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Okay, guys, I’m just back and my brain is still on the plane, somewhere between Oregon and Colorado.  I tried but couldn’t write anything coherent.  (When do you write anything coherent, anyway? — ed. note  Shut up, you — writer’s note.)

I have SO much to do today it’s not even funny.  Would you believe that my kids didn’t clean while I was gone.  (Stop laughing, you — writer’s note.)  They have this peculiar male thing, where kitchen counters don’t exist, too.  They did dishes, mind, but the counters were never so much as wiped down.  Every male of my acquaintance has this problem, and I’m puzzled by it.  What is with you guys and counters?  Are you part of a counter resistance movement?

I also need to sit down and draw a schedule of my duties for various publishers and for myself, make appointments to figure out the legal structure of the imprint I’m starting, and … Oh, G-d.  (Moans)  Good thing I don’t need to sleep.  Of course I might go completely insane.  (Like anyone would notice — ed note.)

So, I’m going to get off the computer, take a shower, get off my robe (Yes, yes, this is being typed by a woman in a state of semi-dress.  DEAL.)  and into cleaning clothes.  And then I’m going to de-cat-hair the house, so I can stop sneezing and scour the counters, which are hopefully still there, and under the grease and the coffee stains.  Oh, yeah, doing the catboxes, too, which I bet no one has done.

Then I’m going to make massive pot of coffee and sit down to draw up a schedule.  I’m very afraid this will involve a white board.  Sigh.

Frankly, the biggest problem over the next year or so is the “retooling of the brain” and “learning to get out of my own way.”

Wish me luck.

I’m not going to post this here.  In fact I don’t propose to post more than the first chapter here.  It’s almost finished, it’s being posted in snippets on the bar and on the face book diner (the CLOSED group.  If you want in, ask nicely.)  It will go to Baen first.  If Baen doesn’t want it, NRP has called dibs.  But I very much hope Baen wants it, since it’ s technically the “other half” of the Darkship books.  (Those will continue but they deal with things OUTSIDE Earth.  These are the Earth part.)

The Monster

Carry Me To the Water

The world celebrates great prison breaks.  The French territories still commemorate the day in which the dreaded Bastille burst open before the righteous fury of the peasantry and disgorged into the light of day the innocent, the aggrieved, the tortured and the oppressed.
They forget that every time a prison is opened, it also disgorges, amid the righteous and innocent, the con artists, the rapists, the murderers and the monsters.
Monsters like me.
My name is Lucius Dante Maximilian Keeva, Luce to my friends, though I killed the last one of those fourteen years ago.
I was born the son of Good Man Keeva, one of fifty men who control the immense territory and wealth of Earth between them, and have for the last three hundred years.  As good as a prince.
But for the last fourteen years, my domain had been a cell, six by ten, with a cot attached to the wall, a fresher in the opposite corner that served to have a sort of vibro-wash and clean one’s clothes, and to take care of the other necessities of the body, all in one.  At the foot of my bed there was a dispenser through which a self-opening can of food and a container of drink came through every so often.  I thought it happened three times a day, but I couldn’t swear to it.
I couldn’t see light from my cell.  But cans arrived three times for each period they kept my lights turned on, so I considered that a day.  And I kept count by saving one of the cans and scratching it on the side with the lid.  Three hundred and sixty five days made a year with the usual adjustment.  And I had fourteen of those to the day when freedom came, unexpected and terrible.
It wasn’t strictly true that I hadn’t seen another human being in fourteen years.  Once, in the middle of the second year, I’d got very ill.  Who knows how, unless the food was tainted – perhaps it was.  I’d caught an infection that wouldn’t let go and wouldn’t be healed by any of the usual means.  They transferred me to a secure hospital ward for two weeks.  A very secure ward, with robots as caretakers and the doctors who saw me only remotely, at least after I regained conscience.  I retained a vague memory of having been touched while only semi-conscious.  Touched by human hands.
But after I became conscious only mechanicals touched me.  Still through the window, made of transparent dimatough – I know, I tried to break it – I could see people coming and going.  Men and women walking around, free, under the sun or the rain.  I remembered them very clearly, each of their expressions, their clothes, their movements.  I’d spent years remembering and making sure I didn’t forget that there were real, live people out there.  Even if I was as good as buried alive.
Twice more I’d been hospitalized, when I’d tried to commit suicide.  And once I’d been attended by humans, while they sewed the open cut on my face, from having got the cot to drop on my head.  I remembered that touch too.  Because down here, in the artificial light or the dark, it was easy to imagine there was nothing else.  Nothing but me, all alone in the world forever.
A world and a monster.  Forever.
Fourteen years after my arrival in Never-Never, I was exercising.  I’d found that just lying around and sleeping made it difficult to sleep and all too easy to stay up all through the time my lights were off, thinking of ghosts.  I’d tried that for three years.  Now I exercised.
I partitioned my day, so that in the morning – or right after the lights went on and I ate the first can of food – I cleaned myself, removed my beard with the cream provided, vibroed my one, faded yellow body suit and put it on, because it gave me the illusion I was still part of the world of living humans, and that someone, somehow, might see me.
Then I sat down and used the gem reader some kind soul had slipped into my cell through the food dispenser almost at the beginning of my captivity.  I used it through gems totaling about five hours, and then the second food ration was dispensed.  And then I exercised.
Back when I was the pampered heir of Olympus Seacity, I’d been provided with exercise machines, and hired trainers.  Turned out you could do just as good a job, or perhaps better, using your body as a counter weight and resistence.  If you had five hours and nothing else to do.
Oh, I used my bed in exercises too.  Since I’d almost managed to kill myself by getting the bed to fall on my upturned face, they’d fixed it so it was permanently attached to the wall, permanently down, and couldn’t fall.  Not even when a man who must be six seven and close to three hundred pounds – I had no way of weighing or measuring myself – suspended himself from it, over and over and over again.
I had my palms spread flat on the bed – at about the level of my pelvis – and was using my arm strength to push down on it and pull myself up, till my feet left the floor completely for a count of twenty, then down, then up again.  I was on my hundredth rep of the day, counting aloud: fifteen, sixteen, seventeen–
Boom.
Boom is not the way to write it down.  It was like a boom a crash and a woosh, all in one, deafeningly loud.
I let go and found myself cowering under my bunk, my back flat against the cold, smooth wall, my head bent, my arms around my knees.  Instinctive.  It is instinct to try to make yourself small and unobtrusive.  Not that I was ever either.
My mind ran through what could have caused the boom.
The first thought was that it was impossible.  Had to be.  There was no way – no possible way – that there could be that type of explosion anywhere near me.
The prison that had been my home so long was called Never-Never because it was the safest, best guarded and most absolutely secure prison in the history of mankind.  It was impossible there had been an explosion there.  And if there were, it would do nothing but drown all the prisoners, because as I remembered from when I’d been transported here in the dark of night, Never-Never was under water, sealed into the base of a seacity.  Most people didn’t even know it existed.
Yet there were other noises from outside.  Noises I wasn’t used to hearing.  Normal prison noises – cherished as random diversions from an otherwise monotonously ordered day – were distant conversations, too distant to hear the words, and sometimes the sound of muffled footsteps walking by outside my door.  Sometimes, rarely, there was a scream, perhaps as a new victim was dragged down to this antiseptic isolation.  Unlike prisoners of an older era, we didn’t even have rats as consolation.
Now the screams came one after the other.  There were drumbeats of running feet.  An odd sound scared me, for a moment, until I realized it was laughter.  And then there was… singing?
My mind raced, making my heart race, and not all the will power in the world could bring me out from under my cot.  Until I saw the water.
At first it showed as a filmy sheen, under my door.  I blinked at it.  Sweat stung my eyes, and I was sure that it was a mirage.  Although Never-Never was under the ocean, I hadn’t seen water except in my drink dispenser for fourteen years.  The fresher was strictly vibration only.  At a guess long before I’d been brought here, some clever soul had stopped up the waste disposal hole with cans, by keeping five or ten of them stopped up the space under the door, perhaps with the blanket – then filled the cell with fresher water.
Now the only way to commit suicide by drowning would have been to block the hole, stop up the crevice under the door, then piss enough.  Even if drink hadn’t been controlled, I didn’t think even I could muster enough desperation for that.
So when the water first came in, it took me moments to believe it – dozens of minutes of my staring in disbelief, while it crept under the door, in increasing quantities, till it lapped at my bare feet, cold and wet.  I put out a finger, dipped it in the water and tasted it.  Sea water.  There was a hole in the prison.  A hole that let in seawater.  I reacted.
Or rather, my body reacted, which means it did something stupid, as bodies will when you’re not paying attention to them.  I jumped up, cracking my head – hard – on the cot, then bent again and scrambled out from under the cot, on my hands and knees, splashing in what had to be, now, two inches of water.
My heart beat hard, and my throat was trying to close in panic.  Never-Never was completely under water, even if the entrance was up above the water line, a narrow, well-guarded hole on a Seacity floor.  The explosion could not have been at the main entrance, or no water would be coming in.  That meant it had to be in the underwater wall, somewhere.
Never-Never had seven levels.  Seven circles of hell.  I was on the sixth down.  If I understood the organization properly, and it was entirely possible I didn’t, this level housed the most dangerous prisoners.  The level below me contained only torture cells.
I’d been taken to them when I’d first come to Never-Never.  I’d never understood what exactly they wanted to know or what they thought torture would accomplish.  Maybe they just liked hearing me scream.
I tried to remember exactly how long it had been from boom to water under my door.  The water was now up to my ankles, and I couldn’t think clearly.  It felt like the explosion had simultaneously taken place several years ago and only a heartbeat away.  But the water was now above my calves, which meant the hole had to be nearby.
They’d come, I told myself, swallowing, imagining the cell filling with water to the ceiling, drowning me.  They’d come before I was floating lifeless.  They’d never let me commit suicide, and they weren’t about to let me die now.
Yes, I’d tried to commit suicide before, but you need to work yourself up to a certain pitch of despair for that.  I wasn’t there now.  I had a brand new data gem, slipped in yesterday’s otherwise empty mid day food can.  It claimed to be ancient novels, from the twentieth century.  Thirty of them.  I hadn’t even looked at the gem at all.  I’d been saving it, reading my old gems: history and science, music and language, and saving the new one like a rare treat.  New ones came in seldom and irregularly.  I’d gladly forego a meal a day for a gem, but I never got that.  This was the first new gem in three months.  And now I’d die without reading one word of it.
I lurched towards my cot again.  I kept the gem reader – a cheap, tiny unit of the sort you used to be able to buy for a couple of cents anywhere – and the gems in the crevice between bed and wall.  Not exactly hidden.  Either the cell was wired for sound and sight – and it probably was – and they didn’t care I had it, or else it wasn’t and they didn’t know.  No one ever came in to inspect, so no one would find it otherwise.  But I kept it there so it wouldn’t fall and break.  The gems were my only connection to other humans: to their words, their minds, their thoughts.  If I lost them, I would quickly lose whatever grip I retained on reality.
Perhaps I had, I thought, as I grabbed the gems and the reader, and wrapped the whole thing, tightly, in my coverlet.  Perhaps this was all an hallucination.  The coverlet ripped easily but I’d found in the past, when I’d spilled drink on it, was completely impermeable.  Like water proof paper.  I was thinking that neither gems nor reader were designed to be exposed to salt water.  And if I broke them, new ones might not be provided.
Though they had to come from someone within the system, they couldn’t be exactly official, or else they’d not be sent inside otherwise empty food cans.
I wrapped the whole as tightly as I could, ripping the coverlet and tying it over itself.  The torn strips weren’t sturdy enough to hang oneself with, but they worked for this.  I slipped the packet inside my suit.  The water was now up to my knees.
Splashing, I drew myself up to my cot and stood on it, my hands on the ceiling for balance.  That would keep me safer longer and give someone time to rescue me.
They would come.  They had to come.  After all my clever attempts at killing myself, they weren’t going to let me die like this.
A voice screamed something outside the door.  No, wait, sang.  Then there was…
A flash of sound and light that glared through the hole in my door where the lock used to be.  I blinked.
When I opened my eyes again, the door was open, and above the ripple caused by the door opening, standing on a broom was the most unlikely angel of deliverance I’d ever seen.

This is a short post (okay, short for me, anyway) as I’m getting ready for the last session of the workshop.  I don’t know if I can post at all tomorrow, since I’ll be traveling, but because I like you guys (Grin) I’ll cue up the first chapter of the current almost-finished novel in the Thena-verse (but not with Athena.)  I’m posting this a chapter at a time in the diners (Face book and Baen Bar) and will probably take it halfway through the novel or a little beyond.  I don’t propose to do that here, just post one chapter tomorrow.

Anyway, I think they’ve done it to me again.  They being Kris Rusch and Dean W. Smith.  Done what you say?  Well, twelve years ago, I was living a blameless (largely unpublished, too) life, writing about a novel every two years and a short story where lightning struck.  I thought that was the most I could produce.  I mean, I had two small children, a house, cats…

I came back from their workshop writing a short story a week and a minimum of two novels a year.

I’m very much afraid they’ve broken me again.  I think if I’m not worried about the soul killing prospect of having to write the first three chapters, then kill the characters if they don’t sell, because I can always put it out myself, I can write a lot more than that.  Now, you guys might not see all of it (unless you’re really the kind of fan who’d buy my grocery lists — yes, they do have funny comments) since a few will be very, very, very, very closed pen names.  But…  time will tell, right?

Meanwhile I’m making lists of every almost-finished novel nixed by the gatekeepers.

POPcorn Kittehs!

And this time it’s serious

So, Sarah how is the workshop going?  Well…  Wonderful and terrible and everywhere in between.

The terrible part comes from my normal relationship with software.  Try it, screw it up, try it again, scream, cry, throw fits.  Repeat.  Somewhere along the line master it and go “oh, this is easy.”  I did put a “book” (actually a short story) up on both smashwords and Amazon and, OMG, it’s ugly.  I know that my friend Amanda Green WILL read me the riot act about the mess it is.  I know, I know, Amanda, but this is how I learn.  After I master it, I’ll go back and clean it up.  I am starting to understand why you do so much work on these things, though.  We’ll talk about it.  And eh.  It’s probably better than most small presses are kicking up.  And if anyone at the workshop with me reads this: I’m really not Diva Bitch From Hell.  It’s just how I react to software when I’m learning it.  It’s like…  Ms. Hide comes out, because I’m so frustrated and don’t know what I’m doing wrong.  Normally I’m only HALF Diva Bitch From Hell.

The most enlightening bit was about covers.  I THOUGHT I’d mastered that.  OMG.  I had NO clue.  Never mind.  Eventually I’ll discuss that, but meanwhile let me say if you’re going to go indie, take Dean W. Smith’s Think Like A Publisher workshop.

The wonderful part is where Dean Wesley Smith has actually convinced me, particularly given my back list, that I can actually make a living from Indie publishing.  This doesn’t mean I’m going to completely abandon traditional publishing.  I’ve said this before but I’ll say it again, just for the sake of making sure everyone gets this: I’m not abandoning Baen.  I could no more do that than I could disown my family.  I will work for Toni as long as she wishes me to.  There are debts that can’t be paid, and the one I owe Baen for picking me up when no one else would is one of those – without them I wouldn’t be a writer today.  This is a debt beyond money, beyond time and beyond qualification.  It will never be paid.  (Okay, so I come from an honor culture.  Live with it.)

Again there is at least one other house, Prime Books (not Prime Crime, which is an imprint of Berkley) which I’ve just started working with.  So far I have no complaints about them, and unless they make the process of working with them painful, I’ll probably continue working with them.  (They’re doing the vampire musketeers under Sarah Marques – warning for those who are my regular readers, this is strong, strong stuff quite different from the rest of my work.  It involves odd sex and… well, just odd.  If it’s not the sort of thing you mind, though, you might find it’s my best work.  The first book Sword And Blood is scheduled for – I think – next Spring.)  There is one other house I wouldn’t mind working for, though I haven’t got around to sending them the proposal yet.

The operative word here is “wouldn’t mind” – I am however becoming convinced that  I don’t need traditional publishing to survive (not if I can make this work and as I said, I’m beginning to believe I can.)   And that is a completely different ball of wax from what I’ve been doing and going through.  I will, eventually, explain all or at least most of the differences, but for now, I’ll say that the most important is mental – and I’ve only started undertaking it.

Okay, first of all, because publishers lived for the “big book”, the one that would “break out” they’ve got into my head and conditioned me to think that way too.  They got into my head pre-production, which I’d sort of understood, but not really.

I mean, I’d understood the “you don’t want to write this, it will never sell” bit.  All of us have gone through it.  But apparently I also have a stop that says “you can’t write this it’s not ‘big’ enough.”  Based on this, I’ve shelved a bunch of “sheer fun” space opera ideas.  I’ve also shelved a bunch of characters as “objectionable and borderline reprehensible.”  Oh, not to me.  Not to the readers (I think) but to the publishing gatekeepers.

Now, it’s not so much a matter of popcorn kittens.  I mean, you know those, right?  Kris linked them.  All the kittens (ideas) jumping and you can’t finish anything.  This is worse…  These are long buried ideas resurfacing, whole novels, novelletes, novellas and short stories.  Entire universes and galaxies are springing back from the turf of “thou shalt not” where I had buried them.

I have to finish the three books between hands, the three books I “owe” trad publishing.  Because after that I need to budget half my time for self and NRP.  Because…

They came from the subconscious.  They’re alive.  And this time, they want my typing fingers!

A hurried post today.  Sort of ties in with yesterday’s.  Sort of.

Random thoughts on change and on technological change specifically:

As we get older we lose our taste for rapid change, even those of us who were always at the edge of it (and my husband and I were both early compute and early internet adopters.)  I note a change in me as I contemplate these trips on business.  I don’t want to travel, partly because t takes time from my novels, but also because it breaks my routine.  And I like my routine.  I like my bed.  I like my neighborhood, I like my office-ish.  I know this makes me sound old and peevish, but there it is.

On the other hand, I’m not that old, and our society is aging faster than I am, since boomers are the largest component of it and they’re getting older.

Is it my impression, or is it a really bad circumstance to have a large component of elderly people in a society experiencing fast, catastrophic technological change?

In former times, people often lost their profession to change, but that was okay, as they lived much shorter lives than we do.

On the other hand, would you trade your longer life for a more stable world?  I wouldn’t.

Will a more aged population slow the change, as we cling stubornely to “the way things used to be”?  Would publishers be reacting this badly if the median age of management weren’t older than I?  What is the ideal balance between flexibility and life experience?  Is the fact that Europeans are, as a population, older than us a factor in how they’ll react to the economic crisis?

I don’t have any answers.  Each of those questions could lead to a speculative essay, but not while I still need to kick the cat out of my suitcase – again – and finish packing.  I might pursue these the rest of the week.  For now, I’d like to hear your thoughts and your further questions about how much of our sense of crisis is the fatal intersection of national aging and technological change.

As we all know I grew up in the sort of quaint place that fairytales – and fantasy books – wax poetic (and often pathetic) about.  So it will surprise absolutely no one if I tell you it came with the necessary accouterments of proverbs and picturesque sayings.  (Because, to allude to my son’s Ninja Nun comic, the touristry ministry gives you seven kinds of h*ll otherwise.)

One of those charming proverbs was something along the lines of (tries madly to remember) “Why would you want, fiddler, to learn to play the harmonica?”  and, with total disregard for one-men-bands, this was supposed to allude to the fact that if you do something well you should stick to it, and not go haring off in search of new work, and different experiences.  (There was also something about potters not mending pans.)

As charming as it is to think that this served people well in a long-forgotten time of stability when a son followed his father’s footsteps into a profession, world without end, I’ve read enough to suspect that this was not ever really true.  I mean, do some sons follow their father’s professions?  Sure.  Talent tends to run in families, so if your father is a brilliant mathematician, or a really good farmer, (or both) chances are so are you.  But here’s the thing, there’s a good chance that the son won’t follow the father’s profession exactly the SAME way.  Chances are that the son will follow it sideways, with a twist, more so, less so…  The sons who just – to extend the methaphor – follow their father’s furrow to the end, always strike me as a little sad, a little… manque, like something is missing of the essential spark of life that animates other people.

And there’s reason to think those sons (and daughters) are not the majority and never were.  Even in the middle ages there were laws in almost every European country saying that a son had to do what the father did, at least in those professions considered essential.  At least, once the plague opened opportunities of advancement in Europe and broke the chains of feudal serfs, everyone seemed to hare off to better their status.  Laws, of course, didn’t work to keep them back on the farm.  (Laws, most people tend to forget, don’t work without heavy enforcement, and then often don’t work as they’re meant to.  Take the minimum wage law (please.) Because it contravenes economic fact, it has resulted in a flood of illegal laborers.  But that’s musing for another day.)  But they did leave us a useful testimony to the fact that life was never as stable as we’d like to think it was.  The golden age back there only seems so to us because we know how the struggles that consumed people at the time will end.

However, I will concede, if anyone is interested – you, back there, stop pretending to sleep.  That’s such a fake snore! – that we’ve entered a time of marked and tumbling change in most professions.  Disruptive change.

Not all change is disruptive, see.  Oh, I know, twentieth century.  Oxcart to moon landing, yeah.  But look, in the essentials, the automobile was just a faster and safer and more affordable (because no horses to maintain) form of carriage.  And most people (more’s the pity) never got close to going to the moon.  Manufacturing got faster and cleaner and better.  A lot of things got cheaper.

I’m not going to pretend this didn’t change lives.  Of course it did, and I experienced a lot of that change myself, over a compressed time.

What I’m going to say is that it didn’t change the processes of life, or not as much as we expect, or at least not in most professions.  Yeah, if you were an old buggy whip maker, you might have retired early, and your apprentices might have gone to study mechanics.  Heck, to read, say the Miss Marple stories by Agatha Christie in sequence, tells us how much the texture of life changed before and after the war.  But Mis Marple didn’t suddenly have to learn to knit using a computer, say.

Now, this is a gross generalization.  A lot of professions, particularly towards the end of the twentieth century, had to learn to knit using a computer, to work that metaphor further.  But by and large, the processes set at the end of the nineteenth century for “how life works” continued the same way.  Yeah, now a woman as well as a man might go out of the house to earn her living.  But even that is not that out of the pattern, since women in the lower classes worked in the factories since the industrial revolution.

And that’s why I think you need to go back to the industrial revolution, to its total upending of what had been a centuries-old way of life, to see the equivalent of what we’re going to: villages which had been stable for centuries were suddenly emptied by people leaving for town to work in the factories; young people who had always started working at ages that seem impossible to us now, suddenly were at least thought to be better off in school (and most of them ended up in school, after a while) because the industrial revolution required workers trained to work in groups and to obey and be punctual; work became something you did outside the house, instead of in the house, often with the participation with the family.  Etc. etc. etc.

The only thing that made the industrial revolution slightly less (a very little less) frightening than what we’re seeing now is that it was slower.  Or at least it seems so to us, from where we’re standing.  (And even then, the fast pace of change and the fear and angst it occasioned, particularly among those with power but more generally too, ended up giving us the French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars and, generally speaking, rivers of blood – I’m very afraid we won’t emerge on the side of this without experiencing the equivalent, but that’s a musing for another article.)

From where we’re standing, only biblical type phrasing seems appropriate, only the Bible – is for some reason – quite lacking in metaphors having to do with machinery and tech.  So, I’ll have to make do and tell it onto you verily (yea!): Brothers and sisters, the day is coming, roaring like a freight train, and when the day arrives, of our way of life there won’t be left stone standing upon stone.  (Yes, today I am devoted to stretch all metaphors till they scream, why?)

Call it singularity, if you want to.  I won’t because the word comes freighted (trains again) with ideas of immortality and brain jacks, and I really can’t be having with that just now.  But the essence of the singularity as something past which everything is different, so different that understanding before and after is very difficult, is there.  Yes, I think change will be that extraordinary.

Now, perhaps I’m silly, because I’m a writer and right now my profession is getting hit on the snout with the rolled newspaper of catastrophic change in tech.  (Mostly for the better, mind.  But the better doesn’t seem so, when we’re in mid-change.  Security is gone and we must adapt faster.)  But it seems to me that most of your professions are in for it, too, and not far behind mine.  Oh, I don’t think heavy manufacturing is close to changing that much yet – except a lot of it is already done by robots.  Doctoring is probably safe for a while longer.  But things like… teaching.  Uh, your time is coming, roaring like a freight train.  And don’t get me started on a bunch of other professions.  At the end of this, we’ll be able to write a scene like at the beginning of City (by Clifford Simak.)  You know “And sometimes the children asked, what is a teacher?  What is a movie studio?  What is a publishing house? What is a freight train?  Historians told them to be quiet.  These words were just made up and the stories just metaphors, to be enjoyed and not thought over.”

So, what can we do?  Besides try to make sure that this time – unlike the last catastrophic tech change – we don’t end up wading in blood up to our metaphorical ankles?  (It might be out of our hands, but its our duty as humans to try to prevent it.)

We can tell the proverb about fiddlers and harmonicas to take a flying leap.  You see, what makes this change so difficult, right now, is that we’re in the air, with all our paws (what, you don’t have paws when you leap? Odd that!) flailing, not absolutely sure where we’ll land, or how to brace for impact.

As with any leap, the way to make things easier is to look ahead and set ourselves where we can fall standing on all four paws and ready to run, attack or cower as needed.  And in this over-stressed metaphor world, seeing what’s ahead means learning as much as possible about the tech that’s causing the change.  And following the lives of those who are ahead of us in the leap.  (Thank heavens for blogs.)

In the interest of the first, I, the world’s least technologically inclined fiddler must now learn to play the harmonica of tech.  (NOT a real harmonica, for those of us who know of my inverse musical talent.)

I am headed for Oregon this weekend, to take Kris Rusch’s and Dean Wesley Smith’s Think Like A Publisher workshop, part of which involves the tech of making ebooks.  Yes, of course I am terrified.  Look, after weeks of my nooddling with the attempts to put up a donate button, my husband did it for me yesterday in about seven minutes (Look, there, on the sidebar to your right at According To Hoyt, though I don’t intend to mention except while posting the free novel.)  The problem is when faced with most tech stuff my brain stops being able to think linearly and, instead, spins in a tight circle upon itself.  But never mind that.  I’m sure it was very hard for Og, who had just used stones picked up from the ground to get his mind around the flint-chipping thing.  But if Og didn’t manage it, the young men with their sharp flints left him behind (hopefully alive, I make no promises for the morals of cavemen) and killed and ate all his normal hunting prey, so that Og was left to finish his miserable life eating only grass and berries.

Berries are okay, but I don’t like grass.  And I really like steak.  So I will muster this flint chipping before the lack of knowledge destroys me.

And, lest you think I’m done abusing metaphors: the fiddle player will one way or another become a one woman band and march over the horizon to mend some pans.

Crossposted at Mad Genius Club

Some of you have heard the story of how I came to see the importance of voice in writing (though this post is about more than that.)

As I’ve noted before, I am almost painfully dim when it comes to learning how to write or to improving my writing.  Part of this might be because it’s a true “vocation” in the non-religious sense.  It’s not just that I always wanted to be a writer, it’s that my particular set of skills and temperament seem geared towards it, and that I decided I’d be a professional writer very early in life.  I think because of that, I write half by instinct and half by guess, and can miss VAST CHUNKS of craft without noticing.  (I mean, consider I spent most of my young – and otherwise – life reading, and that I didn’t hit upon the concept of “scenes” until I found it in an how to book.  If I had to take the character from the living room to the dining room, instead of saying “he walked to the dining room” and cutting to the next interaction, I dragged him over the floor inch by inch, describing the carpet.  I thought I had to.)  Which is also why I’m an OBSESSIVE student of writing and get advice from the oddest places, from Tennyson poems to song lyrics.

So, I figured out voice mattered (and what it was) when listening to Dave Weber at a panel at either Liberty Con or Constellation.  On the panel was one of my fledgelings, whose name is withheld to protect the neurotic (which most new writers are.  Oh, yeah, most old writers too.)  This particular fledgeling has found a self-torture method that is more effective than cats of nine tails if less efficient.  Fledgeling finds how-to-write advice on line, and then believes it.  All of it.  Because most of the advice on line is not from experienced writers but from newbies, the end results can range from the amusing to the terrifying.  (And why would an extremely talented person do that, you ask?  Well, DUH… er… writer.)

The latest bizarre advice was not to use (I think – hard to remember) the words “as” or “for” because they were – supposedly – the mark of a beginner and would trigger immediate rejection.  (I don’t remember the words exactly, but seriously, they were that common.)  Dave Weber listened to my “child”’s disquisition on this matter, looking increasingly puzzled (I was too, out in the audience) and then grabbed the mike and said “I don’t know if that’s true.  I know I use those words.  But even if it were true, what I’ve found is that if you tell the story convincingly and with confidence in your own voice, all such things will be forgiven.”

See, I’d had people tell me before “voice, you iz doing it wrong” – yes, all my editors are Lolcats.  (No.  I don’t mean it.  It’s a joke.  For heaven’s sake, Toni W., don’t aim there.  Don’t aim there.  I type with those!) – but no one had explained what voice was.  And books on how to find your voice were worse than useless.  One of them advised removing all adjectives and adverbs and all “not strictly needed” description and stage setting.  As far as that goes, it’s not a bad style necessarily, though a bit outdated and reading a little like a stage play.

Weber’s comment made it all clear.  It’s the confidence of the voice and – if I may say so – the appropriateness to the story.  (Something I only found later.)

The best way to put this in perspective is to think of someone telling a joke at a party.  Even if they get the wording a little wrong, and it was three sheep and an Anglican Bishop instead of two goats and a Catholic Monk, it doesn’t matter, provided they do the right expressions, put in the right pacing, and make you SURE they know how they’re telling the story, and even that the story is funny.  (Seriously.  Some people just by the tone of voice and bullying through can make you laugh even if they forget the punchline.)  OTOH is there anything more nerve wracking than the person who stands there and goes “and then he says, are you horny or…  No, wait.  It was he says the hornier you are.  Then… No.”  Or even someone who delivers the absolutely perfect line in an apologetic tone and cringes?  (Unless that’s appropriate.)

Of course it’s a little different to think of this in terms of stage performance when all you have are the words on the page, but I’ve found it DOES help to think of it in the same way I would when telling stories at a party.

I’m a bizarre mix of introvert and extrovert and tests swing one way or the other depending on the time of day and mood I take them in.  But I do trend more towards the introvert.  So being on panels or speaking in public, or telling a joke at a party, make me almost physically ill.  The only way I could meet the demands of being a writer in the age when you have to self-publicize, was to put on a persona and pretend I was big and strong and brave and ENJOYED these interactions (weirdly, I do enjoy them while ‘in persona’) and I’ve found putting on the same mind set while writing works best.

But the weird thing is that, through that persona, I can actually show myself.  Pratchett, in one of his books gives a younger person the advice that she should just be herself as hard as she can (I think that’s in one of the Tiffany Aching’s, but I’m sorry, I’ve only had one – admittedly large – cup of tea and my brain hasn’t come online yet.)  And that’s what I find myself becoming, both on the page and in public.  Through the false front of confidence, I can show the truth of who I am.

And this brings us to the part where this isn’t just for writers.  My blog yesterday was, to an extent, about preference falsification and how it can lead to what amounts to a conspiracy of lies. You fear to disagree with those that are considered the “cool kids” and therefore what others hear is reinforced and leads to a unified – and totally wrong – image of the world setting in.  (In most cases this is relatively harmless.  When it touches on things such as how the genders interact or, say, economics, what we think we know can kill us.  As a species, and often as individuals.)

When I lived in a college area – waggles hand – give or take ten years ago, I used to go for walks and cross paths with the college girls all slim and fashionable and, well… young, while I was staring forty in the face.  And I remember thinking “I’d love to have my twenty year old body back, but I wouldn’t want the mind back for all the tea in China.”  This was not because I wasn’t as smart at thirty as I was at forty (for a given definition of smart.  Shut up you, and stop giggling.  Also, pointing is rude.)  It was because at thirty I was still afraid that if I opened my mouth and disagreed with people, people would hate me.  Yes, at forty I was afraid they’d fire me (or never hire me again) but I no longer cared if they liked me or not.  Frankly, if I judged them on their opinions (no, I don’t for a lot of people.  I think they haven’t examined where those would lead) I wouldn’t like a lot of them.  (It’s not defensible to support communism.  No, I don’t care.  It just isn’t.  That whole thing about the press reporting selectively?  Yeah.  If they’d reported on communism as they did on fascism, it would be about as acceptable in social circles.  It might have killed less than a hundred million people – though the quibbling is on the margins of the numbers – but it is still a disgusting, blood-stained doctrine based on envy, which, carried to its ends, leads to feudalism and oppression AND economic stagnation  And if you think it would work perfectly this time, you’d better show me what species you intend on using for this, because it doesn’t work with humans.  It can’t be tried in its “perfect” form because humans aren’t perfect.  If they were, a system wouldn’t be needed.)

And you know what, I’ve found that in writing and in life, keeping your opinions and… your SELF under wraps distorts who you are.  It is that distortion and hesitancy that makes the writing come across as lacking in flavor.  And as for the life…  Well, I’m not recommending any of you go out and mouth off and do yourself out of your job or home.  But I AM recommending that when absolutely needed you don’t keep your mouth shut and you don’t falsify preference.

Will it cost you?  Oh, heck yes.  You pay for everything in life, be it in money or not.  (And that’s another reason communism doesn’t work.  You can’t abolish cost.  To be alive is to work for a living and if you don’t, someone is doing it for you.)  Usually what you don’t pay for in money is far more hideously expensive.

I’m sure since I started talking (has it only been a little over a year?  Really?) it’s cost me.  But here’s the thing – it was costing me before.  It was costing me in stress and emotional twisting.  And it wasn’t getting me all that far, possibly because it wasn’t my “true voice.”

But what, you’ll say, if you’re wrong?  What if the things you believe aren’t true?  Well, if you’re wrong be wrong on your own.  Make your own mistakes.  You’re going to make mistakes, anyway – yours or someone else’s.  Which would you rather make?

I guarantee if you write long enough you’ll come to look at one or more of your books as “Good Lord, I wrote that?  What was I thinking?  Didn’t I know a thing about history?”  And I guarantee if you live long enough you’ll live to laugh at one or more of your opinions.

But when your grandkids ask if you were really an unrestrained gold-standardist, Reformed, do you want to tell them “Yeah, this is why I thought it was a good idea at the time,” or “No, but I had to say that to get published?”  I know which one I’d prefer.

So, go forth and live – and write – out loud.  What’s the worst that can happen?  Yeah, you could die for it.  But isn’t it better than living for nothing?

“I entered our section offices through a washroom booth in MacArthur Station.  You won’t find our offices in the phone lists.  In fact, it does not exist.  Probably I don’t exist either.  All is illusion.  Another route is through a little hole-in-the-wall shop with a sign reading RARE STAMPS & COINS.  Don’t try that route either – they’ll try to sell you a Tu’ penny Black.”  Robert A. Heinlein, The Puppet Masters.

Is there anything as thrilling as that passage?  Anything that as thoroughly pulls you into the story and makes you want to be there and find what the big secret is?  I remember reading it for the first time at about twelve? Thirteen?  Maybe fourteen?  And being completely thrilled by it.

There is nothing so inherently human as feeling a frisson of excitement at the idea that behind the rational, dry world we know, conspiracies move in the shadow, manipulating men and societies to their whims.  More importantly, particularly when we are young and relatively powerless, we like to believe there are conspiracies there, at the back of everything.  It both excuses the failure of our own personal powers that we are – at that age – perhaps just starting to suspect aren’t super-human and it gives us the impression that there is a fail safe and a security net.  Even if we screw up, some GOOD conspiracy will be there, to put its thumb on the scales and change our defeat to victory.

Science Fiction and Fantasy is particularly rife with conspiracies and long-held secrets.  Part of this is that for some of our premises, say “there are aliens among us” or “the fairies have always been here” or even “of course there are vampires.  They all work for the IRS.”  (Hat Tip Rebecca Lickiss who, hopefully has that story out on kindle.) conspiracies are needed.  Effective ones, otherwise there wouldn’t be a setup for our book.  Heck, even in Puppet Masters, Heinlein had the UFO landings be real and the government has sat on them.

Yesterday I was talking to a young friend about conspiracies and the possibility of conspiracies, particularly by the US government.  You have to understand, my own young self was convinced that the US government well well-night omnipotent, and I think so are most Europeans of all ages.  I remember when, a few years ago, I told my parents that our passports were going to take – I think – six months (aftermath of 9/11) and was told I was lying.  This was impossible.  “Big country like that.  Such an efficient government.”

I think I preferred it that way.  Yes, yes, I saw all the movies with evil CIA does something evil.  Sorry.  I still preferred the idea that our government was sharp like a well-honed blade and capable of doing things and keeping them secret for years.   Why don’t I believe that?  Well…  I first came to the States as an exchange student during the Carter presidency.  Very few illusions can survive killer rabbits.

People joke that if the US government could, it would make sex classified.  My question is, how would we know if they had?  The knowledge would still be as widespread.

So, for the record let me say right now that I don’t believe there are UFOs hiding among us.  If the IRS employs vampires, they must survive on blood sausage.  And the Kennedy assassination was a conspiracy.  Well, duh.  Of course it was.  It was a soviet conspiracy.  That was why Oswald was trained.  He came to the US to kill Kennedy.  Look, children, sometimes things are what they appear to be, and that’s the greatest conspiracy.  (And why, you ask.  Oh, tons of reasons, including the fact that our sainted president WAS on prescription drugs that lessened his self control.  But it’s also possible it was an agit prop operation, something the Soviets were VERY GOOD at.  Look at its effect: it succeeded in radicalizing the leftwing of US politics as nothing before it had.  And sometimes the effect is exactly what it was meant to be.)

And this brings us to the other part of things.  I don’t believe in conspiracies, but I do believe in misinformation.  As all of you know, I stop short of being Roman enough to deify Heinlein.  BARELY short.  So I will refrain from saying that his starting with the conspiracy and then leading us to the real way something really big can keep secret RIGHT UNDER OUR NOSES was deliberate and a work of genius.  Perhaps it was.  Ginny is no longer alive for me to ask.

It’s also entirely possible he just used the conspiracy to draw us in, and of course the misinformation was part of what he saw with World War II and the Cold War.  The juxtaposition is possibly accidental.

The facts of the Kennedy assassination are right in the open.  Have always been.  But even those who know Oswald was a communist and had a Soviet wife, will say “yes but…” and then on go on blab about the climate of hatred or evil conservatives.  Why?  Because all the books, most of the articles and ninety nine point nine percent of the dramatizations involving Kennedy go haring off those points and leaving the obvious, visible truth by the way side as something of little importance.

This is the same way that historians, or really anyone who cares to look into the matter at all, knows that Marie Antoinette never said “Let them eat cake.”  She was also not, by the way, the harpy and horror of legend, and her husband was not a terrible tyrant, but a bumbling man who was desperately trying to make the situation better for the peasants – and failing.  But that’s not what most people believe.  The lies have been repeated so often and so loudly that “common sense” or the “wisdom of the crowds” is that Marie Antoinette was a terrible woman who lived in luxury at the expense of the people – or something like that.  If I see one more movie of her as a depraved queen, someone is going to die.  (Probably me, because when I start talking back at the movie screen and we have to leave the theater, the people with me tend to get upset.)

So, while I can’t believe in conspiracies – particularly conspiracies by bureaucracy (wikileaks, anyone?)  I do believe in the efficacy of “the big lie”.  It works because it doesn’t try to cover up every proof of what really happened.  Instead, it suppresses the truth by repeating the lie so often and so loudly, and by accusing anyone who challenges it of being crazy or worse, until truth shuts up and goes away.  It’s still there.  It’s just that no one looks at it.

However, for this to work there needs to be a CONCERTED effort from all means of communication and entertainment, from news to fiction.  Which means, they all need to be in relative few hands, all of them with the power to sneer down their “we are special” noses at the rest of people.  Remember, they don’t have the power to erase the truth. They only have the power to make it shut up.

Look, humans are social creatures.  We want social approval.  We want to belong and to be thought well of.  If “all the best people” say one thing, you might see the evidence to the contrary with your very eyes.  You might believe it to the core of your heart and soul.  You are, however, not going to say a word.  Why risk ostracism.  Or worse, why risk your job and your livelihood?  After all, baby always got to have shoes, and cats need kibble.

Until recently, due to the fact that publishing and journalism, and news and all that, was in the hands of a relatively small group of people (look, smaller than the “upper ten thousand” who set the tone for Britain during the Regency.  And their social rule was often inflexible, too.) who moved in claustrophobically concentric circles, it was easy to “set the narrative.”  And yes, that’s exactly what it was called “Set the narrative.”  If you don’t believe me, google “Journolist.”

It wasn’t a conspiracy.  I mean, it got discovered.  It wasn’t that well hidden.  But the thing was, who was going to report it?  And the “people in the know” could look down their noses at the crazy people talking about it, right?

It is a human thing.  We’ll poke around at stuff that’s hidden, but we won’t say a peep if it will get us thought of as “nuts.”  (And if that Kennedy conspiracy thing won’t manage it, I’m safe, I guess.)  Let me just say that in all the world-size events I had the dubious misfortune to be present at, the event and its reporting had nothing in common and in fact that there are experiences of mine I can’t talk about because people will think I’m insane.  (Of course, the fact it was a small country and its turmoil barely reported in the US helps that.)

Anyway, I came up against this with Darkship Thieves, and more so with Darkship Renegade and even more so with A Few Good Men, the latter being the first book of the Earth Revolution.  Part of the world-building conceit is that history has been mangled beyond recognition and the leaders are, in fact, almost the opposite of what they claim to be.  I realized a-priori the only way to do that was to have them take over the means of communication and hold them.  And to make communications between citizens highly regulated.

Because, here’s the thing, right now (wikileaks, Journolist) the levers of power and the “shut up, we’re smarter” aren’t working.  There are to many other channels of communication, people are talking and posting phone videos of what they actually saw.  Oh, some of it still works.  The whole Arab Spring thing is not going anywhere as positively as it was painted.  I’m sure the readers of this blog, innocent and fragile flowers all, will be shocked to know in most cases it might just be a way to more extremist religious regimes.

But it works far less well than it did, and with every passing month, it’s losing more of its power.  And then there’s the other branches of “information.”  Entertainment shouldn’t be used as a source of information, but it is.  And that too is slipping more and more out of the hands of the upper not-even-ten-thousand.

When Amazon executives, interviewed today, “played down Amazon’s power and said publishers were in love with their own demise.” they were only half right.  I’ve said it here before, I will say it again.  The publishing establishment isn’t dying.  It’s falling on its sword in the most theatrical and splattery way it could find.

But its behavior is only incomprehensible if you view their objective as trying to make money.  It wasn’t.  It never was.  If it were, more of them would have followed Baen’s example of publishing off beat stuff. The fact a small house regularly beat them at their own game (more bestsellers with lasting power come from Baen than any of the bigger houses) should have made them change tactics and stop ignoring the part of the market that wants action, or military sf, or, space opera, or, oh, yeah, no lockstep political affirmations.  Instead Baen was reviled, (and let me tell you right here, most Baen books are as well written if not better written than others, it’s just that their aim – story as opposed to feeling – is different, and therefore the form and practice is different.  Having written both types of book, Baen is just as demanding a format.)  Snooty recent college graduates refused to stock it in bookstores because “it’s a right wing house.”  (This despite one of its authors being if not a current, a not too long lapsed member of PC USA.  But it has some authors who break the perfect harmony of “the narrative”.  Therefore it had to be stigmatized and marginalized.)

Now, with self-publishing and small, independent publishers and more importantly, the loss of control over distribution to the giant e-tailers, the horse is well and truly out of the barn.  The barn is possibly on fire.  But traditional publishers (and a lot of newspapers) are still trying, desperately, to lock that door.  It’s not that they want to commit fiery suicide.  It’s that they want their power to control the narrative and keep everyone else quiet back.  And, btw, it’s not even that any of these people have strong political opinions (a few vocal ones, perhaps) it’s just that, like regency ladies, they want to be able to think of themselves as “good ton” and the best people around because they know what type of lace to wear… er… I mean, what brand of ideology to make sure is in all the books this season. They learned at college that they are smart because they believe a set of things their professors told them — and that only ignorant people believe otherwise.  And they want to go on thinking they are smart.  They want to be able to tell all those squabbling bloggers and indie writers to “shut up” and “you’re irrelevant” and “we’ll never invite you to the nice parties.”

Only, see, I had a friend, long ago, who bought a van in such a terminal state of falling apart that as he headed towards an intersection, he turned the wheel and… the wheel came off in his hand.  (He said he said several rosaries, before he managed to stop the car.  This was particularly interesting since he is Jewish.)

In my mind, this is the image of publishers, and the big communications conglomerates.  They’re twisting that wheel, pulling those levers of “shut up, we know better” power, and nothing is happening.  This is why they’re acting so crazy and flailing around madly.  They’re trying to say the rosary, only they don’t know how to.

Leave them to their torment, and ignore them.  Poor things, they have enough to worry about.  They’ll eventually either crash spectacularly or get that van under control, have it repaired, and join the rest of us.

Oh, and if someone tells you “shut up” or calls you uncouth, scream louder.

Having gone to dinner yesterday at the home of two of those friends that, once you meet them, you realize you’ve known them all your life (or possibly since the birth of the universe, if not before.), I had a tad too much to drink — a problem, since I’ve been avoiding it as the sugar seems to complicate the eczema.  (Not as much as stress.)  As you can tell from these few lines it would be a serious mistake for me to attempt to write a blog today.  I think I’ll go downstairs and play with my art till the head clears.

Meanwhile, the exobrain — i.e. the brain that doesn’t happen to be in my head but who often thinks up the stuff I should think — Amanda Green has an excellent post on the state of the industry over at Mad Genius Club where she blogs on Sunday.  (She often does have those, it’s her job when my brain isn’t connected.)

This week has been a typical week in the industry.  There’s been good news, bad news and news no one is quite sure how to interpret.  All of it does, in my opinion, show the state of flux in publishing and just points out that no one knows — yet — where things will finally settle.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………

So let’s look at that in solid figures.  E-book sales accounted for $82.6 in July.  For the same month, hard cover sales accounted for $91.2 million.  There are several things I believe are important in these figures.  First, e-book sales continue to grow in triple digits each month.  I don’t feel the fact these sales ONLY increased by a little more than 100% in July is indicative that e-book sales are cooling.  July is the middle of summer vacation and most folks are not spending their free time reading.  For another, one month a trend does not make.  But there’s something else to look at.  That mere doubling of sales has brought e-book sales to near parity with hard cover sales.  That’s something traditional publishers have been fearing.  So that knocking you hear right now are the knees of legacy publishers trying to figure out what they’re going to have to do to survive.  Finally, it is important to keep in mind the fact that e-book sales for the year (through July) are up 152.8% while hard cover sales are down 17.8% for the same time frame.  Like it or not, e-books are here to stay and, in my opinion, the tipping point is here.  That will be confirmed as we see the sales figures for the rest of the year.

What would be interesting would be to see the number of units sold, and from what publishers, and not just the total dollar figure.  The reason I’d like to see it is because I want to see how the legacy publishers using the agency model of pricing v. those who follow the philosophy that you don’t have to charge as much for e-books as you do for hard covers.  I’d also like to see the breakdown between how many e-books are sold at the higher agency pricing v. the number of those same books sold when the price is lowered after the paperback version of the book comes out.  Until we see those figures — and I’m not holding my breath — we really won’t know the full impact of e-book sales on traditional publishers.

Read the whole thing at Mad Genius Club