Category: Uncategorized

I did not pull that sword out of the stone.

Okay, I do realize that Arthur is a regional pronunciation for Author. I didn’t know this, when I first started writing, or even when I had my first signing. Remember, I didn’t grow up in this country.

So, there I was, brand spanking author, brand spanking book (and man, were the numbers about to deliver a spanking, but never mind) sitting at a little table at Barnes and Noble waiting for my mobs of adoring fans.

Actually it wasn’t too bad, despite the fact that in a desperate bid to look like a fantasy author (guys, you’ve met me! Well, some of you…) I had put sparklies in my hair. I had no crowd but a continuous stream of local fans.

Then there came a lull and this portly lady comes up, dragging a reluctant five year old by the hand, with the sort of grim determination reserved to making a child eat broccoli or some other dreary but salutary task. She let go of him right in front of me, and while he stared at me with a puzzled expression (probably wondering why my hair sparkled pink and blue. Look, it’s not my fault they make those hair sparkles for little girls) she announced in the tone of a herald, “This lady is an Arthur!”

I eventually figured out, as she went on about the benefits of reading and the wonders of literature, that she meant “author” but for just a split second I was in panic fear I might be required to pull a sword out of a stone. Or worse yet, to put a sword – or a pen, or a keyboard – INTO a stone.

As I was mulling today’s post it came to me that encounter pretty much encapsulated what’s going on with reading and literature today, and also my attitude to it, which was to say, “Oh, no. I’m not an author. Authors are terribly important people with awards. I’m just a lady who writes stories to amuse people.” And then I told the kid about my book, but pointed out it wasn’t quite for his age level. (Well, it’s true. There’s also no better catnip to get a kid to read.)

I suppose I’ll have to explain why I said that incident encapsulates what’s wrong with reading. (My favorite editor, Toni Weisskopf, publisher of Baen books has told me I have a bad tendency to skip steps both in my non-fiction and my fiction and assume everyone’s brain has the exact same wiring as mine. So, I will scatter the bread crumbs, and hopefully you will follow, though I’ve come to believe my path is often weird.)

Before I had children, and while I was a young adult, I thought of programs to encourage kids to read in the way pretty much everyone does. “Oh, it’s a good thing.” And I threw in a dime or two their way when they asked for it. Then I had children.

Children in the abstract – someone else’s children. No, not our friends’ children, horrid brats that they are. If only our friends followed our (childless) advice in raising their own kids, then their kids would be – mythical children, pure and sweet and always smiling, would of course be encouraged to read by t-shirts that say “I read” or by posters saying “yay books” or even by candy and burgers for meeting a reading quota.

Real children, or at least my children (there were days if they got any real-er they’d be made entirely of dirt and cross-grainedness) look at all that stuff and the flags of danger go up. “This is something the adults want me to do. That means it’s either good for me or boring. Or both.” And for the rest of their lives, they’ll regard reading as a chore. A worthy chore, sure, but something to be done when you want to feel virtuous, not something you sneak an hour or two away for when you really, really, really should be working.

Having my kids and remembering all my own misdeeds in childhood, I realized that I had in fact never been encouraged to read. And that the stuff I wasn’t supposed to read was always the most fun. Not only did I never read those insipid picture books about good girls that my poor aged aunts wished on me, but I read books of philosophy that would have gagged a horse, simply because my dad said I couldn’t understand them and they’d be bad for me. I read science fiction because my brother tried to hide his science fiction books from me, since they often had graphic sex scenes (this being the seventies). And while I won’t say I learned English to read Masters and Johnson which my brother had locked away in his bedside drawer, I did study with a will until I could read it and understand it while standing by the bedside table, ready to shove it back in and relock the drawer. (Lock picking I don’t remember learning. But people were keeping things from me, so, obviously, it was my sacred duty to open those doors and drawers and read them.)

I got told that reading was a time-wasting, no-good folly. I got told books would rot my brain. I got told I thought too much and lived in cloud cuckoo land. And I read every chance I got and in the most unlikely places to do it.

I did the same with the kids. (Though I did lock that explicit biography of Julius Caesar where Robert wouldn’t find it till he was a little older, but that was only because no mother should be required to explain “incest” to her toddler.) The older is a reader and the younger… well, he is too, even if he prefers non-fiction to fiction. (Remember, children, even “arthurs” can give birth to little engineers. They have their way, and where would we science fiction monkeys be without them?)

But I had to fight against the schools. The schools wanted to give them candy and burgers for reading x books. They wanted to make them participate in “readathons.” They wanted to make them feel that reading was worthy and difficult and important, and writing was performed by magic creatures with messages or something…

This still relates to the Kris Rusch take on the Wall Street Journal article about the demise of the gatekepers and (according to the WSJ writer) how terrible a blow that will be.

When reading is important, and something that’s good for you, (“brush your teeth, eat your greens, read a book”) then people figure it should also be monitored. I mean, you don’t want to read something that’s not as worthy as you thought it should be, right? You look at the ingredients when you buy those multivitamins, don’t you? You make sure they’re organic or approved or what have you, right? And you look at the stamp of approval on the books you read too.

But I come from a different time, when reading was a guilty pleasure, when I should have been doing something more “normal” like watching cartoons, or something more “fun” like going to a party, or something more “serious” like learning to sew and embroider. I don’t know how many of us there are left, but I hope there are enough. Because we need a synergy of writers who are just trying to tell a story and hopefully make it interesting, and of readers who still think reading is fun, and who want to curl up by the fire and escape elsewhere. (And right now, children, who doesn’t need an escape.)

And we need to get the word out, somehow: reading is fun. You have to be careful, or you end up doing too much of it, and you don’t sleep enough, and you neglect your work. You learn too much and you think too much, and then you don’t fit in right, and you start finding sitcoms boring and predictable. And then you won’t get your friends’ reference jokes. Oh, sure, you’ll have other reference jokes, but who will share them with? – gasp! – not those WEIRDOS who read, right? Reading could ruin your life. You know that guy with the disheveled hair and the reddened eyes in your class? Yeah. He looks like he just tumbled out of bed because he didn’t sleep last night. He was up all night reading a book. He’s a bad influence. Stay away from him.

Meanwhile, I am not an author. I’m a story teller who makes up stuff. If I do my job right, then I’ll keep you up all night and make you forget to feed the cat and change the baby. If I REALLY do my job right, you’ll finish reading my work and have the worst craving for the next book of mine, and stumble over to your computer and order it, and if you don’t read electronic, pay extra for overnight delivery. (And you read electronic, mainline Sarah A. Hoyt under all her pen names for days at a time and emerge dazed, still hungry for more, and start pestering me for more via email [Yes, I know who you are. No, darlings, I really don’t mind. This is why I write.])

Are there books that transcend their entertainment value, that touch something divine within the mere human stories, that capture the eternal human and that help other humans in very different time and places make sense of their circumstances? Sure. How would I deny it? I snuck Shakespeare under the bedcovers with a flash light by the time I was eight. I was raised in Heinlein books, and I love Terry Pratchett. All of them in different ways do that, as do some other writers with less reliability.

But in my poor and limited experience – and I’ll admit I’m a hack – you can’t aim for that. At best, you can do the most competent job of telling a story you know how to, and hope the other stuff will shine through.

And you definitely can’t mandate that someone else do that job. All rules of “good writing” or “good living” for that matter, imposed from above become distorted in the very act of imposing them. Even innocuous things like “eat your greens” are odious and bizarre when they come from above by fiat, even if that fiat is paternal injunction and preaching, and not mandatory.

After all, if you’re choking down that boiled broccoli because it’s good for you, you’ll never imagine how much you could love it, if it were stir fried with garlic and just a soupcon of red wine. Then it tastes good and not like something that’s good for you.

Let’s stop trying to turn genre books into “worthy” exercises in preaching and reading that’s “good for you.” Let’s make them as fun, as much a guilty pleasure as in the pulp days.

Look, the gatekeepers are still there, but we can get around them. Let’s curl up in the big easy chair with a trashy book and kick off our shoes. I have chocolate with marshmallows, and not a hint of broccoli in sight.

 

I’ve said before that writing ebooks directly to the public would make it a very different game from the way most of us have been playing it for years. I don’t think I ever explained why except to give some vague nod towards “we had to get past the editor first.”

But Kris Rusch’s article reminded me of this.

So I’m going to spell it out. For years I was reading how-to-write books not because I thought my writing needed help, but because I was trying to figure out what the editors were looking for, which was the unspoken promise behind anything telling you how to write a bestseller.

I’ve read bestsellers SIMPLY to see what they were doing – what trick they used. (Yeah, I am a fan of a half dozen bestsellers, if you don’t count romances where it seems like anyone halfway decent is a bestseller. BUT I rarely read “mainstream” bestsellers. Only I did, because publishers/editors I worked with considered them upmarket from sf/f and I was seeing if there were tricks I could steal. I still don’t like “mainstream.” Agatha Christie’s definition of its being unpleasant people living lives more boring than anyone should applies.)

Look, years ago I took this workshop and the people teaching it (may I reveal names? I won’t otherwise) told us that we shouldn’t count on getting any royalties. Whatever we got on our advance would come out to about as much as the book would sell.

Do any of you have any experience in business? Because I don’t, exactly, beyond having worked retail a few times, having had garage sales, having been a multilingual secretary and having done this writing thing for pay for a little over ten years.

However I know logic. More important, I know probability. The people teaching this workshop didn’t tell me “the system is crooked and there’s ways to game it.” They didn’t need to. As I’ve said before, I can read print, at least man-sized.

Think. When a book first hooks the editor they have to take it to meeting and present it. When they do so, they have to tell the finance people how much they expect this book to sell. I don’t know what figures they show in those cases. When it’s a writer with a track record, I imagine those are presented. Probably. Almost certainly. This is stupid, because, say, a writer who writes primarily fantasy and is now writing romance or vice-versa will have a completely different probability of sales. Particularly under a different name. Never mind. You could still sort of squint and believe there was something straight forward going on there. Say you close your eyes a little and go “Oh, well, maybe sales are deterministic. Maybe there’s only x thousand people in any subgenre who like this person’s arrangement of words.” Right… improbable but perhaps not impossible in a “found in a Chinese fortune cookie” sort of way.

But imagine this is a brand new writer. No track record, nothing. The editor sits there and… what? Looks at similar books? What makes a similar book? Genre? Subgenre? The character is the same age? Color? Paints toe nails the same way?

Look, there’s no way to put this but bluntly: books are not cans of beans. Yes, there are some similarities between subgenre. Yes there are some guaranteed sales and non sales in each subgenre. Take me for instance – I never liked quest fantasy. Not sure why. Never took to it. So I’m a non-reader for quest. Just as I’m sure there are guaranteed readers for it.

Sure, sure, at the top of a trend, you can more or less predict what a book will sell even with no push (something I’ll explain down the page.) Take Urban Fantasy. About five years ago a typical urban fantasy would sell pretty well, regardless of what was inside the covers. (Provided the signage were right on the cover, and well… mine is not a typical urban fantasy – sigh.)

But even at the top of a trend, given different writing styles, views of the world and ability to hook readers, predicting an advance so your sales come precisely to that would require… mathematical genius. Also, rattling some bones, turning some cards and throwing some yarrow stalks.

And yet publishing houses did it, year after year, day after day. That gentleman in the wall street journal shouldn’t have been so upset at the prospect of losing publishing houses, because think of the benefits to the world if all those geniuses of predictive statistics flooded other businesses. Think of people on Wall Street going “this stock FEELS like that stock, so I can predict its trajectory over the next year or two to the penny.” Can’t you see it’s for the good of mankind?

Yes, I’m being sarcastic. Does this mean I’m mad at it? Do I think individual editors/editorial houses are crooked?

No. What happened to publishing would happen to any industry presented with the same type and amount of temptation. We humans like to control our world, particularly that part that affects our livelihood. In fact, some of it I’ve seen happen to other industries.

Atop my desk (okay, to the side, since my desk is floated in mid-room, facing the door so the kids and the cats can’t come at me from behind and give me coronary) is a framed Heinlein quote. “Certainly the game is rigged. Don’t let that stop you. If you don’t bet, you can’t win.” For years I’ve accepted that and tried to game the system.

What was the system. Well… I’m sure it started as just projections of what the book would sell. Can you do general ballpark, based on what a book like that has sold in the past? Sure. You can look at it and go “Um… Urban fantasy is selling like crazy. This will sell no less than 20k worth.” Can you swear it won’t sell more? Look… even if you are a fan of the genre and can “feel” how it appeals to other fans, you won’t be able to tell.

I’ve been reading science fiction since I knew it existed and there are bestsellers – real ones, swamped by fans at cons – that I read and go “pleasant enough, but… eh. If I stumble on another book by him/her, I’ll read it.”

Unless you have a DIRECT line to the minds of fans or conduct exhaustive test surveys with potential consumers before you make that address offer, the sort of “to the penny accuracy” that houses were achieving is not only improbable, it’s impossible. And none of them conducted surveys. Instead they told us it was more art than science (to be honest it would have to be art – the dark arts.)

Take Harry Potter, which bypassed the whole process – as did a few other Britts – by selling insanely in Great Britain before being picked up here. Suppose one of the American houses who rejected it had accepted it, and the second under editor (Ms. Thistlewhile) had tried to project how it would sell. “Fantasy juvenile, um… they don’t sell great. And the whole boarding school thing… well… Americans just won’t get it. And she does have issues with setting on opening. Well, let’s give her five thousand advance.”

And let me tell you, chums, if they had done that, she would have earned that advance, the book would have gone out of print. There would be books two and three, maybe, and then she’d have been told she either couldn’t work in this town no more, or she’d have to change her name and write something different. Perhaps those hot urban fantasies that are selling so well.

How would this be achieved? The same way they made sure their numbers were always right.

There are several prongs in selling a book, and there’s reasons for each of them to be controllable, when they didn’t use to be, say… twenty five or thirty years ago. I started explaining what happened to bookstores, but that’s an article on its own, one I can’t write without crying, I think.

So instead, lets stipulate that with a few, rare, wonderful exceptions, most bookstore personnel nowadays does no read. They view what they’re selling as editors do: by cover, genre, subgenre, and what did this person do before. Oh, one more thing “How much ‘push’ does the book have?” And the rare, wonderful managers are circumvented by the fact that stocking is decided at regional – usually tri-state – level. Who do these managers talk to? The distributors. How do they decide what to stock? Well… by how much “push” the book has. These are busy people, controlling a lot of bookstores. They can’t read every book. Blurb and cover might come into it, but MOSTLY it’s “push.” So, what’s push? Push is how many books the house chooses to print, and how desperate the house-reps are to place them.

What determines how much push you get? Well, at the rawest level, your advance.

Does “push” work? Not any longer I’m told. (Which might explain some of the interesting statement ballet we’re seeing, because the numbers STILL have to conform. You see, those poor creatures, editors, are paid on how close they’ll sell to their projections. And there’s no way to make those projections. There simply isn’t. Books are too individual.) Did it work back then? Oh, hell, yeah. There are ways to cap the distro a book has at x. And it’s possible to calculate mathematically – if book is on x shelves for x time, it will sell in this range. Why? Because THAT’s law of averages. You should by rights still have the occasional surprise and I can attest to some, like my first Musketeer’s book, but never mind, you can bring it back in line with the next book. Those surprises are rare enough, anyway.

Look, at that same workshop, I was told that if I wrote a really good book it would sell. I appreciated the intent, it was well meant. Sometimes you have to lie to the young. The truth is that even Harry Potter would never have taken off if it had been distributed at one, maybe two books in half of the bookstores in the land, with a “do not restock” order attached and taken out of print at the year anniversary. Word of mouth might still have worked – would. People might still be looking for it – would. But when there are only 3k books printed and they climb to $45 used in the Amazon marketplace, distribution is going to be slow to non existent. And there are a lot of books in that exact situation just now. The fact that the houses aren’t hastening to reissue books that sell for crazy amounts used means… I don’t know what, but it means the model is broken, I think.

So… the best way to have a bestseller was to have the editor read your book or proposal and go “Oooh, this is bestseller material.” Which is why the how-to books worked – when they did – because they were written by industry insiders, who might know cold nothing about how to write a selling book, but by gum, they knew what made an editor’s mouth water.

And then there’s the fact these books “expired.” Because different generations of editors went “oooh” at different things.

Okay, so we used to write for the editor. We used to polish the apple for teach. Some of us with stunning lack of success (listen, bub, I can outline according to these books, but then I fall under my own influence, which is always a terrible thing, and then, next thing you know, there’s so many subversive digs hidden in my book, that the editor would have to be deaf dumb and paralyzed not to twig to at least one of those. Ruining the effect.) We still do, kind of, in this accelerating transitional phase, because we still need to sell to editors part of the time, and while “push” might not work, they don’t seem to have noticed that. But now we’re faced with the wonderful and terrifying possibility of writing directly for the public. How will things change?

Well, I can tell you what’s changed – here, inside my head. I have yet to self publish or even e-press publish something major, but I know I can and just knowing I can feels wonderful. I am no longer controlling every thought and idea that goes on the page. I’m no longer following a model. I no longer read bestsellers unless I like them. (How many people were reading them to steal their secrets? Was it enough to cause preference falsification?) It feels like sanity.

I can make some predictions and they’ve at least as much chance of being right as the next guy. I think we’ll see the long-tail effect. Part of the reason – I think – the industry moved from fad to fad was that editors bought into the fad first, and all of a sudden that’s ALL that was on the shelves, prompting people to go “oh, maybe I should read it.” Sometimes fads took, which meant they hit something people wanted to read, and to some extent there will always, I think, upswells of a certain type of book. But I suspect they’ll be less pronounced and – strangely – perhaps more long lived.

I think we’ll see trends that were as dead as the dodo – say, whatever happened to quest fantasy – come back in enough numbers to support people.

I think there will be a splintering of the field into more sub-sub genres. Because of the way ebooks pay, a writer can make what he would have made from a big house if he/she’s not a bestseller by just having say 5k steady readers, and writing three or four books a year. (Easier, without bothering with proposals.) That means if you find five thousand people who want to read about wizards who conjure using wood spirits, more power to you. And those readers, conversely, will find people to feed their habit directly, so they can read nothing but…

At the same time I’m hoping, as a reader, there will be an upswell of the strange and wonderful. You see, I’ve always liked the “doesn’t fit anywhere” books – say Barry Hughart’s Chinese Fantasies. There haven’t been many of those in recent years.

I hope – and I actually do have hope – we’re about to enter an era where they’re far more common.

This is a continuing take on Kris Rusch’s article this week, which, as I said, contained four or five (possibly more) ideas that could be spun out into articles of their own.

The thrust of the article, as a whole, was an article in the Wall Street Journal, claiming we’ll lament the big publishers when they leave because it will leave us having to wade through a mire of muck to find the single diamond hidden there.

In this just so story, the New York houses, selflessly and gallantly throw themselves before the river of muck flowing from so many illiterate and unaware writers to deluge the innocent. Shield of “good taste” in hand they plunge in, and holding the One Book Of True Worth hold back the invasion, and present the public with the jewel they discovered.

This is, undoubtedly, how most publishers see themselves. (Most, because having talked to my publisher at Baen, including at dead dog parties when she’s tired and out of it, I’ve never heard her say that her job is to educate the public or to mold the public taste or any such rot. The only thing she’s said about choosing books is that she tries to choose books the fans will like. For which, might I add, the fans are vocally grateful.) Look, I can’t even fault the editors. First of all most of them are humanities graduates. As one such, I know what we got about “good literature” and “bad literature” and how the popular taste is almost always wrong. (I won’t say that they don’t tell us that Shakespeare was popular in his day, I’ll just say they usually search for mitigating circumstances, such as “Well, the plays were put on with buckets of blood” or in some sad cases, they try to down-rate Shakespeare because he was popular. They place a lot more emphasis in the fact that Walt Whitman self-published or Emily Dickenson [whose every poem can be sung to the tune of yellow rose of Texas. Somehow they never tell you that] kept her writing a secret. Their preferred narrative is the lone genius writer, recognized only by the literatti.) So all the editors have to brandish as “expertise” is their ability to tell good from “popular.” Second, these editors start out as assistant editors with no power and even less money. (My son Robert, who is a wicked person, has long since created the imaginary Ms. Thistlewhile, second assistant under editor from the right in the leftward sub-basement of a generic publishing house. When we speak of editors, she always comes up in conversation. He keeps threatening to write Slush, the Musical! If you ask him nicely, maybe he will.) Third, even the most powerless of these under editors if they manage to make it to a con are fawned upon and courted by writers, particularly unpublished writers dying to break into a system designed to keep them at bay (more on that in a later article.)

That singular combination of powerlessness and fawning would go to anyone’s head, and editors are human. Couple it with their training in “taste” and suddenly you have someone who thinks he/she is in charge of determining not what will sell or what the fans will like, but what the fans SHOULD like. Again, this is a whole other topic, upon which I will have a whole article.

For now I’ll concede that yes, sure, if the goal were to make sure the books that make it to the top are the ones that appeal to the self-appointed oligoi, then yes, indeed, we’d need editors with masters in literature to sift through it all.

Fortunately – for us – the name of the game is not that. The name of the game for us, as readers, is to pick books we will enjoy.

I’ll take a short detour here and say that, yes, indeed, there is such thing as an embarrassment of choices, sometimes. I have found myself completely puzzled in front of the Crest toothpaste/gel isle for instance. I will say, though, that this is not because I don’t know what I like – something that will serve to clean my teeth – but because nine times out of ten the one flavor/texture the kids like has stopped being made to be replaced by NEW, DAZZLING flavors, and I have no idea which one they’ll like. This is in other words, more akin to what the editors should be doing (but mostly aren’t) than to what I, as a reader, would be doing.

If I were shopping for myself alone, instead of for teenagers, my winnowing process would go something like this: Toothpaste. Need some. Oh, look. Ten brands. Let’s see, I usually like Crest. Okay, maybe another is just as good, but my husband used Crest when I first came to the States, I’ve used it since, I’m used to it. I don’t feel adventurous. Good Lord. Ten thousand flavors/textures of Crest. Oh, let me see, I like gel. It’s easier to rinse off your teeth after brushing. Flavor … um… cinnamon, vanilla, citrus…. I’m in a cinnamon mood today. Plaque, what? Eh. Considering the tons of coffee I drink, I should probably get that.

The whole process takes less than a few seconds.

Can the same be done with books, when I’m faced with no brand, no specific shelving but a bewildering mess of books suggested on Amazon.

The same is done with books. Look, at this point in time, when shopping electronically (not the same thing when shopping on paper, as POD books tend to either be more expensive or look shoddy, which does influence choice.) I don’t even look at who the publisher is. I don’t see if it has a stamp of approval.

So, how do I shop? As I do for toothpaste. “Oh, look… books. I need books. Finished the last batch. What do I feel like reading today?” Here I’ll point out that though I read Science Fiction, Fantasy, Mystery and – lately – Romance and then various (but not all) subgenres of those, I don’t read them all interspersed. No. I go through phases. I’ll spend six months reading nothing but science fiction, then three months in Mystery. Then two months in Romance. Then I’ll feel like non-fiction. So, depending on how I feel at the moment – which often has to do with how hard I’m willing to work on my entertainment. For instance cozy mysteries and Regency Romances I call bubblegum books because you can read them with only a part of your mind while doing something else, like laying on the beach. This doesn’t mean they’re less “worthy” it means they fulfill what I need when I’m relaxing – I know what genre I’m looking for. Say, I’m looking for Romance, where, mostly, I read regencies so far. I’ll first do a search for the half dozen names I remember in Romance. (There are a lot more for other genres.) Let’s suppose none of them have a new book out. (They’re fast, romance writers. I am finding three and four books a year from each, but even they can’t write as fast as I read.) Time to try a new author.

Do I then at that moment go “Oh, let me look for x imprint?” No. I suppose, in romance particularly certain readers do. But I haven’t formed that sort of taste. So, what I do – have done – is look for a word that appears in Regency Romance titles, like, say, Rake. (Yes, it also appears in gardening manuals, but I can usually tell the two apart.) A few books will come up. At which point, strangely, I don’t clutch at my hair and go “Save me, editor, save me.” No, what I do is read the descriptions and the reader opinions (And btw, not always just to see if they’re good. Sometimes the bad reviews say something is bad for a reason that seems bizarre to me and piques my interest in the book.) Or at least skim them. I also look at the “readers who viewed this book also bought” which leads me usually to other regency romances. If none of the ones that came up interest me, sometimes one of the “alsos” will.

More usually – I did this a lot while in Portugal – I come away with six or seven “possibles.” Then I download the samples. You know, it’s amazing how neither the description, the publisher status NOR the author’s name tells me I’m going to like the book.

Long ago, when I was a YOUNG writer, I told Kris Rusch that my “unevenness” bothered me. Some of my stories/books were so much better than others. She looked at me like I was nuts and told me that everyone was uneven. What she didn’t tell me, and I’ve come to realize over time, is that it’s not necessarily an unevenness of quality, but an unevenness of focus. Something someone else – Alma Alexander? – said at World Fantasy last year (in the con suite, where all good talk happens) made me realize what that unevenness actually is. She said that any book you write will be someone’s favorite and someone’s least favorite of your work. I’ve seen this happen with my own work (usually because of the reader’s own preferences and nothing I could have done, but write the same book again and again) and I KNOW it happens with my favorite authors. Even Pratchett whom I love, wrote the Rincewind books which fail to excite me and the Death books which I read only reluctantly. At the same time, my husband and son love the Death books, which goes to show you.

So, if you can’t depend on the creator of the work to ALWAYS turn out something you like, how can you depend on a gatekeeper.

So, do I hate wading through six samples, to get maybe one book I want to buy? No. You see, I’m not judging the “worthiness” of the book. I’m ONLY judging if I want to read it. And that’s easy. Usually I know two paragraphs in. If it doesn’t grab my attention by then, I’m not buying the book. I might revisit it at some later date – probably not knowing I looked at it before – and find it okay, but at that moment it’s not the flavor of toothpaste I want.

The whole selection process takes me maybe half an hour, which is less than browsing books in a single section of a single bookstore used to take me. And I’ve found a lot more authors – in all genres – to know and love this way than I have in the ten years since.

Because, you see, what the publishers have been doing lately is FAR MORE akin to what Crest does (are they being managed by the same people?) You go to the store wanting more of that toothpaste you just finished, and it’s gone, or at least the label is different. Instead of Tingly Cinnamon, it will be new and improved Ultra Cinamonny and the packaging will be different. Because of their obsession with selling books by computer numbers without context like laydown, covers, etc, publishers have been either stopping publishing authors after two books, or making the author take a pen name. So even if you loved Mary Jones’ cat mysteries, and even if Mary is still writing mysteries –now dog mysteries – you won’t find her because she’s now Mary Smith and shelved in a completely different area, with no reference to her former name.

(Yes, I intend to still use pen names for my different “brands” but I also think I’ll put somewhere in the description “this is Sarah Hoyt writing as” and a list of all my other books in the back. That way the fans will know “uh. vampire sex. Not spacemen” but will still be able to find my other stuff.)

Anyway, none of this should be or is a surprise to me, because about twelve years ago, while my husband was traveling, and having hit a point in my then non-career where I was afraid I’d never be published, I succumbed to the allure of reading – and writing – fan fiction. It was Jane Austen (mostly Pride and Prejudice) fan fiction over at Derbyshire Writers Guild. (Yes, I still have some of my stuff up there for free, most of it unfinished.)

DWG – we call ourselves Dwiggies, and yes, I’m still one of them, even though for the last few years I’ve had very little time to visit – is an “unedited” site. No one decides if you deserve to be up there, unlike other fan sites I could name. I don’t know how busy it is now – see the thing about not much time – but around 2000 when I spent almost every afternoon there, there often were ten new stories or episodes of series posted a day.

So, did I read all ten? Didn’t it overwhelm me to read all those unedited stories? Well, no. To begin with, I will only read contemporaries if they’re by an author I’ve liked in the “historical” fan fiction before. So, yeah, my first scan was for “author I know and like” and second for “Story I’ve been following.” What did I do failing those? I read the one paragraph description. Anything set in present day – say half of them, usually more – was out the window.

Then I looked more closely, for stuff that triggered my “like” button. I’m very fond for instance of situation reversal stories (where Darcy is poorer than Lizzy, say.) And then for “dislike” button (I hate overly preachy stories, for instance.) This usually narrowed the selection down to one or two stories I read, and again, took seconds.

An interesting thing to note is that in the sub-genre I read (historical) the stories I liked were usually the most popular. Of course, so were the stories I hated with a burning passion because (sorry, I did say I’m a reluctant snob – and btw The Reluctant Snob is a great title for a romance) they were too melodramatic, too purple, too illogical. Which proves… nothing. That I set certain minimum levels of quality with which other people seem to agree, I guess. But that beyond that I’m prey to my prejudices as is any other reader and/or editor. And that my prejudices often do not accord with other people’s tastes.

The Wall Street Journal article reminded me of when my mom visited and, faced with the same toothpaste isle, said “Too many choices. They shouldn’t allow these many brands on the market. How do I know which one is good.”

And I say what I told her then, “You don’t. You can’t. You can only know which one you’ll like, based on what you’re looking for.”

As for me, I like it. I like to choose my own toothpaste. And my own reading material.

You don’t have to read Kris’ piece this week. You should, at least if you’re trying to make a living in this incredibly screwed up field, but you don’t have to.

If you’re writing for kicks, to amuse yourself or simply because you have vast reams of paper crying out to be dirtied on one side (or is that vast reams of electrons, nowadays) never mind. Carry on as you were.

What interests me about the piece above (I have only minor quibbles with some of the things she says, on the order of “oh, and you didn’t mention” and “Besides, did you ever think that” not disagreements) is that, like an A. E. Van Vogt novel, it “throws out” at least five concepts that could be articles in their own right. (In A.E. Van Vogt, I always felt like he threw out at least two ideas by page, that he disposed of as casual mentions/speculations, which could have made novels in their own right.)

One of them was her saying in the article above that most pieces that land in slush pile are “recital pieces” – comparable only to the piece of music most kids learning music learn by heart, until they play it perfectly. Or, as she put it, the piece that these people can still play years later, even though they’ve given up the instrument.

I knew this, of course. Look, I’ve done my time in the trenches. Years ago, when we were green in judgement, we started a micro press magazine. Slush, we had it – back in the days when it was still in paper form. We also had a cat who peed on the unreadable manuscripts. No, I don’t know how he knew. But the envelopes he peed on were ALWAYS the worst of the worst. Fortunately by that time most people didn’t want the manuscript returned anymore. Because I’d have hated to send a rejection that said “It’s so bad, the cat pissed on it.”

Since then I’ve read for friends and business associates, when they get themselves rained in under a pile of slush. So I knew it. In a way.

It’s just that lacking the experience of learning an instrument (and though my husband is a superb musician, he used to be too shy to play in public, so I don’t think he ever did a recital) the entire concept was unknown to me. I didn’t know how to describe it. If you’d cornered me and forced me to tell you what was wrong with most slush pieces I’d tell you they read like “boiled oatmeal” without the flavor.

So, why am I writing about it, if what Kris says above encapsulates it so well?

Because publishing a small press magazine – as terrible an experience as it was, because the minute we decided to do it our finances went topsy turvy (G-d hates editors) and then I got near lethal pneumonia, which together killed our magazine aborning – was perhaps the last step into making me into a RELIABLY pro-level writer. Before that I oscillated between pro and not. But having dug through the slush, I got a back-brain impression of “this is what not to do.”

Part of this was the gauntlet you ran in order to get published: hell in order to get on the editor’s (I almost said teacher’s) desk.

Kris also mentions in the piece above that there were entire workshops designed to teaching you how to game the system, in order to get published. She is correct. And btw, the “system” by which manuscripts were picked in a process that was designed to – basically – keep off newcomers, is interesting in itself and deserves an article of its own. Or two. Because if you think self-publishing allows for flawed selection, let me tell you bub, you ain’t seen nothing.

What she doesn’t mention is how many of these workshops – and how to books, and… – were designed to justify the system.

I’m not saying that any workshop, or any how to for that matter, ever said, “this is the best system, in the best of all possible worlds.” No. That never happened. No one was that crazy who knew the system from semi-inside even.

But the how tos and sometimes workshops all said “your manuscript has to be perfect.” And then proceeded to give you rules on how to make you so.

First, I’m dyslexic. I misspell in seven languages. I almost flunked my German final in college by misspelling every single word of more than one syllable. (Sometimes those too.) I know it’s hard to believe reading my posts, but not only do I spell check them, but I also read them over three or four times, and correct typos. The queen of typos, that’s me. Worse, I’m the queen of the Freudian type-o. Only it’s not Freudian, unless Freud’s theories were much weirder than I learned in my brush with psych courses (on first pass spelled spych courses.) Because one has to twist logic into a pretzel (on first pass written passel) to get why I would substitute words like “happiness” by words like “number.” And, of course, most of the time I read these as the word I intended.

Second, when writing works – for me – it’s done in what I call “flying.” That’s the state when, after slogging for several hours, days, weeks or months (depending on length) at a story, it all magically comes together, you can see the shape of the whole thing, and you’re flying on a natural high, assembling it all. It’s euphoria better than can be produced by any drug. (And incidentally, it’s where I am right now on Darkship Renegades, which explains my post yesterday.)

The prose this produces is by no means perfect (as anyone ahem “lucky” enough to read my first drafts knows.) The state induces run on sentences and a sort of happy go lucky casualness about wording. I know this, you know this, I’ve grown resigned to it. But what that means is that, at a rational level, I’m ALWAYS very suspicious of prose written while flying. It’s not… blood sweat and tears, and therefore there must be something wrong with it.

Third, I’m an English As A Second Language speaker. I think at this point, to be honest, English is my primary language. I’ve spoken it as a primary language for longer than I spoke Portuguese. Never mind that. There is always that pit-of-the-stomach insecurity about it, like “if I were native, would I use this word this way?”

At the time I was trying to break in, this insecurity was well nigh pathological. I KNEW, somehow just knew that everyone reading my manuscripts could tell something was askew.

Now throw onto that type of mind the injunctions from how-tos on being perfect on paper. No typos. Description, setting, character, and oh, yeah, a perfect hook line coming in on cue. NO MISTAKES. What do you get? Perfection? Ah. you only wish.

My first publishable short story, Thirst was written while LITERALLY flying on morphine, after giving birth to Robert.  If you wish to check it out, it is free — part of the collection Crawling Between Heaven And Earth at the Baen free library.

I wrote it and of course, I couldn’t send it out as was. No. Instead, I started rewriting it. Over the next two years, I rewrote it. Carefully and minutely, till every word, every punctuation mark had been labored over for hours. And then I sent out. And started getting rejections.

As I was prepping it to send out the twentieth time or so, it occurred to me to read it. This was while we were doing the small press magazine. And I was suddenly appalled. I’d been sending THIS out?

Because, you see, it read like… a recital piece. It was boring. Boiled oatmeal with less flavor.

I unearthed my original version, to see if I’d only imagined the specialness. (Children, never throw away your first versions.) And… no. Oh, I cringed at the misplaced punctuation, and the misspellings, but there was a life in that story that hit you in the face and begged to be paid attention to.

I’m not smart, but I can read print, when it’s written in letters of fire ten feet high and right in front of me. I took the original version, fixed typos and grammar, forced myself to do NO more than that, and sent it out. It sold. (Over the next five years it sold eight times. It didn’t get published for another six years or so, because it killed editors and magazines. No, I don’t know why. No one does. But one of the magazines survived long enough to PRINT it – it just got confiscated immediately after – and to send ONE copy out to the year’s best editors, which is why my very first publishable short, first draft with typos cleaned, was a honorable mention in the year’s best 1994 [I think] Check it out if you don’t believe it.)

Lesson learned. Which is why my short stories get two passes – at most – and my novels no more than five. (Novels are messier, you need to make sure your foreshadowing is in place and all your pointers point right. Some need fewer passes than five, but I don’t allow myself more than five, period.)

There is nothing wrong with that recital piece version of Thirst. Even now, reading over it, I can’t find anything wrong, as such. It’s just that the whole, taken together, has about as much life and appeal as boiled lettuce on a bed of blah. And no, the story didn’t change, just the wording and the punctuation.

I think Kris nailed it. It’s a recital piece and like those, it is played minding all of one’s ps and qs. Which means it has no feeling, no artistic expression.

(There is ONE workshop that shall remain unnamed, which acted as a pass to “get on editors’ desk free” and I often thought that it must be the only reason its graduates do well, because heaven help me, I could tell the graduates without looking at the cover letter [I usually didn’t, till I read the story.] I was never wrong. They produced perfect recital pieces, as exciting as a diet of cream of wheat. (Mind you some of these people kicked over the traces later and are d-mn good writers, but when they were freshly graduated, you could tell.)]

So, now that you’re not writing to please the publishers (or not only) since there’s always the alternate ability of going directly to readers, is this going to stop?

Of course not. Like kiddies getting prepped for a concert in front of all those important people, your own nervousness will work against you. And I bet as we speak there is someone writing an how-to book that starts with “To make a million dollars on Amazon you have to eschew the word “the”” or some other nonsense.

I’m not even going to say you shouldn’t read how-to books. I’ve learned a lot from how-tos, sometimes by going against what they say, of course. (You should keep in mind, though, that most of these how tos are actually “how to get on the editor’s desk” or “how to get in good with the publisher.” Not necessarily how to write in a way that readers enjoy. Look, for the last twenty years, sf/f at least – I don’t think romance? – has been in the grip of a minimalist current. It’s just a current, and the editors swore by it. By and large, I’ve found readers don’t like it though.)

All I’m saying is, when you’re done polishing to the Nth degree, get an original version of your story and read it side by side with the last version, and feel for it. REALLY feel. Is the recital piece really better? Or did it just take all the passion out of it? Did you remove anything that might offend anyone, and thereby make it as exciting as last week’s newspapers?

Consider. Perhaps your first version, with typos corrected, would work better. Or your first version with typos and logic flaws (if you have them. I, of course, never do [Grin]) fixed. Or some combination of both pieces.

But don’t assume your recital piece, because it’s “flawless” is what readers want. You’re not polishing the apple for teach. You’re not trying to get on the editor’s desk. It’s going to take learning a different dance.

*Yeah, I know it’s a tease, and I do apologize. I’ll try to post in the evening, but today was a long day of writing, and tomorrow (Friday) will be another, so I need to go to bed.*

   Several things happened, almost instantly. One, the fresher door opened.
    It would have taken Cat speed for Kit to open the door to the fresher that quickly, let alone to turn the shower off – it wouldn’t let him open the shower door otherwise – and then open the fresher door and rush out.
    But Cat speed or not, he forgot he was hurt, and plunged forward towards me, at what would have been a run, except his left leg gave out under him, and his knee hit the floor with a sickening thud, as he bent over his leg keening in unreasoning pain.
The next thing was the woman’s voice, from the door to the cabin, sounding very cold, very clear, “Stay down. Do not go near her.”
    I turned around. Zen stood in the doorway, in the posture taught in every shooting class, feet slightly apart, arms braced, holding the burner pointed at… Kit.
“He didn’t do anything!” I said.
    “No?” she said, but didn’t stop pointing that burner

Twenty years and a few hours either way ago, I was as close to death as I’ve ever been. You see, I’d been in labor for three days, the baby was crowned, but there seemed to be no power on Earth that would make him actually come out.

This was a special baby – special for us, of course, as his parents. Special like every baby is to his parents, but more so because we’d waited six years for him and had thought we were never going to have any children.

And then I found myself pregnant. It’s funny because we never got told what gender he was. We had no particular objection to knowing, but at that time ultrasounds were not ALL THAT clear, and I didn’t want to be set on one gender, then have the other.

At any rate, it was all very much besides the point because I knew the minute I got pregnant and knew it was a boy. I also knew what I wanted to call him – had known for the last five years or so. The boy was Robert Anson Hoyt, after Robert Heinlein.

To make the story of that very long night short, we ended up in emergency caesarean, with three doctors in attendance, because he was crowned and it was all very difficult. And he was born.

Immediately after he was born, I passed out or fell asleep. I’m not sure which. I didn’t wake up for 18 hours, so I woke up to a very hungry little boy.

It was only when I was nursing him that my husband pointed out – not that he remembered, in the fog of battle, my brother had to remind him – that Robert Anson Hoyt had been born on Robert Anson Heinlein’s birthdate.

Robert turns twenty today and for the first time we’ve been unable to arrange to be with him on his birthday. He’s down in North Carolina working in a lab for the summer before returning to resume college this fall.

It seems like just yesterday he fit in my arms, but now he towers over me and is a full grown man. And yet the Robert story is only starting.

“Unka Tom? Tell me the Poddy Story–”

“At your age?”

“Please? I crawled up on his knees. “I want to sit in your lap and hear it once more. I need to.”

“All right,” he said, and put his arm around me. “Once upon a time, long, long ago, when the world was young, in a specially favored city there lived a little girl named Poddy. All day long she was busy like a ticking clock. Tick, tick, tick went her heels. Tick, tick, tick went her knitting needles, and, most especially, tick tick tick went her busy little mind. Her hair was the color of butter blossoms in the spring, when the ice leaves canals. Her eyes were the changing blue of sunshine playing down through spring floods, her nose had not yet made up its mind what it would be, and her mouth was shaped like a question mark. She greeted the world as an unopened present and there was no badness in her anywhere.”

“One day Poddy–”

I stopped him. “But I’m not young any longer… And I don’t think the world was ever young!”

“Here’s my hanky,” he said. “Blow your nose. I never did tell you the end of it, Poddy; you always fell asleep. It ends with a miracle.”

“A truly miracle?”

“Yes. This is the end. Poddy grew up and had another Poddy. And then the world was young again.”

“Is that all?”

“That’s all there ever is. But it’s enough.”

Robert A. Heinlein Podkayne of Mars.

(To begin with a word from er… me.  Since my life is a cartoon script, getting word that I won the Prometheus had to be mitigated by something.  What it was mitigated with was a sore throat, a blinding headache and a touch of fever, which is why after a certain point I stopped answering congratulations here.  [Though I still managed “thank yous” on FB because shorter and easier to deal with.]  I’m better today, though not 100% well yet — honestly, I think it’s allergies! and what follows is my regularly scheduled Wednesday post.  This is the day I post at Mad Genius Club and cross post it here, so it is a book about writing and writers.  I just want to assure people I did NOT forget I won the Prometheus and that I’ll have more to say about it, hopefully tomorrow.)

First of all calm down. This is no statement of intent. It is instead an exploration of something I first read about in a how to write book – the importance of giving up and of knowing when to give up – and how impossible to navigate most of the traditional “career road maps” have become.

I first came across the concept of there being a right time to quit writing – or at least writing as a career – in one of the first “how to write” books I read, which means either Damon Knight’s or Orson Scott Card’s. (It’s been a while. But theirs were the first two I read.)

The advice went something like this: know when you don’t have enough talent/persistence/ability to learn craft to give up. I’ve seen marriages, careers ad children ruined by the determination to persist in the face of all obstacles.

At the time this advice seemed eminently sensible to me. I was, remember, very young and still believed natural talent was the most important thing in getting published, (or any artistic endeavor.) And I didn’t know you could learn, because I’d just started trying to.

In fact, at the time, it all seemed perfectly clear cut and accorded with the concept of an “artistic life” that I’d grown up with. It went something like this: if you’re an artistic genius – and if you’re not, kindly stop cluttering the field – you’ll be recognized on sight by the first professional recruiter (talent scout, editor, gallery owner) who sees you perform your art – or even just sees you because, yeah, talent is that obvious and you know, usually accompanied by madness or artistic temperament – and they’ll immediately bow before you and take you to the top of your profession. At that point, as long as you avoid drugs, sex and suicide (no word on rock and roll) you’ve got it made.

This concept by the way was why I was so distraught at my first rejection, even though it was personal and – in retrospect – almost abjectly fawning. Because clearly I wasn’t a genius. This concept too, was responsible for my not sending anything out again for another four? Six? Years.

Anyway, so when I read that book, it made sense. It has since come back to haunt my mid at intervals. Those who were in my writers’ group when I started out used to laugh at my decision to call it quits. (To an extent they had point. I think the longest I stayed away from writing was two weeks.) Mid you it made some sense, since I think the original advice pertained to getting published, and when I passed eight years of trying, maybe it was sane to give up.

No one said I was sane.

This didn’t change much after I was published. Perhaps this was due to the fact that I broke in in 01. I found it enlightening to read Kris Rusch’s latest column, if nothing else for the fact that she talks about how crazy things have been in the last ten years which is, in fact, my entire time as a published novelist. (I sold my first short in 94, but didn’t actually sell a story that got published till 98, so my extent of time “in the field” is not much longer.) Made me feel a little better, because at least I knew I wasn’t the one who had gone crazy, but the entire field. (Yes, it was a “Oh, so it’s crazy in here, it’s not just me.” It also made me feel better because I’ve had that exact conversation she quotes – in variants – three times in the last two years, and it was good to know it’s not me, they’re doing it to everyone.)

In fact, when I met Dave Freer, I was considering whether the game was worth the candle. My first series had come out to unspectacular (to put it mildly) and perhaps even truthful (after reading that article, and in retrospect, who knows?) numbers, and I’d been told I’d never work in this town again.

It seemed, at the time, like a curiously stupid way to fail. First, because “try for sixteen years, publish a trilogy that fails to sell, walk away” sounds like giving up too easily. Second, because the trilogy wasn’t even within my “typical” type of writing. I’d spent most of those sixteen years writing space opera, and the trilogy was literary Shakespearean fantasy. (No, I’m not saying I wrote it just to get published. Okay, maybe a little. To the extent I loaded it with quotes it was at the publisher’s request. But writing about Shakespeare and elves were just outgrowths of having read a lot about the subjects lately. As you all know, I’m likely as not to write about whatever crosses my mind at the moment. In fact the words “I’ll never write xyz” in this house have the same karmic signature as danging around holding metal poles during a thunderstorm of – to quote Pratchett – calling yourself “Vincent the invulnerable.” However, literary fantasy had never been the pinnacle of my ambitions or the aim of my career.)

It was that”well, if I’m going to fail, at least I’ll fail at something I do more often” that kept me lurching forward through bewildering… some things that might have been successes or failures or “yes.”

Which brings me to my current position. You see, somewhere along the line the “know how to fold it” became very definite, because I – and most of you – have met people who didn’t. These are usually people who have attained some modicum of success: a book or two published; a semi-successful series. Then something went wrong and they stopped getting published by the big houses. But they’re still published by the little houses or – sigh – self published. It’s been twenty years, but they still come to all the local cons and insist on being called “a professional” and give advice to new authors on how to break in.

Most careers in SF/F don’t last forever, you see. When I broke in, Kris Rusch told me the average career lasted ten years, and most of the time the authors just gave up and disappeared back where they came from.

This seemed to me preferable, more dignified, than the living-death of minor publication and the demand of a status one no longer held. You see, in case this isn’t obvious, I have the devil’s own pride.

So, what can the problem be? I mean, I’m still being published by professional houses, but surely when I stop, then….

Well, no. Why no? Because the markers have moved. When people who are self-published are making a million dollars, when people who are self-published are getting better reviews/awards and going on to sign with a house for better careers than those of us who came up through the normal channels, the goalposts haven’t only moved, in fact. They’ve grown tentacles and are dancing a jig.

So… when is the time to pack it in? Danged if I know! I don’t even know – any longer – if that advice was right and if there is a time to pack it in. Now the whole process of publication has become, instead of an identifiable career a try-fail try-succeed sequence like the initial efforts to get published. Yeah, you might have put out twenty books with Amazon and sold ten copies a piece, but if – and this is very important – you’re TRYING and working at it, improving and studying the market, your next one could become a success.

And so it goes.

For me the marker is a little easier. You see, I don’t do this for a hobby. Writing is my job. As long as I can make from it what I could make from jobs I can easily get at my current state of abilities/being out of the market: say, teacher’s aid, or secretary – I’ll continue doing it. (Yes, I could make considerably more from free lance translation or free lance language teaching, but both of those would require an amazing amount of effort/time to get off the ground and then we’re back to “but writing might do that as well with the next book and it’s something I want to do.”) At the point that teacher’s aid or secretary becomes more profitable, writing becomes a hobby, which is given only a fraction of my time and attention.

This year will not be that year, and probably neither will next year.

So… of course, you probably agree with me that one shouldn’t harm ones family, livelihood, or children in order to keep trying. (At least I hope you do.) But after that, is there a point at which you think one should call it quits at whatever phase of one’s career in this strange new world of publishing? And if so, when would you say it is?

At which point do you, in the words of Simon and Garfunkel, cry “out In his anger and his shame,
“I am leaving, I am leaving.”” And does the fighter still remain?

I don’t know how many of you know I’ve been nominated/a finalist for half a dozen awards or so over my career.  My very first book was a finalist for the Mythopoeic, and Soul of Fire AND A Death In Gascony were finalists for a Colorado Book Award.

This is why I didn’t get too excited when I heard that I was a finalist to the Prometheus.  Oh, it was an honor — sure.  But looking at the list of other finalists I counted myself as the least likely to win.  In my head, I knew who would win, and who the second and third would be, and I was prepared to be gracious.

Imagine my very great shock upon receiving an email informing me that: The winner of the Best Novel award is Darkship Thieves, by Sarah Hoyt (Baen Books). The Hall of Fame award was won by Animal Farm, a short novel written by George Orwell in 1945. Sarah Hoyt will receive a plaque and a one-ounce gold coin, while a smaller gold coin and a plaque will be presented to Orwell’s estate.

I didn’t really believe it until I found it here http://www.lfs.org/releases.htm  and my name added to the list of winners in Wikipedia.

I am honored and humbled.  I’ve told you all — many times — that I don’t write to send a message.  It is nonetheless impossible for any author to divorce himself/herself from his/her deepest beliefs while creating a world.  And it should be obvious to anyone who has read my blog for any time that individual liberty is possibly my most cherished value.  So it tends to be the most cherished value of my characters — at least the good ones!

I will have more coherent things to say about this, later — for now I’m glad it won, and I’m glad THIS book — dedicated to Robert A. Heinlein — won.  I view this win as proof he — through his books — done brought me up right.

Update for those who prefer electronic books — electronic versions of Darkship Thieves are available directly from the publisher:  http://www.webscription.net/p-1102-darkship-thieves.aspx  They are non-drm and in all the most common formats, including Kindle.  (Thank you to Francis Turner for the link!)

*Crossposted at Classical Values.*

UPDATE: ‘lanched.  Welcome Instapundit Readers.  This is an author blog with occasional outbreaks of relevancy.  I’m particularly fond of yesterday’s post, but feel free to poke around wherever you wish.

 

 

 

The United States of America is the most revolutionary land based on the most revolutionary idea in the history of mankind.

A year before I married my husband, my best friend from childhood married a Frenchman. She became a French citizen the year before I became an American citizen, and for her that meant that – in her little town – she got to open the Bastille-day ball by dancing with the mayor.

I remember being happy for her but, at the same time, both feeling the vast superiority of my journey to becoming an American citizen (even if I never danced with a mayor) and the vague uneasiness of celebrating bastille day.

Because America was founded in a revolution and because most people writing our entertainment are historically illiterate in that way that only Americans (prosperous and secure [still. Relatively] within a vast country can afford to be) movies and many books tend to resonate with sympathy for other revolutions: the French and the Russian revolution foremost.

They should not. They should not even if the temptation is understandable and even if some of the founding fathers were at first sympathetic before turning away in horror at the results.

Oh, I’ll grant you both revolutions looked similar up front. They were both the work of the educated middle class (the sans culottes were a blunt weapon, not the real revolutionaries) and they both originated on the ideas of the Enlightenment.

The similarity ends there. The French revolution, the Russian revolution and the endless revolutions throughout most of the twentieth century are of a kind and kin with much, much older uprisings. Regardless of the clothes they wear and the names they partake, they have more in common with what the iksos did to Egypt or what the Germanic underclass did to Rome. (An invasion? Well, kind of… only we’ve found that this is not necessarily true. Actually, in Rome’s case at least, it had been trickling over the border for centuries.) It was an uprising of the “formerly powerless” and what they wanted was to seize the place of the upper classes and rule as the upper classes had ruled. This always ends with the new upper class devouring each other and rivers of blood drowning all vestiges of civilization until a dictatorship takes over to impose order.

This is because the revolutions are fights over power – not fights over liberty. As with most human trouble, it starts with the words. The words at the beginning.

The French – and most other revolutionaries – fought for ideals of an abstract and high nature “Liberte, fraternite, egalite.” It doesn’t seem to have occurred to any of them – Lafayette included – that by mandating fraternite and egalite they were denying the liberte. And the fraternity and equality one being a lofty feeling, and the other an absolute measurement always prone to more and finer adjustment, both could be used as levers for the new upper classes to get more and more tyrannical power, until you could be executed as an “aristo” because you knew how to read or you wore glasses. Or you had one plate more than your destitute neighbor.

Americans, on the other hand, based their revolution on life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. You are free to pursue happiness. You have equality under the law on your right to pursue it.

No one guarantees you will catch it or that you’ll be happy when you do it. Well, at least we didn’t use to. In the twentieth century the statist excesses have infected even the US, and we’ve regulated more and more how equal you have to be and how much happiness you can attain and how much is “good for you.” This is a wrong path.

It’s impossible to look at this and not think of a quote from Heinlein, in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. It should surprise no one I can’t find my copy, because that book moves all over the house, though I own something like five copies of it, I swear the kids are playing smuggler (from Canticle for Leibowitz) and burying them in the background against the hard times. However, I read it recently.

After discussing the Luna declaration of independence, Prof Bernardo de la Paz admits he stole the words from Thomas Jefferson and asks Manny if he remembers who that was: “Yes,” Manny says (I’m not quoting exactly) “He freed the slaves.” Prof responds, “Could be argued he tried to, but they caught him at it.*”

The difference between life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and liberte, equality and fraternity is the difference between being a wild-eyed revolutionary or simply playing one (or being manipulated into becoming one) to get a new class into power.

Because once you mandate equality, you fall into the trap of another Heinlein quote. You see, men weren’t created equal, and as I’ve pointed out at length there is only a creative minority and of that minority there is only a minority actually willing to work hard. But it is those minorities that advance civilization. The genius of America has always been to let those minorities do the work. This revolutionary arrangement has led to the freest and most prosperous nation in the history of mankind, a nation that has lifted the whole world out of poverty.

Good job. Now don’t get cocky. Remember:

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as “bad luck.” (Robert A. Heinlein.)

Happy Fourth Of July. Keep on Revolting.

*anyone bringing up nonsense about Jefferson and Sally Hemmings is subjected to the penalty of having Lin Wicklund explain the facts of life to them. If you don’t know who Lin Wicklund is, you’ll find out. Also, judging great men by the standards of a much later time is a device of midgets on stilts, trying to piss on the heads of giants. You only make yourself small.

 

*Crossposted at Classical Values*

There will be a more coherent post later — hopefully. So, yeah, this is the dog ate my homework post.

Mostly, I’m going to try to get in some relaxing time before tomorrow, when I start preparing for the fourth.

You know the way other people feel about Christmas? or perhaps their birthdays? Yeah, I feel that way about the fourth.

My older son Robert was due on the fourth of July and has only been forgiven for missing his due date by three days because he then had the good sense of being born on Heinlein’s birthday. (Okay, so he kept me in labor for three days to achieve this. I know he planed it!)

This is probably a reflection of the fact that some other people love their country – I stalk it, hide love notes in its drawers, and sometimes (in an excess of zeal) call and breathe heavily on the phone at her. But then I spent so much time looking through metaphorical binoculars across the sea and thinking I could never have her…

For someone raised in Europe, the fireworks and unabashed patriotism of the fourth should be cringe inducing, but it is instead very liberating, like a post-modern boyfriend daring to tell his café buddies “yeah, I love her more than life, what of it?”

And if I ever fail to tear up at “the land of the free and the home of the brave” bury me. I don’t care what the vital signs say, it’s a sure indication I’ve died.