Category: Uncategorized

If you look in the comments to the post below, you’ll note that Maureen Ogle has commented.  Honestly, honestly guys – seriously – I don’t have it in for Ms. Ogle, even if her point of view is somewhat insular.

After what ALL OF US here and Mad Genius Club and at Passive Voice and at Kris Writes and at Dean Wesley Smith’s site have done for the last … three? years, she would like me to write something for the Atlantic, explaining what we do as fiction writers, and how new publishing affects us.

Yes, the suggestion annoyed me, MOSTLY because I have a congenital stiffness of the spine, and telling me that after ten years and twenty one novels (I admit to) I should go hat in hand and be a newby in another field JUST to please someone else gives me heartburn.  Particularly when I’ve explained ALL THAT’S RELEVANT in other venues.

However, let’s stipulate something: when I say that I WILL NOT spend my time trying to break into something with the Atlantic’s circulation, when I can, without effort, put blogs up at similar circulation, it’s not the money or the small readership I object to.  It’s the “breaking in” part.  When I do my blog tours, I do “no blog too small” meaning I blog for twenty people, some days.  BUT here’s the thing – the bloggers take what I give them, I don’t have to sign contracts.  I don’t have to bother with multiple rewrites.  It’s less time.  Besides… things on line have a way of propagating.

So, while I was taking a shower (we will not talk of the frosting incident.  No.  We WON’T.) I thought of a counter challenge.

Because I don’t have it in for Ms. Ogle, and because she probably represents my polar opposite in many ways, and because we can both use the publicity and things on line have a way of propagating…

I suggest we both sacrifice some time, for the chance of some publicity wider than we would otherwise get AND for the rather altruistic (eep) possibility of enlightening others.

I am throwing down the gauntlet for the Hoyt-Ogle dialogues.  (Or Ogle-Hoyt, though that seems like a weird command and I’m not even wearing lace stockings.)

Here are my proposed rules, though I’ll accept tweaking:

1- We start with our history in publishing – how we broke in, what contacts we had, how things went.  One post.

2 – We take questions from our respective, collective and individual readers about what we do, what it pays, and what we see happening around us in publishing AND how it affects us AND where it’s all going. (We will pick questions by the method of “if one of us wants to answer it, the other will.  We will take NO questions that insult one or both of us, of course.”

3- We will keep it civil and each one talk about what she sees and her experience, rather than engage in arguments (though “in my case” is allowed.)  And while I’m just a midlist writer, I shall bring in stunt brains by quoting for instance Kris Rusch and J.A. Konrath where applicable.        

4 – I can get it – probably – linked at very large sites, with a lot of readership (PJMedia Lifestyle comes to mind).  I’ll have to check, but I don’t see why not.  Some of them I have keys to.  You are free to do likewise.  I will however echo each of our “twin” posts in my blog, and you’re free to do so in yours.

If we do this right, we’ll both bring our worlds into collision and perhaps get some publicity.  More importantly, perhaps we’ll each understand each other’s point of view better.

Interested?

I’ll leave the gauntlet lying there.  I shall go frost (ARGH) a cake.

Today is one of those very weird days.  I woke up with the vague idea I’d do a post on foreshadowing, which seemed appropriate since today I’m building a robot out of cake, which is probably not something any of you would anticipate as one of my activities for any given day.  Not something I’d anticipate, either, for that matter.  Though I can bake, since we’ve been on low carb for… eternity give or take an eon, very little of it has happened.  And I was always more of the “make it tasty” school of culinary excellence.

So? — So.  It’s the final party for the robotics kids, and they’re SUCH good kids, and the parents are bringing stuff in for them, and I lost my mind.  THREE TIMES.  First, I volunteered to bring a cake.  Second, I decided not to order it (our favorite bakery has gone out, I don’t know the others, and if I’m paying it best be VERY good.  And third when I decided this would be a tri-d robot.  IF I can assemble it without all of it falling apart, I shall post pictures.

Anyway, I was going to do a post about foreshadowing, except my mind is full of devil’s food (as opposed to being the devil’s playground!) and frosting, so I was very glad to find that my friend Kate Paulk at Mad Genius Club did a post that SHOULD be echoed.

Kate’s post is important because it captures HOW NEW this all is.  Metaphorically speaking, this is not the seventh day and the Earth shiny and new and not quite dried in places.  No — hard as this is to believe with how many pioneers there are who’ve been doing the indie thing for years — this is the third day.  We just got plants, we’re not sure what the animals will be or if there will be animals, and those lights in the sky might be stars or oncoming meteors.  Half of our posts are to figure out what in heck is going on FOR OURSELVES.  I’m not sure readers get that.  And I’m fairly sure that the writers who are like a c-section trying to crawl back into their mother’s womb DON’T get that.  They think we’re “gloating” or “dancing” or being “ingrate” to the publishing establishment.  (But that’s a bad thought, and I have a robot to build.  You guys who read Asterix, Asterix and the Cauldron to be exact, should recognize the allusion: FUNDAMENTALLY I have a robot cake to build.)

Without further ado, I give you Kate Paulk, aka da Mad Aussie, aka, the Winch Wench.  (And if you haven’t read ConVent, you should.)

Talking to the other side

by Kate Paulk

And no, I don’t mean dead people. I mean non-writers and writers whose usual fields aren’t the ones we frequent.

Why? Well, between the furor that seems to have finally died over Sarah’s analysis (and anger) over a non-fiction author’s assumption that fiction is easy – just making things up (and therefore more amenable to self-publishing and not getting destroyed by changing times), and the non-fiction author’s response (and challenge) I realized that yeah, we do tend to get wound up in our own universe and frame of reference and forget that there are other people out there with other points of view.

For those who choose to read the comments, especially on Sarah’s blog (things got rather… ahem… animated – I had fun playing with the guy who was either criminally dense or deliberately obfuscating, and may have crossed a few lines there, but that’s me for you. I like playing whackatroll, and seeing how much it takes before the brains splatter everywhere or they start flapping and frothing and contradicting themselves… What? I never said I was nice). Um. Anyway, I realized that between the Mad Genius Club and Sarah’s blog, there’s been quite the evolution of views and development of a new paradigm.

So here’s where I see it. Apologies if this is way too obvious for anyone: I’m trying to look at where we are here from the perspective of someone outside.

Essential vocabulary:

• Heinleining: fitting the salient details seamlessly into the narrative and action, without overloading the reader with details
• Good research: in the fiction world, especially genre, this is research that’s mostly or entirely invisible but makes the whole piece feel solid and ‘real’. Even if it’s about cyborg zombies.
• Time: a mysterious entity no author has enough of.
• Money: see ‘Time’.

Where we stand: in the middle of an ever-widening chasm, trying to keep enough appendages (virtual or otherwise) attached to something so we don’t plummet to our metaphorical deaths-as-writers in the gaping pit that used to be traditional publishing. Traditional publishing is the corpse kind of sort of straddling the gap. I know it’s still twitching: ignore that. Some kind of parasitic outgrowth could still find roots in there and produce something, but for all bar the uber-bestsellers and the industry daaaaahlings (they’re the ones who got gifted with the numbers that should have been credited to the midlisters – visit The Business Rusch for details – that thing is deader than dead, the serious kind of dead that doesn’t get up and start lurching around. There may be a bridge somewhere off in the distance but most of us are right here near that corpse, since it used to be what fed/kept/chained us. Us in this case not including me personally. I’m generalizing here, okay?

Where we’re going: sod if we know, but we’re trying anything that looks good in case it works. Most of us figure that the more different tactics we can get into the mix, the more likely we’ll find one that lets us survive as writers, and maybe even thrive. We’re all banking on the long tail concept – our potential audience is now everyone in the world who can read English (say about a billion people), so we can do well with a really tiny proportion of those people as fans – and cumulative volume – twenty books or more at $5 apiece, which nets an independent $3.50 a sale from Amazon (I’ll use them as the example), each selling 100 copies a month is $350 x 20 – $7000 a month. And since the independent is the one controlling what’s there, those books never go out of print. The first one starts earning a few sales a month when it’s put up, and it’s still earning five years later when the author’s entire trunk list has gone up and there’s now a good, solid income stream. Length doesn’t matter – independents can put up short pieces (short stories, or for the non-fiction minded, monographs) that take a lot less time to write, and have a fat-looking list, all of it selling for not too much, but continuing to sell for as long as there’s an internet.

The catch – and there’s always a catch – is that it takes time for all of this to build. A young writer doesn’t have as much to publish as a more established writer, and none of us have enough money or time. It takes time to properly format anything for ebook reading, and money to get a cover that won’t scream “stock art” or “amateur” (Ask Amanda if you want info on her epublishing online course – she’ll let you in and give you the website. Or just scroll back through the history here until you find it.). Unless you’re one of those fortunate individuals who are good artists as well, in which case you’re going to need more time. So it’s slow. Most of us are holding two or more jobs. Some of us the “day job” is writing for traditional publishing houses, for others it’s a salaried thing. It’s still a time sink.

The key thing – and probably the only thing keeping all of us going – is that there’s hope where there wasn’t before. Within the last couple of years, self-publishing has become both possible and a viable way to enter the market as a writer. We’re not limited to the stale old “just like the last big hit, only different” that’s all mainstream’s managed for years. We’re not having our books – and careers – killed by editors who think we’re not “sexy” or “interesting” enough to justify selling. We’re not being nixed by glorified accountants who reward meeting the sales prediction even if it’s bad and penalize not meeting it when it’s good. (You outside the field, you’ve wondered why there’s so little that interests you in the bookstores now? That’s why. You’re not jaded. Fiction’s been murdered by glorified accountants who think one book is just like any other book. Sarah’s posted about that, too.)

So, give us time. Give us patience. We’re figuring this out as we go, and many of us are escaping an abusive relationship (with the publishing houses) as well, so the process is going to be a little (okay, a lot) messy. But we’ll get there in the end. We might even figure out where ‘there’ is.

I used to be able to pass.  Long ago, before I became a writer and stood out on the ledge of eccentricity doing my own things.

Pass, you say?  Pass as what?  If you’re looking at me and wondering if I’m part of a racial minority – well, both the kids tend to be identified as Latin on sight, which is odd, because I’m not (identified as such.  According to Los Federales I AM Latin), but that’s not even racial, it’s cultural.  Not that a few choice idiots won’t hold it against the boys, the same way I’ve had a few people tell me to go back to Mexico.  (Fortunately my habit of spending most of the day inside and the fact my hair went white at twenty eight and I can dye it any color I want make me rather blandly Mediterranean.  Not that my original color of mahogany-brown was particularly ethnic.  Actually it just looked dyed.)  But that’s neither here nor there.  My husband who was born in New England and, if he spends enough time in the sun, looks merely “white” has been told to go back to Russia.  (This still puzzles me.  I mean, do they think the name was originally Hoytinski?)  And I’m sure if I were a blond, blue-eyed woman named Mary Jones some idiot would discriminate against me because he hates blonds.  Which in a way is part of our discussion, and in a way it totally is not.

No, racial discrimination is more or less verboten in the States these days and though voluntary segregation (more on this later, as again, it’s germane and not) is probably worse than never, people just don’t seem to care about race or different subrace as much as they once did.  In fact, racism has become such a taboo for most normal human beings in the US (the asses you shall always have with you) that an accusation of racism has now become a weapon under which to hide repulsive habits, bizarre beliefs and oddly destructive attitudes.  “You don’t like my habit of burning babies alive because you hate my Carthagenian ancestry, you racist” would totally work in modern day America.  (More on this later, too, as it just gave me an idea for a modest proposal.)  I don’t vouch for other countries, though I will say that those where I’m privileged to mingle with common people and listen to their conversations are about twenty and sometimes fifty years behind us in removing that racist thing from their culture.  Yes, even the ones who point fingers and tell us how racist the US is (what you expected different?)  I suspect Canada and Oz and other anglophonic-colonist cultures are about where we are.  For the others there is a reason they’re not as integrated that goes to the heart of the argument.

So, first, what do I mean by passing?  How can I not pass?

I can’t quite explain it, and I can’t quite put my finger on it.  It’s just that I belong to a minority, and I have the stigmata.  Many people belief we’re a minority by choice and think we should just get over it.  No, it’s not a sexual orientation minority (would that it were that easy to explain.) though we have an unusually high number of people with same-sex attraction in our number.  Also, an unusual number of people with attraction to squids.  And people who, to put it bluntly, might decide to marry their pillow in a small ceremony, attended only by their closest friends.

It’s not an IQ thing, though we often also score exceptionally well on that – which oddly does not translate to success in life, mostly (I think) because we tend to think sideways and backwards to normal human thought patterns.  (Yes, I do know a number of Phds who work nights at convenience stores.  Why do you ask?)

We’re not all of us science fiction fans, though that’s the way to bet.  Some of us have managed to become just as geeky as the most pointy-eared Trekker by fixating on other things: mystery, regency romance featuring one-legged dwarves (you think!) or molecular cell bio.  (I still remember when the World Fantasy Convention took place in the same hotel as a convention of neuro-researchers.  They crashed all our parties.  We fit.  We were family.

You can identify us even in kindergarten.  More importantly, so can the normals.  Recently I’ve started to suspect the unusually high number of Aspergers diagnosis, particularly among kindergartners is not EXACTLY accurate.  Again, we also have a high number of Aspergers spectrum people, but we’re not ALL Aspergers spectrum.

An editor I respect – as an editor – recently had his kid diagnosed as Aspergers and I didn’t try to argue with him, but the characteristics he was giving made me think “they’re medicalizing being one of us.”  Among others it was that the other kids just instinctively didn’t like him.  (Waves hand in the air.)  That the kid couldn’t ride a bike (I managed it at eighteen.  And then I forgot it.  To this day, btw, I can’t jump rope.  NO ONE IN MY PATERNAL LINE CAN.  My mom thinks we’re all insane.  She spent hours trying to teach me.  Hours. [It was a great part of socialization for a girl in Portugal in my generation.  So was the elastic game, in which two girls held the elastic, and another jumped in the middle, touching it or not, in increasingly elaborate patterns.  If I worked VERY hard, I could do the simplest beginning patterns.]) That his handwriting is atrocious.  That his coloring between the lines is bad for his age and, oh, yeah, that he tends to give mini-lectures.

Yes, I know a lot of that fits the Aspergers spectrum.  But it’s also “us.”  So medicalizing that, while that, is the same as medicalizing homosexuality.

Of course, “we” are a harder minority to defend, because we’re not easy to define.  We know each other, mind, and tend to gravitate to each other like a buttered surface gravitates towards expensive, white silk carpet.

The closest we come to assembling in a group, though, is science fiction conventions and/or some mystery conventions.  “Does not play well with others” is a good beginning identification point, but that’s not even true if you look at us in a group of our peers.  Our families are often unusually warm and connected, in fact, partly because we’re all odd people clinging together.

Whatever it is, it doesn’t seem to be – as such – a function of the environment.  I pity those of us who are adopted and raised by normal people, though now I think about it, an unusual number of us are adopted.  The thing is we tend to breed true, and given how we navigate social relationships (like a transatlantic going through the kiddie pool. Why do you ask?) perhaps that’s not all that surprising, either.

At some point – possibly soon – some researcher will isolate a gene we all share, which makes our brains work funny and accounts for our social presentation (which works fine with others of us, I hasten to add) and the way some of our abilities (like coloring between the lines or rope-jumping) lag WAY behind normal.  Some day.  I’m not sure if that will be better or worse.  Maybe people will decide to make us protected (which is bad and good) or maybe someone will come up with a way to “cure” us. (Shudders, because despite everything, she likes being herself.)

Until then, people will accuse us of thinking too much, tell us we are weird because we want to be weird, or accuse us not trying hard enough on the simple stuff.  (Like skipping rope.)  And though we will never be able to put a name to it, we’ll continue to identify each other on sight, and, if we find enough of us, gather in vast groups and have more fun than all the normals combined.

And we’ll continue to wish we were normal.  Or rather, because we really like who we are, dirt and grit and all, we’ll continue wishing normals were us, and that we were, therefore accepted.

In a way my gay friends have it easy – if you throw things at me, I’ll never talk to you again, boys and girls.  Besides, it’s true – in that they can at least name the way in which they’re odd.  And they can tell themselves the reason they’re not accepted is religious/cultural prejudice, not an instinctive and inexplicable recoil that goes all the way before kindergarten, before you could guess there was anything “wrong” with us.  Of course, a vast number of my gay friends are “of us” too.

Anyone of us who has kids and who has seen the kid enter a class, and find out the other kids hate him in a way toddlers can’t begin to explain, and find himself excluded out of all the games and ridiculed for the oddest things, wishes the normals were more like us.  Or that they accepted us.  Or at least that we knew why they don’t.

We might be pink monkeys amid brown monkeys, but we’re a race of monkeys that is not supposed to see in color, and we can’t figure out why we’re rejected.

I was relatively fortunate too, because I could pass.  Sort of.  Half the time, my way of “passing” was to paint myself hot pink and convince the brown monkeys I should be their ruler.  No, seriously.  I couldn’t jump rope, or do the stupid elastic thing, so I simply convinced my classmates those games were boring and for babies.  Instead, I invented RPGs based on my particular obsessions, and played out full throttle: the Musketeers, Robin Hood, Cowboys and Indians and, after I discovered mystery, police and criminals.

And then when I was sixteen, I discovered dressing up, which I approached rather in the way I approach everything else.  Hence the elaborate lace silk stockings and the short skirts.  Once I hit puberty, if I dressed up, people would leave me alone because “us” don’t dress like that, period.

Nowadays I’ve gone back to not fitting too well.  Part of it is the job.  My husband works in the tech field, and yet half the people think I’m weird because I write science fiction.  They somehow also think this makes me “racy” and “risque” and I’m at a loss to explain THAT one.  No, really.

And part of it is that I have the internet.  You see, it is the terrible curse of humanity to be social animals.  Yes, as Laura put in the comments, it is a good thing too.  But here’s the problem – social is fun and of course, rubbing together is what makes us humans (and what makes humans.  What?  Oh, come on, it’s just the tiniest of dirty jokes.  Just once?  Remember I’m one of those dangerous SF writers.  RACY.)  But the downside of being social is that it also makes us tribal.  We want to belong to a group.  We want the group to belong to us.  We want to all be “alike” inside the group, though all being sufficiently different also works for us.

Most of “us” as far as I can tell, grew up being the only pink monkey in miles around.  I suspect like other accidental, non-directly-hereditary minorities (sexual or professional or…) we used to either gravitate to large cities where we could find more of us, or live out in the middle of nowhere, and pretend normal people didn’t exist.

Now?  Most of us are in touch with a vast network of us.  And no, not all of us are late night convenience store clerks or fertilizer factory fork lift operators.  Only about half of us.  The other half are usually at the top of their fields.  (Possibly driven by not-fitting-in.)  And sometimes the ones in dead end jobs are working on time-travel in their basement.  Most of them won’t succeed, of course, but if anyone can succeed, it’s one of us.

You see, even though our condition has its problems – not fitting in is HARD particularly in childhood – it has advantages, too.  We can think at right angles to other people.  We don’t think in the box.  We can’t find the box.

A lot of us are – like other minorities – enamored of totalitarian regimes.  At the back of our heads is the idea that a sufficiently powerful government can make THEM accept US.  Unfortunately totalitarian regimes try to create uniform societies, and we’re more likely to find ourselves up against the wall.  I think as far as a society that accepts us, the anglosphere and particularly the colonial societies, which are already used to discounting body shape and color, and even a little bit of odd behavior, are as good as it gets.

And the internet is a mixed blessing, because it allows our Odds children to meet the Odds children of others like us and …  I’m not going to speculate.  I think the reason that we are disliked from kindergarten is an instinctive response to signs of mutation – signs we might eventually speciate.  In other words, we hit normal people’s uncanny valley.  And maybe their instincts are right.

However speculation on HOW we would speciate, what it would mean, and if a species that much at weird with itself could survive shall be saved for a (much) later point.

Meanwhile we’re back to us not fitting in and being unable to explain to people why.  Well, we can’t form a race.  I mean, we can, but the fact that our colors range from “so pale, it looks blue in certain lights” to “my ancestors have spent the last hundred generations working on our tan” it wouldn’t fly.  We can’t call ourselves a sexual orientation, though brainophile or geekosexual have their own appeal.

Not being able to name ourselves and group together, metaphorically, for defense, is hurting us, because they SURELY can tell who WE are.

So, I suggest we form a religion.  Or, given the nature of our people, several religions, under one umbrella faith.  It has to be – of course, since a number of us are religious – one of those umbrella faiths that allows us to believe the ‘real’ religion on the side.  I.e. our faith allows us to have other faiths, has no opinion on the existence of G-d or your fate after death.

We could call ourselves Odds.  It would have denominations.  Probably impressive and made up on the spot, so that each family – heck, each of us – could come up with a specific denomination.  “I’m an Odkin Trekker, of the first Firefly diaspora.  You?  Oh.  I see, the Buffy heresy.  My parents followed that cult for a while.”

Think about it.  If we call ourselves a religion, we can even accuse people of being racist when they pick on us.  No, it’s not right, and of course, that will bother us, but it’s common usage, and it will make us seem even MORE normal.  “What do you mean I can’t have the week off to drive to Dragon con?  It’s part of my religion.  Are you some kind of racist?”

Soon enough we’ll have them on the run, and those nasty normal kiddies who refuse to play with our sons and daughters in kindergarten will have to take sensitivity training.  AND THEN they will be made to feel abnormal.

I say it’s worth a try.  Do it for the children.

Yesterday I said I did not mean to pick on the person’s fears for her job.  I meant that.  I realize that I sounded ever so slightly cranky (there are tons of reasons for the crankiness but “because I’m me” should suffice most of the time) but that was a reaction more to her tone than to her meaning.  

Oh, her meaning was stupid beyond belief and amounted to little more than a long sustained whine.  BUT that doesn’t mean SHE is stupid, or even that WHINING is stupid as such.  A long sustained whine with no rationality behind it is how humans react to hitting a wall or feeling they’re about to.  It was probably how our ancestors reacted to a tiger springing out of the undergrowth in front of them.  “Ah, ARRRRRGH!”

The difference is what comes after.  Some got sharp sticks and played the Maasai lion trick on the leaping tiger.  And some went “glurb” and died.

I’m not going to rehash it, but what ticked me off about her post was the implication that a) fiction writers have it easy, they just make up cr*p and b)self-publishers don’t even understand what books are – the ignorant newbies.  (This was not helped by her follow up post, in which she first failed to grasp that not only do I have 21 novels traditionally published – at this point I don’t really have any novel non-traditionally published, except perhaps A Touch Of Night and the reissue of Death Of A Musketeer, each a special case. – and then, once this point was brought home to her, that she considers me “tainted” by self publishing…  Even though 99% of what I have out – all but three short stories – were published in magazines an anthologies before.  And the whole idea that self publishing “taints” is probably blow by the fact that those three are my biggest cash cows every month.)  It’s entirely too bad of me to react to “tone” but as my grandmother would have said, “if you don’t have feelings, you weren’t born of humans.”

But in a way it was to bad I got sidetracked by the tone, because what I actually wanted to go into was the panic reaction, what it means, and how to counter.

Every writer I know has hit that panic reaction at one time or another in recent months.  The exceptions are, perhaps, those who haven’t realized what is happening to publishing yet.  (Oh, you’d think there are none.  Or at least none who aren’t cognitively impaired.  But there are, I guarantee.  H*ll, in honest truth, but for my agency going odd and a couple of other things, I might have been one of them.  And I’ll explain why.)  When we hit the panic, we all run around for a week or two or a month, or a year, as if our hair were on fire, screaming “the world is ending.”  And then…  And then we find paths out.  Which is what I want to talk about.

First of all, if you’re a writer, or a journalist, or one of the other professions where, looking ahead, you see the conveyor belt disappearing into a furnace – take a deep breath and realize you’re not alone.  This is being masked – somewhat – by the recession.  But, without going into politics, the recession is – IMO – a creature of unspeakable economic stupidity imposed from above.  (Partly from the hopeful and amiable belief that hobbling the US improves the lot of other people.  This is the sort of stupidity it takes years of education [and a willingness to ignore the real world] to achieve, which means … nothing.  If I ever get a time machine, I’m throttling Karl Marx in his swaddling blanket.)  That means sooner or later the idiocy from above quits (or we’ll all be more worried about whether we can get a leg of squirrel for telling a good story around the camp fire of what remains of human civilization) and when it does, if anything the pace of tech change is going to accelerate as we recover.  Part of it, of course, will be to cut out the severely dysfunctional parts of the economy without sinking more money into them.  And part of it will be because new tech HAS come on line but no one has invested in propagating it through society.  When they have money, they will, and the effect will be…  As though some evil villain just pushed the “fast” button on that furnace-headed conveyor belt.

(No, I’m not going to unpack the previous paragraph, not only because it’s unavoidably political, but also because it is, ultimately, fodder for several essays.  Just nod and say “Okay, Sarah, whatever, let’s assume what you said is true.”)

So, just trust me, that when economy recovers, we writers are going to be joined on the line of people going “argh” as the tiger springs out at them, by: in some order – journalists, teachers, photographers, artists, software engineers (trust me.  They’ve been in crisis since 2000 mostly because their skill is becoming less needed with machines that are more friendly to programing) and eventually real engineers (printable pieces will make a lot of difference.)  Worse, I can’t even imagine all the people who will be hit by the change – literally – and though I’d laugh if you said something like “chefs” or “car mechanics” I could think of a way – and not far off – that their professions AS EXERTED RIGHT NOW will be obsolete in no time.  I don’t even need to mention the two professions my kids are training for, right?  Doctor and aerospace engineer will FOR SURE change shortly after they start working.  Which feels many ways of wrong, but probably no “wronger” than where most writers find themselves.

You see most of my friends are between 30 and 50 or a little either way.  These were the ages at which you used to know what you were doing in your profession, and just take off.  Peak earning years and all that.  Oh, brother.

Part of the long sustained whine is because we writers, perhaps more than other humans – but we humans in general too – believe in stories.  We’re raised with stories.  Oh, sure, little Red Riding Hood, but also “don’t cross the street in front of a semi, or you’ll be a pancake on the pavement.”  It’s a story.  A just so story.  

All of us absorbed such stories growing up, as well as stories about uncle Hubert who worked hard and made good and uncle Eggbert (oh, him!) who went down to Rio where he lives in a compound peopled entirely by hookers and fueled solely by cocaine.

Okay, fine, my family has several uncle Eggberts, and it’s entirely possible that some boring families out there have none.  The point is that all of us absorbed, at some point, the idea of what it takes to make good at several points in life – what’s expected of us, as we were.  We are after all social monkeys, and monkey does what he sees, and, in this case, what he hears.

At my time of life – and a lot of the people panicking are somewhere between 40 and 50 – we expect our profession to be clear and the path ahead to make sense and be… well… expected.  And now, you know, instead of “rising acclaim, secure retirement” there’s the furnace.  Worse, because of the way things have gone in the most recent years – and no, not just in writing.  As tech change came in every field turned odd and sometimes evil (read Dilbert!)  – we are, most of us, nowhere near the acclaim and security we thought we’d attain.  And this might be “as good as it gets.”

Amazing thing is not that we’re indulging in long, sustained whining.  What IS amazing is that none of us has yet gone postal somewhere conspicuous.  My people must be better balanced than I thought.  (Or more confused.  Some psychology researcher should count the massacres in books recently.  We’ve always had trouble with that reality thing.)

The thing is, after the whine, for everyone so far, there is the moment of shaking yourself up and looking at the way of life that is dying.  Because in most cases it was SO dysfunctional these last ten or twenty years that constitute our entire working life, there is usually a time of looking at the field (whatever field) and seeing everything that was screwing us over and holding us down, and going “oh.” in relief.  Sometimes for those of us full of piss and vinegar there is – to quote a writer who is FAR more established than I – “If this new model works, I’m going to be very rude to a lot of people.”  And then… and then there is a time of thinking, a time of rebuilding.  And, at this point friends and I have been on THAT phase long enough that we have checked back with each other and compared notes.  I’m going to pass the notes along for those of you, writers and non writers alike, who are staring the furnace in the face.  Remember those are the notes NOW – for me about a year after the whine – and that the operative part of that catastrophic change thing is the “change.”  Things are changing all the time.  Retailers, tech, etc. change minutely almost daily.  We’re not at the end of the wave of change.  We’re barely at the first swell.  So, don’t take what I say and go, this is the plan for the next fifty years.  Go, rather “Um… good thing for a year or so, if I’m lucky.”  And note how much of it is the same you’d tell someone walking through a jungle full of hungry tigers – “be alert” – that’s what most of these translate to.

So, here’s the distilled wisdom from staring into the furnace (and by the way, the furnace, in most cases, is only a temporary fire, and it’s possible that you’ll emerge from it stronger than you went in, like steel.)

1 – You have to change.
Yes, I know, you’re settled into your routine, and one of the things I’ve learned through the last year of various physical ailments, is that ANYTHING can become routine.  You get used to doing six books a year, under pressure, upside down, in a sewer pipe.  (Okay, I’m exaggerating a little.)  And you like what it means: you’re still publishing.  You’re making money.  And you convince yourself things will get better.  But you don’t expect them to get better suddenly, and you don’t really, ever expect them to get better, worse and yes suddenly.  And you expect it will happen TO YOU not that you’ll have to make it happen.  So when you realize that the money or the publication is diminishing your first instinct is to panic, because it means you’ll have to change how you do things, and it’s going to be uncomfortable.  The bad news?  Yep, you have to change.  (The good news is that almost for sure things will get better – in the long run.)

2- It’s going to be a lot of work up front
Oh, G-d, is it a lot of work up front.  Part of this is because for a good long while, for many of us perhaps forever, you’ll have to work in both worlds.  Or you’ll have to work at what is bringing money in right then, and what will bring money in in the future, both of which will change as things change.  For me, right now, this means keeping up deadlines, helping NRP with covers AND trying to figure out how in heaven’s name to get my backlist up in a modicum of time.

3 – Take a deep breath and give yourself time
This will be different for each of you/each field.  Right now I have 25 (I think) short stories out, and I’m netting $100 a month from Amazon (other places take longer to report.)  I have about 250 in total stories I could put up, and I haven’t put any up in two months.  If you’re going “Are you crazy woman?  MONEY!  If the ratio holds – and so far it has – you could be making 1k a month.  Why aren’t you?”  Oh, G-d.  In this house we have a trinity of excuses we invoke for the “I just can’t” – it’s not logical, but it’s what we’ve heard someone use at some time – “Cheese, lasers, wife!”  Or in this case: “Health, kids, work.”  Or perhaps just a manifestation of Kris’ post about things bringing you to your knees.  Life has been VERY complicated, and emotionally I think I’m healing, as much has I’m (hopefully) healing physically.
I hate being late.  I’m compulsive.  But pushing seems to tie me up more.  So I’m taking deep breaths and going “I’m giving myself time.”  It will happen, once the kid graduates; once I know what is causing the endocrine disturbances, once a couple of other dominos fall in place, once life establishes itself again.
3a A caution – make sure you keep trying to fit the stuff into the routine.  Like, I’m trying to tell myself Saturday is publishing day.  So when normalcy comes back, that’s not squeezed out.
3b – you’ll make mistakes.  You’ll take the wrong projects indie and sell the wrong projects.  You’ll put awful covers on your stories (guaranteed); you’ll put up at least a story with ten typos (the others will have more, no matter how you hunt them.)  You’ll glorp a few formats.  You’ll forget the legal notice on a story.  You’ll make mistakes.  Don’t worry.  It’s more work, not the end of the world.  You’re only human. The goal is ALWAYS survive to fight another day.  If you’re alive, you’re learning.  Tomorrow YOU’ll be better.

4- Don’t Put ALL Your Eggs In the Same Henhouse.

Don’t put all your faith on one stream of income.  

Don’t go “traditional publishing is dying, so I’ll now make all my money from indie publishing.  CERTAINLY don’t go “I’ll now make all my money from writing epic novels about gay warriors” (What?  I’m sure there’s some people are!  I don’t have time to google it.  You’ll have to be pervie on your own time.)  

In the end doing that puts you in the same boat as if you’d stayed in traditional publishing.  Remember the thing about we’re only in the first swells of a tsunami of change?  If all you do is sell space nuns (what?) on Amazon, you’re setting yourself up to go under on the next wave.

For one at least at first, your stream of income from indie will be small – much less from one type of indie.  So you want to keep all your legs going.  Think of yourself as a multilegged mechanical, self-balancing spider (really?  I think of myself as that sort of thing ALL the time.)  In my case, say one leg is traditional.  One is indie.  One is art – and I need to put some of that up and on merchandise to sell.  From yesterday’s kerfuffle I realized another can be non-fiction.  As soon as I have time, I’ll resume the journalism one (two dying fields are better than none.)  And, who knows, as things stabilize health wise, there might even be stuffed dragons and fairy princess porcelain dolls to sell at cons.  (Maybe.  If I can find the time.)

5- Network
I come from a culture in which nepotism is viewed as a virtue.  A basic proverb is “He who has no godfather dies in jail.”  Being me, I rebelled against it.  And I still think that nepotism qua nepotism is a bad idea and makes a society sclerotic and not nimble at all.

BUT

We are social animals.  One thing I had to learn is that people reject you MUCH more easily if they’ve never met you – beyond the quality of your story.  Now it’s a little different, but networking is more important.  Networking and having a large group of friends is how you hear what is working and what isn’t, because the knowledge is so new there are no manuals yet – and no manuals that aren’t superannuated in five minutes.  Have as many friends as possible everywhere, particularly friends who are also trying to figure out the change.

6- Brainstorm
Every so often get together with your friends and brainstorm – not ideas.  Not stories.  Brainstorm how to make money.  Shoot wild ideas out.  Make crazy suggestions.  Look, until the kerfuffle yesterday, it never occurred to me I could sell my research as non-fiction BEFORE selling it as fiction/integrating it into stories.  But of course it should be possible (though the time thing might delay it.)  And I AM trying to be aware of new opportunities.  It’s just that the new model is so different we have to make tiny incremental changes.  So every so often, get your friends together, break out the alcohol (or whatever) and just talk.  “Hey, can you think of any other way to make money?  What if–”

And that’s all I know so far.  Like a traveler on the move in strange, mutable terrain, stay alert, move fast, be ready to see things in a completely different way (Sometimes a schmerp ISN’T a rabbit, even if he looks like one) and keep all your several legs on the run.

There’s gold in them there hills.  You just have to survive to get there.

I don’t mean to pick on this writer.  Her article is valid – to an extent.  Or at least I GET her fears.  (BTW, I’ll also note that after reading her blog, to get her name I needed to go to Amazon.  EVEN THE LINK TO HER BOOKS doesn’t give her full name. I can see her name in Ie.  For some reason it won’t show in firefox.  Is it time to update already?)

This is the point she’s making:

But I’ve noticed: The new self-publishing king/queenpins are almost entirely novelists, meaning they write fiction rather than non-fiction. (*1)

They crank out a novel or two (or three) a YEAR. I’m sure that many of them have to do research for their books, but for MOST fiction writers (not all of them), that research is minimal and is the kind of thing that can be taken care of with good googling or a trip or two to the public library.

As a result, they don’t understand that for people like me, the “traditional” publishing industry is my only lifeline, my only means of support.

She’s not alone in her situation, or at least not as alone as she thinks she is.  While I “crank out” – why the terms implying that I’m doing less work than she is?  What if I said that non-fiction authors are “compilers” and just “jot down” stuff?  (No, I don’t think this is true.  Writing non fiction calls for different techniques that’s all.  It’s a load of work.)  How derogatory would that be? – more than three novels a year, I’d be in a world of hurt if I didn’t have Baen right now.  This year I’ll probably get 2/3 of my income from Baen, and I get it in more substantial up-front chunks.  And with two kids in college, health issues going on and various other things, I’m glad of the up front money.

I’m not alone.  In fact, almost all of us who depend on writing for some amount of our livelihood (in my case, for the butter on our daily bread – as in my husband’s income pays for food, roof, clothing and such, but repairs, tuition and the occasional weekend in Denver come from my money.  It’s the difference between living pinched and scared and living okay.  Not swimming in money, but okay) right now are doing complex calculations.  It goes somethign like this: Any book I sell to a publisher I might never see.  (Yes, even Baen.  G-d forbid, but in the convulsions of publishing, Baen has deals with Simon and Schuster which I don’t get and S & S is under scrutiny by the DOJ.  I DON’T think Baen is at risk, or at least not beyond the risk of “what if a safe falls on me during my morning walk?”, but it’s something that COULD happen and is beyond my control.)

Yeah, I know contracts say, or SHOULD say, that in case of bankruptcy you get your book back – but bankruptcy is a complex, drawn out process and … well, you’re at the mercy of the courts.  Your book could be considered “assets” and held back by some judge you never heard of.  Now, even I, with my “cranked out” books do have books that are “heart’s blood” – A Few Good Men – for instance.  If that book were put out of my grasp, in the sense that I couldn’t publish it, and no one else could, for even ten years, I’d be very, very unhappy.

I have to look at it, and look at the money, and look at the house handling it, and then bargain with myself.  “Is this worth it?”  In the case of AFGM I’m dealing with Baen, whom I trust to do the absolute best they can for me and the book (within limits of human error), I need the money, and, well… in the coming roiling waters of publishing, I think Baen has a good chance NOT to drown.  Better than other houses.  So, the risk is worth it.

BUT there is a negotiation with myself that wasn’t there before.  Indie or traditional?  Money up front versus money over a long time?  More distribution or more control?

However, this lady not only thinks she is the lone ranger (which is weird, because she doesn’t look like a teen, but apparently no one else has problems like she has) but also doesn’t seem to know her readers.  So… let me highlight a few of her ideas, and explain where I think she got it wrong.

The self-pubbers canNOT wait for the day when the entire traditional publishing complex falls into a huge hole in the ground. The self-pubbers have the funeral all planned. (If the self-pubbers spent as much time writing as they do gloating over the slow death of publishing, they could easily crank out another book or two each year.)

Dear Lady, if the publishing establishment had treated as it has treated most of us who have gone the way of self-publishing, you too couldn’t resist a little dancing on the grave.  But if you read any of us, you’ll also see that our glee is tempered with fear, and that what we write about the slow death of publishing is designed to shape what comes next as much as to “gloat.”  Oh, and I do write – crank out, you say? – more than two novels a year, and have for the last ten years.  This charming pace was imposed on me by the establishment you revere.  I had to keep it up to make a starvation wage.

As a result, they don’t understand that for people like me, the “traditional” publishing industry is my only lifeline, my only means of support.

Consider: I started working on the meat book in early 2007. I finished it in early 2012. You do the math.

Yes, I’ve DONE the math.  Tell me, just for the record – enquiring minds want to know – HOW much of that time was spent on “enjoyable” research?  Traveling for instance.  Reading.  Going to museums.  Don’t tell me that’s part of your job.  Of course it is, but you can do jobs in various ways.  HOW much of it was done in a more leisurely way than needed?  How much time off do you take?  How many hours a day do you work?

None of my business?  Fine.  We’ll talk about it later.

I spent five years researching and writing the beer book, and of that, a great deal of money and time was spent on traveling to specialized libraries. The Key West book took me two years to research and write.

How did I pay for that? By entering into a partnership with a traditional publishing house that provided financial support.

Oh, gee.  HOW NICE it must be.  How very nice.  The traditional publishing house provided financial support, you say?  Out of the goodness of their hearts, I guess.  You know, here’s the funny thing, we – crankers outers, let’s say – CAN’T do that.  I’ve written work – just for your information – that required as great a level of research as yours.  No, strangely to set a book in a time period and use a documented historical character is NOT easier than writing nonfiction.  (Who would have thought it?)  The most one of my historical books paid was 12k.  The most time I was given to write it was a year.  You see how that limited the “partnership” and the joyous feelings I had towards the publisher.

My research was done as my writing is: at my desk, usually eight to eight.  Rare books?  Oh, sure thing.  Interlibrary loan.  Travel?  Well, I traveled a good deal as a young woman and had to make do with memories, other people’s pictures, and sometimes asking people who live near the places I needed to describe.  Ideal?  Well, no.  For one, I’d like to work normal hours.  I’d also like to be able to see the places I write about.  I’d also like a pony and a flying car.  The world is what it is.  Fortunately being a cranker-outer I’m not made of fine stuff and I’m willing to work crazy hours.  And, hey, sometimes I take my birthday off!

It works like this: My agent sells my book IDEA to a publishing house. The house pays an “advance”: a sum of money upfront that I can live on while I research and write the book. It’s not much money — in fact it’s an embarrassing amount of money and I also am fortunate enough to receive financial support from my spouse.

Without that assistance, I couldn’t do what I do. Period. Again, it’s not much money, and it’s the ONLY money I earn from my books. (If I were lucky enough to write a bang ‘em up bestseller, I’d earn more than the advance, but I’m not that lucky. Er, um, not that talented a writer.)

Okay, either your embarrassing amount of money is much more than my embarrassing amount of money, or your spouse has a lot more money.  HOWEVER, let’s ignore that, okay?  Let’s talk about “I couldn’t do it.”  Sure you could.  Off the top of my head, I can give you several ideas:

First, do a book about your local area.  Do it in your spare time now.  (You know, work nights or weekends.  Think of it as a second job.)  Put it up on Amazon.  Take the money it makes, over the next two or three years, while you still work at your traditional work.  Then use that to research the next book.

Second idea – work as a resource for fiction writers.  Contrary to your idea, we do NOT pull from air.  Yes, I’ve read – and I’m sure you have too – books with embarrassingly bad research.  They’re not the majority.  They’re not the norm.  And the worst ones usually are justified.  (Say you’re asked to write a book in a month.  Just imagine it d*mn it.  It’s happened to me.  It pays 5k.  You don’t want to do it, but RIGHT THEN it’s your only chance to continue publishing.  You do the best research you can.  I was fortunate to have an expansive education and to travel a lot as a young woman.  Most people weren’t.  Bad research, in those circumstances is justified.)

I’d love to be able to reach a topic-expert who has done lovingly detailed research on a topic and pay a fee.  Say I need someone who IS a real certifiable expert on Christopher Marlowe.  I have three contradictory sources, I want to call up and go “So, what was his mother’s background?  What’s the latest research?”  Let’s suppose you teach CM for a living, or have written a book on him.  You should have your files, be able to consult.  Would I pay for that?  Yes.  My means are small, but I’d willingly pay $100 for an hour of work.  I’ve paid $80 for a book with a usable paragraph, so…  Get a few dozen writers who depend on you – I don’t know, advertise on Twitter, Facebook and tell people you’re available? – and you can continue your leisurely and expensive research.  Paid for.  A little more work?  Sure.

Third option, and I’ve never tried it, but there are sites where people will donate money for a project.  I’m sure if you ask, tons of people know where these are.  My commenters do, I’m sure.  Try it.  How do you know, till you flap your wings?

Fourth option – do articles.  Do your research in itty bitty chunks.  Put it up in itty bitty chunks.  Say, I want to write a book on Christopher Marlowe.  (Now that you mention it, yes, I do, though again it’s one of those cranked out things, right?  Which I’ve only been researching in ALL my spare time for twenty years.  Never mind.) I get money to visit England and do some primary source consulting.  I blog the experience and ask for donations.  THEN I put my diary of the trip up on Amazon for sale.  If I can make it entertaining at all it WILL sell (trust me on this, please.  I’ve seen what sells.  I have done research on self publishing.)  Which will bring in a stream of money, which will allow you to travel and… see how that works?

The self-publishers, in my opinion, have a distorted view of “books” and of “publishing.” In their minds, every writer is cranking out novels that don’t require much time to research and write, and the lag time between creation and payoff is short.

So I ask them: What happens when the agents, editors, and publishing houses go away? Who will write non-fiction then?

And here, I’ve been feeling guilty over being cranky with you.  And then I read this paragraph again.  (Takes deep breath.)

Lady, you’re an insular, blinkered and stubborn woman, clinging to the ledge of her comfort zone and creating straw men to justify yourself in not leaving it.

First, WHO do you think “self-publishers” are?  Let me disabuse your mind of this idea that they/we are all very young or very naive.  Self-publishers are EVERYONE.  Or at least every writer who is awake and aware of what is happening around them.  They come from all walks of life and all educational backgrounds.

WHY do you think we have a distorted view of books?  We are WRITERS for the love of Bob.  Do you think we don’t read?  Do you think we read only fiction?  WHY do you think that?  Before Amazon I was a member of the History Book Club so I could get hold of books my local bookstores wouldn’t carry.  The payoff between idea and publication is short?  FOR WHOM?  My Magical British Empire Trilogy took me four years to research (while writing other stuff.)  Ten years if you consider initial familiarization reading.  AND from proposal (ie. full research) to sale (let alone publication) was EIGHT YEARS.

WHY do you think we have a distorted view of publishing?  I think you have a distorted view of publishing, if you believe it’s some sort of benevolent purse-fairy ready to hand you money for your projects, so you can, in the fullness of time, give them a little gem of a perfectly researched book.  Perhaps that’s the publishing you’ve encountered.  The one I’ve worked for more closely resembles a sweatshop.  Other people’s experiences are anywhere in between.

However, if you don’t want me to wax sarcastic about your views, do respect other people’s views.  Do a little research about what these strange creatures “self-publishers” are and the reasons they’re venturing into these nasty, nasty self-publishing waters.  Right now the way you refer to us doesn’t fill me with a desire to go and look up your books.  Why not?  Because you didn’t do even the minimal “googling” research you imagine we do for whole novels.

And then there’s… who’ll do the serious research?  We will.  The people who have a passion for a subject and for learning it.  We will do the research.  We will do the publishing.  Who will pay for it?  We will.  PUBLISHING IS NOT A GOOD FAIRY.  If they’re advancing you money it’s because they make it back.  And they make it back on a model that’s so outdated and cumbersome, that they’re wasting a great deal of it.  They’re making it back by selling it to READERS.  Which means you have READERS out there.

By cutting out the middle man, you can get 70% (or worst case scenario 30%) of the net sales.  And if your books are worth it, you WILL get it.

Contrary to your vision of us, most of us cranker-outers read non-fiction as much as we read fiction.  In the last year I’ve read obsessively about: WWI, WWI the home front (England and the US), Prohibition and life in the 1930s, degenerative diseases of the brain, a history of Cleveland.  ALL of this against the background of my constant preoccupations: The French Revolution, Tudor England, Space Exploration.

I know you’re looking at that and saying “But there is no way you can do all that research SERIOUSLY.”  This is akin to saying “But you write fast, so it must be crap.”

Judge not lest you shall be judged applies here too.  Look, I’ve had people say “When you write four books a year they have to all be bad.”  Until they read them.  And until they realize the time I put into each of those books is as much as they put into each of theirs.  I just have no downtime.

Burning the candle at both ends?  Sure.  But we each are the way we’re made.  This is how I’m made.  I bore easily.  I have friends who work both faster and slower than I.  THAT doesn’t reflect on their work.  Rid yourself of that idea.

Take with you ONLY the idea that yes, the world is full of readers of serious non-fiction.  Many, if not most of them, are fiction writers.  So, instead of insulting us, start talking to us.  You have stuff (original research) we need.  Who knows, we might have stuff you need – like ideas on how to make money.

Meanwhile, you opened your post by saying it’s exciting to watch history in action.  Yes, it is.  Just remember, if you were a carriage maker at the time of the automobile revolution, screaming that the new horseless carriages were just shoddily built wasn’t going to bring back your steady work.  Telling us automobile plants are uncouth places won’t either.  On the other hand, perhaps, offering to make seats for the upper-level automobiles will net you a very good living, and allow you to do what you want to.

Life is full of these little trade offs.  Like the calculation of whether to go indie or not, the tradeoffs can be difficult.  But if you’re not so busy looking down your nose at the rest of us, you might spy the path of least pain through the brambles.

I wish you good luck.

I never expected to be a mother.

I won’t say I never wanted to be a mother, because that isn’t true – precisely.  I wasn’t opposed to motherhood and at various times in my life had sort of distant dreams of having kids one day.  But here’s the thing, mostly I saw myself adopting kids.

You see, I never expected to get married.  Okay, so it went well beyond logic, but I thought of myself as the world’s most unattractive woman.  In retrospect, I wasn’t – not physically, not by a long shot – but I was “awkwardly in the world.”

One of the ways in which I am stupid is this tendency to forget I have a body.  What I mean by that is rather literal.  I’ll get involved with pursuing some line of research, or get thoroughly ensconced in some imaginary world I just created and other than the obvious necessities and routines – which I do more or less by rote, from eating to showering – I forget I’m present physically (or I used to, before I was responsible for other people’s physical existence.  More on that later.)

Anyway, it might not be obvious, but this lack of attention to physicality can present issues when one hits what we’ll delicately call a romantic age.  As in, if you don’t much pay attention to how you dress, and periodically remember to style your hair but most of the time don’t (Recently – two years ago – I had hair I could sit on.  Not on purpose.  I forgot to make an appointment to cut it.  For five years) guys aren’t likely to notice you’re there.

Add to that that most young men (and many older ones) bored me out of my gourd, and you’ll understand why I never expected to be a mother in the natural way.  Besides, the whole thing seemed very awkwardly put together, as a physical process.  I mean, kissing was bad enough with one never knowing what to do with one’s nose, but that?  You’d got to be kidding.

Then interest in boys – real interest, not the pretend-romantic one that inspired hundreds of sonnets to a young man who never knew I existed – hit suddenly and devastatingly at eighteen.  And I realized my inadequacies.  I’m a quick study.  I observed other young women and what they did to attract men.  It worked.  I started to have a dating life.

None of which made me think of motherhood in more than a theoretical way.

You see, I didn’t want to get married.  Most men still bored me – particularly long term – and good gravy marriage was SO final.  Between 18 and 22 I rejected six marriage proposals that I remember/got I was being asked (I suspect there were others, because I had a tendency not to get “subtle.”  My idea of subtle is a two by four to the skull.)

Then Dan asked me.  Let me right now assure you I intended to say “no.”  Yeah, I loved him.  Yeah, I wanted to live in the US.  BUT my degree was not valid here (being a teaching degree.)  And besides, one travels lighter.  And besides…

I can’t really explain it.  This has happened a dozen times in my life, at crucial points.  I just couldn’t say no.  The option didn’t exist.

So I got married.  And suddenly, like the boy thing had hit, the motherhood-thing hit.  I wanted children.

In retrospect this is vaguely puzzling.  Look, guys, I was always awkward around babies, vaguely puzzled by toddlers and often outright scared of school age mons– er… children.  So why the heck did I want kids?  Who knows?  Perhaps biological imperative.  Perhaps insanity.  I wanted eleven children.

We waited a year then started trying and…  Nothing happened for almost six years.  Of course, infertility made me more determined than ever to have children.  I don’t like failing at things.

What I never paused to think about is why I’d want to have a child, or what in heaven’s name I intended to do to him/her.

So, when I had Robert – actually had him – it shocked me out of my gourd.

To begin with, pregnancy shocked me.  Why?  Well…  I don’t know how I imagined it before.  Like Alien, I think.  BUT … well…  Would you believe me if I told you I knew I was pregnant two hours after Robert was conceived?  And I knew he was a boy?  And I could SENSE him, clearly?

It is very WEIRD.  The idea that there’s a human inside you is one of the weirdest things you can experience, I think.

It gets weirder when they’re born.  There’s not only a sense of crushing responsibility – you brought him into the world.  What are you going to do about it? – but a sense of being “divided.”  Your soul – for lack of a better word – is riding along in two bodies…  Three, when Marshall came along.  (And, for sheer confusion, with Marshall I not only didn’t sense him from the beginning.  I couldn’t sense him even after I’d SEEN him on ultrasound.  I thought to the end something horrible would happen and he’d die before being born.  Turns out, no, he’s just very reserved.  That sense you have of someone else there when someone is in the room with you?  Yeah, he turns that off often enough, seemingly on purpose.)

I don’t know how to explain this without sounding new agey, though I think it’s more a matter of “attuning” your senses to the kids, but the “link,” the sense of being a soul in several bodies, grows fainter as they grow up, but I don’t think it ever goes away completely.  Right now, a part of me is listening for their movements, in their rooms, the sound of typing.  It’s not that I want to pry on them – it’s just a vestigial mother-thing.  Even when they’re out of town and too far away for me to hear/feel/sense, my mind tries to follow them.

I used to think, as a kid, that mothers had this special power.  I wanted to impress my mother.  I wanted her to be in awe of my achievements.  (Yes, there is a story there, but mom is mom and she did the best she could, and I love her.) To me, she was a figure of power, the center of the family.

Being a mother, it feels completely different.  I feel small and humble, dwarfed by the task and always aware I’ll never be good enough for it.  No matter what I do, I’ll always do/have done something spectacularly wrong.

And yet… and yet…

Despite my claims – loud and frequent – that I should have stuck to raising cats, things are not that simple.   They never are.  The truth is now that they are young adults we are ALMOST equals (no, not quite equals.  I’ll claim the rights of experience and knowledge.  And yes, I AM one of those sticks in the mud that insists in a difference in how they treat me, and how they treat their friends.) And I find I enjoy their company.  I enjoy their minds.  I enjoy going for walks with them, and woodworking, and those late night discussions where we unhook the universe and spin it around just for fun.

And in retrospect, I enjoyed the process, too.  They never scared me – except with the fear that I was raising them wrong – they never had a “feral” phase.  And even as toddlers, they interested me – perhaps instinct over brain.

I miss the sticky kisses, the odd collections of pebbles, the children’s books, the stories.  I enjoy the rational discussions, the stories about college, the sharing of esoteric scientific knowledge.

And I look forward to the future – scared and confused, happy and terrified, confident and humble – glad I got to be a mom, even if I was the least likely person to be so.

To my mom, whom at various times growing up I judged far too harshly but who did an amazing job, given that she never wanted to be a mother and that she had no happy childhood on which to model mine, I wish a happy mother’s day and I hope we still share many years among the living and have time, now and then, over those years, to share the joys and fears of motherhood.

To my (paternal) grandmother who was very much my secondary mother, and whom I lost nineteen years ago, wherever she is (keep your opinions to yourself, okay?  I might or might not have an afterlife, but I’m sure grandma did/does) I hope she’s not shaking her head too much at my efforts at being a mother.  In many ways, now as when I was a little toddler, following around in her wake, reaching up my hand for hers, I’m still following in her footsteps – and I’ll never be big enough to fill her shadow.

And to all the mothers, fathers and children out there: Happy Mother’s Day.

UPDATE: the free short story is up.

Yesterday night I didn’t know what to blog about.  The problem looked even more complex when Amanda Green dropped Mad Genius Club rotating Saturday blogship on my lap late last night.

Fortunately the gods of fate are kind to me.  And fortunately the publishing industry will never, ever, ever run out of teh stoopid for me to marvel at.  So just as I was about to go to bed, a friend of mine gave me a link to The Passive Voice which made my blood boil and my mind become awed at the sheer amount of stupid in this field.  The particular link was this.

 The background for this is the DOJ case against the big six publishers who are accused of collusion in pricing in the so called “agency pricing” that was imposed on ebook retailers.  Amanda has covered this very ably here (as here, here, here here and here)  I don’t have time to go into it, but fell free to check it up.

Every time Amanda talked about it, someone came up with the talking point that “it didn’t matter” and “it didn’t hurt anyone.”  This puzzled us because on the face of it, agency pricing hurt quite a lot.  It hurt readers, who had to pay more for a book they wanted than they would have, had the free market been allowed to operate.  It hurt publishers, who sold fewer books because some people simply refuse to pay that much for what is essentially a license to carry the book on one, or a limited number of e-readers.  It hurt authors (at least it would, if publishers in most cases didn’t calculate ebook royalty by guess and by golly) because they made less money.  (This is not in dispute.  Publishers say everywhere the agency model means they’ve made less money.)

More importantly, Amanda said the law – unjust or not – is the law and price fixing is against the law, period.

 BUT the talking point still puzzled us.  How they’d even come up with that gem made no sense to us (or probably ninety percent of human beings.)  And then, as I said, a friend sent me that link.  The link was about a letter Simon Lipskar, agent and board member of the Association of Authors’ Representatives, sent to the Department of Justice regarding the antitrust suit filed by the DOJ against Apple and five large publishers alleging the group colluded to fix prices on ebooks.

 Joe Konrath, long may his beard grow, fisked the letter here.  Also linked was another column by Konrath – a letter by a publishing insider.  And that is what caused this blog post, because it FINALLY explained what they meant by “but it doesn’t hurt anyone.” 

This is the money shot: 2.  One Book Is Pretty Much The Same As Any Other.  Lipskar acknowledges, as he must, that the prices of New York Times bestselling books went up following the simultaneous industry-wide imposition of agency pricing (“prices for a limited number of titles published by these publishers increased, i.e. those ebooks that were digital editions of newly released bestselling hardcover titles.  Amazon had quite explicitly promised its consumers that these titles would be available at $9.99, and with the switch to agency pricing, these titles did indeed increase in price, mostly to $12.99”).  But, he claims, these higher prices couldn’t hurt anyone because the prices of other books decreased (“No Price Increase for Non-Bestselling Titles”).

Okay, got that?  (Beyond the fact that yes, they increased the price of non-bestselling books or else some of my books are REALLY selling beyond statements, but we’ll leave it at that.)  ONE BOOK IS JUST LIKE ANOTHER.

 Look, guys, I’ve been in this field forever, and I have the bruises to prove it, but the thing about shocks me to my core.

We’ve long known that publishing execs weren’t readers.  But NOW, now, we have proof they’re not only not readers, they’re insane, or possibly an alien life form.

 What they’re saying above is that if you’re a fan, say, of Nora Roberts, you’ll be just as happy with a book by Terry Pratchett.  If you’re a fan of Jonah Goldberg, you’ll be equally pleased with a book by Michael Moore.  If you’re a fan of Robert A. Heinlein, you’ll simply adore a random book with “SF” on the cover.

 Got that?  Books are fungible, which means they are interchangeable.  You want to read Shadow Warriors by Tom Clancy and we don’t have it?  No problem, we have If you Give A Mouse A Cookie.  It’s a book and it should make you just as happy.

 “Of course they don’t mean it to that extent,” you say.  “Are you out of your ever-loving mind, Sarah?”

 Okay, so they don’t mean that to THAT extent, to what extent do they meant it?  I can tell you to what extent they mean it.  They mean if you’re into a certain sub-genre of science fiction or fantasy or Romance or anything, you’ll be just as happy with a book which is more or less along the same lines.  Say, you’re a fan of Nora Roberts and her book is too expensive.  Well, you can buy this nice book by Julia Quinn (or, since JQ is also a bestseller, let’s use a made up name, like Mary Smith).  See, you have a book.  It has words and everything.  So, you – being an idiot child who is easily distracted – will be perfectly happy.

 “But Sarah,” you say, “they didn’t call us idiots who are easily distracted.”  No?  Really?  But they’ve been TREATING you and me and every other reader as idiots who are easily distracted.  This is the only way they can treat books as fungible and think a book is just as good as the other.  (And I’ll have something to say on this before I close this article, btw.)

 This particular sentence though, this concept of any book being just as good as any other suddenly made sense of a bunch of industry practices which – otherwise – make no sense whatsover.  (It also made a mockery of a bunch of other industry practices, which is why I’ll have more to say on this.)

 For instance, how many of you, as readers, are aware that publishers think books are bananas?  Okay, maybe not bananas, but some other, fragile, quickly-expiring, short-sell-by-date produce?  Probably not many of you.  Heck, I didn’t when I was just a reader.  (Though it was a little different then, too, because the particular inventory tax laws that killed back list hadn’t come into existence yet.)  Most books these days have a an expiration date of just a few weeks.  When you have a traditionally published book, you have to start promoting MONTHS before it is even available because that influences how much it will be available, which influences how many will be bought in the first weeks they are on the shelf.  After that, they are removed from the shelves (if they ever got on the shelves at all) and replaced with other books.  This never made sense to me, but now it does.

 If books are fungible, why would you want to read a book that’s older than a few weeks?  If any book is much like another, all that counts is that the book is new and shiny and on the shelf, right?

 Or consider what publishers do, by buying books for the AUTHOR’S life story or the author’s cute face, or the author’s nice bit of leg in lace stocking.  It makes no sense to readers who – silly us – read for the story and the words and couldn’t care less if the creature who wrote them is secretly a cockroach.  BUT if one book is exactly like another, then the only way to sell them is the “image” and the “narrative” – therefore buying writers for things other than their writing?  Genius!

 Or consider “stocking to the net.”  Since all books are alike, readers – those idiots – must be attaching to the writers’ name in order to buy books (who knows why.  Maybe it’s like imprinting.)  So they will buy every book with the same author name in the same amounts, even if they are in totally different fields.  Romance by Georgette Heyer?  TOTALLY the same thing as mystery by Georgette Heyer.  And if a writers’ name isn’t selling, the best thing possible is to change the name, since that’s all the reader imprints on.

 Or consider that the publishers thought it was a PERFECTLY VALID and, in fact, marvelous state of affairs to be able to control which books even got seen, much less bought.  They would buy a hundred books and plan on 80 of them failing and, in fact, make it impossible for those books to succeed.  (The reason for the inventory being so large is related to all sorts of other stuff, including “holding space” and the fact that even a book which “doesn’t sell” will sell a few hundred copies, which with the new print on demand tech was enough for them to make money.)  How could they think this made sense?  How could they think they could PICK the books the public would want to read, across the country with that much exactness?  How could they think they could say “this book will sell 100,000 copies and this one will sell 500?”  Let alone why would they buy the book which would sell 500, let’s concentrate on their belief that it was a good thing to decide how much the book would sell before exposing it to the reading public (this from an industry that does no consumer surveys and in which twenty one houses turned down Harry Potter.)

 HOW could any sane industry think it was a good thing to be able to say “Well, I don’t care if the customers want more Pratchett.  We shall give them more Laurell Hamilton.  They’re both fantasy.  The readers will buy more of what is in a bigger display, and that’s the end of it?”  (Of course, both Mr. Pratchett and Ms. Hamilton sell.  However, Pratchett didn’t for almost a decade in the US while selling in the UK.  Why?  Because NYC had decided he wouldn’t sell.  So he got print runs of five thousand books and was about as well known here as I am.  The moment at the first Discworld con when Pratchett said “What changed between then and now?  Different agent, different publisher.  I write the same,” was a moment of intense relief for me, because if they can hold Pratchett at that level, they can hold anyone.  It’s their decision, not the writer.  More on that later.)

Well, the publishing execs think one book is much like the other.  So, it’s perfectly fine to push the books they want to push, with the opinions and attitudes they want to promote.  The reader, is after all an idiot, and they can just buy whatever is available.

 But Sarah, you say, printruns have been falling since this became policy.  Well, yes, I know that, but editors and publishers say it’s video games and TV and movies.  That’s their problem, not mine.  (And also, readership has increased with the e-book revolution.  I wonder why.)

 Other things that are their problem – if every book is fungible and every reader will be just as happy with one book as another:

 How come you stop buying an author when he/she doesn’t magically become a bestseller, when you haven’t slated him/her for it?  Because, look, if the reader will be just as happy with Harry Potter, A Farewell to Arms or If you Give A Mouse A Cookie, HOW can it be the writer’s fault?

 How come you give different advance levels to different writers?  Exclude the celebrities, since you think that sells a book.  How come you give some writers millions and some a thousand?  If a book is the same as the other, then all writers should be paid the same, right?  Maybe a certain amount per word?

 And if every book is the same as another book, why would anyone buy books from a certain publisher?  (Baen fans, SIT DOWN.  I’m not saying every book is the same.  Big Publishing is.  Baen is NOT part of teh stupid in this, and Baen is not guilty of this nonsense.)  Why not buy indie instead?

 By their very logic this brings us to the conclusion that the big six might or might not be alien life forms or mentally damaged, but they ARE in fact fungible.

 Don’t give big publishing a cookie.  BUY INDIE (Small press, micro press or self published and, of course, Baen who is in many ways indie).

 *My title btw, is taken from Shakespeare, whose works still sell, and therefore – by not being bananas – puncture all of big publishing’s argument.

*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. *

For previous chapters, look here:  https://accordingtohoyt.com/witchfinder/

 

Prisoner and Guards

Caroline couldn’t think and couldn’t focus.  Not that she wanted to focus.  As the ground seemed to speed beneath her, and she saw the clods and small stones struck up by the hooves just an armspan away from her, she was all too aware only the centaur’s strong arm, its tight pressure beneath her breasts, kept her from falling down and being trampled.

She closed her eyes, but it was impossible to ignore her situation.  She smelled horse and human sweat commingled, she felt the jarring pound of the centaur’s hooves beneath.  After a while she heard yelling, and then the hooves stopped and the movement, and the human arm let go.

Caroline opened her eyes in time to stumble a little, then recover her ballance.  She stood on a clearing, filled with dozens of centaurs, clustering round her on all sides.

The centaur who had brought her pushed her forward, a hand on her shoulder, and said, “I have brought her, you see.  At the council’s command.”

Around her there were many centaurs.  All of their human bodies were swarthy, heavily muscled, and her first impression of them was of a menacing group, particularly as they moved restlessly, their hooves stomping the ground, and calling out words she only partly understood.

“In the sacred ground of our ancestors–”

“The announced one–”

“In this dire hour.”

They spoke now one and now the other, their voices louder and more resonant than normal men’s voices, their heads tossing – just like horse’s heads, she thought, in shock, even if they were atop men’s trunks and necks – their long dark hair sweeping and becoming even more disarrayed.  They had overgrown stubble or outright dark beads.  Some wore necklaces of what appeared to be human teeth.

Caroline wanted to run, but she could imagine this troop of centaurs following her – hunting her down.  She swallowed hard and felt sweat prickle at her eyes.  Her throat was so parched she feared she might not be able to speak, but she had to speak.  If she couldn’t run, she had to do something to prevent these creatures–

To prevent the creatures what?  She could remember, vaguely, from her classical mythology and history that drunken centaurs could get thoroughly unpleasant, in the way of unpleasantness that mama would say Caroline shouldn’t know about until her wedding night – and perhaps not even then.  But Caroline had heard the women of the nearby village talk, and some of the maids too.  And besides, the home farm had livestock.  And Caroline was no slower of mind than she should be.  So she had a pretty clear idea of how unpleasant and in exactly what way centaurs could get.

Though she wondered if it was exact enough to fend it off.  She should have asked Gabriel.  Of all of the adults in the house, he was the only one not likely to tell her she was being unladylike or to turn her mind to more appropriate thoughts.  Michael wouldn’t have told her that either, but he knew no more than she did, and besides, frankly, Michael was not very interested in what went on between centaurs or women.  Or men and women for that matter.  If it didn’t have gears, he was simply not much interested in it.

Which brought her to here and now, and whatever the centaurs meant to do, and the fact she was quite – quite – powerless to defend herself.  Except by trying to do what mama called showing herself a lady and therefore beyond their touch.  She looked at those large hands, at the end of bulging muscular arms, and realized not a few held knives or lances.  She swallowed again, then planted her feet and spoke loudly, “I am Caroline Ainsling, the sister of the Duke of Darkwater, and I want to know what you want with me?”

They moved.  At first she wasn’t sure how.  There was just more stomping of feet, and more galloping, and sounds like a stable.  Smells like a stable too, which made her wonder how human centaurs were, and how animal.  Around the edge of the clearing where the centaurs were assembled, two of them galloped in circles.

“Quiet!”  It was a clarion call of a voice, a voice such as, unleashed in a square in London could have called the whole city to attention.  Caroline trembled, thinking the yell directed at her, but then the voice said, “We are being rude to the maiden, and fools to seek her help but not tell her what we wish.  Agapios, Thanos, cease your mad galloping.  If you insist on behaving like colts, you shall be excluded from the councils of men.”

To Caroline’s surprise, the two madly galloping centaurs stopped, and one of them lowered his head like a schoolboy caught at fault.  It occurred to her that despite their golden skins, the long, dark hair, they were very young.  If they’d been horses, their horse-body would look like a colt’s not fully grown into its height, and if they’d been humans, the human body would have looked too gangly, too thin, not muscular enough.  The sweaty faces were devoid of stubble, and one of them wore his hair pulled back from the forehead with a bit of ribbon, an affection that, for some reason, made him look younger.  She almost smiled at him, then remembered the situation, and that she definitely shouldn’t encourage centaurs with untoward friendliness, and tried to make her face impassive.

“Caroline, Daughter of the Duke, Maiden,” the man who had first spoken, spoke again, and then, to Caroline’s eternal shock, fell on his front knees in front of her, and looked up at her with anguished eyes that didn’t look any less scared for regarding her from under beetling brows.  “We need your help.  My son has fallen in a snare, and you’re the only one who can save him.”

Caroline looked again at the powerful bodies around her.  “I’m the… only one?  But you…”

The centaur shook his head.  “No.  It is not a human snare, nor one such that can be defeated by the hand of a centaur, or the force of our arms.  It is a snare of the mind, a snare of the soul, and we are powerless against it.  We felt your nearness, and we went to get you.  We don’t know if your potency will hold against the local magic, but we hope so.”

Her … potency?  Had they lost their ever lasting mind?  And where were the centaur women?  Unpleasant ideas formed in Caroline’s mind, and she drew herself up very tall – or as tall as her five feet would allow – and spoke in a way that, she hoped, would do the Duchess credit.  “I do not have the pleasure of understanding your meaning.”

“It is my son, Akakios,” the centaur said. “He has been captured.”

“Captured by whom?  Where?”

There was movement again, this time towards her.  No.  The circle that had been all around moved, so in front of her there were only trees and no centaurs.  The centaur who’d knelt before her – the same one who’d brought her here? – now stood beside her, his hand on her shoulder.  Impossible not to follow as he walked forward, though he neither pushed nor pulled her.

He said only “Caroline, maiden!” and at that moment, they reached the edge and she could see through the trees.  She’d thought they were in a large clearing, but the clearing ahead was twice as large.  From the center of it, suspended on what seemed to be a silver chain, that attached soemwhere in the distance, was what looked like a crystal bird cage.  For a very large bird.  A very, very large bird.  Only there was no bird in it, but a young centaur.

His hair was in more disarray than that of his congeners.  His hands were clasped on the translucent bars of his cage.  And his human chest and horse body were crisscrossed with bloody slashes.

He raised his head, as if sensing her scrutiny and looked at her with eyes that were as green as leaves in spring, and that looked like he’d been crying.

Then she saw them: Around the clearing, as though on guard, galloped many unicorns.

They were large, white, glimmering, beautiful.  It took her a moment to realize that the tips of their horns were stained with blood.  

By which I don’t mean this is a blog devoted to Kate Paulk’s book.  Sorry, guys.  When it’s cued to come out, I shall let her excerpt, okay?  Good, now moving on.

One of the things that my blog yesterday touched on was the concept of “Consensus reality.”  You guys seemed to know exactly what I was talking about, which is good, because…  Well, mostly it is a concept I’ve discussed with my kids, but not with anyone else much.  However, I don’t know if you understand the breadth and depth of consensus reality, or what it means, how it is established, its fatal flaws and how insane things can get when the consensus reality is significantly different from the kind of reality that can bite you in the er… nethers.

Creating or changing the consensus reality has been a project of revolutionaries and/or invaders and/or reformers since… the world has been a world.  Probably.  You can find it in changed inscriptions on the stone monuments of ancient empires.  You can find it in defaced monuments, for that matter, in which someone’s face was carefully chiseled out of a statue, which was left standing.  You can find it in historical descriptions of battles, invasions and other such “first sources.”

When studying history, it is a bright idea to remember the supposed credo of journalists “if your mother tells you she loves you, verify it.”  In this case, if your great grand mother tells you she gave birth to your grandmother, verify it.

How can you verify it, if every source is biased?  Well, you read as much information as you can, in as wide a pattern as you can.  After a while the way in which things contradict each other, and some of the absolutely known, rock-bottom facts about the era (like “half of Europe died in wars,” for example.  Or “At the end of this era the country was markedly poorer,”) will give you a fairly accurate view of reality.

Note what I say about multiple sources.  When studying history, multiple sources are the cure to consensus reality.

Now let’s say you have an ideology – because the ideology has changed what it actually believed in through the time, except for a few certainties – we’ll call it Hopeful Stupidity which believed that it needed to change what people thought reality was in order to get a foothold in a country that they could FINALLY transform into paradise on Earth.

BTW the idea that HS in its beginning format, [and including the idea that people like onto angels (by which – bizarrely – they meant intellectuals, philosophers and theorists!) could impose a better way of living from the top down and drag us from the grubby present into a perfect, peaceful and prosperous future] was a propaganda coup of the old USSR is not in dispute.  The beginning of it as a project in the US started before that (the ideas are to an extent to be expected of the then-normal beliefs about technology and the future) because no idea is stupid enough not to have occurred multiple times.  But the level to which it has become a consensus reality – in fact, the project to make it a consensus reality, was part of the agitprop of the old Sov Union.  Keep that in mind, because it is relevant.

Again, the idea of creating a consensus reality of – in fact – lying to the mass of people about their past and their future was not a new development in politics or government.  What was new was its intersection with technology.

To the extent that such things can be simplified (And they have to be, because I’m writing a blog, not a 100 page treatise) the twentieth century depended on technologies that worked best in mass form and were directed/controlled from the center.  (And our political theories have a tendency to follow our tech.  It’s stupid, but there it is.  See Glorianna in the middle of her clockwork empire.)

But what that meant is that those technologies were – by nature – designed to create a “consensus reality” such as the world had never seen.  (And the world has seen some great attempts at this before.  For instance, I BET some of you believe that Marie Antoinette said “Let them eat cake.”)

In most countries, creating a consensus reality took the form of top down authoritarianism, though.  The Sov Union, itself, resembled more than anything 1984 with lower tech.  And such work has holes.  Mostly it has the problem that people are really good at developing double-think.  That is where they will say something with the lips and confess another faith in their heart.  By the time the project really got going in the US, there were already indications that this was so.  And it disturbed those involved in the project.  (Was it a coordinated and rational project?  To believe Heinlein’s bio, as well as the documents in the USSR archives, yes, at its center.  It was in fact a conspiracy.  However, at its outlying edges it wasn’t really enforced.  People did things to advance it, more or less without thinking.  The “coolness” factor was a great part of it.  The early-planted idea that the future lay that way.  And the fact that it was bought into by probably the most massive generational bump to hit the US.  There are other factors, like the feelings of veterans of WWII, and the advent of television and… again… I don’t have 100 pages.)

In the States, the form it took was that “the good people” – people with a certain view of how the future should go.  Yes, yes, mostly (once more) philosophers and intellectuals, though a few were ruthlessly practical and power hungry men.  It happens.  And this particular project afforded a lot of power – took positions of power.  In a way it was a very easy project, because Americans are a very weird breed.  We like to do things, and we like to mind our own business.  That means NO ONE is minding the philosophical shop most of the time, and as far as liberal arts in college go, well, we want our young people to be able to show them Europeans a thing or two and read the same works and all but Good G-d, we don’t expect them to take all that mumbo jumbo seriously, right?  So, just go on to school, Johnny, and spew back what your teachers tell you, but we’ll forget all that when you come home and take over dad’s business.

And for a while it worked like that.  AND because NO ONE was minding the ideological store, it was very easy for little Johnny who had a more… HS bend than the others to finish his degree with flying colors, and to take a job where he could come to the top and control who got hired to teach the kids.  And what they were allowed to teach.  Or to take a job where he could control what books got published.  Or to take a job where he could pick what TV programs got aired.  After a while, with people possessed of Hopeful Stupidity in mid-positions, or in enough low positions, it was enough for little Johnny to be dim but really good at regurgitating back the Hopeful Stupidity credo.  And, to paraphrase Heinlein, if he was too lazy to work, too stupid to create anything new, and too cowardly to run his own con, little Johnny fell in place like a cog in a machine.

In the fullness of time, the people at the top died and little Johnny took over.

I think – if there are future generations who are literate enough for this – our descendants will laugh themselves sick at the idea that just as these people slotted into key positions, the Sov Union was falling apart, and the idea of top down economic and cultural control was withering.

Part of the issue, of course, is that in the US this wasn’t so much a conspiracy as we think of it, with cloak and dagger, but a slow and steady application of the idea of what is “cool” and the “future” to the culture, by all means available, and a slow but steady promotion of like minds, at all levels of entertainment, news, academia.  That type of thing takes a LONG time.

(And before you accuse me of paranoia, go and take a poll of academia, of publishing (fiction and non-fiction), of journalism.  If there were no ideological filter in hiring and promotion for those, in a deeply divided country like ours, the politics would break 50/50, right?  Or thereabouts?  But they don’t.  If the country mirrored those professions, we’d all be Red Pioneers.)

The other part of the issue is that this type of system promotes DUMB.  By which I mean, rock bottom stupid.  No, I don’t mean that individuals are stupid in the sense of not being able to memorize and spew back what they heard.  Some of them are brilliant that way.  But when it comes to innovation and intelligence, they are DUMB.  It is part of the Hopeful Stupidity credo that we’ve already reached a stable point in tech, and that’s why the government can now direct resources and thoughts and beliefs towards a better society.  If you let people going around creating random crap, that would upset the whole apple cart.  You can’t have that.  That creates “instability” and breaks apart the “national consensus.”

What this means is that the USSR promoted the same type of people.  Intellectuals, with a hunger for power.  Too lazy to work, too dumb to create, too cowardly to run their own con.  The first generation had to be hungry and sneaky.  The second needed to be less so, and were at least somewhat aware of not being the sharpest tool in the shed…  Which meant they hired the same type as themselves, but dumber.  Dumb enough not to challenge them.  Which is part of the reason that the Sov Union collapsed when it did.  Past the third generation, you’re in the same point that took the royal families of Europe centuries to achieve through mere inbreeding, where a king could put the crown on the right end of his bride two times out of four or so, and could be taught not to drool in public.

However, collapsing when it did, it also acted as a clarion call to the people who’d been involved in the project of Hopeful Stupidity in the US.  Up till then, at least in my profession, they let the occasional dissenter through.  And though you’d not get the bestest goodies, you could make a comfortable living, if you just kept quiet about how STUPID Hopeful Stupidity was.

Then the people, by then comfortably in control almost everywhere, realized that – uh – people COULD doublethink.  (Be kind to them.  Most have trouble single thinking.)  And that meant they needed to keep a sharp eye for heretics.  Certain profiles stood out.  Say you were OBVIOUSLY not stupid, but didn’t rock the boat.  “Um… better safe than sorry.  Keep so and so in menial no-decision positions.”)

In an ironic twist the Heigelian philosophy I was taught was right in this.  A system always seems strongest before it crashes.  By the nineties Hopeful Stupidity, by then flying the banner of “everyone has the right to never be offended” was publishing manuals on what language you were allowed to use, what words you were allowed to think, what word use was the moral equivalent of eating babies on screen.  And they were kicking out anyone from the industries they controlled, who might have a spark of original thought.  (Some escaped by having got established before that.)  This, btw, among other things, explains the state of the movie industry.

But here’s the thing – while it worked, it established Consensus Reality.  By which I mean, people got the same view of the world EVERYWHERE.  From school to your shootem movie, you heard the same things, over and over and over again.  In retrospect, this should have been a warning, but it wasn’t.  Of course it wasn’t.  Humans are social animals.  If our monkey band all thinks they can levitate the Denver Mint, if our education tells us that belief controls the world, if there are philosophical treatises on how belief is everything, if in movies and novels people can levitate the Denver Mint and end the war…  Well!  It must be true.  Otherwise someone would say something different, right?  (And btw, post-modernism is a way of closing that thought-escape-hatch.  It’s incoherent, of course, but it can work for a time.  If you really want it to.)  And when it doesn’t work, there are always reasons.

I was telling my son that the first time I thought FDRs policies had been RESPONSIBLE for the Great Depression, I thought I was going nuts.  All the “experts” knew he’d saved the nation.  It said so in my history book.  Casual reference was made to that in movies.  Fergodsakes, I was just a chick who read economics.  How could I question this?  (For the record now even Krugman admits it.  Only he thinks it can work, provided we get a WWII.)

But the Hopeful Stupidity NEVER understands innovation.  They don’t get that other people will do things other than climb to the top of the ladder by regurgitating the credo.  And they particularly failed to get that 20th century tech was a transitional state.  (Forgive them.  Part of it is that they just want power – not knowledge or wisdom.  Also, they don’t usually study tech.  There’s all that math, see?)  

And so… first the VCR, then cable.  In science fiction they could never QUITE get rid of Jim Baen (Wherever you are, Jim, I’m glad I got to “meet” you, if only over the phone.)  And then… and then there was the internet.  And all hell broke lose.  

The internet was supposed to be for scientific exchange or SOMETHING.  It was supposed to be for important people to tell each other important things.  They would tolerate porn, of course, but…  Political blogs?  Who were those people in their infernal pajamas?

And then it got worse.  What do you mean people can write and publish books without our approval?  But we worked years to be gatekeepers.  We licked all the right… er… boots.

Worse, just when the books that would show these people the past was different from what the gatekeeper’s said were FINALLY aging out of readibility… they could be brought back?  In a way that doesn’t age except when language ages?  (I would say the “lead” regulations that got half of my kids’ school library destroyed slotted into that, only I don’t think they’re smart enough to have thought of it.)

In case you wonder this is where SOPA came from.  It’s also where the shrieks of the industry come from.  And why they seem caught in molasses and unable to adapt.

We’re uncoordinated, insane, often very very angry (who, me?) and we just “put it all up” and “throw it all out.”  BUT that, it turns out, is the big hammer that shatters the delicately built, painstakingly constructed crystal of consensus reality.  The ONLY thing that could work.

Things are going to get much worse before they get better.  No establishment EVER goes down easy.  But in the end, hammer will always shatter glass.  (And isn’t it ironical that the originators of Hopeful Stupidity thought the hammer was theirs?)  Particularly when it’s a million pen hammers, wielded with gusto.

Carry on my friends.  Aim for the shiny bits.

I often talk about how I was influenced by Heinlein.  What I don’t mention is that the only books of his that could even vaguely be considered juveniles which I could find translated into Portuguese in the early seventies (which doesn’t mean that the others weren’t translated, only that I could no longer find them.  Portuguese book business has always worked on no-back-list, so barring finding the book used you were simply out of luck) were The Door Into Summer and Have Spacesuit Will Travel.  (This last one, of course, hit straight home because in many ways my family resembled Kip’s.  In many ways, too, I WAS Peewee.)

I read the juveniles after I got married.  My husband had about half of them, and I tracked the others down, used, one at a time, till my mid thirties.  (The days before Amazon were dark, oh, children of mine.)

But the thing is that before Heinlein I had another very strong influence on my formation and character.  Those of you who are from Europe, nod as you go along – Enid Blyton.

Yes, I know what is said of Ms. Blyton.  I don’t know if they call her sexist, but I’ve heard her accused of being racist and/or hating gypsies.  (Did she?  Well, I didn’t see it that way.  In Circus of adventure the gypsy girl is a central and sympathetic character.  BUT even if she had a condescending attitude to gypsies, it’s not race prejudice as such.  Part of it has a reason, at least if you go back far enough in Britain.  When sheep-culture [I can’t remember the Latin term.  Oviculture?] began in England, the enclosing and merging of lands led to a lot of marginal tenant families being dispossessed of the land they had farmed for generations.  Any number of them became “counterfeit gypsies.”  It was a way of avoiding the work house.  They dressed colorfully, moved from place to place, engaged in minor acts of pilfering.  “Gipsy” became the British word for “Homeless” or “Transient.”  The encampment of gypsies in Jane Austen’s Emma was almost certainly of this nature.  In that sense, it had nothing to do with race, and it was more akin to a young woman being afraid to cross a homeless camp – for that matter, probably not entirely unfounded.  Just because someone is discriminated against, it doesn’t make them angels.  My guess is that is the background of Blyton’s recoil from gypsies, if any.)

She’s also been accused of class prejudice.  Look, I wouldn’t know.  I did not grow up in a classless society, so at the ages I read her – four to ten or so – I would have been blind to it, at any rate.  It was just part of instruction on “How to behave properly.”

And right there, I must point out these things might be far more evident in the early childhood books.  I’ve heard of Noddy.  A friend of mine had one book.  But I never actually read any of those books.  The ones that helped form me were Famous Five and the Adventure books.  (I discovered the boarding school ones much later and read them, but by that time I was beyond “forming” at that level.)

What do I mean formed me?

Well, Enid Blyton who might or might not have hated Heinlein on sight, shared with him one important characteristic.  It is something that goes well beyond being a good writer, something almost of an alchemic nature, which is difficult to pin down.

They create in you a sense of morals – their morals – and a desire to follow them so that the author’s characters [or more often, bluntly, the author] would approve of you.

Admired, loved, important writers completely lack this.  (I could be wrong on this, being, again, well past the age of being formed, but from what I saw of how these influenced my younger son, J. K. Rowling completely lacks this, but Terry Pratchett’s Tiffany Aching series has it in spades.)

From Ms. Blyton I got un-Portuguese and frankly un-feminine senses of fair play and nobless oblige.  (Now, not totally un-Portuguese because the Northern region I come from was heavily influenced by England.  However, certain things that Blyton managed to instill with me, such as not taking advantage of personal connections and trying to get ahead purely on merit, or keeping a stiff upper lip and not displaying emotions, are outright counterproductive in Portuguese society.)

I’m not going to speculate on what creates that effect.  That’s a subject for another column.  I suspect it’s some combination of a strong personality, a strong voice, attractive stories AND the courage to give your opinion loud and clear.  (Agatha Christie seems to have this effect on some people, but not most, possibly due to her rather more quiet personality.)

I can tell you Enid Blyton had that effect, though, because hers were the first books I evangelized, and I saw her attitudes push into everyone to whom I gave the books.

Yes, I know what I said above about the attitudes being counterproductive in Portugal – but all the same they gave me a way to arrange my inner universe.  And they dovetailed rather well with the attitudes I picked up from Heinlein, btw.  So, of course, when I had children, I wanted to influence them to be more like me, so I could understand them (And verse the vice of course ;) )

Heinlein books were easy to come by, and by then I had hold of the juveniles.  Enid Blyton, on the other hand…  The year before we had Robert, with the vague idea that a miracle might happen and we might eventually reproduce (well, we’d been trying for five years, in our twenties) I stopped by a bookstore in England to look for the books.  And recoiled.

There were books with those titles, right enough.  But they were not the books I’d read.  There were televisions, and computer games.  But what was more, the kids did not sound RIGHT.  It was a short excursion and I didn’t have the time to really read them, but I walked away shaking my head.  The books had been re-written, which I thought I understood.  But I had no intention of exposing my kids to this.  I didn’t know if whatever they’d done left the alchemy intact.

Fortuitously, years later, when Robert turned three, a friend of mine – hi Charles! – worked at a used bookstore.  When someone came in wishing to trade a large box of Enid Blyton, the books didn’t even go on the shelf.  I got a phone call, and rushed down.

These were the real deal, the books from my childhood.  I passed them on to the child, and again, the alchemy worked.

Now, you’re saying “But Sarah, they had to modernize the books.  How could kids read them otherwise?  Children are not sophisticated.  They have to read about kids like them, in environments like theirs.”

Really?  REALLY?  You’re REALLY REALLY REALLY going to tell me that?  And you expect me to believe it?  (Presses fingers on either side of the bridge of her nose, closes eyes and shakes her head.)  What kind of children do you people have?  More importantly, what kind of namby pamby expectations do you have of your children?

Throughout history children were raised on stories of lands long before their own and far more alien to them than England between the wars would be for children today.  Even fairytales should be incomprehensible to American children a hundred years ago.  Were they?  No.  Children will accept the parameters of a story, and then build from that.  Doing that is no different than learning the rules of Harry Potter and enjoying the books.  I mean, kids, you do know that your children aren’t learning broom flight and magic, right?

Is the setting of Enid Blyton’s adventure tales odd to modern children?  I should hope so.  It was outright alien to me.  No one in Portugal (different culture, remember?) would dream of letting their kids go and camp anywhere before their eighteenth or twentieth birthday.  And even then, they would not let girls do so.  There were also all sorts of idiosyncracies.  They had no TV for instance. …  But kids are adaptable.  I knew I was reading about a different land, a different time, and I went along with it, captured by the characters and accepting the premisses of the world.

People who insist that Blyton or Heinlein or for that matter Agatha Christie must be modernized for “the younger generation” have been sold a bill of goods.  Young people who won’t read Heinlein because “I grew up with computers, and his characters don’t have them, so they’re irrelevant” of course also can’t handle mythological tales, or stories of the middle ages.  Or perhaps they’ve just been sold a bill of goods by the adults in their lives.  Or perhaps… and this is the scary part, they’re so convinced of the rightness of the consensus reality these days, so absolutely sure that our prejudices, our beliefs, our thoughts about things are the right ones, that they don’t want to think society might have been organized differently once upon a time.

This is different – if you ask – from the type of strong moral (or immoral) code that can influence other people.  For one, it’s more fragile.  I can’t imagine anyone like Heinlein or Blyton refusing to read about other lands/people because “they aren’t like me.”  They would probably judge the inhabitants of those worlds, fictional or not, according to their own lights (multiculturalism being a weak poison at the time) but they wouldn’t put their hands over their ears and refuse to hear about it.  In fact, this attitude of “modernizing” books betrays a LACK of cultural confidence, and a lack of belief that this is what we should pass on to our children.  It’s as though we’re (and here I’m talking society as a whole.  Just like I am at home in the lowest greasy spoon and the highest gourmet restaurant, I can encompass literature from all eras, and my kids can as well) afraid our kids will find out things were organized differently once upon a time, will investigate why and will come to believe (oh, horrors!) those old norms.

In fact, the “updating” of books is another way of enforcing that consensus reality that the gatekeepers have been working so hard at.  It’s a way of making sure that you hear nothing that makes you question “how things are done.”

It is in a way the same impulse that led to the endless revisions of history in 1984.  “We have always been at war with Eurasia” means you shouldn’t consider that perhaps there is a specific reason for that war, and that maybe that war is wrong.  “We have always had computers” and “it’s always been wrong to look down on gypsies” and “Women and men have always been equal” means you don’t think too hard about the way we live, and don’t consider HOW you could live.

You see what I mean about how that betrays a lack of cultural confidence?  How what it shows is that people are afraid their kids will meet unexpurgated books that push thoughts that are no part of our “politically correct” reality?  (Did you know that term comes from Maoism?  It was supposed to denote something that was obviously wrong, but was “politically correct” – i.e. true to the ideology of Maoism.)

“Oh, come, Sarah,” you said.  “Aren’t you getting al bent out of shape because some idiots gave The Famous Five computers?  I mean, it’s not like they’re defacing Caesar’s Campaigns in Gaul!  Perhaps kids like reading about other kids with computer games.”

Ah.  But see, when you go in to “modernize” something it’s very easy to change the other stuff too – on purpose or not.  Look, I’ve tried to revise a mystery that I wrote in the early eighties, and had it fall apart in my hand.  It was impossible for that book to happen in a world in which you could google things.  Modernizing something from the early twentieth century?  You’re going to have to change essential parts.  You’re just going to have to. And, of course, while you’re modernizing, you’re going to “correct” the attitudes of the characters.

No?

Okay, let me tell you a story.  My older son, during one of our walks, brought up a book I couldn’t remember.  He said something about a tree and “it was one of the books I read when I was little.”  Well, he read EVERYTHING when he was little – kind of like a pulping machine will swallow everything – so I forgot about it.

Only he didn’t.  Turns out that box of books had a few Enid Blytons I’d never read.  Robert, in attempting to prove to me he’d not gone nuts and that there was a story out there that sounded like what he’d told me, went looking through the internet.

He found it.  It’s The Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton.  And then he found the paragraph on Wikipedia, talking about the “modernized” versions.

In modern reprints, the names of some of the characters have been changed. Jo has been changed to Joe, the more common spelling for males, and Bessie is now Beth, the former name having fallen out of usage as a nickname for Elizabeth. Fanny and Dick, whose names now carry unfortunate connotations, have been renamed Frannie and Rick. The character of Dame Slap has become Dame Snap, and no longer practises corporal punishment but instead reprimands her students by shouting at them.

I’ve never seen my son so shocked.  Not the names, though changing the names is a goodly piece of nonsense.  Again, children are not completely stupid, and it doesn’t hurt them to know that the slang terms weren’t always the same as they are now.  On the contrary it gives them an idea of change and of time altering things.  (Which of course will make them question the justness of our own versions of things.)  But note that the character who practiced corporal punishment has been changed too, because G-d forbid our precious little sprouts would guess that once upon a time, and still throughout most of the world, corporal punishment is the norm in child rearing, and that generation upon generation have been raised that way without turning out any more dysfunctional than our own children?

If the precious moralists and revisionists HAD to do that and felt their own inherent superiority enough to do that – what else did they DO?  What else is changed in those books?

I bet you EVERYTHING.  Every attitude, every way of looking at the world.  EVERYTHING that made those books powerful moral influences.  If anything of that feeling remains, it is now in the service of the currently fashionable ideas – ideas like the ridiculous animism/new-primitive worship of the Earth (quite distinct from trying to keep a functional ecology), ideas like “we can’t hurt anyone’s feelings, even if they’re bad” ideas like “political correctness.”

My son said “WHY do that?  Why keep the book, the shell of the book and change everything?  That’s horrifying.  Wouldn’t it be more honest to burn them and ban them?  How dare they take the words of someone who is dead and can’t defend him/herself and make them into something OTHER?”

I agree with him.  If you’re that diffident about your current ideas and attitudes that you don’t want children exposed to older ones, be honest about your insecurity and bigotry.  Burn the books.  Ban them.  Yes, it will make you feel like a thug, a bully and a coward, but that just means you’re seeing yourself clearly.  If that’s what you want to be, BE that.

But don’t hollow out a person’s ideas and thoughts and attitudes, fill them with your own consensus reality, and then sell it under that person’s name.

That’s repulsive.  Grave robbers have better morals.