Category: Uncategorized

Today I need to clean the house. I hope to do it quickly, so I can… work in the afternoon.

Yep, that’s how much fun we pro writers have. Aren’t you glad you asked?

Windy but sunny. I’ve gone for a walk for the first time in days — instead of using the treadmill.

Bought dishwasher and washer and dryer yesterday. My poor wallet is screaming, but this is good news for my readers, as I’m likely to get more work done without the endless hours washing dishes by hand, or having to make trips to laundromat. Yes, both things failed two months ago, at about the same time. I was too busy to shop until this weekend. Now that’s done. Unfortunately it will take a couple of weeks for stuff to be delivered, so there’s more laundry trips in my future.

On the good side, a new washer won’t have “tricks” I’ll have to work around, so I can teach the boys to do their own laundry. This will serve them well when they move out (a date edging every closer) and free yet more time for me to work. (Whee.)

I’m doing my post for MGC ahead of time and hope to get the next Refinishing mystery finished this week.

Well, besides my head? It’s when you consider junking your own comments or marking your own comments as spam in your own blog, then wonder if you’d take offense.

Yeah, okay, I’m sleepy after an excellent dinner with Doctor Les Johnson and his wife who were visiting in the Springs. Les and I will be sending a joint proposal up to Toni really soon. Like, as soon as I get off my behind on my part of it. :-P

At least the headache/nausea are gone.

if I didn’t touch alcohol? Partly it seems to be the result of sugar alcohols/artificial sweetener. I think I have a bad reaction to them. Partly, I THINK it’s that my sinus infection is back.

So, it’s an achy breaky day.

Being in a p*ssy mood I wrote an article which I’ll never post. Yeah, the woman who brought you the socially-conservative view PRO gay marriage (it’s in the archives, somewhere) came within inches of bringing you the FEMINIST view AGAINST abortion. (Though not for making abortion illegal. Heck, I’m not sure murder should be illegal.) But it ran to eight pages, and there’s way too much room for it to be WILLFULLY misunderstood. And it WOULD be.

I’m hungover. I’m not suicidal. I’ll go and write a holiday story instead.

The first birthday I remember, I must have been about three. I don’t remember details, only that I got up very early — before my parents knew I was awake (though I think they were both awake and busy. I don’t remember.)
I remember going through the still house — it was a brief excursion, since at the time we lived in a railroad-appartment (for the unitiated, that’s an appartment where the rooms follow one another in a row. Long and thin. One room thin, though we did have a large hallway which accomodated my brother’s trundle bed) carved out of my paternal grandparents’ larger house. (I understand they converted the store rooms to accomodate my parents.) One door faced the street, the other door faced to the back patio (which was no wimpy suburban patio, but more substantial. A working patio, almost a farmhouse patio, floored in broad paving stones and surrounded on the two sides flanking the house by my grandfather’s workshop, the shed and the chicken coups. The one open side faced a bed of calla lillies and a broad backyard which was itself surrounded by grapevines.) Both doors had glass panels which provided the only natural daylight in the house. Since we lived in the kitchen, that back door was open almost all the time we were awake. (I used to dream of living in a house with windows, as weird as that sounds. I never outgrew my wish for “a lot of windows.”)
That day, November… 1965? was so cold that the back door was closed. I opened it and looked out.
There was a whisp of wood smoke in the air and the fog shrouded the yard and gave it a dream-like quality. I don’t remember why — perhaps because it was the first time I’d woken up, dressed myself, and was out there on my own? — but the day had a quality of wonder and marvel.
My grandmother was in the yard, splitting wood for the franklin stove. I don’t know how long I stood at that door, watching her work. I remember feeling love for her and more importantly feeling protected and happy at her love for me. I remember the fog cool on my face. I remember the smell of burning wood.

There have been other birthdays since — forty five of them. I’m now markedly closer to the age my grandmother was then than to three. Or four. Or ten. As an adult, I can now appreciate how extraordinary it was that she was doing that work at … she had to be more than sixty, with neither complaint nor any signs of weekness. What is much harder to remember or accept: my grandmother has been dead eighteen years. I have sons who, I think, depend on me the way I depended on her.

But in my mind, I’m still standing there, my hand on that green kitchen door, looking out with new eyes at a world full of wonder and magic and the one woman who — more than any other (though my mother is formidable in her own right) — molded me into who I am.

When I first moved to town, I had a small child who was — just barely — verbal. This meant I spent a lot of time walking around with a baby carriage and day dreaming about writing. One of my favorite fantasies was “If I’m going to get published, I wish I’d come back and tell me that, so I wouldn’t despair…” So, in that spirit, ten things I would tell my younger-writer self, if I could.

10 – Read some up to date books. Find out the styles and conventions of what is being done now, not twenty years ago.

9 – Find a critique group, ASAP.

8 – Make sure it’s a critique group for genre fiction.

7 – Start sending things out, instead of waiting for a psychic editor to call and say “I know you have some wonderful…”

6 – Stop being afraid to send things out. Believe me, the editors have seen MUCH worse.

5- Stop taking rejections personally. Nine times out of ten it really is “We can’t use it now.”

4 – Start going to the cons you can afford, so you can put faces with the names and so they know you’re a real person too.

3 – Read the trade magazines, not just the “how to write Magazines.”

2 – That beloved world you’ve been working on for years? Kill it. It’s way too weird.

1 – Yes, you’ll eventually get published, if you work very hard. You’ll stay published if you continue working very hard. And, oh, yeah Don’t GET COCKY!

Another Fine Mess

The first time I tried to run away from home I was three. I’d packed all my comic books and a package of cookies in a book bag emblazoned with Remembered Murder, the name of my parents’ bookstore in Goldport Colorado, and I’d made it all the way down to the bus station, where I realized I didn’t have the money for a ticket. I’d then sat quietly in a corner bench and eaten my cookies and read my comics until my grandmother noticed I was missing and came to find me.

It never occurred to me that a three year old with a mystery bookstore shopping bag would be sort of noticeable. And it was several years before I realized that, even if I had had the money to buy a ticket somewhere, I wouldn’t have known where to go. My knowledge of geography at the time was limited to my street, the road leading to the kindergarten, and the diner where grandma took me for kids eat free Monday dinner. The only reason I’d found the bus station was that you could see it from the diner.

And I’d been married before I realized that, even had someone let me buy a ticket and run away by bus somewhere, no one would have given me a job when I got there.

The saddest thing of all was that at thirty one this was still about my level of planning. And that I was, once more, contemplating running away from home. Or at least running away from my parents’ store, where I sat by the fireplace, in one of the sofas provided for the comfort and convenience of customers wishing to browse mystery books, and listened as my mother and my best friend planned my second wedding.

Ben, aka Benedict Colm, has been my best friend since middle school. He is tall and rugged looking, with a face that’s more interesting than handsome and the sort of body that makes one think of Viking ships. He tones down the appearance by wearing a selection of impeccably color coordinated and blandly conservative suits during the week. On the weekend, he dresses down by wearing slacks, no coat, and sometimes shirts with an almost imperceptible pattern, which he convinces himself are garish. Today he was practically slumming, as he wasn’t wearing a tie and had unbuttoned the first three buttons in his shirt.

I suppose the attire goes well in his job as a financial planner. Unfortunately I suspect it was one of the things that had kept my mom – a porcelain-doll like woman who could have played a more true to life Miss Marple than the rather butch TV series actress – from believing me when I told her Ben was gay. Though if she didn’t believe it as he leaned forward and said, “I’m wondering if perhaps we could find someone to make a tuxedo for Pythagoras, so he can be best-cat?” I washed my hands of her.

I also washed my hands of my mother, whose response was, “So, your pet rats, are we putting them in the specially designed harnesses, so they can be used as buttonieres?”

It was at this moment I realized my hands had come up of their own accord and clasped the sides of my head, in horror. Cats and rats? Did they listen to themselves? And while Pythagoras, who is not so much my cat as a cat I allow to crash at my home, might be nominally my pet, the rats weren’t even mine at all. Okay, so I’d rescued them from inside a piano I’d buy to refinish for my fiancé Cas Wolfe. I’d only nursed them and looked after them because otherwise they’d be snake food. They were Ben’s problem now. I didn’t want them in my wedding.

“I don’t want anyone in my wedding,” I heard myself say. I sounded surly and unacountably like a teenager. My hand moved, all on its own, making an horizontal movement from side to side to indicate how much I didn’t want anyone at my wedding. “At least no one besides me and Cas. No cats. No rats. No tea roses. No buttonieres and NO book distributors. Also, no, mom, my wedding is not the ideal venue to display the covers of upcoming mysteries that can be bought at the store for a discount of twenty percent. And paperback books do not make tasteful wedding party favors.”

The two of them stopped talking for a moment and looked at me, for all the world, as though they’d completely forgotten I existed. Which, to be frank, they probably had. Then mom reached over and patted my hand, absently, more like she was fluffing a cushion or something. “There, there,” she said. “Brides always get nervous.”

“I’m not nervous,” I said. I realized my voice was louder than it should be. “This is not my first time getting married. I don’t want a dress. It’s not a church wedding. I don’t want a guest list. I don’t want a reception. I don’t want–”

Mom and Ben traded a look that implied they were the adults in the room and that I must be humored and cajoled into playing my part. He tapped the pen he was holding against his teeth. It was one of the most annoying habits in the world, and I’d told him so several times since sixth grade. “To be honest,” he said. “Perhaps the mystery books as favors are a bit over the top. They’re damn hard to wrap in a tasteful way. Besides, we can’t know for sure what the guests will like to read or even if all of them read mystery.”

Mom narrowed her eyes at the unlikelyhood of someone not reading mystery, then wavered. “Well,” she said. “My husband has said that perhaps tasteful bottles of fingerprint powder…”

And like some slumbering warrior awakened from long sleep, my father perked up behind the register ten feet away, and beamed at us. “It would be handy, you know. Funerals and weddings and all often result in murder, and when someone kills Sherlockia on her wedding day, we’ll be all ready to take fingerprints.”

My name is not Sherlockia. Had my name been Sherlockia, I would have run away from home well before the age of three. In fact, probably before I’d learned to walk. Mom and dad had almost separated over what to name me, with my dad wanting Sherlockia and my mom holding out for Agatha. They’d met to discuss reconciliation in the local candy shop and mom had gone into labor over the parfaits. Which might explain – but did not excuse – saddling me with the names of Candyce Chocolat. Dad had dealt with the defeat as he dealt with such things: by pretending it had never happened.

Which meant the only way I could deal with this was by running away. I’d take my on-the-verge of dying third hand volvo station wagon, kosh my fiancé, police officer Cas Wolfe, stuff him in the passenger seat, then wait until my ex husband – all ex, couldn’t be more ex if I’d killed him, something I often contemplated doing – returned my son E – all right, his real name is Enoch, but I’m trying to save on therapy bills by calling him E. I’d strap E. in his car seat in the back, and we’d drive like bats out of hell to… Maybe as far as Denver, before my car died.

I revised my plan. I’d kosh Cas FIRST and steal his keys to his white Honda SUV. Then drag him to the passenger seat, move the car seat over and…

I paused. I could see E sitting in the back seat, screaming all the way to Las Vegas because we’d left Pythagoras – whom he called Peesgrass – at home in Goldport.

Right. I’d throw Pythagoras – a mangy and extremely neurotic black cat – in his cat carrier and strap him in next to E’s child seat. And then…

In my mind’s eye, I saw Ben – as opposed to the real Ben who was sketching something on a paper pad and showing it to my mother – crossing his arms and giving me his more in sorrow than in anger look at being left out of my elopement. After all, he’d been left out of my first wedding, mostly because Al-ex was jealous of him, which ranked up there as a feat of stupidity even for Al-ex. It probably wasn’t fair to leave him out of my second wedding as well. Besides, I’m superstitious. The first wedding had been Ben-less and the marriage had ended up on the rocks. What if the lack of Ben also blighted the second marriage?

My mental self koshed my image of Ben over the head, dragged him to the car – a feat of strength since he probably weighs double what I do – and strapped him in next to E and Pythagoras. Only in time for me to realize that Ben’s significant other, Nick, would probably be very upset if I took his boyfriend away for a few days. And probably even more upset to miss Cas’ wedding. Nick and Cas were not only best friends and colleagues in the Goldport Police department but also cousins who had been raised almost as brothers. It would be unforgivable not to take Nick along to Las Vegas to see us married by an Elvis impersonator at the Little Chapel of Quick Unions.

Sighing, I koshed my mental image of Nick, too, and stuffed him in the car under Pythagoras’ carrier, which probably would keep Pythagoras calmer for the trip, too.

Then just as I was about to get behind the wheel of my imaginary get-away car, I realized that though my parents had never exactly approved of me – I’d disappointed them by not becoming a private eye – I was their only daughter and they – alas – my only parents. They might be – and often were – the world’s most annoying people, but they probably deserved to be there when we told Elvis that we did…

I’d just done strapping my mental image of mom to the roof rack and dad to the front bumper, like a very beffudled looking deer, when I realized this wouldn’t do. I mentally untied dad’s hands and put a mystery book in them. He wouldn’t even notice he was strapped to the front of the car, provided that the book was interesting enough.

And then I realized that Fluffy, mom and dad’s cat, would be left alone for the whole time. But I had to draw the line somewhere. And Fluffy hated me and had – twice – tried to eat Pythagoras.

“No,” I said. “I’m NOT taking Fluffy.” And as mom and Ben turned to look at me, I realized that
eloping while taking all your nearest and dearest was probably not practical and got up. “I have had enough of this,” I said. “I’m going to work.”

As I rushed out of the store, I heard Mom ask Ben “What was that all about?” And Ben answer, “She just realized that she couldn’t take us all along if she eloped with Cas.”

I hated the way the man read my mind. Which did not excuse what I did next.

I don’t suffer from it. But my son, Robert, does.

However, I’m starting to suspect trying to blog on Saturdays is a lost cause. You see, on Saturdays, we bum around town either in a pack of hoyts TM or — today — my husband and I. Today we hit the re-store for some scrap vinyl and paint. I found a website that swears that the wrong side of vinyl, painted and varnished, achieves an effect similar to floor cloths and more durable. Since we can’t have rugs on the floor because Euclid (the model for Pythagoras in the mysteries) was cloth-trained before we got him, and therefore will come running from across the house to pee on the sock you dropped on the floor two seconds ago, I’ve conceived this idea for protecting the various areas of century-old oak floor that get the most use with floorcloths.
I’m not convinced this vinyl thing is the best of ideas, but I’ll keep you posted on it. Meanwhile the antibiotic is doing its antibioticky thing and my head is clearer than it’s been.
Tomorrow I get to write — hopefully. Fingers crossed.

I find myself as awkward at this daily blogging things as a teen at her first party. (My first party? I hid in a corner wondering why my friend at whose house it was taking place had invited a tribe of Neanderthals. None of the guys were even remotely… human, let alone attractive. Then again I was sixteen, so this might have been normal.)

Right now I’m looking for that dark corner to hide in. I mean… what do I do? What do I say? What are the popular girls doing? And you expect me to dance to THAT?

Let’s face it, I’m not putting up deeply significant posts every day. Unless I start walking around with a notebook to jot down something everytime a possible linkage occurs to me… Um… I could do that.

Anyway, today could be filed under “another d*mn wasted day.” I woke up late, but still felt tired. Too tired to concentrate. Went for my morning walk which was nice – first time in several days I did the full walk. Came home. Did the litter boxes, a job I normally do without thinking but which so thoroughly wiped me out I had to nap.

Read Slightly Scandalous (can’t remember author and book was left downstairs) which was okay for popcorn reads. Don’t know that I’ll run out and buy all of the author’s books, but will buy them if I stumble upon them and have money. It was pleasant enough and she didn’t rape the Regency three ways from Sunday.

Napped again (are you starting to see a theme. For reference, I normally CAN’T sleep during the day. Even if I try to.) Went to doctor. Sinus and double ear infection. Came home and asked older boy to take me to pharmacy – had to, as Dan had my car, since snow was expected. Yeah, I walked to doctor. It was actually pleasant – it’s not too far. Oh, it was cold as heck – snow expected, though not here yet – but I have a foofy coat I bought in Ohio, so I was warm.

Dropped off prescriptions, went grocery shopping while I waited, came home, took meds, cooked dinner… ate… and here I am.

I just realized I gave you an accounting of my actions today, like my grandmother used to do, and possibly for the same reason. She did it because she was alone and wanted to believe what she did with her time still mattered. I did it I think because I feel like I got nothing done. Which is true.

I’m about to call it a night at eight thirty pm again. BUT I have meds, and hopefully tomorrow will be better, right?

Am I a bad person because I wish it WOULD snow a lot and the guys would get a snowday? At this time in their lives, they don’t really bother me much when they’re home, and it feels so snugly with all of us in the house. Probably won’t happen, though you never know. The forecast has been wrong twice and in Colorado when that happens it means they’re way out of their league.

Colorado – where the weather is insane and drives the weathermen that way.

Will any work actually get done? Will the snow fly? Will the boys drive me insane? Will the weathermen put broccoli in their socks and rub their heads with bunnies? Who knows? Tune in tomorrow for another exciting episode of As The Sarah Turns…. :)

I’ve been thinking about fiction versus reality, recently. It’s Leonard Cohen’s fault. I was listening to his songs while working, and the song Everybody Knows caused a random firing of neurons that led to fiction and reality.

For those who haven’t heard the song – it is about a lot of things that “everybody knows” which just ain’t so. In case you miss the point he drives it home with everybody knows that you’ve been faithful, give or take a night or two.

This, because I was traumatized by a college course called Theory of Literature whose final paper made me answer “What is the difference between literature and real life?” at length, over ten pages (no, I wasn’t allowed to go up to the professor and hit her repeatedly over the head with War and Peace while shouting “the book is literature, but I’m hitting you in real life,”) led me to the number of things that everybody knows in fiction that just aren’t so in real life, and how much of that knowledge has bled over into real decisions made about real life.

There are a lot of these. I mean, a lot of ideas that come from the pages of literature and that have, unexamined, slithered into people’s back brains where they lodge, making a mess of that real life where you do die if you’re beaten with a large book.

For now we’ll leave alone things that are “narrativium” (Terry Pratchett’s word for the force that binds his Discworld… and all stories) – like all the problems getting fixed at the last minute; like the brave little guy always winning; like our sympathy for the plucky comic relief character. We’ll leave those alone because, frankly, my life seems to obey these rules. Also because then we get into art imitating life imitating art.

Instead, let’s get into facts of life, history, society that everybody knows and which are, on their face, so totally absurd that you wonder how so many people could believe them. And then you realize they are the background of ALMOST every novel published in the second half of the twentieth century.

What am I talking about? Oh, for instance, if I’m EVER on another panel with a bunch of under thirty female authors and the subject has anything to do with women or history I’m bringing War and Peace, so I have something on hand to demonstrate the difference between reality and literature. Because every one of these women – bless their dizzy little hearts – will unfailingly bring up the six thousand years during which men have oppressed women. Apparently, my gender has been kept in slavery to such an extent that they weren’t allowed to do anything and when they did it anyway, the vast conspiracy of all the males in the world hid it from history. And then, these super villains magically got defeated by a bit of shoulder-to-shoulder and self-empowerment. (Because it would be that easy to defeat people that powerful.)

Usually I counter this by pointing out that the men I live with – all three of them – can’t agree on whose socks are whose, much less on a vast conspiracy involving doctoring history books, blackening the name of female religions, associating goddesses with unpleasant things, etc etc etc ad nauseum. They look at me, round eyed and then go on as though I hadn’t said anything (which is why I need War and Peace. The iron-cover edition.)

Even right now I can see some of you going “but…”

Yeah, right. Women WERE oppressed, right enough. By a collective conspiracy of males? Oh, h*ll no. By biology. When you spend most of your life incubating new life and caring for infants and – in the conditions of the time – are likely to die of it, yeah, you’re probably not going to be a great thinker or warrior. Not to mean there weren’t some. More thinkers than warriors, mind, and those either religious or noble and almost unfailingly either celibate or delegating the business of raising the children to other women.

Look, kids, men were oppressed too. By their biology – a friend tells me men don’t get PMS, they’re just like that all the time – by the fact that their muscles and larger size made them logical hunters and warriors. They took most of the risks and the skeleton of any ice-age hunter tells you how much pain they endured. Oh, yeah, medieval skeletons aren’t much better. Life was brutish, short and nasty for everyone, right? Plus, they sort of had to assume their wives’ kids were theirs. There was no DNA test. So, sometimes they went a little overboard in making sure that momma wasn’t slipping a different one in. (And if you think THAT didn’t happen – ah! Genealogy is a joke because NO ONE can know what their great great great grandmama did with the peddler behind the kitchen door while great great grandpapa was out felling the wild boar.
Think about that – at least women knew the kids they were looking after were their own. Men… well, it required a leap of faith. They might be slaving away, and getting all beat up or dying to defend someone else’s progeny. All on their wife’s word.)

What never happened outside books is the gigantic conspiracy of males, the “we must keep her down”, the “well, we have to erase memories of the wonderful matriarchy by making the goddess into an evil demon in our religion”, the “yeah, this woman beat our pants, so we’ll erase her from history books.”

To begin with, this idea is absurd on its face. No. Hear me out. How CAN today’s college educated, smart women not realize both the vastness of the world and how UNCONNECTED AND TRIBAL it was even a hundred years ago, let alone six thousand?

(Look, the reason the Europeans took so much of the world four hundred years ago wasn’t their superior technology; it wasn’t their superior (ah!) intelligence; and it sure as heck wasn’t their superior rapaciousness or their greed (sorry, guys, no.) It was the fact that they were the first to overcome tribalism in favor of the nation state and that they had continent-wide communication and at least limited cooperation between nation states. Read stories of colonization. Time after time a tribe eliminates the European colony thinking “that’s the tribe, that’s all there is.” Good strategy in tribal wars. Which was ALL they knew. They didn’t know and they couldn’t GUESS that this story would go all over Europe (broadsheets and pamphlets and later newspapers) and bring them retribution from nation states, much bigger than their little tribe or even federation of tribes. They couldn’t conceptualize it.)

How could – to take one narrative that seems so widespread that everybody knows it is so without thinking – evil patriarchs replace the idyllic matriarchy in tribe after tribe after tribe ALL OVER THE WORLD, even when these tribes had no means of communication with each other? How could they all change history to hide the fact women used to be in charge? HOW? Think about it. A million little tribes, all over the world. Each with its language and its ways. Each one so suspicious of strangers that “them over the ridge” are another nation. Worse, how could this happen AFTER THE DISCOVERY OF WRITING (the DaVinci Code) and then be so thoroughly erased that only a conspiracy passing from wise person to wise person throughout the centuries knows the truth?

While we’re on that, let’s examine the idea of any sort of conspiracy that involves more than three people, which leaves no trace or almost no trace even centuries later. Good Lord. Have you guys ever tried to keep a secret that a group of friends knows? At best it’s like playing telephone. Things come back to you that you know mean your friends have talked but not given details or given the wrong details on purpose. So you’ll hear that so and so lost their aardvark, instead of their husband. At worst, the entire village, city, nation will know. Even if they sometimes pretend not to – with imperfect success. (Remember the Friends episode on “she knows I know they know but they don’t know she knows…. Yeah.)

Has any of you read Roman history? Or how about the history of the Middle Ages. How many “would be conspiracies” are now plain for all to see? Heck, were plain even in their day? Even if the conspirators didn’t know that everybody knew they knew? Two can keep a secret, if one of them is dead.

So how did the idea of the great conspiracy of men against women or any other great conspiracy become an everybody knows to the point that people – unthinkingly – use this as the basis of their decisions and their positions on the world?

I think – and I could be completely wrong on this – it is because fiction is more real than non-fiction. And these ideas – mind you – at one time made great and startling fiction. (No, they don’t anymore. Not really. Why not? Because they’re expected. They’re the “easy path.” Oh, you can still use conspiracies and secret societies. But do try for a little couth – I mean, look, if you bring in the Templars, credibility just went out the window. As for the conspiracy of men against women. Heavens! You might end up on the NYT bestseller list. That’s how old and hackneyed the idea is.)

What do I mean fiction is more real than non-fiction? Well… I have followed in some fascination the way that false memories are created, and they are very close to the way good novels are written. The way to make someone remember – think they experienced – something that just ain’t so, is that you weave reality and fiction, things they know are so and have experienced (the wind on your face, the tight throat that comes with crying, the description of a sunset) with the things of imagination. If you do it well enough, people will believe they lived it. They will believe these are things they saw with their own eyes and lived in their own lives. Oh, not rationally, but where it counts, in the back brain.

No wonder educated women – and men – KNOW these things that could not withstand the most cursory examination. No wonder it becomes the substratum of belief and knowledge from which decisions are made.

So, what am I saying? That we should regulate what goes into novels? That we, writers, should examine the ideas we weave in our fiction? That readers need to think more objectively about what they read?

No, yes, yes – but…

Look, no one should regulate what goes into novels or any form of art. The idea of a censor board gives me cold sweats. It’s bad enough it is being regulated, in a way, right now, by the everybody knows syndrome. Try to write a novel in which a female-dominated society is more rapacious and evil than their patriarchal counterpart and it’s likely to be rejected with “but this was never so” when it truth, maybe it wasn’t (there is really no evidence of ANY female dominated society. Again, see the part where women were slaves to their biology. There MIGHT have been Amazon-like groups in some tribes, but the evidence is so far not conclusive) but it’s as likely as the other way around.

Should we, as writers, examine the ideas that go into fiction? Uh… yeah. Indeedy. Never mind that some ideas that make great fiction make no sense in real life, (It’s a million to one chance. That means it’s a sure thing!) at least as a writer TRY to rise above everybody knows. TRY for original ideas and ideas that make sense. The great patriarchal conspiracy, all joking aside, no longer thrills anyone. Dan Brown might have milked the last of it.

Other things that no longer thrill anyone and which have become part of everybody knows with very little basis in fact: the idea the oppressed rise up against their oppressors (in fact, the “oppressed” usually rise up when the oppression lightens. All the great revolutions were bourgeois ones. The only other revolutions are actually action from outside); the idea that intellectuals are naturally allied to the workers (this is a Marxist chestnut that has made its way into fiction and from it into popular belief. In fact, we egg heads, with few exceptions, are puzzled by manual workers – I might be one of the exceptions, but just because I LIKE manual work); the idea that women are more caring and peaceful than men – no, seriously. I think this must have come from the fact that most women writers way back were spinsters or nuns. Look, I went to an all girls’ school. It was sort of like hell without the flames. (Except that one time we short circuited the electrical board in the attic to get out of English class. But I think the statue of limitation has gone out on that one.) Women are as sneaky and underhanded as their male counterparts and, btw, they can get very physical too. So, please, no more planets where there are only women so it’s peaceful (no matter how much it allows male writers and editors to enjoy a bit of vicarious and guilt free tribadism.)

It is not my business to tell anyone what he should write. It is my business to tell my colleagues the main problem I have with most books nowadays is that they bore me to tears. Now, I might not be representative of most people. Some people clearly read to have their biases confirmed. But not all. I’m convinced there’s a large group of people like me out there. And that large group is woefully underserved.

Yes, readers should be thinking about what authors wrote and examining it for plausibility. But if storytellers are doing their job, then readers won’t – perhaps can’t – do so.

So it comes back to writers again. I won’t ask you to use your powers for good. Instead, I’ll ask you to do something more difficult. I’ll ask you to think and to find ways to make your readers think.

It will be more fun. And it just might bring about a better future in which everybody knows is at least a little closer to reality and people aren’t making decisions based on false memory syndrome.