’m not suggesting you do TV show work – do you know how many times I have heard Portuguese referred to as speaking Spanish?  I have) the more you’ll get cocky and think you know stuff that just ain’t so.  (More on that later.)

So, to an extent the Lords of Political correctness are right, sitting in their NYC strongholds and saying that straight women can’t write gay men because they’re opaque to us; men can’t write women; white people can’t write black people (dooming my husband’s Ninth Euclid to the unpublished drawer – and yes, he will self-publish as soon as he can get time to do the rewrite necessary now it’s been nine years since he first wrote it.  Author’s pride and all that.); cats can’t write dogs, etc.

Why?  Because no matter how much you research, and how much you study, and how much you read, and how many friends of that persuasion/color/gender you have, you are not them.  (And let me tell you, guys, getting friends who lived in other centuries is a right b*tch.  The ouija keeps breaking.)

Like the author who knew Portuguese and Portuguese speakers really well, there will be one or two of those who will read your book and go “oh, heck no.  No, no, no, no, no.” from their own experience.  And sometimes they will even be right.  (I know at least one well researched non-fic book that is completely wrong according to my family history.  BUT my experience and my family’s is regional, quirky and suis generis, and even if the author knew about us, putting in “except the Silva family from Saint Gemil” is just over the top, no?  Besides, my grandfather would have got VERY upset.)

What the Lords of Political Correctness and Not A Sparrow Shall Take Offense fail to do is take that far enough.  They’re thinking in terms of people-who-matter-not-being-offended, i.e. people who can call on organizations and groups who will make the publisher’s life living hell if there’s an error.  Hence “no man can write a woman convincingly” bs.

It they had the honesty of their convictions, though, they’d say “you can only write what you are.  EVER.”

Which would lead of course, to the world’s most boring books.  You can only write what you are and what you know.  Because the past is another country and you really can’t study enough to know more than people who spend their lives studying one family over a fifteen year period – yes, they exist – and who know the napkin is folded wrong in your ballroom scene, you can’t write that.

So, we’d have ALL autobiographies.  And because most of those, to be interesting, are heavily fictionalized, we’d have BORING biographies.  Like…  “The last ten days and what I had for breakfast, by Sarah A. Hoyt.”  (While some of you might be crazy enough to read it, and my life might be crazy enough to make it fun – just tell me you wouldn’t prefer to read the next one of Shifters. [It’s in progress.  If you’re VERY good, I’ll give you little bits…] And at the end of it, because if you write what happened ten years ago it’s not the same person you’d end up with the parody book that Bucky, the cat from Get Fuzzy wrote “Chapter ten, in which I shift my butt.”

We ALL live in secret worlds.  Think about it.  How many times have I posted something here about “it’s how accountants do it,” only to have RES pop up like an actuarial accountantly (geesh) jack in box and go “Actually Sarah, that’s not precisely true.”  (Yes, RES knows about Area 51 and how to find it.  Fact.  And if you don’t get this joke, go watch Independence day.)  How many times have I put in a throw away line about “pioneer life” and had Celia come in to confirm or deny?

WE ALL, in our highly wealthy and specialized world know things that very few other people know.  If you want to write about anyone at all, you’re going to have to take a risk that a few people will know where you bsed to bridge over an awkward spot or information you simply couldn’t find.

I’m not suggesting that you should – because of that – go around writing only about what you know.  For one, how many of you are interested in how my office chair feels right now?  (Crappy.  I must buy another one soon.  The other day the left arm fell off and I had to screw it back on.  BUT that’s time to shop which I don’t have.  Also, we need to buy a new stove.)  And I’m not suggesting you travel to the exotic location you want to write about, because if you’re going traditional you’ll NEVER make more than the price of tickets.  And if you’re going indie, you won’t make the tickets back for years.  And, of course, if you have a time machine and can travel to the time of your civil war novel, first… WHY AREN’T YOU SHARING and second, are you insane?  Because, you know, they had diseases we don’t even have NAMES for.

And I’m certainly not suggesting you disguise as another race or gender, though people have done it to write books.  But even that doesn’t work, unless you’re writing about someone DISGUISING as another gender or race.  Because you can never, ever, ever have the experience of growing up as someone else, of being socialized as someone else, and of BEING someone else.

But that’s where the LOPC (Lords of Political Correctness) get it wrong too.  Because it’s not just that writers like to write about people not like them, they can come damn close to the feel.  Also, they can allow the reader to experience being someone else.  Because, you know, the people writing it from their experience, know their secret world, but they might not know how to cue people who are NOT in their secret world.  For instance, I couldn’t write Portugal when I started out, because I didn’t know what Americans thought they knew about it.  So…

So – assume – know that you’ll violate some secret world when you write.  Can’t be helped.  Then write what you want.

A few hints, to avoid getting TOO MANY angry letters:

1 – Research initially.  Enough to familiarize you with the time or the character or the science or all three (I have books like that.)

2 – Write the book.  You’ll never know all the details you need – like how someone does laundry! – until you write the book.  When you’re done print the manuscript and:

3- Read it over, flagging all the places you fudged or deduced from other similar cultures.

4- Research those specific details.

5- Find someone who knows the secret world.  Usually you can find someone no more than six degrees of separation or, if you’re me, you know ten people who can help you.  Have them read it.  Pay attention when they tell you “Sarah, it’s not this way.”  Or even “this scene sounds weird, I can’t tell you why.”  (And only ask them why they’re calling you Sarah AFTER you take notes.)  But what if it completely messes up your book if you change it?  Then think about it.  If your source who knows the secret world and who will probably get it goes “um, it’s probably me and two people…” then leave it in.

Secret worlds are meant to be exposed.  Books are the only way most of us can truly be someone else.  (Movies don’t allow that.  They allow you to see someone else.) Go and pull back the curtains.

I’ve talked before about the soccer clubs where I grew up, and I’ll start with that because it illustrates something without the immediate reaction that professional or political examples would bring.

Where I grew up, soccer is what people use to slot into the place reserved for tribal affiliation.  (I suspect the reason my family doesn’t give a hang about sports is that we’re affiliated with the sf/f tribe and have been from way back.)  Porto – Futebol Clube do Porto – is the club of the largest big city nearby and the “tribe” most people in the North root for.  Since this is not an affiliation of birth or of locality per se, though, there is always a desperate bastard or two – picture the hunch-back in 300 – who declares for Benfica, the Lisbon club, just to get everyone’s back up the wrong way.

To illustrate what lies between the two regions, they were on opposite sides of a civil war fought around the same time as the American civil war.  The overt reason was not the same.  The underlying reasons were fairly similar: catastrophic technological change, particularly industrialization.  (I’m not going to dispute that slavery was a great evil, or that it needed to be corrected, but the two sides had pulled together under the same yoke for a good long while.  The war was coming, but the covert precipitating reason determined the moment when it came.)  In Portugal the open reason was parliamentary vs. absolutist monarchy.

Porto was in the North and the North held for absolutism.  Yep.  My ancestors fought and died for the chance never to have a say in their governance again.  No, I can’t even understand that.  But there were other reasons there too, reasons of clan and family, of land and regional loyalty.

The North lost.  There was no reconstruction, but there sort of was.  There were no carpetbaggers, but there sort of were.  Nothing is ever overt or open, but Northern accents are “bad” and Northerners are “dumber” and I was once ordered off a public bus in Lisbon after I opened my mouth to ask something, because the conductor didn’t transport trash.  (Much to the bewilderment of my – then – American fiancé, who eventually decided to find it terribly funny.)  And because Lisbon is the seat of government, and governments tend to attract money like excrement attracts flies, Portugal often resembles a very large funnel with the hole at or about Lisbon.  (Beautiful city, at least twenty years more “advanced” than Porto.  I just can’t write that sentence without wanting to spit.)

The soccer disputes serve as cover for all of this.  As the clueless American tourist I’ve become, I once was there on the day of the last championship match.  Dan and I (Either this was before the kids were born or they were very little) took the car out to go to the center of the country (two? Three? Hour drive.  It’s a small country) to look at some Roman ruins.  On the way back, people kept honking at us.  It was driving Dan nuts.  He kept wondering what he’d done wrong.  We stopped and went over the car to make sure we weren’t spewing black smoke, or dragging a flat tire.  Nothing.  Then I noticed people flying a blue and white (Porto colors) flag out the window.  And people waving whatever they’d found in the car that was blue and white: kid’s toys, scarfs, a gloved hand.  This is when I realized that, as a loyal – coff, deranged – fan of Porto my dad had a mini-shrine to Porto in the little flat space behind the back seat, just under the back windshield: a blue and white scarf, surrounding a blue and a white dragon stuffie (the dragon is the symbol of the club.  Of course, the Lisbon one is the Eagle, which makes me so confused.) kicking a soccer ball.

All those honks were people trying to share their happiness.  After that, Dan enjoyed himself greatly, the rest of the way home, honking back at people and laughing because this was all so weird for him.

But of course, Porto doesn’t win every time.  And every time Porto loses, there are REASONS.  Yeah, okay, about one in ten times, my dad comes up with a reason that actually incriminates the club or one of its players.  Usually only one.  At worst the club is composed of ten extraordinary players, and one bum.  So it goes something like this “That John Doe, he’s such a bum.  If Porto just got rid of him, we’d have the best defensive line/goalies/kickers in the world.”

That’s one time in ten.  The other nine times, though, the fault is the referees.  Worse, if the game is against Benfica we know exactly whom to blame.  The referees were bought by Benfica.

This is not actually impossible.  Benfica is the “national club” and as such gets subsidies.  And you know, the Portuguese way of DOING BUSINESS, I mean, normal business, seems beyond corrupt to the average American.  (Though I daresay you encountered it if you did business with South America or Russia or even, I understand, China.)  It comes from Roman concepts of business and business morals.  There isn’t exactly payola, but there are nice gifts as a consideration to those who might look out for you in this deal.  There isn’t actually pay to play, but there is “one hand washes the other” – you do for me, I do for you.

So the idea that the referees are bought is not necessarily false.  It’s even possible that they really are bought every single time.  Possible – but unlikely.  And you know, I’ve known fans of Benfica (well, some of them clean up nice and get under your defenses before you realize the evil at the core you know [sheepish grin.] It was my dad’s nightmare I’d marry one of them) and they swear every time they lose, the referee was bought by Porto.  As a former fan of Porto, I have to tell you that’s just crazy talk.  First, our lot is too moral and upright to do that.  Second, why would we need to, since we consistently have the best team in the world, save for the one bum?
More seriously, it is highly doubtful that Porto ever has the money to buy referees.  (Though not impossible, they have a beautiful stadium, which my dad shows to the boys as a sacred shrine EVERY TIME we visit.)

What I’ve taken almost two pages to say is that perceptions lie.  There is a defense mechanism that says that you or the team you support can’t be wrong – or weak, or bad.

There is a defense mechanism too that says your writing can’t be bad.  And not just “it can’t be bad” in the sense that you’re the best writer in your writers’ group and you won a regional prize for your writing, and oh, yeah, your mommy loves you – no, part of you, part of event he most modest of writers insists that he/she must be the best writer in the world.  That she might not be (yet) Shakespeare or Austen, but she could be a contender.  (I assure my readers I TRULY don’t believe this in the daylight world – I’m not that nuts – and the voices are mostly under control.  Well, those voices, the other voices…)

So, how do I know that the dismay most of us, midlisters, feel when confronted with our statements, and the reasons we come up with : They don’t calculate the numbers right!  They’re robbing us!  It was the cover/laydown/lack of promotion!  Aren’t basically “those Benfica-bought referees!  We wuz robbed”?  How do I know the “well, you know, I wrote urban fantasy with no sex.  Of course it didn’t sell” isn’t the equivalent of “if only we got rid of that one bum.”

This has bothered me for years.  In fact, for years I refused to consider any of the above “excuses” because I could hear, in my mind, my dad ranting and foaming at the mouth about Benfica, and I knew that was crazy talk.  Besides, what else could I do?  There was no other pathway.

I was forced to confront it again this weekend, as a friend who is just starting out in writing and who hasn’t read any of the industry blogs, came to me and said “What do I do to break in?  How do I find an agent?”  (She’s been so unplugged, she didn’t realize I’d fired mine.)

I had to consider again what to advise, and what my experiences really met, and were they universal?  My friend is younger than I and very pretty, and could the industry go head over heels for her?

I had to think about it: my experience versus my excuses/ when I came in, versus the industry now.

I advised her to go indie first, and I think I made the right decision, but part of it involved deciding which of my excuses have to be real, because it makes no sense otherwise.

1- I’m almost sure that identical numbers, to the last digit, between books published under different names, in different genres (but by the same house – with one exception) are well nigh impossible.  I’m even willing to believe the houses aren’t stealing on purpose, but their calculations are obviously off, which means money is going to be free floating and falling from account to account, and it’s so easy to conveniently fall into the one you wish it to, then.

2 – It’s impossible that a system built on guessing how much a book will sell gets it right EVERY time, even with as much control as they’ve had over distro, tec.  The only way to do that is what my husband calls “Enron level corruption.”  (If those of you who know accounting better want to correct me on that, do so.)

3- Even if you’re going with a publisher who is the soul of probity (and remember bookstores and distributors aren’t even then, necessarily – and not even because they are crooked, but because so much of the practice is based on guesstimating shipments and sales.  Read Kris Rusch to find out how much) once you turn the book in, everything from cover to press releases to how much they PUSH is out of your control.  And all of those factors GREATLY influence how much a book sells.  (I’ll remind you again, with Draw One In The Dark I was so horrified at the cover that I didn’t want to be seen with my own book.)  When you’re a control freak, that tears you up inside.

4 – The industry really is in disarray.  Don’t listen to me, listen to them: the wailing and moaning about the end of their ability to “push”; the bookstores going out; the DOJ lawsuit…  It goes on.  If the industry isn’t collapsing, it’s collapsing and rebuilding at the same time.  From my angle it’s hard to tell.  (Kind of like driving into NYC the first time: is it being demolished or built up?  Yes.)  Entering the industry now is sort of like pitching a tent in the middle of a tsunami region, just as the water is receding miles off the shore.  You might be fine, and the water might bring you goodies you want and deposit them gently in front of your tent, but the odds are not in your favor.

Now, the one argument against this is that 80% of books are still sold on paper and that a publisher can still get you on shelves where your self-published book can’t go.

Against this, though, must be weighed the other side.  This field has always taken forever to break into.  ALWAYS.  I took close to 13 years of intermittent effort, but even the people who are whisked to Olympus in the arms of the gods take four to five years now. And the advances are diminishing.  I think the standard beginner advance now is four thousand dollars, and lower in Romance.  Add to that all the “we get to keep your copyright, your first born and all your cats” clauses that the Passive Voice has blogged so much about, and the advantages of going in to traditional publishing now diminish.

I can see someone where I am sacrificing the control and, in the long run, the money and still going traditional particularly in a series that’s doing well, so we can extend our reach and build our audience, so if/when we go fully indie, in the fullness of time (even publishers you love are usually wholly dependent on the life of one person.  It’s a flimsy protection against being locked out of the field) we have that much more following.  BUT for a beginner?  When you build in the ramp up/break in time?  Not a chance.

Plus, of course, nowadays, the best way for a newby to get a contract offer IS to have a successful indie book.

Which all brings us around to my spectacularly unsuccessful career (sort of.  Darkship Thieves, so far, has outsold all others of my books by ten times, and it’s still on shelves.  So, the books are still open on that – and btw, this was the book no one in the industry would touch for thirteen years because “space opera doesn’t sell.”  Yeah.) and my excuses.

I’m fairly sure the referees were bought.  Probably.  Besides, you know, there’s that one bum.  but I don’t need to worry about it if I go indie, because even if the books sell at the lowest level of my traditionally published books, on Amazon, at 3.99, I’ll get the same I got for my highest paid books.

And if they tank?  Well, I know who the bum is, and I can study and work on it.  Because there are no excuses.  I can stop wondering if it was the distribution/cover/publisher, or if it was based on my age/looks/ethnicity/politics.  I can stop fretting over how to make publishers love me, which is like being in middle school and wondering if the boy I like loves me (something I hated back then too.)

I can just look at the book and go “Well, that didn’t work.  Let me look at what does, and see what I can do.”  Then I can go to work.

I’m a strange woman.  I like that.

Update: The free short story is up.  You guys really need to remind me to change these every week.  (Sigh.)  I used to have a brain, then I had kids.

NOTE: We were without computers for a significant part of the morning, as we had a power outage.  I know I promised another post today, but I don’t feel like it, I don’t wanna, and I’m not gonna do it.  The sun is shining and I’m going for a walk and maybe a mini-golf game with the boys.

*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. *

Healing

How odd it was, Caroline thought, that Akakios had seemed so much smaller, so much younger in the cage.  From the moment he’d got hold of her and galloped with her across the clearing, she’d known him for what he was.  Young, yes.  Probably too young to count as an adult in the world of centaurs, but some years older than her.  She’d guess him to be nineteen or twenty, or maybe a little older.  Strong with it, too, despite his injuries.  He lifted her effortlessly, and his gallop faltered only once, when crossing the clearing, the type of almost tiny missteps that a horsewoman learned to identify as a sign of the mount being tired.

He had deposited her amid the other centaurs, and then she’d let her control over the unicorns slip.  She could hear them tramping and baying – an odd sound, unlike anything she’d ever heard before – in the direction from which she’d come, but the magic clearing where they lived seemed to hold them in their perimeter.

And Caroline, sitting on soft grass, beneath a canopy of trees, closed her eyes as the pain of her injuries hit her.  And undefinable time later, she became aware of two people arguing loudly next to her.

“– Already risked too much.  I will not let you,” the centaur chief was bellowing.

“In the great cause, I risked too much?  What have you risked, father?” and though she’d heard his voice only once before, she was absolutely sure this was Akakios.

“Everything but my one remaining son,” the chief answered.

“Ah.  And then it will all be for nothing, won’t it?” Akakios said.  “My brother’s sacrifice, everything we’ve done to restore the balance and bring the land under control?”

The chief sighed and Caroline thought there must be two sets of lungs at work there, because mere human lungs could not hold enough air for that long a sigh.  “Let her go with someone else.  Agapius or Thanos or… me, even.  There is no rule that says you must be the one to go through the forest of dread to free the stranger.”

“Just ast there was no rule to say Aniketos must be the one to risk himself to bring back the princess to Avalon.”

“And you know how that ended, you fool,” the chief said, his voice now bellowing out with a sense of outrage.

“He didn’t follow the rules.  He didn’t make it public what he’d done and why.”

“Something happened to prevent it,” his father said.  “You know he’d never–”

There must have been a sign somewhere, because their voice stopped abruptly and Caroline realized she’d opened her eyes, and was looking up at a bright blue sky through a canopy of leaves.  She also realized her skirt was hiked up, and her petticoats with it, and had a moment of dreadful fear.

Looking down, she saw a very odd face so close to her, that she let out a strangled scream.  It was broad and dark, crisscrossed by scars, surrounded by straggly white hair, ornamented by equally straggly white beard and, with all that, the possessor of the brightest, merriest pair of eyes she’d ever seen in any face.

It was the eyes that stopped her scream, and in the next moment she realized the smile that shaped the lips beneath the eyes was one of the kindest she’d ever seen too, and that the centaur – for it was a centaur – who was kneeling on the ground and had hiked up her clothes, was in fact doing something to her leg.  The something had made the pain go away entirely.

Caroline half sat up and looked down.  There were flasks of something green and herbal on the ground.  The elderly centaur had yet more flasks in a sort of sling across his middle, which had been fitted with little rings from which small bottles filled with varicolored liquids depended.

There was also a little pouch, from which the centaur now extracted a long roll of white cloth, which he started to wind about her thigh.

“Hello, Lady,” he said, when he saw her looking.  “I am Eleftherius and I am a healer.  I have mended your thigh and it should be strong enough to walk on in a very few hours.”

She blinked at him.  Her throat fell so dry that she thought she would die of thirst, but she remembered the injunction never to eat or drink anything in fairyland.  He gave her a smile, as though reading her thoughts.  “I can take care of that, too,” he said.  “Of your thirst and your hunger, lady, but it is a dangerous game, and one that could cost you your life.”

“My life?”

“Yes, for you see, if you don’t feel it, you might not know when you’ve run through all your reserves and your body is dying.  I can’t make you not hungry or not thirsty, you see.  I can only make you stop feeling it.”

Of course, at his words, hunger had joined the torment of thirst, and now she couldn’t think of anything else, couldn’t do anything else, but obsess about when next she would get water or food.  She had to be able to think.  She’d done two good deeds.  At least she hoped freeing Akakios counted as a good deed.  By the laws of fairykind, if she saved one more person, rescued one more victim in trouble, she should get her heart’s desire, which was to get Michael out of fairyland.  It couldn’t possibly take that long.  “Do it,” she said.  “Whatever it is you can do for my present relief.  I must be able to think.”

The centaur selected a flask from the array at his chest, carefully tore out a piece of cloth, soaked it in something blue that smelled faintly of aniseed, and put it against the back of Caroline’s hand.  It felt cool and wet, and she thought it was very silly as a means of stopping hunger and thirst.  But then there was a tingle of magic coursing through her, and she realized the liquid was more than some herbal medicine.  The need to eat and drink vanished.

And then, sitting up fully, she looked down and saw the medicine on her leg was magic too.  She should have known her.  Such a stab wound as she’d had could not be healed that quickly.

She looked over to the side, from which Akakios voice had come and she thought that Akakios too was festoned in white bandages and looked more lively than he had before.  “It was the iron cage,” he told her, as she looked at him.  “While we are not, like fairies or elves, or even dragons, incapable of touching or being near cold iron, and in fact many of us travel to non-magical worlds, iron will cloud our minds and hurt our bodies over time.  And I was in it so long, concentrating only on making my bleeding slow down, that I would have died very shortly.”  His voice vibrated with a strong emotion as he said, “I owe you my life, Lady Darkwater.”

“No,” she said.  And to his confused expression.  “Lady Darkwater is my mother.  I am Miss Darkwater or… or…” she reasoned thinking that he was some sort of prince, for unless she was very wrong indeed, his father was the king of all centaurs.  And if he was a prince, even of a different species, surely she ranked below him.  “Or Caroline.”

He inclined his head, a curtain of dark curls hiding a face that looked less pretty than it had when he’d been in that iron cage, but for all that not less attractive, with its beak of a nose and the intent dark eyes on either side of it.  “Caroline,” he said.  “I owe you my life.”

She didn’t know what there was in that statement to make his father draw the sort of breath only a centaur’s lungs could draw, seeming to gust on forever like an approaching storm.

Eleftherius the healer made a sound like chuckling, almost at the same time, only it was like chuckling and clucking your tongue all at once, and he said, his voice seeming to vibrate with some private joke.  “I shall give a bottle of this elixir, m’lady, the one that allows wounds to heal quickly.  You and prince Akakios will, perforce need it.”

“Yes,” Akakios said.  “Yes, thank you Euftherius.”

And at the same time his father said, “No.  No, I tell you, he shall not go.”

“Still fighting against the oracle, my kind?” Euftherius said with a chuckle to his voice.  “What good is it, when it was the oracle cast at your wedding, before either of your sons was born?”

“They said–” The king said, then let his breath out, again with a sound like gusting.  “They said there was a way out.”

“Only if you’re willing to let things lie as they are,” the centaur said.  “And for fairyland to wither and the worlds unending with it.  If you want to stop it, though the oracle told you what the price would be.”  His voice sounded like he was repeating memorized lines.  “You shall lose both sons, oh, king, nor shall your line ever again tread the glades of fairyland.”

The Lord’s Duty

Seraphim felt as though his world had plunged into madness.  First there was Nell’s being the lost princess of Avalon.  And she’d been in Avalon for over a year.  And no one knew.  That should have been impossible.

Princess, aye, and anyone of the blood, had more spells laid on them at birth than should be possible to contravene in any way.  Safety spells, sure, but locator spells too.

And yet, someone had got her out of the royal nursery, surrounded as it must have been by locator spells and spy spells and discouragement spells.  Someone had got her out and dropped her in the Mad– On Earth.  He was starting to learn that Earth was less of a madhouse than a world that moved according to rules Avalon wouldn’t be able to understand.  It wasn’t the same as having no rules.

As far as that went, it made perfect sense.  On Earth she would be out of the reach of mind probes and location spells.  But how had they got her out of the nursery to begin with?  And how could they have dropped her back in the world without anyone noticing.

He found he was chewing the corner of his lip, while Gabriel, the necromancer and Nell continued talking around him.  Half of his mind monitored what they were saying, but there was nothing new in it for him.  Nell was telling them of her reading, and was being told by Marlon, with insufferable, didactic patience, that her casting had been too broad to be meaningful…  Which Seraphim had known, he supposed, though he thought the casting had been useful, nonetheless.

He could not doubt that Nell was the princess.  It wasn’t just the medallion, perhaps the last hereditary line of magical defense, which nothing short of destroying all of Avalon’s system of magic could have stopped following her as an infant.  It was also her resemblance to the queen.  While a man might have bastards aplenty, and – had she resembled only her father – she might have been no more than a royal byblow, queens were in a different position and not many had unacknowledged children.  Oh, there were always legends, of course, but it didn’t apply here, because now that he knew what she was, he could see the power she had as the unlikely blend of her parents’ type of power.

No, Nell was the princess, right enough.  The necromancer had found her, too, before this.  But what did it all mean?

Out of the mess in his mind, a thought came, something Marlon Elfborn had said that made no sense.  “Your father?” he asked turning to the man who had been explaining to Nell how spells should be cast.  “You said your father and the Blaines were involved in this.  What did you mean by that.  Your name is Elfborn.  You are a magical halfling of no known parentage.”

The look that Marlon gave him was almost odd – half open mouth, as though a laugh had frozen halfway through emerging, and an arrested and yet somehow malevolent look to the eyes so strong, that Seraphim started to clench his fist in the ancient sign against the evil eye, before he realized the look was not really directed at him.  Marlon’s eyes might be turned in his direction, but he was really looking past Seraphim and at something or someone else entirely.

“I am Elfborn,” he said, after a while, when he could get his speech.  “Because I am unacknowledged by my father, though fain, I could have forced him to admit to me, but the game was not worth it.  I don’t want people to know I have his blood in my veins.  I would much rather not know I had his blood in my veins, if I could undo the knowledge.”

“He is human, then?”

“Oh, yes,” Marlon Elfborn said, and his voice echoed bitter and low.  “He is Lord Sydell.”

“Sydell!” Nell said, at the same time that Seraphim said, “The King’s ears.”

“Yes, indeed, and his eyes, and his secret hand too,” Marlon said, and the malevolent look was back in his eyes.

“But…”  Nell said.  “I worked for him.  I mean, after Antoine was captured, I was forced to work for him.”

“Were you now?” Marlon said.  “I wonder why, and what he planned that he had to wait for, thereby keeping you close and yet captive.  I wonder – I very much do – what my dear papa can have been thinking, and why he didn’t thrust you back to Earth as soon as he could.”

“Because he couldn’t,” that was Gabriel, quietly.  “Because her power wouldn’t allow him to do so, not once she had touched the soil of Avalon.  And that meant that he had to keep her subdued and hidden until he could… dispose of her more permanently.  Which might very well be what all this is about.”

“All this?  The coil ensnaring your family?” Marlon asked.  “My dear, I think that involves far more than disposing of her Highness.  For one, you and I know all too well it involves fairyland.”

“But–” Seraphim said.  “What are you two talking about?  You can’t mean that Sydell, the king’s right hand or at least his left had anything to do with…  You can’t mean the princess…”

But in his mind things were assembling in an all too clear pattern.  Who could make sure that the princess’s wards were perhaps not as strong as they should be – the king’s spy chief and head of protection services.  Who could make sure that any spells to trace or protect the princess were ineffective?  – Blaine’s blessings, which specialized in that sort of thing and had been in charge of the business.

But why?  If Nell stayed disappeared, the throne might – though it would take many many other deaths to do so – come to the Darkwaters, but it would never come to the Blaines.

Seraphim couldn’t say that had been part of the plan, to kill everyone in the way until his house inherited and Honoria Blaine married him.  He couldn’t say that because it was nonsensical.  So many deaths would need to happen that the amount stopped being serious and started being farcical.  And beyond all that, they couldn’t be sure he’d marry Honoria, certainly not back when Nell had disappeared.  And beyond that, Honoria had brothers, and surely her father would want them to inherit if inheriting were to be done.  No. That was not to be considered.

But something the Blaines had meant, and something they had done.  And the snare into which Seraphim had fallen had scattered his family and might have been designed to kill him – and Nell – off world.  In fact, now he thought about it, both their meeting and the trap set in Antoine’s body, had taken them to situations where they SHOULD have died.

He took a deep breath and announced suddenly, loudly, “I don’t think we’ll be able to figure out anything more tonight.  I think we should go to bed and sleep on it.”

They looked surprised, but they did not argue.  Which was good.  He had no intention of sleeping on it.  But he did intend to transport quietly to Avalon and have a long-delayed chat with Honoria.

Only not really, because if I went fishing I’d catch a ton of ideas.  This is my way of saying that Witchfinder will either appear very late today or early tomorrow, together with tomorrow’s post.

Sorry, but I was finishing a grossly overdue short story.  It took me so long to get it done and so much emotional energy that I had nothing left for the chapters of Witchfinder (probably chapters, as the rotation is getting shorter, which means one chapter would be too short.)  As you probably know this is a bad thing.

This is, of course, the drawback of doing this, as it were, on stage and in front of people.  I suspect porn actors must suffer from performance failures sometimes too (runs.)

Those of you following Witchfinder will get your fix just probably not today or really late today.  Those not following Witchfinder, feel free to continue discussion here of the recent posts.

Some news from this writer’s household.  The young — very young — raccoon trying to court one of the cats we feed at the back door, has now decided he’s a cat, and keeps trying to convince me of this.  I have told EVERYONE we’re no adopting it.  It’s a wild animal and might have rabies (yes, all the cats we can catch have their shots.)  This seems to have no effect on my sons who have now named it Bandit.  It is completely (!) unafraid of us.  I don’t want to know what kind of crazy a raccoon needs to be to think he’s a cat.

And speaking of a kind of crazy, Kris Rush talks about the crazy that is the book business right now.  The thing that struck me most was her note that B & N doesn’t want to sell you books.  When the musketeer mysteries were in full swing, fans ROUTINELY reported fights with B & N trying to get the books on the shelves, or at least special ordered.  Faced with irate fans demanding their fix, the B & N salespersons routinely — and “patiently” — explained they didn’t have room on their shelves for books no one wanted to read.  And of course they knew no one wanted to read the Musketeer mysteries — they told the fans howling for them — because their distributor had passed on them after (presumably) the sales person for the publishers had failed to push them, because they weren’t what was “hot” at the time.  What was hot at the time — or at least what filled every shelf devoted to “mystery” at B & N were chatty books about single women in large cities who solved murders while shopping for bitchin’ shoes.  I think that fad lasted — on shelves — all of a month, but it was what  B & N salespeople had been told would sell and, by gum, they believed.

Has it ever occurred to anyone that dogma and upward-down decisions might be fine for religion, but truly, truly suck for business?  Apparently not to B & N.  So, as they sink, they need a demon and that’s eeeevul Amazon.

I wonder — again, my view is limited, since I don’t have many friends who aren’t writers — how many industries are doing this.  I’ll note at my kid’s college orientation — where he’s going for mechanical and aerospace engineering — we were told that it’s very important to get your BA even if you end up working at Starbucks.   Apparently “studies” have proven that people with a bachelor degree are happier and healthier than those with a high school education.   Look, I understand they must keep their humanities department going (as a humanities graduate I have nothing against the discipline, but I did NOT take courses on commercial jingles or movie appreciation — though even in the eighties I had friends who did) and that not all kids want to study something that will give them a job, but… 

How much happier and healthier are those people with 100k in student debt working at Starbucks, again?  Have studies been done on those specific people?  Or is this the same sort of talk we get from publishers, denying reality and hoping that will make it go away?

I’m sure other companies are doing these.  In the tech boom years I was always amazed how the first thing a company did when it got in trouble was fire their R& D team.  Because success would come from selling the products that were failing, right?

Perhaps just perhaps having someone analyze what is happening in the field you work in then changing your model to suit would be better?  No? 

I know, I know, only someone who knows nothing about business would come up with this boneheaded a suggestion.  Which is fine.  Because reality always win and if publishing, and education, and for that matter tech, continue in the same old ways, something will replace them.  This is not me wishing them ill.  This is not necessarily what I wish will happen.  It is just the way reality works.  And reality, like her sister, life, is pure b*tch.

Any owner of cats will know of what I speak. Cats come at dawn to sit on your bed. They may not nip your nose or inhale your breath or make a sound. They simply sit there and stare at you until you open one eyelid and spy them there about to drop dead for need of feeding. So it is with ideas. They come silently in the hour of trying to wake up and remember my name. The notions and fancies sit on the edge of my wits, whisper in my ears and then, if I don’t rouse, give more than cats give: a good knock in the head, which gets me out and down to my typewriter before the ideas flee or die or both. In any event, I make the ideas come to me. I do not go to them. I provoke their patience by pretending disregard. This infuriates the latent creature until it is almost raving to be born and once born, nourished.
                                                                                                             Ray Bradbury

Listen, can we talk?  I think I’m in trouble.

Okay, I’ll just pull the couch over here and stretch out.  Forgive me Freud, for I have neurosis. (A chocolate to the first young man telling me where that quote is from.)

So… ideas.  How do they come at you?

I once met a writer – ONE in my entire career – who, sitting at a panel with me, told the crowd she would write more, if only she could have ideas.  I think she was lying to make herself more interesting.  Had to be.  What kind of misbegotten word-slinger has a paucity of IDEAS?  Most of us can’t get rid of the stuff.  We produce three novel ideas while cooking breakfast, four series assail us while brushing our teeth.  We shed short story ideas like my cat Havelock (a bioengineered organism designed to turn tuna into fur) sheds balls of fluff.  They gather ignored in the corners of the room, collect under the bed and generally make a mess of our mental plumbing.

In a way it’s a lot like when we first decided we wanted a cat.  We didn’t know anyone who had cats or kittens, and this was way pre-craigslist, and the time machine was broken – makes note  time machine/craigslist/kitten story – so I spend weeks moping about wailing about not finding kittens.

Then the same weekend a friend called to say her daughter, in a college dorm, had a highly secret cat who had dropped a litter of kittens… who wouldn’t remain secret much longer.  I agreed to take the orange twins (Pixel and Randy) ALL while my husband drove an hour away to visit family friends … who were getting ready to take a found-kitten to a dumpster to “fend for himself”.  That fender-for became Petronius the Arbiter about two seconds after he met Dan and wrapped him around his scruffy black paw.

And then, despite our best efforts to limit our household to “two cats only” tm, we’ve never had fewer than four.  I refuse to admit how many we had at one time – though to be honest three of them weren’t ours.

It is as though having lit the sign that says “Cats accepted here” we became a beacon for these multi-universe-hopping fuzzies to converge on.

Over the years, as we got better at feeding-on-the-porch but not letting them in the cats have become more creative and shown up on our doorstep (or friends’) orphaned, three weeks old and sick.  Or showing up at a mini-golf course, undernourished, covered in grease and with a broken tail.

My ideas are much like that.  It’s as though once I threw on the light going “writing stiff working here” the ideas converged from everywhere in the multiverse going “whoop, whoop, whoop, cranium space on isle four.”

In self defense, I’ve learned to treat them like we treat stray cats.  You don’t run out to meet them on the street.  You don’t invite them in.  You don’t lay a trail of crumbs to your door.  Instead, you sit a bit aloof, you feed them – sometimes – but you don’t let them fully in, and you watch if they can find another head to fester er… develop in.

You learn to avoid spaces where stray cats ideas hide.  You don’t approach the feral ones who attach to your mind with sharp claws and don’t let go till you write them.  Of course sometimes one of those – A Few Good Men – lurks where I least expect it – I was in the bathroom.  READING A ROMANCE FOR FONZI’S SAKE – and has its grubby claws in me before I see it.  Then I have to let it ride to the end, pushing everything I was supposed to be doing aside.

And then, if the ideas are “your sort” and have hung around long enough, and have grown and shown they can live with you and you with them, you let them and write them.  THAT is how it’s supposed to work.

You don’t go looking for them.  You most certainly don’t ask your friends for ideas.  You learn to avoid the conversations that are trending in a certain way.  (The phrases to watch for are “what if” and “wouldn’t it be neat” and also “Hey, I just thought.”  Words are also dangerous.  Words like “Imagine” and “think” and “time” and “space”.  After a while, when talking to other writers “The” “a” and “and” are not trustworthy either.)  – My friend Kate cautions you to never say “there’s a story in that” because there is, and it will happen to you.

My ideas and I have reached an uneasy truce.  Several uneasy truces – a series of carefully negotiated detentes eventually ending in surrender for either writer or story.  They understand I have only one set of fingers, and can only write one novel at a time.  (The whispers in the night that I should learn to type with my toes don’t really help.)  And they allow me a little peace if I write them down.  Which is why I have scraps of paper everywhere with scrawls like “the guy with the glass eye and the woman with the bionic arm.” – note: story about writer who dies and whose unwritten stories haunt his house, the characters battling it out for existence while trying to attract someone who will write them.– Sometimes, I think the more feral stories make me write them in my sleep.  At least I have no explanation for the entire (MEDIEVAL ROMANCE) novel in my hard drive that is undeniably mine but which I don’t remember writing.

The typical writer has loving thoughts about the cartoon character Calvin and his machine for turning earthworms into replica Calvins.  If only… oh, if only.  (Note – short story about writer who enslaves alternate universe selves to write for him.)

And sometimes you manage to give the idea to a friend and walk away whistling.  I know, btw, that the author who said she didn’t have enough ideas was lying, because when I offered to mail her my excess ones, she looked horrified.

But as I said, I’ve worked out an arrangement with my ideas, where I sometimes – rarely, I grant you – have time to you know… sleep.  Oh, and go to the bathroom. That last one is important, since graphomania doesn’t seem to doctors a good reason to insert a catheter.

Until this morning.

Okay, so I understand having four writers in a house is the same thing as having two cats… in the universe.  Something happens, where one of them is fine, but two or more… warp reality and things start happening that are really weird.  (Like, why is there Havelock fur inside the SEALED PLASTIC BAG for the t-shirts I just brought home from the store weird.)  One of the weird things is that ideas get discussed – and that’s fine.  Once an idea is halfway to being adopted and you’ve picked out a name, you might as well discuss it.  It’s the equivalent of buying another litter box.

BUT the ideas have broken detente.  They’re not playing fair.  This morning, as I huddled over my tea, trying to revive enough brain cells to write this blog, my older son came downstairs and said, That idea you wanted to write, you know, the sf YA series, based on the nursery rhyme…  Mind if I borrow a part of it?”

And when I said “I don’t have any YA series based on a nursery rhyme.”  He described it.  And he gave me the rhyme: Vintery Mintery Cutery Corn:”Vintery, mintery, cutery, corn, Apple seed and apple thorn;Wire, briar, limber lock,Three geese in a flock.One flew east, And one flew west,
And one flew over,The cuckoo’s nest.”

I’m not going to describe the idea for the series, because I know y’all and you’ll demand I write it all tomorrow.  Let’s just say it’s that rhyme meets Childhood’s End meets Darkship Thieves.  And when Robert told me the idea, I knew two things with absolute certainty: I’d never had this idea before.  And it was mine.  It was mine like my arm is mine or my eye is mine.  Undeniable.

Oh, a third thing – it was there, all six books and ready to be written.  SOBS.  How could it come in through my SON’S head?  What have I done to deserve this?  They’ve broken detente.  They’re on the path to assured Sarah destruction.

Forgive me Freud, for I have neurosis.  And ideas.  And now I’m going to run to the office and try to catch up on the backlog of ideas before they find more creative ways to ambush me.  What’s next?  Coded messages on the street lights?  Dirt patterns on the ceiling?

If they’re so smart, why don’t they write themselves?

Too late to fix another drink, the lights are going out.  I’ll just listen to the darkness sing, yeah I know what that’s about.
                                     Leonard Cohen

And this morning I learned we lost Ray Bradbury.

In the pantheon of my young years, where science fiction writers were gods (note small g) who lived across the sea in an inaccessible land called America, three reigned supreme: Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, and Clifford Simak.  (Yes, I know I’m weird.)

Around those clustered others: Asimov, Anderson, McCaffrey, Clarke, Turtledove too many to name them all, but all eliciting immediate buy orders from the brain on sight.

But those three were supreme, names to be pronounced and treasured, books to be anticipated for months before release.

Heinlein brought me up to a great extent, but Bradbury… Bradbury spoke directly to my poetic soul.  The first book I read in English was Dandelion Wine.  I still have it, that same copy, all underlined, with notations on the meaning of words on the side.  It took me months to read, but it was worth it.  And the richness of the words leached into my vocabulary and my own writing.

The first thing I translated in Techniques of Translation was a Ray Bradbury short – and it changed the teacher’s mind about “junky science fiction.”

When I applied to become an exchange student, I started the essay with a quote from Fahrenheit 451.  My first married year, I was thrown into raptures of magic the first time I saw an ice-cream truck.  There is a vintage carousel near us that is a place of enchantment for me and my children because of Ray Bradbury.

I was smart enough to realize what Ray did I could not do.  Sure, I can spin words and lots of them, but the magic that animated HIS words and made reality sparkle and flit with potentiality and power – that I did not have.  This realization probably saved me from a lucrative career in “literature.”  But I continued to enjoy his way with words, and his way with magic.

The quote above ran through my head when I heard of his death.  And sure, I know how to hear darkness sing, because Ray made it sing.  But even at the heart of his darkness, at the most scary moments of his stories, there was… humanity: humanity sometimes twisted and turned, but never despicable.  Humanity shining and singing: now dark, now bright, always interesting, always alive.  That is no mean gift, to spin of darkness a tapestry so enticing that others can find light in it.

And if the lights are going out, as the last of my giants passes from this world, what good is it to wail and beat our chests?  What good is it, either, as many of the present pygmies do, to try to stomp down their memory and make ourselves feel good?

Their lights have gone out, but we have these here matches, and maybe they’ll allow us to light something, and set the world of the mind ablaze – as they did.

You go on ahead, Ray.  I’m sure even now, in the eternal con bar, Heinlein is pouring some dandelion wine into your glass.

I’ll come, by and by, past the fortune teller and the dark streets of a small American town, circa 1920, across the amusement park where the merry-go-round beckons, across the ravine where dark and golden eyed forms loom, to take my place at the bar.

But meanwhile here there’s work to do.  I have this here match.  I’m not worthy of any of you.  I’m only a small human where giants trod.  But I’m going to see if I can set imaginations on fire.

Update: Thank you to Instapundit for the link, and as always, welcome instapundit readers.

This post is about learning.  It is not about schools, as such, though they are part of learning – it is about teaching and learning, though, the passing on of our civilization as it’s been passed on to us.  

In that respect, and as far as that goes, it is about writing too.  It is about every craft and everything – because it is about civilization and what is at the base of it.

I don’t know when I realized that not only weren’t most schools doing their job, they were going out of their way to not do their job and trying their best to keep kids from learning.  I think I started suspecting it as far back as elementary school.

Look, it was not much further than first grade when I had to teach Robert about spelling and grammar.  He went into school having taught himself to read, and clearly they weren’t teaching him to write.  Then I had to teach him long division – which because it is done with different symbols, etc, in Portugal means to this day he’s still doing long division by the archaic Portuguese method.  Then there was Marshall and multiplication tables.  It seemed like they weren’t teaching him to memorize them but expected him to know them.  He was doing okay – he’s good at calculating things in his head – but he was way too slow.  Teaching him by rote was like a revelation to him.  And there was, of course, the fact that Marshall has sensory issues which make him slow at reading and writing.  Or did.  The doctors gave us this list of exercises for him so complex that I didn’t get them, and I was supposed to give them to him.  They bored him stiff, so I had to chase him all over the house to make him do them.  And the more I thought of it, the more I REMEMBERED being so slow at reading and writing that writing my name (on average two surnames longer than my classmates) seemed like unusual hardship.  I remembered only the relatively lax village school saved me from having incomplete’s on tests because I was granted another half hour as a matter of course.  Yet by ninth grade, I was writing and reading faster than everyone else.  In between lay years when my father – who from his stories had the same issues – made me copy two pages of text an evening.  It seemed logical: I want the kid to write faster.  You do things faster with practice.  So I made him copy stuff (oh, the crying and gnashing of teeth) and I made him read aloud to me when I was cooking.  Within a year he was faster-than-age-norm.  His spelling and grammar improved, too.

Then came languages.  I’m not a natural foreign-language-learner.  I’ve seen what that looks like.  Drop my brother into a country whose language he’s never heard, and he emerges in two days, talking like a native.

I learn languages like I learn everything – slowly and with a ton of work.  I will forever be grateful to my first English teacher because after my first week in the class, when I’d been ignoring her because I had other priorities, she called me to the blackboard to conjugate to be and then, discovering I had tuned out the whole week, asked me vocabulary questions.  I knew nothing.  The humiliation was horrible, and I refused to be humiliated again.  I spent the weekend catching up and, because I knew the woman was clearly vindictive and capable of calling on me at any time, I stayed on top of the material.  I strongly suspect if that hadn’t happened, I’d never have been enamored of English, never have gone on to be an exchange student in Ohio… which means I wouldn’t be here today, posting this for you.

So when Robert just couldn’t seem to learn French, I thought “Well… he really doesn’t have a talent for language.”  And then one summer I looked at what he was actually doing in school.  He had three years of French then, had passed, but knew nothing.  There were French magazines and French games and pat phrases they learned.  NOWHERE was the basis of the language: verbs, vocabulary lists.  Part of this is because the taboo of translation.  Yes, yes, I know.  Some people learn better by total immersion.  People like my brother.  The problem is most people are NOT like my brother.  Most people need to know vocabulary and the structure of the language.  The other problem, of course, is that classroom (or even Rosetta Stone) is NOT total immersion.  You’ve not in the country, you don’t do everything in that language.  The other problem is that unless the person is already a linguist, acutely aware of the structure of languages and where the pieces go, teaching by total immersion… uh.  Find person who came into country as illiterate immigrant.  Now talk to them one or two years later.  That’s total immersion.  (The Columbian exchange student who came to the High School I did, speaking no English, by the end of the year could understand and make himself understood…  After a fashion.  Dan and I still talk about “Ricky English.”  For instance, he often said “You need go for store?” Understandable, yes.  Enough to allow him to function had he stayed here?  No.)

Of course by now you probably know I initiate wars of terror on my children in the name of learning at the drop of a hat – so yeah, Robert learned French that Summer.  The next year he read Dumas in French.  Which the teacher would say “see, that’s how you learn.”  BUT by then, he had memorized endless lists of vocabulary and been quizzed on irregular verbs, apropos nothing in the middle of the grocery store.

I thought about this because of my discussion with RES in the comment thread that will not die, about there being a distinct lack of knowledge of how to do things – even – particularly basic things.  My post cannibals was predicated on the belief that people know how to do things, but cut corners for profit or power, and of course that might be true in some cases, but I think it’s also not true in a lot of them.  This is my experience only, but I’ve found one good handyman in my married life, who knew how to do things I couldn’t figure out with a book and twenty minutes.  He’s dead (and sorely missed) now. Everyone else I’ve paid to do stuff because I didn’t know how, or didn’t have the time, the job was either so shoddy (tiles in the bathroom falling off after a week) I had to call them to redo it, or I had to bring out the encyclopedia of home repair and figure out how to fix it, or I had to live with an uneven kitchen floor.  Considering we buy fixer uppers, that’s a lot of instances, and while they’re not “data” they are significant.  I’ll add that most of these people were eager, honest and highly recommended.  And their work was OKAY.  Just okay, though.  Nothing a talented amateur couldn’t do.  (I’m not sure about talented, but I grew up as my grandfather’s carpenter “boy” so I’m not 100% amateur.  Just a very green beginner.)

This is not meant as an indictment of my kids’ teachers.  The school from which the younger just graduated was extraordinarily good.  When we transferred him there for the final two years, I was shocked to find there are still schools where the teachers love to teach and will learn stuff to teach if they have to.  BUT this is rare, now.  And part of it, I wonder if it is because these teachers don’t know how to teach.  They, themselves, weren’t taught as such.  They were just given principles that should work.

And then I thought about all the things I have had to learn to do, because not only was I never taught them, but there is no one around to teach me.  Stuff like proper ironing, or how to cook some things from scratch.  I find myself going to books pre World War II.

And then it hit me.  I have a theory.  I could be wrong, I often am.  BUT I think this is what happened to our civilization, causing the thread of learning and teaching to unravel.

Humans have always learned best as RES mentioned: apprentice, journeyman, master.  Even in the home we learned that way.  Daughters would be given simple tasks in the kitchen to keep them quiet and out of the way, then they learned those tasks and were useful at them, and learned a little more… and on.  Boys (and odd girls like me) followed father (or grandfather) around in the workshop.  They learned to hammer things in.  (For a long while I was nail-girl.  Yep, my job was to hold nails and proffer one when my grandfather called for it.  Only I wasn’t called nail girl, I was called “rapaz” – boy, synonym wiht apprentice.)  Eventually, at the end of this, when they were good at the simpler stuff, they learned the formulas for making varnish.  (School interfered.  I never did.)

This was the natural way of learning for rural, traditional communities.  One of the reasons sons used to follow fathers in the trade was that they already knew something.  This was not always so, though.  Both my grandfathers were carpenters though they both came from wealthy families who – for different reasons – chose to apprentice them to craftsmen.

Schools naturally taught the same way.  The kids lucky enough to go to school were taught by rote – that is, in simple tasks of repeating and memorizing.

Then came the twentieth century, the world wars, rapid industrialization, population mobility…

Part of it was the sheer disruption most of the world experienced, not just in the devastated countries.  But there was more – there as a need to teach people new things, very fast.  How could you be an automobile mechanic in the twenties by learning from your father?  Your father had never seen a car.

This gave rise to an industrial process of education.  Or rather, it cemented it.  The process was in place from the time of early industrialization and early nation states.  It created tenders for textile mills (more or less.)  But now, “experts” fanned out into the world to learn “best teaching practices.”  I.e. how to learn and how to teach.

And that’s where things went wrong, because humans aren’t all alike.  Anyone looking at me, plodding through verbs and conjunctions and coming out with errors will think “that’s no way to learn a language.”  Anyone looking at my brother emerging from a country in two weeks speaking like a native down to puns and word games will go “that’s the way to learn.”
One thing they missed – until I have his brain, I can’t learn as he does.  After the rote (after the first year, for English) I will profit from total immersion.  BUT the rote has to be there at the beginning.

The processes they replicated from language to learning to read were all for “exceptional readers” which… don’t work for normal human beings.  Rote works.  Rote is of course boring for the exceptional.  It is also – I think – boring for the teachers.

So they tried to make the exceptional work for everyone…

There are other issues there, of course, issues we won’t go into because I could be here all day.  But the thing is, for a while the sheer inanity of the process was masked by parents like me: parents who knew how to learn, knew how they learned, and while feeling guilty about it, took the kids aside and taught them by the age old method.  There were even some teachers who did (though I think administrators have run most of those out.)  But we’re now in the second, third, fifth generation past that, and people don’t know how to teach except by trying to teach kids (and adults) by methods that never worked but for a few exceptional people.

And we’re seeing this in all crafts – ALL crafts…  And the arts too.  There are things you can learn if you have a passion for them and you apply yourself.  Most things you can learn.  Heck, I’ve taught myself this writing thing.  But it’s not as easy to learn as if you were properly taught.  And it will leave holes.

I almost cried reading Heinlein’s bio, at his early editors and the time they took to teach him his craft, to guide him, to make him get a sense of what story was.  I got the same, of a sort, from reading Dwight Swain’s Techniques Of The Selling Writer.  But it was slow, plodding work and no one to tell me if I’d interpreted the instructions wrong.  Editors now expect you to come to them KNOWING.  And if your first book doesn’t take off, you’re out of there.  Because… you’re supposed to be a natural genius or nothing.  They’ve forgotten that people NEED to learn.  Even geniuses.  Perhaps there is somewhere, remote, a naturally gifted author who comes out of the gate good enough at all elements of writing.  No, wait, I know there is.  I just can’t get him to finish his d*mn book.

But that person would be “good enough” but not nearly as good as he could be… if he were taught.  Mind you, I think his arc would be more like my brother’s with language, but he still needs to have an arc.  And that person is one – ONE – I’ve met in a lifetime of tutoring fledgelings.

The myth of the genius, of the person “born knowing” is just that.  It works in movies and books and we – all of us – have forgotten it is not true.  Don’t fall for it.

Now… the internet is taking care of some of that.  People who are desperate to learn something can research it, find the old processes, practice it, talk to those who do it.  And that works fine for those of us who have a passion and a need to perfect a certain craft…  But what about the others?  What about the people who never even are taught to READ properly.  And don’t tell me they’re not capable.  One of the girls in my elementary school class was mentally impaired, probably at about six years of age for life.  She learned to read and write: clearly.  Yes, there will be extreme cases who can’t, but the vast majority of people are more than smart enough to learn to read and write – if they’re taught.

And what about the manual crafts.  It’s getting harder and hard to even find someone willing to do things like snake a pipe, even though it pays.  And part of it might be the perception of “menial” labor.  But part of it seems to be not knowing how, and not knowing how to learn.

We can’t afford this waste.  We can’t afford not to pass on the civilization bequeathed to us.  Things will only fall apart faster, unless we learn to teach and learn again.  In that respect, the thing that’s heartened me most is the parents in homeschooling and how homeschooling is becoming a movement of massive proportions.  They threw out the supposed best practices, and they’re just teaching their kids.

I think the indie movement will provoke a similar move in writing.  People will be able to “apprentice” by seeing what sells (not to distributors, but to the public) and then wading in and doing it themselves.

I don’t know enough to know what is happening in other fields, and whether technology is forcing us past that “don’t know how to and can’t learn” thing.  I’m sure commenters will inform me.

I just know that – barring brain implants for learning, and I wouldn’t count on them – it’s a civilizational hurdle that MUST be overcome.

Let’s figure out how.  Let’s get ’er done.

(This is a guest post by Amanda Green who posted over at Mad Genius Club, also.  I’m echoing by permission.  I will — probably — try to post again this afternoon, but no promises.  There’s a possibility my sewer is backing up, which means I might be VERY busy the rest of the day.  Yes, most of you know what Amanda is talking about BUT it can never be said too much.  Her listening to Twisted Sister, though, THAT I have NO explanation for.)

We’re not gonna take it anymore!

by Amanda Green

I woke this morning with this Twisted Sister song ringing through my head. The video, which I hadn’t seen in years, was vivid in my mind. The image of the father, leaning over his son, demanding “What do you want to do with your life?” was right there.Except this time, instead of straight laced father and rocker kid, it was legacy publishing and an author.

What do i want to do with my life? That’s simple. I want to write. I want to write stories I want to write and that the public enjoys and will read. I want to write them when I want to write them and bring them out when I think they should be. That means, gasp, taking control of my publishing life and turning my back on legacy publishing and on agents, at least until the roller coaster the publishing industry is currently on slows down and sanity returns to the board rooms.

The time is past for publishers to look to bean counters to tell them what authors to buy and what books to publish. The problem with this method is that the process is flawed from the onset. The bean counters are using data that is flawed. They are basing their decision on sales. But guess what, those sales figures aren’t accurate. No way and no how are they accurate. Whenever you rely upon a third party to gather your sales data and that third party is not gathering data from all your sales outlets it will be flawed. But when that third party gathers data from less than half the book sellers in the country — and I’ll bet you a drink and dinner that’s the case with Bookscan — then your data is seriously flawed. Oh, I know Bookscan, like with the Nielson ratings, says they have a good mathematical formula to extrapolate fairly accurate figures. But the truth is still there. They are guessing. And who is that gets hurt? Authors. We get hurt because the publisher doesn’t worry about checking the Bookscan numbers against the print run figures, distribution figures and return figures. So, the publisher gets to keep all that extra money floating around and doesn’t have to report it to the creator of the product.

And we have let them get away with it.

But there is another problem with what the bean counters are saying. They are basing their decisions on information they gather today. They aren’t taking into account the fact it will take 12 – 24 months to get a book into print and on the shelves. Remember, these are legacy publishers. They don’t give a flying flip about e-book sales.

That time lapse means readers will very likely find other things to read, other trends to follow. Does anyone remember all the Da Vinci Code-lite books that came out and failed? There are others. How many Harry Potter-lite books came out and never made a ripple on the sales charts?

Now there is another trend with legacy publishers that we, as authors, have to be aware of. Amanda Hocking was the darling of the self-published. She made a huge splash through good story telling and hard work on the social networks. As a result, she was one of the first “indies” to be a real success. Guess what happened. Legacy publishing came rushing to her door, pounding to be let in. With major hoopla, she was signed to a mult-book contract by St. Martin’s. If I remember correctly, they’ve pushed out three books by her in the time since her signing. But has anyone really heard much about her or those books? I certainly haven’t. So where is all that promotion they promised?

But it gets worse. Worse for authors and, in the long run, for readers. Several of us have already written about how publishers are wanting us to sign over our copyright, not for a reasonable period of time, but for the life of the copyright. Folks, that means that not only will we be long gone before copyright returns to our family but so will our children. Hell, at the rate things are going in the industry, so will the publisher. Which means if there isn’t a very good reversion clause, our copyright will be in limbo and require court action to get it back. Do we want to saddle our families with that years after we are gone?

But there’s something we haven’t talked much about and that is how agents are also in the grab game. There are agents out there that, when they agree to represent your book, guess what, it is for the length of copyright as well. Okay, I don’t know about you, but unless agents are zombies or vampires — both of which are possible, given some of the folks in the business. I swear, there are times I think Kate is right about editors being minor demons, etc. — why in hell do they want this? Oh, I know. Money. They don’t want the writer to be able to take the book elsewhere after the contract ends, even if they have done nothing to help the author get a better deal or to get better promotion for the title.

Look, I have absolutely nothing against the agents who are out there fighting for their clients. There are still some of the “good guys” in the business. But they are becoming the exception and not the rule. Agents are letting publishers get by with putting in the non-compete clauses and right of first refusal — without a time frame for that refusal to be given being defined in the contract. Agents aren’t pushing legacy publishers to live up to the promotion clauses in the contracts. Agents aren’t telling their clients they are signing over their copyrights for years after the author dies. And, as I noted in my previous post, a lot of agents are asking the author before even accepting the author as a client what their business plan and marketing plan happen to be.

I have one response to that: WTF?!?

When is legacy publishing going to realize we, as authors, do have alternatives to them. There are small and micro presses that will do everything the legacy publishers do and still give us a bigger piece of the pie. Hell, these small presses actually do more than legacy publishers do in a lot of cases because so many of these small presses were started by authors fed up with how they’d been treated by their publishers.

Oh, we’ve heard all the responses from legacy publishers and their sock puppets. We know the onus that has been attached for decades to self-publishing. We’ve been told that we will never again be published by a “real” publisher if we go this route and we will never be respected as writers.

Well, guess what. Most of us never have and never will be respected as writers by legacy publishers. The writers they are dissing are the mid-listers, the work horses who kept the house afloat without any gratitude from the publishers. They always held the carrot of better advances, more promotion out in front of us but they very rarely delivered.

When that argument doesn’t work, we’re warned that Amazon is evil. It is casting its net far and wide to destroy brick and mortar bookstores and to lure unsuspecting authors in with its KDP terms. But we should beware. Amazon is evil — I said that, right? — and will turn on us when we least suspect it.

Hmm, sort of sounds like legacy publishing, doesn’t it?

There are logic problems with these dire warnings. The first is that Amazon isn’t out to destroy brick and mortar stores. That isn’t Amazon’s goal, although it may help cause the ultimate demise of the big box stores. But guess what? These same big box stores that are crying foul about Amazon are the same stores that swooped into our neighborhoods 20 years ago or so and drove out our locally owned stores. The ability of the big box stores to buy in bulk and then discount their prices below what the indies could afford to do drove the stake into the smaller stores. Hmm, ability to buy in bulk, ability to dictate terms to publishers, ability to discount prices…seems like those big box stores did exactly to their smaller competitors what they are now complaining about Amazon doing to them.

As for luring us in with great royalty terms only to turn on us later, well, that’s in our court as authors, isn’t it? If we have learned nothing from what has been happening the last five years in publishing, we should have learned to start reading the fine print in our contracts. If we haven’t, well, then it’s on our heads. But, when faced with the opportunity to take a 70% royalty (65% on BN) from Amazon for a novel I’ve written if I put it up myself or 50 – 60% royalty if I go through a small press like Naked Reader Press versus 15 – 25% from a legacy publisher (of which your agent, if you have one, gets a cut), I’ll take the larger percentages.

Can I self-publish? Absolutely. I even have some titles in the queue that I will put up on my own. However, I bring the bulk of my titles out through the small press route because I don’t have the time nor the talent to design my own covers. I know I can’t edit my own work and I don’t want to have to worry about obtaining my own ISBN. It is worth the slight decrease in royalties to me to have that taken care of. I justify it as no real out of pocket expense because it isn’t money I have to put up before ever seeing a dime of profit. But that is my choice.

Maybe the reason I’m so willing to take this leap of faith into small press and self-publishing is because I’ve been on the receiving end of some of the things I’ve warned others about. I’ve submitted to an agent who said she was still accepting submissions only to receive a response back 8 minutes after hitting the send button. Eight minutes. Not even enough time to open the attachments and read the pages. No, this was simply an agent who, for whatever reason, was willing to hold that carrot out in front of eager writers trying to break into legacy publishing by finding an agent first and then beat those same writers with the stick the carrot was tied to. Then there’s the agent who asked for several rewrites and then “forgot” they had my manuscript — for months and months and months. Then there was the editor who really liked my book but who wanted me to rewrite it in first person because paranormals were always in first person. That one really had me scratching my head because the book was an urban fantasy, not a paranormal romance. Hell, there was no romance in it and certainly no sex. But, because it had a female main character who happened to shapeshift, it was automatically pigeonholed at PR.

Give me a break.

Or maybe it’s because I’ve grown up in Texas where we take pride in the fact we are a right to work state. Hell, we take pride in being contrary and bucking authority. Add in stubborn German pride and the Irish “screw ’em” attitude toward authority figures and I guess it’s no wonder I don’t take kindly to legacy publishers trying to strip away all my rights to something I’ve worked so hard to create and who, at the same time, are probably going to try to rob me blind through some very creative accounting methods.

The truth of the matter is that none of us have to take it anymore. We do have alternatives. Hell’s bells, if we have to make sure we send an edited manuscript to our agents and editors before they “edit” it — and yes, there are a number of authors who pay freelance editors to go over their work before submitting it because they know there will be no real editing done by their editors at certain legacy publishers — and we have to do our own marketing and promotion and do it on  our own dime, why are we giving legacy publishers the majority of money earned by our hard work? We are the creators. Without us, what would the legacy publishers have?

So, in the words of Twisted Sister:

The truth of the matter is, we do have a choice now. Publishing in not the closed industry it used to be. We are no longer the orphan Oliver saying, “Please, sir, I’d like some more.” Nor do we have to bend over, cough and take in it the rear just to have some air of so-called legitimacy.

When I write posts like this, I think of Howard Rourk blowing up the Courtland Building. No, I’m not saying I am destroying an industry I built. I may be full of myself at times, but never to that degree. No, the Howard Rourks I’m thinking of are the Sarahs and Daves and other authors who have fought and struggled to survive in an industry that has done its best to screw them over (and, for the record, I do NOT mean Baen here. Baen is the one main publisher I would consider signing with right now because I do agree with most of what Baen stands for, especially when it comes to e-books). Legacy publishing is the Courtland Building. The plunger and explosives are the various programs like Amazon’s KDP, the weapons in the hands of writers to bring down something they helped create but that has been corrupted by others.

I’m ready and willing to help place my hands on that metaphorical plunger and destroy something that has been so corrupted that it now works against our best interest as readers and writers. Are you?

There has been a study done, recently, which discovered that people greatly overestimated the number of minorities among them.  The article I read mostly referred to gay people, but there were equally interesting studies/slip ups with various races, religions and handicapped people.

At least part of the reason for this is that these minorities tend to be prominently featured in book and movie and tv.  Part of it is, as Dave Freer talks about today (second half of his post at Mad Genius Club) that trolls can be very vocal; that some minorities back the trolls and that writers are socially inept and don’t generally want to fight … Or couldn’t, while they were working through the politically-correct houses and distributors.  Now some of us are discovering we have untold reservoirs of rage ready to explode at a moment’s notice (yes, I’m keeping it under control.  Mostly.  The words Sarah Smash strike fear in the heart of sensible men, though.  sensible women too, and possibly even sensible dragons).  The other part of it, of course, was that a way to be seen to be “good” by a big house — where they probably could no longer evaluate your writing, much less care if the readers liked what you wrote — was to be seen to back an important “cause” and to get the backing from the – often vocal – supporters of this cause.

I have to say, from personal experience, as far as that goes, having (even sympathetic) gay characters is a bust.  It might actually get you in trouble with the pc police if you’re writing a different gender and you’re straight, because you’re “stealing victimhood” and also, say, a gay man is completely opaque to me and I can’t tell how he thinks.  (Bless one of my gay friends who, when informed of this, said “I should hope I’m opaque to you.  Would you really want to see me digest the hamburger I had for lunch?”)

If you were a woman, a good way to be seen as “good” and be promoted to the skies and beyond was to be “feminist” which of course earned you the buying power of the largest group, because, oddly, women manage to be a minority while being the majority of the population.  It’s all very bewildering. Oh, and if you were a minority say, because of a Latin last name, you HAD to write minority victim stories.

Of course, I was born contrary, so even though I knew perfectly well how to get the attention and the approval of the big wigs, I wanted to earn my way up with good stories.  Yeah, you know how well that worked.  Never mind.

I do however have gay characters and I was thinking over the weekend as to WHY.  Oh, I have gay friends, but that’s not it.  I don’t base my characters on my friends.  (Unless one or more of you shifts into a dragon.)

So why do I have gay characters?  (If you count them in my case it averages to around 10% which the study said was still way too high.  I’m not sure.  I think this is very hard to survey.  From my real life experience I’d think 10% was about right.)  In my case, honestly, because I like to make life difficult for my characters.  It’s not the “gay character” thing it’s the “character has a secret thing.”  Or “character has to work around a more difficult labyrinth than other people do.”  This is why I’m MORE likely to have a gay character where it’s forbidden or difficult to be gay.  It gives me another bewildering plot point to confuse matters and… well, another way to torture the character.  Where it would be a non-even – the shifter series! – and wouldn’t make the characters’ life more difficult at all, I don’t have any gay characters.  (The refinishing mysteries?  Think about it.  I’m making life more difficult for DYCE.  She’s a woman raised by crazy parents, who is at odds with reality in general.  Her best friend couldn’t be a woman, unless I made that woman even crazier…  So… her best friend is a gay male, a position that puts him also slightly askew to reality and makes them both spin sideways at a tilt… thereby solving mysteries that would escape normal minds.  That Ben is the voice of reason in those books – except about his own love life – is a clue at how difficult I’m making Dyce’s life.)

Okay, Sarah, you say.  BUT you’re an author, and a weird one.  I know these days there is almost no book I can open or show I can watch without either the “wise gay character” or the “victim gay character” – sometimes both being the same.

Yeah.  I can’t explain it, as such, but I can tell you HOW that came about.

It starts with the Taboo.  How many of you read Nemesis by Agatha Christie in the seventies? And how many felt a frisson or horror and shock when the motive at the end is revealed to be lesbianism?  (And for that matter cross age and creepy, but never mind.)

Back when homosexuality was the love that dare not speak its name (or as we call it around this house, given two of my cats and their proclivities, the love that dare not meow its name) no one anticipated it as a motive.  It was a total surprise, a great way to throw out red herrings, and the shock of it was big enough to make the book memorable and to hide any clumsy thumb marks leading up to the conclusion.

We writers are magpies.  We can’t look at anything that works that well and not go “ooh, shiny.”  So… throughout the seventies there was a gallop of gay… mostly villains.  Mostly villains until either someone thought “hey, that’s not fair” or “OMG, what if I turn it around?  What he’s hiding is that he loves so and so and that makes him seem like the murderer, but he’s really a good guy.”  Enter a cavalcade of hidden virtuous gay people.  (And eventually — shocking — open, virtuous gay people.)

Of course, meanwhile gay rights were advancing, people were exiting the closet in droves, and at some point someone thought, “I know, I’ll get double author points.  I’ll make gay people victims, because humans always root for the underdog.”

Enter a cavalcade of mysteries where the solution was always “He was killed because he was gay and so and so hated it.”  These books routinely go against the wall, as do the books that say things like “It was all a mob plot” or “he just went crazy.”  They go against the wall because they’re boring and predictable, and instead of reflecting the human condition hold up a kid’s crayon drawing and tell you it’s a true picture.

The thing is, this too is passing away.  We’re now getting the “he’s gay, he’s the murderer and he was driven to it because people hated him.”  Um…  We’re coming back, you see, through a circuitous route to the “gay murderers” – and those are shocking, of course, because for so many years we weren’t allowed to do it.  (And I’ll add a great part of the search for the shocking is that PC has made it impossible to REALLY DISCUSS the stuff the writers worry about, like [well, I’m a writer] what is honor, or what you owe other humans, or what is the ultimate fate of humanity, or is a flea really a rat and a boy when it comes to suffering?  Robbed of the ability to make readers think, a lot of us have decided to resort to “Ah!  Shocking.”)

This too shall pass.  The reason the gay whatever was once powerful was that it was taboo.  Writers got used to coasting on that frisson.  Now they’re not taboo, the frisson is not there, and while many of us will continue to use gay characters (look, Bub, I don’t even fully control who my characters are.  They even insist on certain names.  I often don’t find out why till the book is almost done.  Sometimes I NEVER find out) because it’s a useful way to torture the critters and also because they allow for someone slightly outside and askew (more so for historical characters.) we will have to write a book that works without the “oh, shocking, gay.”

Personally, since I realized that was the “easy way out” about fifteen years ago, I’ve been trying to do just that.  So while I have gay characters, that will not be the thing that carries the book.  Even when it’s the main character or one of the triggers of the plot, there will be other reasons and other tasks to accomplish.  And the book will not be ABOUT being gay.  (Though at least one of them is about being odd.  No, it’s not out yet.)  Since my characters don’t have sex on screen — really — I don’t see why anyone can care that much, anyway.

Other writers…  To no one’s surprise at least half of them aren’t getting the message and will continue to purchase “victimhood” points and “relevancy” points and induce “Ah! Gay!” shock.  This will probably last as long as publishers have ANY power to push a book.  I’m not going to make bets for after.

More interesting is how tv writers (okay, guys, let’s not be mean, they have to accomplish a load of work in very short space) have now strayed from “Ah!  Gay!” to “Ah! Weird!”  This is how I stopped watching mystery shows.  I’m willing to believe – at least in my circles – that there are about 10% gay people around.  I am however not willing to believe there are even 0.1% autoerotic autophage cannibals, or transsexual incest fetishists or pedophilic bestiaphiles who prefer to have sex in free fall.  Okay, okay, I made up that one – but not the other two, which tells you how far the writers are going for “Ah! Shock!  You never saw it coming!”  (And I will not apologize.  In this subject there are no – groans – safe words.)

What that is becoming is ultimately “the villain is insane and has this compulsion” which in the end of course means that there is no rational reason and it’s an unsatisfying mystery.  (At least for me.  Tons of people like it.)  The same for every other form of writing, btw – to some extent all writing is mystery because there’s usually some knowledge the reader must discover or some secret the characters don’t know.

I’m betting that as more people go indie, and as indie writers become more experienced, we’ll see the fictional universe reflect the “real universe.”  I’ll continue having about 10% gay characters, including possibly some main ones (which was forbidden in traditional publishing.  Don’t even ask.)  And they’ll be good/bad/indifferent.  I might have fewer black characters than I “should” by strict head count simply because of where I live.  Yes, I know that sounds weird, but the west has a lower black population (no, I’m NOT going to call them African Americans.  First, because Mike Kabongo will hurt me.  Second because most of my characters are NOT American or, now I think about it, African) than most of the rest of the country, and this seems to seep in through my consciousness.  I noted my percentage of black characters dropped since I moved here.  Which doesn’t/shouldn’t matter except for giving future whiners the chance to call me racist.  (Rolls eyes.  I think the only people I beat on by default are blond women, and yeah, I’d mind if my sister married one.  Actually it’s an old all-girl school in a Latin country injury. The blond chicks tended to be unbelievably stuck up.)

OTOH at least in the Earth Revolution books I have one planned that’s set mostly in Africa and its dependencies, so… that should set that balance straight.  And the fact that I’m even worrying about this, shows you the things we’ve had to take in account in our writing that should never have crossed the mind of any novelist.

Hopefully going indie will allow us to stop counting heads and wondering what the editors will think of us, or what group will picket the publishers’ door, and write what we feel needs to be written.

And the taboo?  There will always be taboos.   They will always be a frisson of shock that hides a multitude of sins.  If you discover one that no one else has had the guts to use (and that isn’t so completely bizarre that readers roll their eyes) go for it.  Just remember, after the first time it loses most of its potency.  (I TOLD you there were no safe words.)

And if you find yourself relying on it, it’s become a crutch.  Find what parts of the book you need to shore up and throw away the taboo.  It will save you coming up with a villain – or a hero – who gets his jollies by watching Venusians mate while suspended upside down in cherry jello.

Yesterday in the comments someone mentioned giving back to the community.  That is one of those phrases that makes my eyes turn red and smoke come pouring out of my ears in loony-tunes style.

Don’t misunderstand me.  It’s not that I don’t believe in “community.”  Or rather, I hate the word community.  I prefer almost any other word including “group.”

But I believe in groups of people and I believe in the synergy of groups – not so much, mind, that the group is better than the sum of its parts, but that the group is the sum of its parts.  Or healthy individuals make healthy groups.  Or whatever you’d like to call it.

I’ve been a member of several groups that for a while made it easier for me to reach my goals, and I still am a member of groups that do.  I used to be a member of a largish (I think we were ten people at our greatest size) writers group that, while it lasted, made it easier for me to focus and work every week, despite having small kids and a schedule so full that any writing time came off sleep time.  I used to get up at five in the morning so I had two quiet hours of writing before the kids woke up.

I’m now a member of a much smaller writers group that is not quite so focused, but which talks me through snares and supports me when I’m in the dumps.  The same applies to the somewhat larger group of friends (some of whom are writers.)

Of course, looking further back, I was a member of an extended family.  In my case when I title something “me and my cousins” I’m not just talking about the Arab proverb.  By culture or design (I never knew which) though my family ran to small nuclear families, the cousin-group was raised more or less in and out of each other’s pockets.  I used to think of my cousins the way Americans think of their siblings.  In many ways, I still do.  If I managed to be a solitary kid at all, it was because I was so much younger than the rest of them, being almost ten years younger than my brother, who in turn was five years younger than the (female) cousin who was raised (even more so than our other cousins) as our sister, and who is four years older than him.  The other day I almost died watching this video, because that baby elephant was me, from trying to get involved in stuff that was well beyond him, to giving up, throwing himself to the floor and trying to become the center of attention.  Yes, I had a very happy childhood.  Idyllic in many ways.  Not “ideal” which is not the same thing, but good enough.

And of course I’m still a member of that family, even far away, and I’m a member of my nuclear family, and our family sometimes worries me that it might be too close.  We didn’t raise the boys to be our friends.  That was not our job.  Our job was to raise them to be adults and to trust them to find their own friends.  Of course they have done that.  But we seem to accidentally have become friends, somewhere along the way.  Not equals, but you don’t have to be equals to be friends.  I realized we were going the friend route when vacations with the boys were way more fun than vacations alone with Dan.  We might now be at the point – with them living in the house through college, and us wanting to reclaim our lives again – when we need to resume running away from them for some periods of time.  BUT it can’t be denied that the family is a group, and a functional group at that, which allows each of the members to excel.

Heck, this blog has become a group of regular commenters, a “blog community” (one of the few times this word is more appropriate than group) which adds to my own experience in writing the blog.  I know whatever I throw at you will be enlarged and deepened, or just made more fun by your takes on it.

So, why is community appropriate in this case and not in the others?

Because “community” is – at least in my mind – a more undefined and softer edged critter than “group.”  A group is me and Bob and Joe and Mary.  A community is “the group of people who comment on this blog” which, yes, has some core groups, but meanders and changes and defines itself differently moment to moment.  In that sense, community is a term out of sociology.  Take a mountain village.  It’s a community.  Is it the same group it was a year ago?  Maybe.  Depends on how many people moved in and out.  Is it the same it was 100 years ago?  Oh, h*ll no.  With bells on.  People have died and been born, and, if it’s in the States, moved in and out.  You’ll be lucky if there’s one person who is a direct descendant of someone who lived there 100 years ago.  Unlike a group, also, you’re not aware of everyone in the group and usually don’t have any say in who joins and who leaves.

This might not be true in communities where you have to be voted in, like country clubs, and in many groups – families – you might not have much of a say on who joins or leaves, either.  And of course some groups are too large for you to be aware of every member.  And of course, some groups are too vast for you to be aware of every member.

Now that I’ve made a big muddle out of those definitions, let me try to make some clarity: I view a group as more of an association of individuals.  You’re part of a group because you want to be, and your individuality matters to the group.  A community, on the other hand is a group of undefined faces.  “People” belong to communities, but it won’t be the same over time.  There can be groups within communities.  There is a definite group of core miscreants in the community of regular commnters on this blog, and I worry when one of them disappears too long and start wondering if I did something to offend him/her.  But there is a larger community around that group: people who come in now and then, in a way that’s statistically but not individually significant.  In the same way, when the Baen bar was healthy, I knew “mine” in Sarah’s Diner, which was definitely a group (at least at its core) but we existed within the community of the Baen Bar, from which a few stragglers would join us or stray out on a more or less random pattern.  To make it clearer: My writers group, but the writing community; my family, but the community we live in; my friends but the community of writers in the area.

So, now that we’re clear as mud, let’s talk about “giving back to the community.”  (Give me a minute.  Must control fist of doom.  Okay.  I think– Yeah.  I’m all right now.)

Why does that phrase annoy me?  Haven’t I said that various groups, starting with my family have helped me along the way?  Aren’t I prone to books that become group efforts?  Even in Darkship Thieves, with an individualistic narrator, told first person, would Thena have got anywhere without Kit and his family?

Yeah.  Okay.  I’m not advocating the lone wolf way of life.  I’m actually – particularly for a writer – highly social.  My profile can tip introverted or extroverted, depending on how I feel.  And though I recently had the first party we’ve held in 9 years, it wasn’t so much not wanting to do it, as the fact that my schedule has kept me in “h*ll on Earth” for about that long.  I love AIM and email because it allows me to get work done AND talk to my friends every day, on my own schedule.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: humans are social animals.  It is both our downfall in many ways, and one of our greatest advantages.

No, what gets on my nerves is two fold “community” and “giving back.”

First of all, let’s define community as it applies to any individual.  What communities am I a member of?  Well, I’m an American (Thank you, G-d, thank you, for allowing me to find my tribe.)  I’m a Coloradan.  I’m part of the science fiction community and the writer community.  I’m part of a community of libertarian (note small l, guys) thinkers community.  I’m part of the cat rescue community.

So, what am I complaining about?  Shouldn’t I be giving back to those communities?

These are my middle fingers.  See them?  They’re waving in the air.  Yes, it’s rude.  But it’s not as rude as telling me I need to “give back.”

I should give back what?  What have I STOLEN or TAKEN from anyone?

“But Sarah,” you’ll say, “doesn’t being an American give you the freedom and peace of mind to carry on your life?  Don’t you like the rights you have as an American, to make an example of a community?  How could you have anything or be anything if you were squatting in a dirt pile, clutching a spear to defend your food?”

Uh.  Right.  And every one of the other American citizens has decided, FOR MY SAKE to make sure that we live in an ordered and lawful society, have they?  All this effort has been expended to let little Sarah achieve her goals, is that it?

“Well, no” you say “that would be ridiculous.  But we have these laws and conventions and customs that allow each of us to develop and do our best.  It’s a community.  You got to give back.”

See middle finger?  We are a nation founded on laws.  Those laws allow each of us to do our best – that’s why we have these laws.  It’s called our constitution and to the extent it’s not ignored, it works better than any other organizing charter in the world.  BUT it doesn’t work because we each wake up in the morning, sing kumbaya and decide to abide by it.  It works because it functions well with human nature.

To hell with you and your giving back.  My duties as an American are to defend and uphold the Constitution that made me an American (yes, I took that oath when I got citizenship.)  That’s not giving back.  That’s my duty.

“Okay, okay,” you say.  “What about the writer community?  Are you going to deny you’ve had mentors along the way, people who put themselves out to teach you and help you become the writer you are today in both craft and career?”

I have no intention of denying that.  Yes, a lot of writers help me and have helped me.  Yes, some sacrificed time and earnings to do so, or risked displeasing their publishers.

So, shouldn’t you give back?  Well… no.  What I got was freely given.  This doesn’t mean I’m a monster of ingratitude.  Most of the people who helped me along the way have claims on me.  I’ll do anything for them when I can.  Some have tested this.  BUT it is not “giving back.”  I didn’t steal something from them that I’m scrupulously returning.  Rather, I’m under obligation to their kindness and their friendship FREELY given to me.  And they have the claims of kindness and friendship on me.  What is the difference?  Well, for one I don’t feel I owe them a finite amount.  Their claim on me is infinite.  I’ll do what I can when I can until one of us dies.

I also pay it forward.  Some of you I mentor, even if I’m the world’s worst mentor ever.  (I hope this will change as I’m more able to control my own schedule and perhaps as health stabilizes a little after this upcoming round of “consorting with doctors.”) And I teach a workshop in Bedford, TX, ever September (and no, the price doesn’t go to me.  It benefits the local library.)  And I try to advise people online.

Do I do this to give back?  Well, hell no.  I didn’t take anything away from the newbies coming in.  I do it because I’m human and I remember being where they are.  I needed help (and eventually got it, but not a for a while.  I didn’t KNOW anyone) and so I give help.  It’s a love offering, freely given.  It’s also, in a way, a self-interested act.  When my newbies develop nicely, I have new authors I love to read.  As a reader that’s a plus.  (And I’m eagerly waiting Kate Paulk’s next con book.)

“You call it love offering, we call it giving back.  Why are you arguing words?”

Because words matter.  When you give back something, you return what you took.  It’s an obligation – sometimes a legal obligation – and it puts you under a constraint to act a certain way.  Now, I don’t know about you, but when I undertake work under an obligation, I feel like I’m lifting a very large rock, pushing and making an effort to get it where it needs to go.  I rarely fulfill an obligation, particularly while someone stands over me screaming “you owe me” with a light and happy heart. RES has made the point in the comments that it’s hard to do for money what you do for enjoyment, and the same thing applies.  I’ve found that I have an almost pathological distaste for editing – even though NRP is waiting for me to do some of it – if I’m obliged to do it by contract.  I will read/critique friends stories fine, but NOT if I’m the editor for an antho, say.  If I owe it, I keep blocking on doing it.  If I owe it, then I hate doing it, and will try to do it as quickly as possible.

Most of all I hate the idea of “giving back” because it presumes that the individual is nothing without the undefined, faceless community.  No one is going to dispute that people do best with rule of law and private property (well, the “community people” might dispute that last.  That’s all right.  They’re wrong) but the “community” doesn’t do that for the benefit of its members.  Rather, each of its members does that for his/her own benefit.

I also hate the (you knew we’d come to it, right) Marxist ethos at the back of that phrase.  In “giving back” is the idea that whatever you achieved was achieved at a cost to others.  Instead of a group, where we each do better because we have this charter that supports all of us (which is what the best writers groups I belonged to were) we end up with the idea that people did this FOR you and that whatever you have came at their expense.

It all comes back in the end to the idea of economics as a finite pie and a closed system.  This is completely insane (each of us now has more “wealth” than any king in the Middle Ages) but it is the only way Marx could define envy as a virtue, and, by gum, he was running with that.  Envy is only a virtue if anyone who does better is a thief.  Someone needs to “give back” only if he took more than his fair share.

This is my middle finger.  See my middle finger?

But I’m not a thief.  I didn’t steal.  And the faceless “community” can earn its own rewards as I have.  I will give, but I won’t “give back.”  I will volunteer, but I volunteer because I want to.  (A lot of my volunteering involves saving orphan and sick kittens, and much as the cats I’ve known have enriched my life, I don’t owe the “cat community” anything.)  VOLUNTEER should be just that.  Don’t get me started on the schools that “require” “volunteer hours.”  It strikes me as getting kids used to slavery, and I disapprove of slavery.

What I have is mine and I earned it.  I will pay back the debts I know I owe along the way – and the cornucopia of the retribution on those is infinite, mostly because what I was given was a free offering, and I return it as such.  There is no limit to what I can give in those cases.

For the others, the ones who want a piece of me because “you’re not squatting in the dirt and defending your possessions against all comers” can have my middle finger.

The end result of your envy and your belief anyone who achieves anything owes you something IS a society where we each squat in the dirt and fight off entitled little pests like you.  (Well, not really like you.  You’ll be long dead.)  I will fight to my last breath your attempts to make me “give back.”

Go and make your own.